The Hard Path to Homeschool Freedom

“The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues.”

—Abigail Adams to her son John Quincy Adams, January 1780¹

John Adams, Abigail Adams’s husband and our second president, echoed the same truth throughout his life: republics are forged in hardship, not ease.² Strength, fortitude, and true liberty grow only when families shoulder their burdens in a voluntary, private community without leaning on the state. Today, as homeschool parents, we stand at a crossroads that would have been recognizable to Mr. and Mrs. Adams. Will we embrace the hard road of personal responsibility with support from local communities—the very road that built American homeschool freedom—or trade it for “government gold” and the inevitable chains that always accompany it?

A History Written in Hardship

Look back across our history, and the cycle reveals itself with stark clarity. For nearly two centuries, home education was simply what families did. Colonial parents taught their children at the kitchen table or fireside. No bureaucrats hovered. No forms waited to be filed. Education belonged to the family, where it had always belonged.³

Then came the age of compulsory schooling. Beginning with Massachusetts in 1852, every state eventually required children to attend school.⁴ Homeschooling slipped into a legal gray zone or was treated as explicit criminal behavior. By the early 1980s, it stood effectively outlawed in most states.⁵ Parents who dared teach their own children faced fines, court dates, and even the threat of losing their children. Teachers’ unions and school boards warned that only certified professionals could be trusted. The state, they insisted, knew best. Soon after, private schools followed suit and began inviting state intervention into their once private institutions.

The Pioneers Who Paid the Price

Yet brave families refused to bend. In Texas, numerous families were prosecuted for homeschooling during the 1980s and early 1990s.⁶ The landmark Leeper v. Arlington ISD case culminated in a unanimous 1994 Texas Supreme Court decision that established homeschooling as a legitimate private-school option under state law.⁷ In Michigan, the DeJonge parents were convicted for teaching without state certification until the Michigan Supreme Court overturned the ruling in 1993, affirming parental rights rooted in the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.⁸ Iowa and North Dakota clung to criminal penalties until the last possible moment in 1993.⁹ Across the country, pioneers endured real hardship: legal bills drained savings, public shame increased, and sleepless nights were spent wondering if the state would knock on the door. They contended with difficulties exactly as Abigail Adams urged. And out of that struggle, victory emerged. By 1993, homeschooling was fully legal in all fifty states.¹⁰

One Family’s Story

My husband was homeschooled in the uncertain years when the law still cast a long shadow. His parents took the risk and taught him anyway, recycling curriculum from private schools because home education in their state was a criminal offense. Today, our family homeschools freely because those earlier families paid the price. In a single generation, the impossible became ordinary. Yet freedom, once won, is never safe. It must be guarded.

The New Threat, Dressed as Safety

Now the threat returns dressed as “safety” and “support.” Connecticut, long one of the most hands-off states, passed House Bill 5468 in 2026. Signed into law in May, it requires every parent—public, private, or homeschool—to file an annual “intent to educate” form.¹¹ New homeschoolers must appear in person at the district office and submit to a one-time Department of Children and Families background check on every adult in the household.¹² A state that had long protected parental educational freedom suddenly imposed new bureaucratic burdens on families seeking alternatives to government schooling.¹³ Connecticut is not alone. It is the cautionary tale: government never stops at “modest” steps. Each new regulation chips away at the independence our pioneers secured.

The Glitter of Government Gold

And here comes the newest temptation: education savings accounts, or ESAs. They are spreading rapidly. Approximately eighteen states now operate ESA programs.¹⁴ Texas, Iowa, Louisiana, and others have launched or expanded programs pouring thousands of taxpayer dollars straight into parents’ hands. On the surface, the offer of curriculum money, tutors, and co-op fees often glitters. Why not accept help? After all, “it’s your tax dollars.”

What CC Has Made Clear

Classical Conversations has answered that question with unflinching clarity. Leigh Bortins, our founder, has spent decades teaching families that education is fundamentally a family responsibility, not a government one. Robert Bortins, our CEO, puts it plainly: government does not give money because it loves you. It gives money to gain power.¹⁵ With the funds come the strings. Families who accept ESA funds in Arizona must forgo filing a homeschool affidavit and instead sign a contract with the Department of Education.¹⁶ They cease to be independent homeschoolers and become government-funded participants, subject to approved vendors, expense audits, and future rules written by distant lawmakers.¹⁷ Classical Conversations communities are encouraged to remain privately funded. Why? Because responsibility cannot flourish when the state holds the purse strings.

Flourishing Costs Something

The Adams family understood what so many today forget. Human flourishing does not spring from comfort or convenience. It is born in the daily decision to rise early, plan lessons, sacrifice vacations, and teach truth even when it is hard. When parents shoulder the full weight of educating their children—without bureaucratic lifelines—they build vigorous minds in themselves and their sons and daughters. They model the very virtues a free republic requires: courage, self-reliance, and moral clarity.

So let this be our rallying cry. Homeschool parents, stand firm. Reject the allure of easy government funding. Refuse to trade the hard-won independence our forebears purchased with years of courtroom battles and quiet courage. Teach your children as free men and women who are answerable to God and conscience, not to the latest state form or auditor. In doing so, you honor the pioneers who came before. You protect the liberty that one generation so recently secured. And you prove, once more, that great necessities still call out great virtues.

The path is steep. The cost is real. But on the far side lies something far more precious than any check from the state: children who know what it means to be free because their parents chose responsibility over relief, character over convenience, and liberty over the illusion of help.

The revolution of homeschooling is not over. It has only begun. Let us keep it worthy of John and Abigail, who inspired it. Let us keep it free.

“People and nations are forged in the fires of adversity.”

—John Adams¹⁹

Sources & Endnotes

Written by:

Rachael Jensen

Rachael Jensen is married to a real-life superhero—her husband, Michael Jensen, who honorably served in the U.S. Air Force for 20 years. A proud Arizona native, Rachael and Michael make their home in Scottsdale, where they are raising six wonderful children. Now entering their 15th year with Classical Conversations, the Jensens have graduated two of their homeschoolers. Over the past 14 years, Rachael has served in various roles within Classical Conversations. She is now grateful to serve as a passionate State Advocate for homeschool freedom.