Skipping School

“Lane’s project moves beyond sensationalist and alarmist opinion reporting on homeschooling. Instead, she soberly presents a clear narrative of homeschooling that sheds light both on American society today and, through the stories of real families, on the motivations of actual homeschoolers.”
–Mere Orthodoxy

“The best thing about Skipping School is it will prove alchemical to every reader. No matter your preconceived notions about homeschooling, you will leave with a transformed perspective. This is the highest kind of history: true to the facts and challenging to our biases. Skeptics of the practice may walk away viewing homeschooling much more reasonable; hardcore conservative Christian homeschoolers may see the history and current situation as less monolithic.”
–Daily Wire

“Dixie Dillon Lane, a homeschooling mother herself, pulls back the curtain on a group of Americans who, by experience and necessity, have often lived quiet lives.”
–WORLD

“Dixie Dillon Lane’s Skipping School: A History of American Homeschooling and How It Went Mainstream is easily the best book I’ve read on its subject. Anyone with an interest in homeschooling should read it. But it could also be profitably read as a how-to by scholars who are working on entirely different subjects. I can’t immediately recall the last time I encountered such a model of rigorous scholarship made not merely accessible but inviting to a large audience.”
–John Wilson, First Things

“Skipping School blends history, sociology, and memoir. At times the book reads like an accessible treatment of the homeschooling movement since 1950, and at other times like an apology for this approach to K-12 education. But Lane’s professed goal is to write a history that homeschoolers themselves will recognize–and in that, she succeeds.”
–Christianity Today

”[Dixie Lane] is uniquely situated to offer this textured account of parent-led education in American after World War II… . Rigorously researched, Skipping School will interest historians of education and general readers curious about the place of homeschooling in American life.”
–The Wall Street Journal

“Dixie Dillon Lane deftly merges scholarly research with layperson-accessible writing to provide important academic and personal insights into the modern homeschooling movement and community. An engaging, challenging, and delightful read.”
–Brian D. Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute

“With engaging prose, balanced judgments, and keen historical insight, Skipping School offers a model exploration of an unusually tangled subject. Debates over homeschooling involve complex legal, cultural, political, religious, and (of course) educational questions, questions that are addressed in this book with discerning intelligence. Well-researched general history, focused attention on Los Angeles as a central venue of influential legal decisions, and occasional references to the experiences of the author’s own family shed welcome light where heat too often prevails.”
–Mark Noll, author of A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada

“We used to say that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, schools replaced families as the primary vehicle for the education of children. Yet in 2026, one in ten American children is homeschooled. Dixie Dillon Lane’s elegantly written and absorbing history of the modern homeschooling movement in the United States is essential reading for anyone attempting to understand this momentous shift. Combining archival research and interviews, Lane has written a book of fundamental importance for policymakers, parents, and citizens.”
–John T. McGreevy, author of American Jesuits and the World

“I could not put this down. Skipping School is the book I wish I had when I began my parenting journey as a young academic mom in 1999. Beautifully written, fast paced, and exquisitely researched. Lane’s book will set the conversation for the next decade.”
–Catherine R. Pakaluk, author of Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth

“Dixie Dillon Lane’s Skipping School is a sympathetic and balanced history of homeschooling that recognizes the movement’s diversity and avoids simplistic caricatures. Lane explains why so many parents both in the past and present have wanted to homeschool their children–and how, in making that choice in such large numbers, they have transformed the meaning of home education. This book is ideal not only for parents who are homeschooling (or thinking about homeschooling) but also for anyone who wants to better understand this movement on its own terms and make sense of its impact on the next generation.”
–Daniel K. Williams, author of The Search for a Rational Faith: Reason and Belief in the History of American Christianity

“Skipping School is a well-researched, easy-to-read history of homeschooling in the United States. Lane shows how diverse families successfully challenged the status quo of education by building on family, individual, and communal connections to reconnect learning and living in their neighborhoods from the 1950s to the present.”
–Patrick Farenga, coauthor of Teach Your Own and publisher of Growing Without Schooling

Dixie Dillon Lane is an American historian and homeschooling parent who lives in rural Virginia. She holds a PhD in history from the University of Notre Dame and serves as associate editor of Hearth & Field.

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