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instead of one that served the developmental needs of im-

pressionable children.  In the 1970s the countercultural

left, who responded more strongly to Holt's cri de coeur,

comprised the bulk of homeschooling families.  By the mid-

1980s, however, the religious right would be the most domi-

nant group to choose homeschooling and would change the

nature of homeschooling from a crusade against "the estab-

lishment" to a crusade against the secular forces of modern-

day society.

Buttressed by their national media appearances, legis-

lative and courtroom testimony, and speeches to sympathetic

communities, Holt and Moore worked tirelessly to deliver to

an often-skeptical public the message that homeschooling is

a good, if not a superior, way to educate American children;

that it is, in a sense, a homecoming, a return to a prein-

dustrial era, when American families worked and learned

together instead of apart.

Homeschooling Becomes Mainstream

Today, the growing popularity of homeschooling is

evidence that the work of Moore, Holt, and other similar-

minded reformers snowballed into a grassroots revolution.

Brian Ray of the National Home Education Research Institute

posits that homeschooling is growing at the rate of 15

percent to 40 percent per year.20  Conservative estimates

were that the number of homeschooled children in 1985 was

50,000.21  Patricia Lines, a researcher with the U.S. De-

partment of Education (whose data, used for estimating the

homeschooling population from the fall of 1990, were updated

for the fall of 1995) estimates that the number of home-

schooled children is between 500,000 and 750,000.22

In a working paper on home education, Lines explains

how she gathered those data:

The 1990 data came from three independent

sources--state education agencies that collect

data; distribution of complete, year-long graded

curricular packages for homeschoolers from large

suppliers; and home school associations' member-

ships.  As each represented the tip of an iceberg,

each was adjusted based on data from other sourc-

es, including surveys of homeschoolers indicating

the extent to which families filed papers with the