As common as the accomplishments of students who have been home schooled is public speculation about the quality and value of at-home education. This sociological study, focusing on home schooling as a social movement, provides an account of a novel education movement and provides analysis of the relationship between cultural context and a social movement's form and message. Based on ethnographic research conducted throughout the 1990s relying heavily on in-depth interviews with home-schooling parents from a variety of backgrounds in the Chicago area and an examination of 10 national home-schooling organizations, the book describes how the home-schooling movement is essentially two movements, reflecting both the liberal alternative school movement of the 1960s and 1970s and the Christian day school movement of the same era. Chapter 1 of the book introduces the home-school world and describes the nature and limitation of the inquiry. Chapter 2 examines home-schooling literature and samples of home-school curricula, providing a sense of home schoolers' varied pedagogical approaches. The chapter also highlights parents' talk about the hows and whys of home schooling and sketches the relationship between home-school pedagogy and home schoolers' broader world views. Chapter 3 assesses the scope of the work home schooling requires and the different ways in which mothers make sense of that work. Chapter 4 describes how home schoolers have worked to assemble themselves into a national constituency and examines the subtle ways in which different organizational sensibilities have had lasting consequences for the shape of the movement. Chapter 5 addresses how home schoolers go about their politics, recounting a watershed event on Capitol Hill that betrayed and solidified home schoolers' organizational divisions, and offers an explanation for why individual leaders have had such success in their endeavors. Chapter 6 considers what home schoolers teach about the nature of American childhood. Notes for each chapter conclude the book. (KB)