A couple of months after two children attacked Enna Pink’s son with sticks at kindergarten, he began pleading with her to stay at home. “I didn’t want to force him to go,” says Ms Pink. She and her husband, who both worked at a startup, thought home-schooling would be a better fit for their son, who is “hyper-sensitive”. But it is illegal in Germany, where they lived. So they moved to Costa Rica, where home-schooling is illegal for locals but there is little oversight for digital nomads.
Now her children, seven and four, do not follow lesson plans; instead they learn by playing outside, joining other children in local activities and travelling around the world. She thinks all this fosters curiosity and confidence. “We feel that what our society needs in the future is not what the school system can offer,” she says.
Chart: The Economist
Home-schooling has long been associated with oddball parents, awkward children and shaky pedagogy. But it is growing swiftly. Numbers were rising before the pandemic; they have since surged in countries like Britain, Australia and Canada (see chart 1). In America 3.2m children, or 6% of the school-age population, were home-schooled in 2024—more than double the number in 2019.
As home-schooling has grown, the families who take it up have changed as well. Take America, where home-schooling, once a fad on the counter-cultural left in the 1970s, was by the 1980s driven by conservatives who decried schools as “Satanic hothouses”. It is still associated with white evangelical Christians.