Apparently, Gen Z Wants to Homeschool

A survey published this year found Gen Z is 74% more likely than other generations to want to home-educate their own future children. I did not see that coming.

I read a piece on Upworthy a couple of weeks ago that made me pause. It was covering a survey by Age of Learning of just over a thousand parents and aspiring parents in the US, and the headline finding was that Gen Z is 74% more likely than other generations to say they want to home-educate their children.

As a parent of three, a sentence that made me chuckle out loud was “Of course, it’s always easier to imagine homeschooling kids you don’t have yet…”.  Brace yourselves, lovely Generation Z.

I want to be careful about how much weight I put on one survey of a thousand people, especially one commissioned by an education technology company. But the size of the gap is enough to make it worth thinking about, even if the exact number moves a bit under scrutiny.

What I don't fully understand is why. The article suggests the two main reasons Gen Z gives are safety and freedom, which are the two reasons the survey found across all generations, just felt more strongly by Gen Z. That's a real answer, but it doesn't quite tell me what's underneath it. Are Gen Z more worried about schools specifically, more anti-institutional generally, more used to learning online themselves, or is something else going on that a survey question can't get to?

The other thing that struck me is a stat further down the piece. The number of homeschooled students in the US has gone from roughly 850,000 in 1999, to about 2.5 million just before the pandemic, to around 3.62 million more recently. So the growth was already well underway before Gen Z started thinking about their own future families. Their preferences just add to something already in motion.

I don't have a strong theory about all this. I'd guess it's some combination of pandemic memory, distrust of institutions generally, wanting more say over what and how children learn, and maybe just having grown up watching family YouTube channels of home-ed families making it look manageable. Any of those could be part of the picture, and none of them feels like the whole thing.

The bit I keep coming back to is the mismatch between the survey and the stereotype. When you say "homeschooler" in most rooms, people still picture something specific and slightly old-fashioned. If a big chunk of Gen Z are seriously considering this for their own children, the actual home-ed population in twenty years is going to look nothing like that mental picture. Which is either exciting or worrying depending on where you sit, and I'd love to know which it is for people currently in the middle of home-educating.

If you're Gen Z and you're thinking seriously about home-educating your children one day, I'd genuinely like to hear what's drawing you to it. If you're home-educating now and this trend rings true (or doesn't) from what you see in your local community, I'd like to hear that too.

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