Why Compulsory Schooling Laws Need to Go

Instead of criminalizing parents whose children miss school, sometimes for heartbreaking reasons such as bullying, we should seek instead to abolish compulsory schooling statutes.

[Dear Readers, This is a guest post written by my colleague Kerry McDonald, a Harvard-educated writer and author of the celebrated book, Unschooled. Sign-up for her newsletter, LiberatED]

When Massachusetts passed the nation’s first compulsory schooling law in 1852, parents were required to send their children to school under a legal threat of force. 

Prior to that statute, and those that followed in all other US states over the subsequent decades, cities and towns were compelled to provide schooling for those who wanted it, but parents were under no obligation to use those schools. And many didn’t, choosing instead to send their children to private schools, church or charity schools, “dame schools” in their neighbor’s kitchen for younger children, apprenticeships for older children and teens, or to homeschool.

Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Massachusetts Board of Education secretary, Horace Mann, and other education reformers who were captivated by the Prussian schooling system and its embrace of compulsion and conformity, convinced legislatures to widen compulsion from municipalities to moms and dads. 

As I’ve written previously, there was a broad and open anti-immigrant sentiment, especially in mid-nineteenth century Boston, that paved the way for compulsory schooling statutes in order to inculcate dominant Anglo-Saxon Protestant mores in newly-arrived Irish Catholic immigrants. 

Mann, who homeschooled his own three children while helping to mandate schooling for others, explained that strong parental bonds are obstacles to children’s and society’s development. He wrote in his fourth lecture on education in 1840: “Nature supplies a perennial force, unexhausted, inexhaustible, re-appearing whenever and wherever the parental relation exists. We, then, who are engaged in the sacred cause of education, are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.”

Since their inception, compulsory schooling laws have been used to criminalize parents—particularly low-income parents and parents from marginalized groups, such as immigrants and racial and ethnic minorities. In the wake of nineteenth century compulsory schooling laws, Catholic parents began sending their children to parochial schools to avoid government-run education—a practice that Oregon banned in the early twentieth century. That action ultimately led to the landmark US Supreme Court decision, Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), that famously proclaimed “the child is not the mere creature of the State.”

Today, parents continue to be jailed when their children miss too many days of school, as The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week. We may see this criminalization accelerate in the coming months as states and school districts try to find the alleged “missing” children who have left district schools since the pandemic response began in 2020. 

Instead of criminalizing parents whose children miss school, sometimes for heartbreaking reasons such as bullying, we should seek instead to abolish compulsory schooling statutes and free families from the government’s coercive clutches. In the absence of these laws, as I’ve written, a robust, diverse, and decentralized education ecosystem would emerge that would be grounded in consent over coercion and defined by variety over monopoly.

Some states, such as West Virginia, have taken initial steps to loosen compulsory schooling laws by widening exemptions. More state policymakers should follow suit. 

Compulsory schooling is incompatible with freedom, as Thomas Jefferson himself recognized. As we celebrate American liberty this week, let’s work to identify and unravel the fetters that continue to tether freedom.