It has become a truism to even mention it: the COVID 19 pandemic altered every single aspect of our lives globally – our work and leisure time, our rights and duties, our family lives, even our intimate relationships were impacted. One of the most noticeable perturbations has been the closing down of schools and the confinement of families inside their homes. A great many parents, those with young children most evidently, were suddenly assigned the task of organizing and supporting learning activities for their progeniture, while sometimes simultaneously working from home themselves. Unprepared, burdened with the new role forced onto them or disturbed by the virtual presence of teachers in their living room, many soon longed for the reopening of schools.

A small group chose instead to continue homeschooling their children even after the end of their confinements, thus contributing to raising the numbers of homeschoolers in many countries of the world. Though drastic in some cases, the increase resulting from the pandemic merely accelerated a pre-existing, more profound and earlier trend. Beginning in the 1970s in the USA and eventually arising in most industrialized countries of the world, the homeschooling movement has been growing and extending its scope ever since its first appearance.

In an attempt to better understand the sociological dynamics underpinning this increasingly global phenomenon, we examine them through the lenses of systems theory. We first discusses the turn to modernity, paying specific attention to the emergence of the modern family. We then reflect on complications arising from the functional differentiation of society and emphasize two potentially problematic dynamics – reductive and expansive – typical of modernity. Next, we examine how such dynamics play out in the specific case of the relationship between the family and school education. We then explore whether and why schooling may be perceived as a risk, and homeschooling as a solution, by some families.

Homeschooling is typically practiced in these contexts with a highly developed educational system. The phenomenon first emerged in the USA where it has been growing regularly since the 1970s, and later expanded in most developed countries across the world, notably in Europe, where it is now growing at a faster rate (Tilman & Mangez 2021). Its expansion can therefore not be attributed to the lack of a formal system or to its underdevelopment. Instead it must be put in relation to the development of schooling itself. It develops from, and expands together with, education systems. In order to better understand the phenomenon, we interviewed about 50 homeschooling families in Europe and in the USA. Qualitative structural analysis supported the analysis of the data. From the perspective of these families, going to schoolschool is not without risks. By attending school, one “is confronted for the first time and suddenly with a society that is no longer negotiated by the family” (Luhmann and Schorr 2000, 31). The differentiation of education and its organization in classrooms allows for the creation of a peculiar social order, strictly distinct from its simultaneously operating and turbulent environment. What children learn from their teachers and the ways in which they might be affected by being socialized with their peers escape family control (Tyrell and Vanderstraeten 2007). Luhmann’s observation (2000, 2006) that the individual has no choice, if she wants to participate in modern society, but to place her trust in systems and organizations to which she has in fact “ceded control” thus proves all the more relevant for school education, and helps understand why some families cease to trust the system and its organizations.

A close examination of the relations between formal education and the private sphere of the modern family reveals the various ways through which school requirements increasingly penetrate family life and helps in turn to explain the need that some families now feel to gain back control. Relying on systems theory makes it possible to identify the “form of the problem” (i.e. conflicting expansive-reductive systems) which is at work in these situations independently of its actual content (education and the family). In turn, it becomes possible to consider that the same form of problem or dynamic – Teubner (2011) calls it a dynamic of “regime-collisions” – might be at work with other systems and give rise to other social movements. To the extent that such movements react to highly advanced self-referential systems by ceasing to place their trust in their organizations (schools, hospitals, firms, courts, political parties, etc.), they will often take on the appearance of a retreat from modernity. The rise of self-referential and conflicting systemic perspectives in the domain of education or in other domains (the economy, health, law or politics, for example) tends to generate distrust of systems and their institutions and the emergence of particular “lifestyles” characterized by a form of withdrawal from the established systems. To conclude, we suggest understanding the homeschooling movement as a specific case within a broader range of social movements through which modernity reacts to its own self-made problems.

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