Home School Heroes

When Christopher Klicka wrote Home Schooling: The Right Choice!, the home education movement was still in its formative stages. As a pioneer homeschool father and an attorney representing other families on behalf of the Home School Legal Defense Association, he was particularly well-suited to champion the cause and exhort other Christians to follow those who were pioneering an alternative to the godless indoctrination of state-run schools. That first book did both at a time when homeschooling was not yet legal in all states.

The Heart of Home Schoolingcame many years later, after years of homeschooling his seven children, speaking to home educators around the country, and continuing his work as an HSLDA lawyer. It was a plea to Christian parents either to begin homeschooling or to continue to do so, with an emphasis many similar books overlooked—the essential role of the father in the home school family. But whereas Home Schooling: The Right Choice!marshaled extensive references, statistics and evidence, The Heart of Home Schoolingfocused on appeals to Christian parenting and ideology.

In Home School Heroeshe presents the history of the modern homeschool movement through the stories of those who fought to make it universally legal in the United States despite often fierce and downright terrifying opposition. For those homeschooling in the wake of the movement's often turbulent beginnings, it may be shocking to read that social workers forcing themselves into innocent families' homes, repeated accusations of child abuse, and actual forced removal of children from their homes were fairly widespread events in the early days.

But this isn't a horror story. Instead, Klicka uses these stories to demonstrate God's faithfulness to those willing to follow Him in the matter of educating their own children according to His principles. It's easy to take our current homeschooling liberties for granted—Home School Heroesshows that we neither should nor can, that while things are better now we must remain vigilant lest through inattention we lose the ground the pioneer homeschoolers worked so hard to gain. A sort of triumphant sequel to Klicka's earlier books, this is destined to be one of the truly important works of homeschool history.