My parents got into home-schooling for practical reasons; I learned to read early, the kindergarten was a long drive away, etc. They intended it as a temporary thing, a year or two before I went off to school like a normal person. By the time my younger siblings came along, they'd gotten the hang of it, liked it a lot, and just kept on teaching us all at home; I never did end up going to school.
They had always been religious, and we were raised with religious practice as a part of everyday routine, but they steadily became more and more a part of the countercultural fundamentalism that was growing up around them in the 1980s. As that happened the practice of home-schooling became both a cultural marker and a means of rejecting and protecting their children from what they saw as a corrupt and unhealthy mainstream society. By the time I graduated, my parents and most of their social circle were fully on board with the whole quiverfull homeschooling right-wing fundamentalist subculture.
Of course I promptly rejected the whole thing, as did most of my cohort. The fundamentalist homeschooling subculture appears to perpetuate itself almost entirely via recruitment and not through reproduction, so far as my observation goes.
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