Yes, after I initially published this, a lot of homeschoolers or unschoolers contacted me to express a lot of anger at what I had written.

But I think some of them at least were missing my point, which is not that homeschooling itself is a problem, but that allowing religious belief to deny education is a problem.

Amish parents don’t even homeschool, at least not to educational standards that would allow their children to choose university if that’s what they wanted for themselves.

Torah was an outlier. Not only did she run away from her family, but she managed to make up for her missing high school education while she worked to support herself.

Amish kids around here where I live can leave their communities after they turn 18 or 19, that’s not a problem. A large plurality of them actually do that. It’s actually kind of necessary, because the Amish have such large families that they usually don’t have enough property and wealth to leave to all the children they have.

But then these young adults are faced with the problem of having to support themselves and get decent jobs without the education that their non-Amish peers have. For boys with exceptional woodworking or other mechanical skills, that’s not necessarily the end of the world. Many boys, however, don’t have those kinds of skills, having specialized in pre-modern farming instead.

Amish girls tend to be even worse off. The skills they learn are well suited to managing a large 19th-century-style pre-electrical farm and taking care of children without modern conveniences. But those skills are not marketable.

So most of the young people who leave Amish communities find themselves greatly disadvantaged. Nobody is going to pay for them to make up the high school education their community did not afford them, so they mostly enter a pool of underprivileged, under-skilled workers with few opportunities to rise above that status.