I found this quote in reference to something the author saw at a national park mentioning that Teddy Roosevelt was “homeschooled.”

People have been educating their children at home for centuries, but “home-schooling” has a contemporary political edge, and it doesn’t fit the Roosevelts.

Home-schooling is an act against “the establishment,” or at least apart from it. The Roosevelts couldn’t be against “the establishment”; they were the people who established the establishment.

So the term “homeschooled” has political connotations that “tutored” does not? Exactly what political connotations is the author, Ruth Walker, drawing? Could it be the “right-wing, fundamentalist, Republican” stereotype? And was TR himself really an establishment kind of guy? He was rather unorthodox and had a rather unorthodox childhoood as far as I remember. I think TR’s family would have fit in quite well with the homeschoolers I know–except that they (the Roosevelts) were rich and, unfortunately, most of us aren’t.