This interview-based study suggests that the home schooling movement represents another literacy crisis. Home-schooled students may define their commitments to the public sphere in ways that conflict with the assumptions of community literacy and other pedagogical projects. Home schoolers may adopt the values of the "literacy frontier," constructing exclusive social boundaries in their communities and rejecting the roles of public literacy sponsors. The literacy frontier, however, is not a negative, reactionary space. It is important for public literacy researchers to recognize the rhetorical ways in which home schoolers attempt to reproduce the public sphere through private and quasi-public literacy sponsors. (Contains 3 endnotes.)