Much of the existing research on home schooling focuses on statistically describing home schoolers, classifying families on the basis of their motivations, or linking them to the privatization agenda. In contrast to these studies, this qualitative research study attempts to shed light on an understudied aspect of home schooling, namely, the lived experiences of mothers whose children started out in institutional schools, but pulled them out in order to home school. At the cultural level, this study traces how the meaning of school has evolved from the Aristotelian view of school as schole or leisure into modern managerialist notions of school as buysness. The mothers' stories show how their every day experiences collide with social efficiency and bureaucratic processes schools have borrowed from business. This analysis should be of interest to parents, school professionals, and policy makers.