During the last few years in the PRC and in Taiwan, a small minority of parents have illegally removed their children from compulsory school attendance in order to oversee their children’s education themselves or to entrust them to private individuals. Focusing on the Confucian Classics as the sole textbooks, those involved believe themselves to be the inheritors of the “traditional education,” which they re-appropriate as an alternative to the official school system, due to their perception of deficiencies in state education. Just as the wider “children’s Classics reading movement,” of which they are a radical group, the sino-taiwanese “family schools” owe their origin and their principal characteristics to a Taiwanese professor, Wang Caigui, who, after having been a disciple of Mou Zongsan, has evolved from his neoconfucianist academic background and become a strong promoter of “Classics reading,” and also, though in a more discreet way, “family schools” as a kind of paradoxical elitism. Based on fieldwork study in about ten “sishu” in mainland China and in six Taiwanese “dujingban,” this article takes into account both the similarities and differences of Chinese and Taiwanese socio-political contexts, not neglecting the evident homologies with western “homeschooling” practices. It tries to articulate both the generic and the specific approaches by combining three perspectives on the dynamics and issues at stake in this double education network.