Educating Children at Home, Alan Thomas, Cassell, London, 1999
www.worldzone.net/
lifestyles/homeducation:
a site drawn up by Amanda Petrie that provides information on legal aspects of home
education in Europe.
www.rama.1901.org/vens for information on the French
home education movement
Les Enfants d’Abord is organizing a home education conference from Aug. 26
to Sept. 2, 2000. For information:
33-4-70 59 81 23 |
Parents throughout Europe are
becoming bolder about educating their children at home, even if it means defending
their rights in court
 The continent that has adopted
a single currency is a long way from unity on home education. Although data remains
scarce, support groups in several countries claim that they are receiving increasing
numbers of requests from parents looking for alternatives to formal school systems,
a movement being matched by legislative attempts to curtail its practice.
According to Amanda Petrie, one of a handful of European researchers on the subject,
there is an underlying thread running through recent legislative changes suggesting
that “if you are not in school, you are not learning.” In Ireland, an Education (Welfare)
Bill put forward for discussion in 1999 treats home education as a school attendance
problem, rather than as a right guaranteed by the Constitution, which declares that
the primary educator of the child is the family. With the expressed intention of
cracking down on sects, the French parliament voted a new law in December 1998 obliging
parents to follow the national curriculum more closely and inspectors to visit their
children once a year in the home. The law was passed by a handful of deputies without
consulting with representatives of the home education community. For Elyane Delmarès
of the French support group Les Enfants d’Abord, “it’s a bogus argument. The state
already has a whole arsenal of weapons to fight sects. This is really about the state
having a stronger hold on education.”
Support groups say these controls cast home education in a negative light and reflect
misconceptions about how learning takes place outside school. For Petrie, imposing
a national curriculum and allowing inspectors into the home are two examples. The
first assumes that “the state knows what education is, takes a certain formula, and
if you apply this formula, your child is going to be fine.” The second discriminates
against people who are “not upper middle classes with reams of bookcases in the home.”
The
value of informal learning
But even in
countries where the practice is tightly restricted, ambiguity often prevails. In
Spain, where schooling is compuslory up to 16 years of age—special circumstances
aside—a court ruled in 1999 in favour of parents from Almeria who are educating their
seven-year-old child. In Germany, where home education is illegal, several families
have gone to court and paid fines but they have been allowed to continue the practice.
After returning from a posting in Micronesia, Dorothee Becker and her husband found
that their two children were unable to adapt to the German school system. “It didn’t
offer the variety we had hoped for, especially in languages and science,” says Becker,
who has been to court once. In the Netherlands, authorities have refused 90 per cent
of homeschooling requests, acccording to Syne Fonk, head of the support group Syntax.
In response, a growing number of parents are starting up their own private schools.
Increasing research on home education would be a first step to breaking through some
of the misconceptions surrounding the field, still widely shunned by the academic
community. Studies are most advanced in the UK, which has Europe’s strongest home
education community, with an estimated 10,000 children. There can be one hundred
different reasons for making the commitment, ranging from a simple question of philosophy,
to concern about bullying and behavioural problems at school to religious convictions.
Alan Thomas, a visiting fellow at the University of London Institute of Education,
carried out in depth-research on 100 families in Britain and Australia to provide
one of the first detailed accounts of how parents go about the task of teaching their
children at home. Besides shorter lessons and extra individual attention, Thomas
noted the far-reaching impact of informal and shared learning and the importance
of conversation that is all too often lacking in school. He found that children had
“high confidence in their ability to learn, high self-esteem and are socially mature
in a way many who have been to school are not. They’ve not experienced failure. If
you don’t understand something, you deal with it there and then.”
Petrie takes the debate one step further, emphasizing that the right to home education
should be a principle of democracy. “I think it comes down to a question of how much
confidence the state has in the parent’s ability to know what is right for their
own children. The debate hinges on that.”
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