In November of 2012 two important conferences, one in Berlin, Germany and the other in Madrid, Spain, were held. Both were concerned primarily with fostering a political climate of openness to home education in European countries.
On November 1-3, 2012, about 170 delegates from around the world converged on Berlin to attend the Global Home Education Conference 2012. The conference’s general tenor and feel is ably summarized by Harriet Pattison of the University of Birmingham in the Spring 2013 issue of Other Education, available here.
The conference produced a document called the “Berlin Declaration,” available here.
While the conference was largely organized by the North American advocacy organization HSLDA (the Home School Legal Defense Association), it was attended by a wide range of home educators representing various pedagogical and ideological commitments. Another summary of the proceedings can be found at the website of the far-right U.S. magazine The New American, available here. It should be noted that there has been some criticism of this conference for being a thinly-disguised attempt by HSLDA to export its aggressive American-style political activism to other countries. You can read some of this sort of sentiment here.
On November 29-30, the Third National Conference on Family Education/Homeschooling was held in Madrid. As this conference was held in Spain by and for Spanish speakers, there has been scant coverage of it in the U.S., and it is difficult to find English-language information about it online. However, Carme Urpí of the Universidad de Navarra attended the conference and graciously provides for us the following summary of the conclusions reached there: (more…)
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A second, fully revised edition of my 2008 book Homeschool: An American History, was published in March of 2017. 
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Homeschooling Research Notes 