HOME EDUCATING PARENTS: Martyrs or Pathmakers?

Record: Leslie Safran Barson, “Home Educating Parents: Martyrs or Pathmakers?” in International Perspectives on Home Education (2015): 21-29. [Table of Contents]

Summary: This article is part of a series of reviews on the book International Perspectives on Home Education. Barson is a homeschooling mother who went on to get her PhD in Education. Here she discusses the sacrifices that parents make to homeschool their children.

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EDUCATION WITHOUT SCHOOLS: Home Education in the UK, part 2

Record: Helen E.  Lees, Education Without Schools: Discovering Alternatives (Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 2014). [Abstract Here]

Summary: Lees, a Visiting Research Fellow in Education and Theology at York St. John University in England and founding editor of the online journal Other Education, here draws on her doctoral research to make an impassioned plea for expanding the public understanding of education to include more than formal institutional schooling.  I summarized the first five chapters of her book here.  In this post I will summarize chapters six through nine and end with a bit of analysis.

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EDUCATION WITHOUT SCHOOLS: Home Education in the UK, part 1

Record: Helen E.  Lees, Education Without Schools: Discovering Alternatives (Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 2014). [Abstract Here]

Summary: Lees, a Visiting Research Fellow in Education and Theology at York St. John University in England and founding editor of the online journal Other Education, here draws on her doctoral research to make an impassioned plea for expanding the public understanding of education to include more than formal institutional schooling.  In this post I will summarize the first five chapters of her book.

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PARENTS’ RIGHTS AND EDUCATIONAL PROVISION: An Argument for Abolishing all Private Schooling

Record: Roger Marples, “Parents’ Rights and Educational Provision” in Studies in the Philosophy and Education 33, no. 1 (January 2014): 23-39.

Summary:  Marples, a Principal Lecturer in Education at University of Roehampton in London, here makes a spirited argument against the legitimacy of non-government schooling in all but the most extreme circumstances.

Marples begins by asserting that the claims of parental “rights” go back to Lockean notions of property rights and to claims by philosophers like Robert Nozick and Charles Fried that the child is an “extension” of the parent.  Marples disagrees.  For him, “treating children as mere appendages to their parents is both to disrespect and undermine their moral status.” (p. 24)

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How European Nations Regulate Home Education and How They Could Do it Better

This post reviews Henk Blok and Sjoerd Karsten, “Inspection of Home Education in European Countries” in European Journal of Education 46, no. 1 (2011), pp. 138-152.

Blok and Karsten, both at the Kohnstamm Institute at the University of Amsterdam, here summarize what is known about homeschooling regulations in 14 European countries.

The countries covered are these:  Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, England, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and Sweden.

For each the authors give a succinct summary of the nation’s homeschooling situation, and they recap it all in a convenient chart.  Over at the ICHER website we have our own graphic with some of this information, but Blok and Karsten give much more detail.

After summarizing the situation in each of the 14 countries they make a few generalizations and conclude with four policy recommendations.  First the generalizations:

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