INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON HOME EDUCATION: Do We Still Need Schools?

International Perspectives of Home Education discusses home-based education in a wide variety of countries such as the UK, USA, Australia, Israel, Afghanistan, Norway, Germany and more. The volume was edited by Paula Rothermel, a UK academic in the field of home education. She is Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) and Elected Associated Fellow of the British Psychological Society (ABPS). She also coordinates the International Network for Research into Home Education, a global community of scholars interested in home education research.

 

Over the next several weeks, all 21 chapters will be reviewed in order. Links will be added as reviews are posted. Here follows a table of contents for the volume:

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LITERACY: Informal Acquisition and Development

Record: Alan Thomas and Harriet Pattison, “The Informal Acquisition and Development of Literacy” in International Perspectives on Home Education (2015): 57-73. [Table of Contents]

Summary: This article is part of a series of reviews on the book International Perspectives on Home Education. Thomas is a visiting fellow and Pattison is a research associate at at the Institute of Education, University of London. Here they investigate the informal development of literacy in the context of home education.

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Summaries of Two Recent European Home Education Conferences

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:

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INFORMAL HOME EDUCATION: A Philosophical Rationale for Liberated Pedagogy

Record:

Alan Thomas and Harriet Pattison, “Informal Home Education: Philosophical Aspirations Put Into Practice” in Studies in Philosophy and Education 32(2): 141-154 (2013) [Available Here]

British researchers Thomas and Pattison are frequent collaborators, most significantly on the 2008 revision of Thomas’ book How Children Learn at Home.  In this article they draw on some of their earlier empirical research to make several normative claims about informal home-based learning.

Summary:

Thomas and Pattison begin by noting that all children start out as informal, or what they call “osmotic” learners, mastering such complex tasks as learning to understand and speak language and to interpret social cues without any sort of formal, structured curriculum.  Many children go on to learn to read this way as well.

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Two Recent European Conferences on Home Education

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.

Read Full Post »