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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Homeschooling in Albania

This post reviews Timothy Hagen, “Free to Learn: The Rationale for Legalizing Homeschooling in Albania” in Central European Journal of Public Policy 5, no. 2 (December 2011): 50-85 [available fulltext here]

Hagen, a professor of economics at Epoka University in Albania, here offers what is I think the first ever article about homeschooling in that country. 

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Monk on Regulating Homeschooling in Britain

This post reviews Daniel Monk, “Regulating Home Education: Negotiating Standards, Anomalies, and Rights” in Child and Family Law Quarterly 21, no. 2 (2009): 155-184

Monk, Senior Lecturer at the School of Law, Birbeck at the University of London, has been studying homeschooling for a few years now, his work largely concerned with challenging the dominant discursive tropes used by both advocates and critics of homeschooling, trying to get everyone to see that there is more at stake than the simplistic parent vs. government rhetoric suggests.  This new article is not available online, but a 2004 piece he wrote along these lines is available here.

In the present article Monk summarizes the current legal context of homeschooling in Britain and makes predictions for future policy directions. 

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