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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Merry and Howell on How Family Intimacy is a Good Argument for Homeschooling

This post is the first in a series reviewing the recent articles published in the November 2009 issue of Theory and Research in Education.  The article under review is Michael S. Merry and Charles Howell, “Can Intimacy Justify Home Education?”

Merry, professor of philosophy of education at the University of Amsterdam and author of an important recent book on Islamic schooling, and Charles Howell, a philosopher of education at Northern Illinois University who has published many articles on homeschooling (most of them in Brian Ray’s Home School Researcher), here team up for a vigorous argument for intimacy as a guiding value in homeschooling that can justify the practice.  Here’s the argument in a nutshell: 

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