The Jewish Namdar family is back in court on Gothenburg, Sweden over their decision to homeschool their children. A homeschool advocate from Sweden visits the Rigal family and their church in Cuba finds striking similarities.
October 16, The new law started taking effect even before it was passed. Swedish municipalities interpreted the old law with the intentions of the new law and denied permission to home school in many more cases. Families who had been home educating successfully for many years where suddenly denied permission and threatened with the social authorities and fines of up to 20 euros per child and year.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is Germany where the education sector is tightly regulated to the extent that homeschooling is against the law. In cases where parents have refused to comply with legislation requiring them to send their children to officially regulated public, private or independent schools, this has resulted in children being removed from the home, and taken into the care of the local authority.
Read criticism of the case, here. Ultimately, in answer to the question as to whether there is a right to homeschool under international law, the answer is no. Parents enjoy the freedom to raise their children in line with their religious and moral beliefs, and free from unnecessary state interference.
However, children enjoy the right to education. Both are important but parental freedom cannot trump the rights of the child. And, as we have seen, under international law, it is for the states themselves to determine standards and regulations and, as a consequence, to what degree parents are free to homeschool their children.
Un article faux de bout en bout. Ce qui demeure en droit en est une autre. Children's education is a must. They will make the society of tomorrow. So, we should give them the opportunity to learn better. The article is interesting as example whereby the desired conclusion — the state apparatus has a largely unlimited right to interfere in families and the upbringing of children, nay the state is the primary parent of the child — is embedded in the vocabulary and idioms used to describe the laws imposed by the various governmental apparatuses around the world.
In the end, when you have such an intolerable imposition without recourse to a democratic solution, it comes down to who has the biggest firepower and this is usually the state apparatus. Let us not kid ourselves that it was ever otherwise. And I still had my freedom after school, when I would devour books, spend time in nature, and be with my friends. School, even though it was mandatory, did not dominate my life. Being a social democratic country at its core, Sweden has been working for equality for almost a century.
The thought of free education for every young citizen resonates profoundly with my conviction that every human being should be born free with the right to develop to her maximum potential. However, things have changed a lot since my childhood, and not for the better. Sweden is a unique country in the sense that we citizens truly believe that the state is benevolent and wants the best for us.
Why would we parents even want to stay at home with our children, if we can all have a career and develop a sense of self worth? Actually, why would we even think we could offer our children something better than what the state is already offering? The state wants our best, and it knows better than we do what we need. I believe this is one of the reasons homeschooling was never a big movement in Sweden. Why homeschool if the system is already providing us with something we believe is superior?
Why renounce our freedom to build a thriving career? That says a lot about our trust in the system. Questioning the belief that the state might not always want our best is almost impossible. Also, change has been happening slowly enough for people not to realize how something that was good for the majority is now actually becoming very bad for most people. When the educational law changed in Sweden in , the freedom and relative flexibility that I had as a child disappeared.
This makes it basically impossible for other teaching philosophies to function the way they were originally designed. Montessori, Waldorf and Freinet are all suffering the consequences. The controls have become more rigorous. Marking starts already in 6th grade, and some politicians are advocating for it to start in grade 4. National testing has gotten more frequent.
In , the age at which a child starts school dropped from seven to six. And obviously, it made homeschooling illegal. Not that it was ever a big movement, but at least the possibility existed prior to This has led to many families leaving Sweden in order to offer the possibility of a freer education to their children.
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