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Branigin lecture at Institute for Advanced Studies, Indiana University 4. April 2012:
HOME EDUCATION – A MIRROR FOR DIFFERENCIES IN EDUCATIONAL
POLITICS
Christian W. Beck
Institute of Educational Research
University of Oslo, Norway
c.w.beck@ped.uio.no
http://folk.uio.no/cbeck/
Thank you for the invitation to give a Branigin-lecture at your institute. I am honored. It is
nice to be here in Bloomington.
I will use the expression “home education”, because that what I am used to from Europe.
Home education means here exactly the same as you in US call “homeschooling”.
I have followed HE closely and done research on HE in Norway, my home-country and have
also followed international HE since 1994. In this lecture I will try to see HE in a broader
perspective, both when it comes to the social and political context for HE, and HE seen over
time. After a short introduction the lecture is organized in eight points:
1) Home education in different societies
2) The legal dispute about home education
3) Home education in the Nordic countries
4)
Quality in home education
5) Home education and social integration
6) Home education and illegal schooling
7) A new social motivated home education?
8) Epilogue
Introduction
Home education represents parents protest against the public school-institution, against
pedagogical ideologies, against degradation of family-values and home educators are fighting
for individual freedom. This emphasizes populist values in home education. Populist being
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understood as a movement with its origins among the common folk and ultimately forming a
sub-culture in the modern sense of the term, which in both Norway and in the US can be
traced back to more traditional sub-cultures and their historical evolution from movements in
rural areas. This populism, which is far from fundamentalism, I will say, represents the
strongest political dimension in HE. HE can both be pre-modern traditional oriented and hightech postmodern. But I see HE of all kind as an important part of a broader protest to a
technocratic, centralized and often alienating educational system in the late modern global
world.
1. Home education in different societies
In spite of populist similarity between US and Norway, the home education in these two
countries is very different.
In US federal-state public institutions like schools are in conflict with both market values and
popular values. Home education in the US is then both popular and as Michael Apple write
neo-liberal and neo-conservative in terms of its ideological orientation. The situation in
Norway is different. Here criticism of public schools are almost by necessity a critique of
both of the state and the market, since these two chief institutions are so closely intertwined
in our modern social democracy and then in the politics forming the public educational
system.
Norwegians like people in the other Scandinavian countries are, compared to US, much more
loyal to the national state and public schooling. In contrast to US, we find HE as more pure
popular motivated critical to an integrated state and market domination in our social
democratic government in schools in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland.
Norway has 5 million inhabitants, US 310 millions. Only 2 % of the students in Norwegian
private schools, that is unlike the situation in the US with at least 10 %. In the USA modern
home education started in the late 1960`s, in Norway in the beginning of the 1990`s. In US at
least 1.5 million students are home educated (2-3 %, may be 4 %, in Norway about 400 (0, 06
%) home educate, which is about European average. Home education in Norway compared
with the US is a small-scale phenomenon, which still is in its initial phase.
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US HE-families are most typical families with well educated middleclass parents. Norwegian
HE-parents are under average educated compared to all parents in the country. In US the
home educators seem most numerous outside big cities and suburbs dominated by a white
population. Norwegian HE is almost totally rural, including urban middleclass families going
rural.
In US 30 - 40 % of the HE is religious anchored. In most European countries religious
motives are less than 10 %. Mostly HE in Europe is alternative lifestyle and unschooling
oriented, especially in Western Europe. In Eastern Europe the religious motives are more
pronounced and HE is here also possible when the child have some forms of illness. Some
parents use this last possibility creatively. In US the majority of HE-ers is mostly a political
conservative movement. In Norway and other European countries we observe positive
references by home educators to the leftist educational ideologists from the 1970s like Paulo
Freire (1971) and in England to the American Marxists Bowles and Gintis (Schooling in
capitalist America 1976).
Internationally we find four main groups of HE-ers. The groups overlap and are more like
“ideal-groups”:
1.
Structured – Home educators, who are frequently religious, conservative, well
educated middle class parents. They are what the English educational sociologist Basil
Bernstein (1977) calls role- and position-oriented in their pedagogical codes and often
practice structured school oriented home education.
2. Unschooling – Home educators who are frequently well educated middle class parents,
anti-establishment, with radical political and cultural viewpoints. They are what
Bernstein calls person- and identity-oriented (ibid). They often practice child-centered,
natural learning home education with priority placed on cultural creativity and new
interpretative and communicative knowledge.
3. Pragmatic – Often rural, working class home educators. The parents have limited
formal education. They emphasize home education anchored in practical work.
4. Unknown – Different groups of home educators which more or less are all not
registered with the authorities or unknown: This could consist of radical unschoolers,
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gypsies (romanis), unknown immigrants, socially troubled families who sometimes
have substance abuse problems and extreme fundamentalist religious families. Some of
these are serious about home education, but others appear to use home education as an
excuse for self-imposed isolation from society. This unknown-group seems in Norway
to be 50 – 70 % of all home education. If we in my hometown Oslo calculate from the
difference between the number of school-age children and those who attend school, the
figure of unknown students is much higher. In Oslo, this difference has increased by
600 % in 10 years and is currently approximately 1300 children (2.3%). This is mostly
immigrant children. Only a few of these can expect some sort of education at all.
The first two groups provide well HE and are the most researched. Students in group 3 with
serious and persistent HE seems well trained in reading, writing and math. In addition, they
learn their parents' often practical occupation and many avoid serious negative experiences of
school like bullying. Children in group 4 can range from getting super HE to no education at
all and sometimes child abuse. Differences between US and Europe and between European
countries seem to be the relative size of each of the 4 groups.
2. The legal dispute about home education
In Colombia in Latin-America HE for example is not specified in their Education Act at all,
and HE-ers see this as a problem, as the right to HE has no legal protection. In almost all
modern countries, there is somehow an opening in the Education Act so that parents can give
their children HE instead of school. England and the United States are the most liberal
countries. However Germany and to some extent the Netherlands and Sweden are much more
restrictive. Norway is situated in the middle, but closest to the liberals.
Currently there are conflicts about the right to HE in many countries. An underlying issue
here is the Muslim immigration to Europe and the fear of a segregated society. Integration of
HE-students has become an important issue for a verdict in a German-HE-case (Konrad-case)
in the European Court of Human Rights Strasbourg (2006). The parents lost the case for the
right to give HE. The court-verdict implied that HE-ers may be anxious for the development
of parallel communities of native ethnic groups and immigrants in European countries. To
avoid this, the court has chosen to associate the child`s right to education with socialization.
The State shall ensure children's right to education, which according to the verdict shall also
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include the child's right to integration through participation in the school community. The
verdict also found that parents' religious influence on their own children must be in a way in
which children understand the consequences.
In a California court-case, USA (2007) I know, HE-ers lost the right to give HE. The rationale
here was also that the school was necessary because of socialization. After pressure from the
HE-organizations the sentence was later annulled.
Sweden, (2010) has now adopted an additional instruction in the new educational act that
prohibits the right to HE on religious and philosophical grounds. Arguments used are the
same as in Konrad-sentence/ case. Swedish authorities believe that when the school is secular
and objective, religious/ philosophically based, HE is not necessary. Sweden can now
compete with Germany to be the most restrictive HE-European country. In Sweden 11 HEfamilies last year migrated to “Ålandsøyene” between Sweden and Finland where it was
possible to continue their HE.
In England there has been a law-proposal for a more restrictive and controlled HE, but this is
rejected in Parliament.
The authorities' control of HE applies both to registration and monitoring (inspection), which
can be connected together in various control regimes. Countries can be divided into four
groups:
Table National rules for registration and monitoring of HE
Registration
Strong
4
2
Weak
1
3
Weak
Monitoring
Strong
1) The most liberal countries. Some states in the U.S. and England have no requirement for
registration or monitoring of HE. If the authorities wish to intervene in HE they relate HEcases to child welfare / care issues. Also the most restrictive countries, like Germany,
associate HE-cases to child welfare cases.
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2) The law proposal of HE in England does not distinguish between the registration and
monitoring. It attaches conditions to be recorded and you must be registered in order to give
HE. Such registration should automatically trigger the monitoring part of a registration
regime. Similar conditions are also found in some U.S. states, and in Sweden, where HE is a
way to fulfill the obligation of school, which implies court-permission to home educate and
requires both registration and monitoring.
In the Czech Republic and other Eastern European countries both registering with authorities
and monitoring of HE are required. HE in Eastern Europe is often treated as strong
government-controlled educational experiments.
3) In Norway, we have requirements for monitoring in the law, but no legal requirement for
registration. To send a letter to the municipalities to report one's intent to HE is a custom, but
are not statutory requirements. The same arrangement exists in Denmark and Finland, as well.
4) In some U.S. states registration is required, but not monitoring. In such places,
registration is often associated with an offer of testing of HE-students and IT-support for HE.
As an alternative to inspection, one can think of transparency. The government has the right to
gain access / documentation of HE, but has no sanctions clause in the law. In Sweden, they
use the concept transparency, but this is in practice supervision, because they do have
sanctions clauses. I know home educators who want “transparency” to be the wearing concept
for the relation between HE-ers and school-authorities
Personally I find it reasonable that the government puts some demands on both the
registration and monitoring of HE. However, the audit must be in a way that accepts HE and
its peculiarities and there must be an "upper limit" which prevents excessive monitoring.
At the same time in all countries with HE, the reality is that there are HE-ers who are neither
registered nor monitored and if you push them too hard many of them will not go back to
school, but go “underground”.
3. HE in the Nordic countries
In the 18th century, schools were established in Denmark, together with Norway, which at that
time was a province of Denmark. Even though teaching was still rooted in the home, the
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school steadily took over. In Sweden and Finland, which was then governed by Sweden and
in Iceland, literacy teaching continued for many years to be based in the home. Home
education seems to have been an effective method of learning to read. A significantly higher
proportion of the population of 18th-century in Sweden could read than was the case in
Norway and Denmark. The Nordic history of education is grounded in populism and nationalstate equality-values. This reflects today a splitting view on HE. People are positive to the
populism in HE, but as the authorities they also have a negative fear of inequality and social
segregation effects of HE.
Modern home education (HE) started in Nordic countries in the beginning of the 1990`s, in
Norway and Sweden in strong conflicts with the authorities and with several court cases.
Norway, Denmark and Finland have a more liberal legal regime for HE with obligated
education which means every one can start HE. Sweden and Iceland have a more restricted
regime with HE as an exception from obligated schooling, which has to be called for. HE in
Sweden today as I said is almost forbidden.
Table 2 Comparing HE in the Nordic countries
Country
Number HE- Law
students
Monitoring, Access to private
Not reg.
schools
Test res.
(PISA)
Norway
400
Yes
Restricted
Middle
Sweden
1-200
Yes
Good in urban areas Middle
Denmark
1-200
Yes
Good
Middle
Finland
3-400
Yes
Restricted
High
Liberal, obl.
education
Restricted, obl.
schooling
Liberal, obl,
education
Liberal, obl.
education.
Conclusions:
1. Liberal law seems to give more visible HE (Norway)
2. Strict law and control seem to give less visible HE, but
more underground/hidden HE (Sweden).
3. If loyalty to public schools is good, authorities HE-control is more
relaxed (Finland).
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4. Liberal access to small private schools gives less HE (Denmark and
Sweden
4. Quality of HE
From the starting year of modern HE (1960's), there has been considerable uncertainty about
the quality of HE. Do the HE-students have the expected learning results?
Several studies, particularly from the institute NHERI in the United States show that HEstudents scored very well on knowledge tests, much better than the school-students. However,
the methodological weaknesses of these studies are crude and with many sources of error. The
results apply to middle-class Christian families who HSDLA know about, as a volunteer with
the tests, which are administered by the testing agencies that sell services to the HE-ers.
Parents administer and score the tests themselves and decide whether to submit the results.
There are many sources of error here. The most valid with this research from conservative
Christian organizations is that they often have large samples.
If we try to correct for the method-errors in these test studies, they show that the most
committed Christian upper middle class students who do very well in both public schools and
private schools, also do well with HE. HE is no disadvantage for them.
The conclusion about the learning outcomes of HE seems to be that particularly middleclassHE gives good results, but also that serious and persistent HE otherwise provide acceptable
learning results. Some new research indicates that with unschooling under specific condition
HE-students don’t learn what they are supposed.
Research on the socialization of HE-students seem to show that in families with serious HE,
the children are well socialized both as independent individuals and community members. HE
is both a way to be normal and a way to be weird.
But two questions about home education and socialization seem unanswered:
1) When are HE-students going to end their family-oriented primary socialization? Do
they get enough secondary socialization where they meet the broader society also with
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counteracting viewpoints other than their parents` and will they be challenged enough
from today`s global world diversity?
2) Will HE-people be inner oriented clans and communities with very strict borders
between themselves and rest of the world?
5. Home and social integration
It seems like the main threat for school authorities and common people by HE not is its
content, but its placement outside schools.
If school attendance is considered important to social integration, non-attendance due to home
education can be viewed as a threat to integration.
Home education challenge how strong parental rights and other fundamental human rights
should apply in democratic societies before they counteract the idea of public education and
social integration. Too restrictive practice of such human rights could on the other hand
counteract reciprocity between home educators and society and the increase the possibility of
segregation of home educators.
Home education, particularly among the religiously motivated, can challenge social unity.
Nevertheless, known about and registered home education often produces well-socialized
students. The greatest difficulties regarding social integration seem to be in the category of
unknown home educators. Such home educators often have little or no communication with
society and there is no monitoring of the quality of their possible practiced home education.
6. Home education and illegal schooling
Some parents in Norway practice a form of cooperative-HE for their students for a limited
time (mostly one year), in connection with the closure of small public schools and a call for
private school, often Montessori –schools. The answer from the school authorities take about
a year. In the meantime they collectively give their children home education. They organize
this HE to a certain extent together, but also hire a teaching aid and they “home educate” in
the closed public school building.
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In some communities such cooperative-HE has been tried stopped, School-authorities have
called this illegal schooling. Such stop attempts have not been brought forward. Actually it is
only a trial or a new law-clause that can clarify this. I find this issue of general interest. When
school authorities see lack of educational community as an HE-problem, why do they
then allow HE but not informal parental-schooling? I think the answer here is simple, it is
about control. Such controversies I think give arguments in favor of HE.
7. A new social motivated HE?
Informal education with individual and societal concerns twined together in everyday life was
the long historical starting period of schooling. For a long time after the first educational law
was put into effect in Norway in 1739, there was lack of schools in rural areas and therefore
home education was allowed and practised.
The school expanded. The age at which children start school has now been lowered all over
Europe. Today, the enrolment of 4 year-old children in pre-school education in European
countries has been increasing. More years and hours per day spent in school are seen quite
uncritically as a positive development by national authorities in modern countries.
Today we can talk about a new pedagogical mainstream in school. The new can be described
in three points:
a) Increased range – More time spent in school both in terms of the years of an individual’s
life and in hours a day spent in school.
b) Socialization – More focus on socialization and identity issues.
c) Testing – Testing and testable knowledge have a priority not only in reading, mathematics
and natural and social science, but also in social skills.
Wealthy, modern countries with a high level of economic development, Gross National
Product (GNP), have the most developed school systems and the best results on OECD’s
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(Organization for Economical Co-operation and Development’s) international PISA
knowledge tests in reading, mathematics and natural science. It is especially the countries that
have somewhat high GNP that have to mobilize their educational system out of necessity to
get even higher GNP which score highest on PISA tests such as Finland, who have best PISA
test results.
Again we can see similarity between the two countries, US and Norway. Both stand out with
the highest GNP in OECD, but have relatively low PISA test results. The modernization of
society has been connected to an increase in time spent in school. But there is no evidence to
support the claim that more time spent in school results in more teaching time and better
learning results. Have the US and Norway passed a peak for time positively used in school
and in learning efficacy, and will Finland and other modern countries with high PISA test
results soon pass the same point?
Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s (1975) concept of everyday life in their famous book:
The social construction of reality is here relevant: Every day life is participation in family,
community and elsewhere with a low level of formal institutionalisation and authority control.
In everyday life we mainly act with what the English sociologist Margaret Archer (2003) call
first-person-authority. In such acts the person’s free will makes a difference. In the formal
institution you act in “third”-person, you are an object to fulfil the program in school.
More of the everyday life of children spent as time in school means less 1. person life and
more 3. person life. This stresses the socialization possibilities expected from everyday life.
The imbalance between time used in everyday life and in formal educational institutions could
disturb the overall conditions both for a student’s knowledge learning and socialization.
When extended school participation sometimes reduces the everyday life of students under an
accepted minimum, the move towards home education is an understandable reaction. This
reaction can go too far, but home education is a strong message about the loss of everyday life
in modern societies.
The solution seems neither to be entrenchment in a minimized everyday life of the students
nor in an over extended school. Most parents want to reconstitute the balance between
everyday life and formal educational participation for their children, but in their own way.
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Nearly 20 years after Mayberry and Van Galen’s studies of personal motives for HE like
ideological and pedagogical motives, we can observe interesting signs of change in
motivation for home education in Norway. In a research survey (2006): “Parents view of
school” a representative sample of 1050 Norwegian parents with children as students in
Norwegian compulsory school (6 to 16 years) (N=564) answared about their opinion of
school.
One question about home education was:
Do you for a period of time want to give your child home education?
Answers: NO = 83 % (462)
IN DOUBT = 7 % (36)
YES = 10 % (57)
The 10 % that answered “yes” represents about 60,000 students of the compulsory school
population in Norway. Today, only about 400 (0.06 %) students are home educated. For each
home educated student there could then potentially be 166 more. Not many of the 10 % who
answered “yes” will start to home educate in the near future. However, the results
demonstrate that many parents are considering out-of-school options like home education for
their children’s education. Home education, an almost unknown option for parents 10-15
years ago, is today a possibility parents know about and have in mind when they answers such
questionnaires. The parents that answered “yes” come from all social classes, but more
specifically when the student is in private school and the father is not working full-time.
The parents were asked for their motivation to want to home educate for a period.
Table 3 Motives to want home education for a period in 2006
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Motives to want HE
Number (%)
Problems with school
26 (46)
Want more time with my 23 (40)
child at home
Pedagogical reasons
22 (38)
Religious reasons
4 (7)
Other reasons
20 (34)
n=57, some parents mention more than one motive
Only 7 % of the possible home education motives would be for religious ones. This is a strong
decrease from 2002/03 when 30 % of Norwegian home education was religiously motivated.
The pure pedagogical school motives are more or less the same in 2006 (38 %) as they were
in 2002/03 (40 %).
The top two motives in 2006 are both social (46 % and 40 %). A social motive is here defined
as related to a deficiency in the student’s social frames such as socially related problems at
school and parents who want to spend more time with their children. This is different than
more personal motives like pedagogical and religious (life-orientation) motives.
Even if these two social motives here to some degree overlap, there is remarkable increase in
social motives for possible home education in 2006 compared with the 16 % who home
educated based on social motives in 2002/03.
Parents in the survey who chose home education as an option are more concerned about
bullying, absence of their child’s well being at school, bad relationships to teachers and their
child’s social development than the other parents. They are not however more concerned, than
other parents, about their children’s learning results at school.
The two studies are different because the 2002/03 survey asked for
motives for real home education and the 2006 survey asked for motives for possible home
education. Still, the significant differences in motivation for home education in these two
surveys provide reasonable empirical ground to say that religiously motivated home education
could be on a decreasing trend and socially motivated home education to be on an increasing
trend in Norway.
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Will expanding time spent in school for students and decreasing time spent in everyday life
give more social school problems and more socially motivated home education? A new
socially motivated home education may be a reaction in modern countries to extended
pedagogical institutionalization of children and youth, an attempt to reconstruct modern
everyday life. This may be an international trend.
8. Epilogue
While following the Norwegian HE, particularly close since 1994, and also international HE,
I have discovered an inner connection between on the one side school-authorities resistance
to and sometimes demonization of HE-ers and on the other side- HE-ers who see all the
school authorities and all the critical comments of HE, as enemies. I believe this is a mentality
both authorities and HE-ers have to fight against.
I think we have to admit that HE-ers are very different and not one big community. But I find
too many HE-ers extreme self-centered, inner-orientated and some of them as fundamentalist
in a religious sense but also when it comes to HE itself. HE is in their sense “pure” and school
and state are “dirty”.
But still HE is freedom. I see HE-ers positively as agents for a new epoche in education,
mainly with school, but a school more open to the family, to communities, to other civic
institutions and to the working-life.
I am sorry to say that the situation when it comes to HE-research is quite bad, even if some
good research exist. Of course I except religious motives for HE. But when HE-researchers
say HE is a gift from God, it is difficult to take their HE-research seriously. It is then difficult
to have enough critical distance to your research object. HE-researchers who themselves give
home education often also turn too narrow-minded and subjective in their HE-research, but
there are exceptions.
On the other hand the critical HE-research is often on leftist ideological ground and overlooks
much of the positive sides of home education. We obviously need more objective, high
quality HE-research.
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Parent`s motives to practice home education are also a diagnosis both for school and society.
It is difficult to predict, especially about the future, but its fun to try. Here are finally five
possible future scenarios for the development of HE and then also are scenarios for society
when it comes to education:
1. Ephemeral. HE was a kind of self-defense for a small minority of families and students
around the year 2000. When schools get better quality and school-legitimacy increases then
the phenomenon will disappear, just by itself.
2. The Forbidden education. HE will be prohibited, but continues "underground." HE-ers
will be prosecuted and HE end up in the most scarcely populated areas and in the immigrant
ghettos in major cities.
3. Minority phenomena. HE will continue to be legal, but not a widespread, minority
phenomenon.
4. HE supreme. HE increases steadily and becomes eventually the dominant educational
form. It is not necessary to prohibit the schools, because nobody any more is interested in
them.
5. Diversity. HE is made normal and harmless. About the teaching going on in school, at
home or otherwise find the authorities uninteresting.
Today we see all these five HE-scenarios practiced, more or less, in different countries.
I see tendencies of ephemeral HE in my own country, Norway. Here HE has stagnated or
even reversed the last 3-4 years, but at the same time, as I have said, there may be a potential
of a rather large number of social motivated HE-ers.
Underground and forbidden HE is more or less practiced in countries like Germany were HE
in the law almost is forbidden, but is also practiced in other countries like Sweden.
HE as a minority phenomenon seems established and stabilized in most modern countries.
HE as supreme may be is an emerging reality, to some degree, in some US-states, but is today
at most a theoretical concept.
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Diversity - Signs of normalization of the chosen form of obligated education, school or HE,
may be seen in some US-states, Australia and Canada.
------------------------------I will end this lecture by saying to the HE-ors, but also to the school-authorities: Take a
chance on openness and cooperation out of your own ranks. Do not let HE be strangled under
the heavy burden of fundamentalism. HE-ors are in the front-line for renewing modern
education.
Especially to HE-ors: Use the freedom you have taken and show the world that good
education can take place without school.
Thank you for your attention.