Nach der Allgemeinen Erklärung für Menschenrechte dürfen Eltern die Schulausbildung ihrer Kinder wählen. Und immer häufiger entscheiden sie sich dafür, ihre Kinder zuhause zu unterrichten. Lernen die dort vielleicht besser als in der Schule?
Homeschooling is a human right that governments must respect and protect globally. Children should be allowed to explore their interests and realize their fullest potential in an environment that is nurturing, affirming and safe. Home education provides these and many more attributes.
Homeschooling delivers parental engagement regardless of race, background or income. In minority or economically disadvantaged households, children who would do poorly in school do extremely well in the homeschool environment. Motivations for homeschooling include concerns about safety, gangs and bullying. Parents might be dissatisfied with the level of academic instruction, or wish to provide their children with moral, philosophical or religious teaching. Children with a special learning profile, such as autism, or a physical disability, like cerebral palsy, can find mainstream education very difficult.
School is a one-to-many environment; it cannot compete with home education, where you have student-teacher ratios of one to one, or one to three. Every child is unique. Not everybody learns the same way. In school, it’s hard to ensure that each child gets exactly what they need. In a home environment, you can develop the curriculum and teaching methodology to suit the individual. This allows children to reach high levels of academic engagement and performance.
Teachers have strict training, yet research shows that the level of teacher qualification does not correlate with the academic results of their students. The average homeschooled student performs 25 to 35 percentage points higher on standardized tests than those in public or private schools. Article 26.3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights allows parents to choose “the kind of education that shall be given to their children”. The European Court of Human Rights ruling in the case of the German Wunderlich family was a tragic decision that allows states to persecute families who homeschool. Germany says homeschooling contributes to the rise of parallel societies and that children can only be properly socialized in a school. There’s absolutely no proof of this. It makes no sense, especially when you look at homeschooling communities around the world in which children are well socialized and fully integrated into society.
Schools are the place where children and adolescents learn what a society deems to be basic requirements. Compulsory schooling ensures that they are taught by teachers who have proved their knowledge of the curriculum as well as their didactic ability. It is not a good idea to let children decide to learn only what they want to learn — or to let parents decide what they want to teach.
Everyone who has mastered a skill, learned a foreign language, learned to solve a mathematical problem or understood a scientific fact, knows that at some point, you have to put in an effort in order to understand, practise or implement new skills. Things like grammar structure and vocabulary in language learning, for example. And there are not many parents who alone can offer the knowledge and understanding of the many subjects that a number of schoolteachers together have to offer.
But schools are not a place where children and adolescents learn and understand just the curriculum. In my experience, homeschooled children frequently find it difficult to assess how they appear to others, or how to handle criticism. In school, children encounter many different personalities and learn how to interact in larger groups. They experience companionship and friendship with people who are completely different from them and their family, and interact with people they might not like very much at first. Maybe they have to learn to conquer the fear of speaking in front of many people or in front of adults they do not know well. Children learn that sometimes it is necessary to compromise or to accept authority different from that of their parents, and that sometimes it is necessary to stand up for your opinions or your needs.
Most importantly, if children are homeschooled, they are not exposed to different worldviews in the way that school can provide those different perspectives. The influence of the family is very strong; children from families that hold a fundamental and constricted religious or political worldview or philosophy have to struggle to develop their own (perhaps more liberal) view of the world. School, and compulsory schooling, gives them a space in which to encounter other opinions and beliefs, and in dealing with these, to gain an opportunity to discover their own perspective, free from the influence of the family.