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Despite increasing global popularity perceptions of homeschooling remain problematic. It resists trends towards mass compulsory education and the promotion of children's rights; it challenges the state's authority to educate citizens; and raises concerns about child protection issues and educational outcomes. Contemporaneously many homeschoolers identify their fears of risks and failings in mainstream schooling as the reason they homeschool. This article explores how discomfort and fear is ingrained within meanings associated with homeschooling often related to its domestic practice. It develops Freud's account of unheimlich (the unhomely) as a useful addition to the sociological analysis of the multiple renditions of meaning attached to homeschooling. These include the conflation of homely and unhomely accounts; the significance of anecdotal accounts as a means of restating class biases and racisms; and the ambiguous relationship between family and state. It argues both policymakers and homeschoolers need to acknowledge these ambiguities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dramatic growth in the homeschool population in recent decades has coincided with an increase in the methods used to educate homeschooled children. However, researchers tend to treat homeschooled children as a uniform group without accounting for vastly different homeschooling arrangements. In this study, we examine the prevalence of four types of homeschool arrangements by pooling three cross-sectional waves of nationally representative data on American homeschool families (n = 1,468). Results indicate that most homeschool families supplement home education with cooperative instructors and private tutors, online education, and brick-and-mortar schooling. Families who do not use these resources are declining. They are also more likely to be White, less educated, and residing in the South region. Homeschool families whose children attend brick-and-mortar schools part-time are less likely to be White and more likely to reside in urban areas. Future research is needed to explore outcomes across different homeschool arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Lack of knowledge about living donor kidney transplant and difficulties in approaching potential donors constitute barriers for many patients and may contribute to inequality of access. Project Aims: Renal Education and Choices at Home was a UK single-centre pilot of home education; an initiative aiming to overcome barriers by increasing knowledge among patients and support networks and by facilitating living donation discussion in the patient's home. Design: This was a pre-post comparison of knowledge, attitude, and ability to communicate about transplant. Pre-visit knowledge about treatment options and attitudes towards transplant were measured using a validated questionnaire, repeated 4–6 weeks post-visit, to assess the session's impact, along with an evaluation survey, to determine how patients perceived the session. Results: From November 2018 to February 2020, a nurse specialist delivered living donor transplant education sessions in the homes of 86 patients, attended by 141 additional invitees. Home visits led to a significant improvement in knowledge about renal therapies, including living donor transplantation. The evaluation of the home visits by patients and invitees was overwhelmingly positive. Of the 86 patients visited, 46 (53%) had at least one potential donor initiating the assessment process following the visit. Overall, 78 potential donors initiated the assessment process. Conclusion: Home education contributed to addressing recognised barriers, in a way that was well received by patients and was novel in our health system. Home education may be particularly beneficial for patients affected by known barriers to living donor transplantation such as socio-economic deprivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to present the perspectives of three school leaders in one rural primary school in the English East Midlands, who, when faced with closure due to a falling student numbers, decided to offer and operate a flexi-schooling model of educational provision. We aim to find out, through a theoretical model of systems school leadership, how the school leadership team addressed this issue. Findings suggest that the principles of systems leadership, operating through an open systems model, have facilitated the journey towards flexi-schooling and ensured the survival and growth of the school. The learning community created with parents and the personalisation of the curriculum for learners reflects an innovative curriculum design and in part solves the problems which led to the initial decision taken by parents to home-educate. Focusing on ways to secure healthy student numbers, school leaders developed a partnership with a multi-academy trust, yet they still face challenges in formally recording student numbers when their attendance is only part of the week. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unschooling is a form of home education in which free play, trust and autonomy are highly valued. Unschooling is also a countercultural movement that began in the United States in the 1970s. Applying dialogical theories about the development and exchange of ideas through dialogue, unschooling can be seen as an internally persuasive, centrifugal discourse that resists an authoritative, centripetal discourse that assumes children's education happens at school. The researchers conducted a dialogical analysis of 19 unschooling blog posts that contained autodialogue among multiple voices within the Self, including I-as-unschooler, I-as-mother, I-as-countercultural, I-as-learner, and I-as-thought-leader. These I-positions interacted with inner-Others, such as public figures in the unschooling movement, other bloggers, children, mainstream adults, and the school system. There were clear tensions as the bloggers engaged in imagined dialogue with their critics. As an exploratory, qualitative study on an under-researched phenomenon, the study opens up questions for further research, including how values, beliefs, and identities play out in unschooling families in practice, and contributes unique insights into the ways unschooling bloggers dialogically author their social identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Home education is at an early stage for the public, researchers, media and educational authorities in China. Yet the research relating to the development of home education has been entirely ignored. In particular, the literature focusing on the legal status of home education is negligible in the educational context of China. There is no literature that has systematically explored the relationship between Compulsory Education Law and home education. The public, parents, and researchers have many questions as to whether home education is legal or not. This article provides comprehensive firsthand legal data and an in-depth analysis of the relationship between home education and law in the Chinese context. This article aims to contribute to the literature and reveal the legal status of home education in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a comprehensive study of two-hundred fifty homeschooling families in urban, rural and suburban areas of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the researcher examined all aspects of the instruction, materials and curricula employed by the families in a ten-year longitudinal study from 1998 through 2008. The researcher conducted interviews and gathered questionnaire data from: 1) all of the families in the sample in 1998, and 2) those families still residing within the same designated district in 2008. Significant changes occurred in the demographical data and the families’ instructional programs. Within the methods/materials/curriculum data, increases occurred in the: 1) use of prepared curricula (religious and non-religious), 2) the acquisition of more textbooks from local school districts, 3) use of the public library, 4) technology applications, 5) consultation with instructional specialists/teachers, and 6) greater networking with other homeschooling families. In their pooling of resources, sharing of expertise, and communicating with other homeschooling families, the homeschoolers had upgraded and diversified their choices of pedagogy and their modalities for delivering instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A notable increase in the number of U.S. families choosing to homeschool their children in recent years has underscored the need to develop more systematic knowledge about this approach to education. Drawing on a theoretical model of parental involvement as well as research on families’ social networks, this study longitudinally examines home- and public-school parents’ motivations for home-based involvement in their fourth through eighth grade children’s education at two time points. The study also examines whether involvement activities predicted student proximal achievement outcomes (academic self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation for learning, and self-regulatory strategy use) across the two groups. Results suggest that parental self-efficacy for involvement, specific invitations from the child, and parent social networks are positively related to home-based parental involvement across the groups, although home- and public-school parents recorded significantly different perceptions of personal self-efficacy, role activity beliefs, social networks, and child proximal achievement outcomes. Findings are discussed with reference to implications for future research and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many parents cite intimacy as one of their reasons for deciding to educate at home. It seems intuitively obvious that home education is conducive to intimacy because of the increased time families spend together. Yet what is not clear is whether intimacy can provide justification for one's decision to home educate. To see whether this is so, we introduce the concept of 'attentive parenting', which encompasses a set of family characteristics, and we examine whether and under what conditions attentive parents risk loss of intimacy by sending their children to school; or, alternatively, whether they can avoid this risk by educating children at home. What we will determine is whether families who exhibit the specified characteristics are prima facie justified in educating their children at home under the conditions of interest. We argue that, for attentive parents, home education not only promotes greater intimacy, but also provides insurance against the loss of intimacy that may occur under certain conditions when children attend schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Home education in Germany is a contravention to the school law, and severe sanctions are applied against it. Despite this, a small home education movement has developed within the last 25 years. This article, after a short overview of home education in Germany, examines the reasons why a policy with sanctions fails to deter homeschooling. Then I point out why the legitimate interests of the state and the child, which are usually given to justify the prohibition of home education, might be better served if home education were legal but regulated and controlled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]