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In Quebec (Canada), a new normative framework and the COVID-19 pandemic have precipitated the hiring, by the ministry of education, of at least a hundred new resource persons to monitor home education. According to international writings, these professionals are at the crossroads of normative, political, and educational conflicts. Our literature review reveals that these resource persons might solve such conflicts by adopting some of ten typical intervention strategies: mutual understanding, tolerance of disagreement, search for the child's interest, creativity, competency development, negligence, abuse of power, protection of their professionality, incontestability, and distrust. A questionnaire was constructed on the basis of this typology, aimed at supporting the study of their interactions with families.

To better understand the experience of unschooling, non-directive in-depth interviews with five Quebec adults who had experienced it were conducted according to a phenomenological approach, revealing their perceptions of their educational experiences and their families, as well as their views of the world. Certain aspects of the testimonies corroborate the results of previous studies concerning self-directed learning, use of information technology, development of interests, and participation in a support group; others reveal limits when it comes to learning perseverance, pursuit of complex learning goals, school integration, and evaluation. The participants also spoke of family conflicts, parental control, negligence, and the influence of this experience on their views of society, work, the school system, and the role of government in education.

In Canada, until now, no studies have focused on the practice of home education in the francophone province of Quebec. While the home-educating population in that province is tangible, it has remained largely unknown. Quebec's distinctive character on three fronts-- political, historical and cultural--make the application of results from the rare Canadian studies or data from the US home-educating population seem inappropriate. This research, conducted by questionnaire in 2003, documented the sociodemographic characteristics of Quebec's home-educating families and their motivations for home education. Beginning with a portrait of Quebec's particular context, this article presents the motivations underlying the choice of home education expressed by 203 Quebec families. The reasons why these families have chosen to homeschool are many and diverse; parents' rationales for their choices are wide-ranging and multidimensional. One particularity of the results is that no religious, philosophical or anti-state viewpoint seems to dominate the combined discourse. Seven motivational factors for home education were identified. Collectively, the respondents express the following as their main motivations for home educating their children: a desire to pursue a family educational project; an objection to the organisational structure of the school system; a desire to offer curriculum enrichment; and finally, a preoccupation with their children's socioaffective development. (Contains 6 tables and 5 notes.)