Homeschooling is not by far the most common option, but more and more families are opting for so-called “homeschooling.” The main motivations for parents and guardians who choose this option are the quality upbringing of children in pedagogical, ideological or ethical terms.
What do those who opt for home education argue?
Many families who decide on this teaching model state that the current Educational System does not provide them with the needs, motivations and interests they seek in the academic and personal training of their children.
They justify their decision in the overcrowding of classrooms, the high level of academic failure, in teaching focused on content, in an inadequate academic environment for study and effort, in the rigidity of the curriculum or in a pedagogy that seems stagnant and that does not attend to one’s own individualities.
For other families, however, education outside the school center is a way to deal with the specific educational support needs of their children, bullying or the tensions inherent to schools (exams, uniforms, obedience or punctuality). .
What is the main disadvantage?
An important part of the educational community, pedagogues and psychologists, for their part, view homeschooling with suspicion.
For them, the level of socialization and maturation of students who do not go to school cannot be compared to students educated in centers; by not having experiences with the daily problems related to living in a work environment with equals. Other drawbacks that stand out include the difficulties of coexistence, as parents have to perform two functions in front of the child: that of teacher and that of father, leading to situations of stress derived from prolonged contact, their compatibility with working life or the difficulty of the technical aspects of one’s education (development of programs, teaching of lessons, creation of material, selection of pedagogical model, etc.)
Is homeschooling legal?
From the associations that claim the right of parents to choose the education they should give to their children, they collect these inconveniences and try to provide the necessary support and resources to make the task more bearable, demanding that administrations have a legal framework that protects them. .
Homeschooling, today, is not regulated, nor is it a non-legal practice; There is a gap in relation to the homologation of the compulsory education qualification, which is filled through different mechanisms or strategies, such as enrolling in a foreign center remotely, taking the ESO tests at age 18 or studying within the System the last ESO course.