Home Schooling

Alternatives to mainstream schooling and education are becoming increasingly recognised as pertinent and urgent to better understand. We need to know what really works in successfully educating children and adults today. This is not just important but a duty. This duty comes especially in light of the dominating performance driven and managerially organised economic modelling of education. This Handbook seeks to explore the vast range of educational alternatives—from appreciating just why we don’t like changing our mind about education to knowing more about the value of forest schools; to “seeing” home education properly to learning the value of solitude in schools; to hearing about new technological attitudes to education to understanding why order at home meets educational goals; to feeling our way through heterotopic education spaces to learning about practical new alternative school models. The Handbook maps the current and future terrain of the educational landscape. Global in its perspective and field-defining in content, this wide-ranging one-stop volume will be an indispensable reference resource for academics, students and researchers in the fields of education, education policy and philosophy.

Editor Biographies
Dr Helen E Lees researches and writes about alternative education, broadly conceived in all its matters and manners and silence for education and well-being. She is lecturer in Education Studies in the School of Education, Newman University, Birmingham, UK. Helen is founding Editor-in-Chief of Other Education—the journal of educational alternatives www.othereducation.org. Her latest book (2014) is Education without schools: Discovering alternatives.

Nel Noddings is Lee Jacks Professor of Education Emerita, Stanford University. She is a past president of the National Academy of Education, Philosophy of Education Society, and John Dewey Society.  In addition to 19 books, she is the author of more than 200 articles and chapters on various topics ranging from the ethics of care to mathematical problem solving. Her latest book (2013) is Education and Democracy in the 21st Century.

Article draws attention to various forms of restrictions that are connected to setting up home schooling for Czech children. While the law allows for this method of learning and teaching for primary school children (age 6 do 11), in praxis there are many obstacles erected in order to minimalize number of those, who opt for this mode of learning. The idea of inclusion and exclusion from the mainstream school system is explored and put into context with home education.

The transition from face-to-face to distance (home and online) schooling is likely to generate educational loss. Using data from Understanding Society, the UK Household Longitudinal Study, we estimate that loss to be more pronounced for children from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds than for other children.
In April 2020, one month into the lockdown:
• Children in primary schools spent on average 2.4 hours per day doing schoolwork (compromising on average 2.2 offline lessons - a mix of worksheets, assignments and watching videos – and 0.6 online lessons) plus 2 hours per day of support from adults.
• Children in secondary schools spent on average 3 hours per day doing schoolwork (compromising on average 2.3 offline lessons and 1 online lesson) plus 0.9 hours per day of support from adults. 
• Focusing on combinations of circumstances which are both common and policy relevant (see graphs), we found that children in the most advantaged families, where both parents work regularly from home, the main parent  is in a ‘service class’ occupation (large employers, managers of professionals) and the children have their own computer spent on average 2.9 hours per day on school work for primary and 3.8 per day for secondary pupils. More disadvantaged children in families where the main parent is not in a service class occupation, where the child has to share a computer with other family members and either parent does not work regularly from home, the hours spent per day on school work are 2.3 for primary and 2.6 for secondary education.
Socio-economic differences in the estimated education loss are marked.
• For children in primary education, those from the most advantaged families will have lost on average 24% of a standard deviation across subjects by the time schools reopen in autumn, while children from the most disadvantaged families will have lost 31% of a standard deviation.
• For children in secondary education, children from the most advantaged group will have lost on average 14% of a standard deviation across subjects, while children from the most disadvantaged group will have lost twice as much, 28% of a standard deviation.

Refletir a partir desta resenha sobre o que o autor intitula de "ruínas educacionais" perpassando pelos pressupostos doutrinários que ele vai correlacionar sobre educação clássica e cristã emergem inúmeras discussões longe dos países em que a ideia é culturalmente normal. Genitores refutam a educação modernista a partir do ensino não formal, e isso envolve uma ideologia em que de certa forma os deixa com pensamentos enrijecidos diante da contemporaneidade. A educação clássica e cristã lhes apresenta exatamente algumas alternativas que podem ou não ser assertivas, porém de forma polarizada e isso os habitantes de países latino-americanos devem ponderar em seus entendimentos para que não haja uma contaminação de concepções que de positivas, passem a ser negativas. Palavras-chave: Educação clássica; Educação domiciliar; Educação Cristã.

Pedagogy is central to geographical knowledge, where Kropotkin’s ‘What Geography Ought to Be’ has significantly shaped the face of contemporary geographical thought. At the same time, anarchists have developed very different political imaginations than Marxists, where the importance of pedagogy has always been of primary importance. Pedagogy accordingly represents one of the key sites of contact where anarchist geographies can continue to inform and revitalize contemporary geographical thought. Anarchists have long been committed to bottom-up, ‘organic’ transformations of societies, subjectivities, and modes of organizing. For anarchists the importance of direct action and prefigurative politics have always taken precedence over concerns about the state, a focus that stems back to Max Stirner’s notion of insurrection in 'The Ego and Its Own' as walking one’s own way, ‘rising up’ above government, religion, and other hierarchies, not necessarily to overthrow them, but to simply disregard these structures by taking control of one’s own individual life and creating alternatives on the ground. Thus, the relevance of pedagogy to anarchist praxis (understood in a broad sense, as in Paulo Freire’s 'Pedagogy of the Oppressed') stems from its ability to guide a new way of thinking about the world and as a space that is able to foster transgression.

Our study aimed to investigate what Muslim families in England have the opportunity to have religious education for their children and to examine the institutions or structures that provide Islamic education opportunities. Document analysis as a qualitative method was adopted in our study. Academic books and articles related to the subject, statistical records, various re-ports provided by the state and private institutions, school curricula, school inspection reports, and law articles, and some court decisions constitute the main data sources. Maximum diversi-ty sampling from the purposeful sampling types was used in determining the schools that were examined their Islamic curriculum, and it was tried to include as many different curriculum examples as possible. The fact that religious lessons are compulsory in schools in England and that this lesson is taught with a multicultural approach can be seen as an opportunity. On the other hand, there is a flexible education system in England. Muslim faith schools, supplementary schools (madrasa, maktab, and mosque school), and the home-schooling system are places and structures where Islamic education is carried out within the scope of formal and informal education. It is seen that Muslim faith schools are allowed to be opened as 'voluntary aided schools' by defining their distinctive religious characters as Muslim. The number of ‘state-funded Muslim schools’ is very limited, but their existence carries symbolic weight as a recognition of the Muslim com-munity’s right to establish such schools. It is understood that Muslim faith schools were opened mostly in the category of ‘independent schools’. Although there are various discussions about it, it is also important for Muslims to have informal religious education, in addition to formal education; it is allowed to open schools that offer Islamic education under the name of madrasa, maktab or mosque school. Families who send their children to the community schools because of the insufficient number of Muslim faith schools send their children to madāris (singular: madrasa), makātib (singular: maktab), or mosque schools which are called as ‘supplementary schools’. Social and moral values are taught here, including the teaching of the Qur'an, as well as sīrah (the biography of the Prophet), fiqh (jurisprudence), and Islamic history. It was understood that families who want to protect their children from the unhealthy envi-ronment of the school have the right to prefer home education, since the school is not compul-sory. In this sense, home-schooling can be considered as another opportunity for Muslim fami-lies to have their children Islamic Education. In addition to all these opportunities, the lack of a standard in these educational structures, the unqualified teachers, the inadequacy of curriculum development studies, and as a result, lack of qualified teaching materials are important problems. Economic limitations emerge as the first obstacle to increase the number of Muslim faith schools and to improve educational quali-ty. This situation threatens the quality of education by giving rise to poor buildings, insufficient resources, insufficient health and safety standards, and inexperienced management. Another threat to the quality of education is that teachers for independent schools do not have to have Qualified Teacher Status (QTS). While negative perceptions about Muslim schools have been identified as another challenge, it is expressed in various sources that Muslim students are frequently exposed to Islamophobia in various ways in public schools. Linking mosques and Islamic education institutions to radicalization and making them a subject of discussion is another noteworthy issue. Although there is no evidence of the relationship between Muslim schools and terrorist acts in England, Muslim schools are subjected to suspicions of being po-tential breeding grounds for future extremists. It seems necessary to take some actions for madrasahs who do not want to be under the con-trol of the state to reach certain standards and increase the quality of education. For example, Muslim supplementary schools should be united under the same roof of an association like The Association of Muslim Schools. This will help to attain certain standards, to increase the quality of education, and to create opportunities for various cooperation and sharing of experiences. Also, it should not be seen enough that the teachers in the madāris only have religious educa-tion, and their pedagogical competencies should be improved by subjecting them to various educational programs.