Who is responsible for a child’s education? In our view, education is the responsibility of the parent. In the other, it is primarily the role of the state—a view that is incompatible with parent-directed homeschooling.
These widely divergent views stem from fundamentally different roots and yield very different fruit, as the recent United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report, “Homeschooling through a human rights lens,” shows. The report is the consequence of a human rights ideology that, at best, doesn’t understand homeschooling and, more likely, doesn’t like it.
HSLDA has been monitoring this issue for decades. We have long opposed domestic ratification of any international treaty or convention that would impact parental rights and homeschool freedom.
Standing for Freedom
HSLDA successfully led the US opposition to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in the 1990s. We were concerned the legal language used in the treaty leaves the door open for state actors to determine what is “best” for children and families and overrule fit parents.
Far from ensuring protections for children, we argued the treaty would lead to federal control over children, overruling a long history of laws and legal protections for families. If the treaty had been ratified, the federal government would have assumed jurisdiction of family and education laws. Those would in turn be subject to CRC mandates.
With this recent report, our concerns that the CRC would lead to an unacceptable and dangerous landscape seem to have materialized. The 45-page report is rife with problems.
The authors of the report operate from a view that cedes primary educational authority and responsibility to the state. For example, in the one-page Short Summary, the report states that “safeguarding the right to education in every setting remains a core responsibility of the State.”
It emphasizes the implementation of government “oversight mechanisms such as to registration and evaluation” with the goal of ensuring that “homeschooling serves both individual and societal needs.” While that might sound harmless, or even desirable, the practical outworking of these proposals is ultimately greater state control over homes, families, and children.
Flawed Approach
Buried within the report are a handful of positive statements, however, these acknowledgements are rendered hollow by the rest of the report’s conclusions. For example, the report correctly distinguishes homeschooling “from the distance-learning responses employed during the school closures” resulting from COVID-19.
UNESCO also acknowledges there are diverse reasons parents choose to homeschool, and says, “Parents’ right to freedom of choice regarding their children’s education is widely present in [International Human Rights Law].” And the report explicitly admits that “school attendance does not automatically translate to developing all life skills” and attendance at public institutions comes with other problems.
However, despite this handful of positive recognitions, the substance of the report makes clear that UNESCO’s approach to homeschooling is flawed. Regarding a parent’s education, the report notes that “teacher qualifications [are] a key determinant of education quality, raising questions about how homeschooling can maintain equivalent standards.” Regarding the content of students’ education, UNESCO believes in a one-size-fits-all approach following “government-imposed requirements.” (Read our recent HSLDA Magazine piece on the factors that influence education quality.)
With mere passing acknowledgment of the duties of parents, the report calls for government oversight. It claims that “regulation, if not arbitrary, remains legitimate and necessary to safeguarding children’s rights, including the right to education.”
Notwithstanding that freedom of religion includes the right to teach your children in accordance with your beliefs (even under current international human rights law), the report offhandedly slams religious education. “Dogmatic approaches may stir up intolerance,” the report says, and “homeschooling may be a practice sensitive to fundamentalist approaches.”
The report’s views on accountability and monitoring are equally alarming. It calls for registration as “one of the fundamental regulatory measures” to ensure homeschool children are educated. In addition, the report says “inspections by local authorities/the minister of education” which “often take the form of home visits” are needed.
Looking to the State
Finally, the report says “standardized testing is one of the accountability and monitoring tools.” But the purpose of this testing is not to ensure basic literacy and education. Rather it is “to guarantee that children have been exposed to the State’s national curriculum and are reaching attainment levels similar to those children in public schools.”
Sadly, for the majority of homeschooling children around the world, this would mean a worse education.
While this report is alarming, it’s not surprising to homeschool advocates. This focus on state oversight and control of both public and non-public education is pervasive in the UN and other international organizations.
Ten years ago, UNESCO hailed a World Education Forum meeting held in Incheon, South Korea as “a historic milestone on more than one count.” At this meeting, 160 countries adopted the Incheon Declaration and the Education 2030 Framework for Action, which according to the Final Report has a goal to “realise everyone’s right to education as a fundamental dimension of human, social and economic development.”
A few years later, in 2019, a group of 57 “global education and human rights experts” met in Ivory Coast, Africa with their sights set on private education. During this meeting, the group’s “experts” adopted the Abidjan Principles, which focus “on the human rights obligations of States to provide public education and to regulate private involvement in education.”
The question they ask is not whether the state should regulate private education, but simply how they should fulfill this requirement.
And we could go on, naming many other education initiatives, goals, meetings and the like that are intended to redesign education from a globalist perspective.
What Makes Homeschooling Work
It’s clear that this attitude toward private education and homeschooling is the result of the seeds planted in the CRC, which is referenced no fewer than 36 times in this latest report. UNESCO and other international organizations have been watering the seeds from the CRC in many ways over the course of decades, operating from the perspective that education is primarily the responsibility of the state.
What UNESCO does not understand is that homeschooling largely works because it’s not a part of the state. They cannot conceive of a world in which children are educated outside of the purview of government and public institutions. They cannot conceive of a world where the state doesn’t regulate and monitor all students.
HSLDA was correct about the CRC in 1995. In the international context, it has led, and continues to lead, to a place where homeschooling is put in a box under tight state control and regulation. The fruit of the seeds from the CRC continue to lead to an unacceptable and dangerous international landscape for homeschool freedom.
What about here in the United States? While we may not be bound by the CRC directly, many within our borders—from academics to politicians to the media—believe that the responsibility for education lies with the state. The ideas and proposals in the UNESCO report are held by many within our own country. As a result, we cannot let our current freedom lead to apathy and inattention. We must remain vigilant and vigorously oppose any attempts to curtail our freedom. The preservation of homeschool freedom for generations depends on it.
And we can only do it together. HSLDA stands alongside all of you, our members, our donors, our allies, and our cherished friends, to defend the right of parents to direct their children’s educations. Together we have made homeschooling what it is today, and together we will preserve homeschooling for the next generation.
In the early 1900s, Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote: “The responsibility for starting the child in the right way is the parents—it cannot be delegated to the schools or the state, for the little feet start on life’s journey from the home.”
We agree.