Problematising home education: challenging ‘parental rights’ and ‘socialisation’

In the UK, home education, or home-schooling, is an issue that has attracted little public, governmental or academic attention. Yet the number of children who are home educated is steadily increasing and the phenomenon has been referred to as a‘quiet revolution’. This paper neither celebrates nor denigrates home educators; its aim, rather, is to identify and critically examine the two dominant discourses that define the way in which the issue is currently understood. First, the legal discourse of parental rights, which forms the basis of the legal framework and, secondly, a child psychology/common-sense discourse of ‘socialisation’, within which school attendance is perceived as necessary for healthy child development. Drawing on historical sources, doctrinal human rights and child psychology and informed by post-structural and feminist perspectives, this article suggests that both discourses function as alternative methods of governance and that the conflicting ‘rights claims’ of parents and children obscure public interests and fundamental questions about the purpose of education.