Introduction


Before 2009, when new rules were introduced by the Ministry of Education that required state schools to increase levels of continuous assessment and formal examinations (called the National prov or National Test), homeschoolers, who managed to get permission to homeschool (rarely granted and usually treated as some strange abberation) were pretty much left to themselves.


With only a couple of annual supervision visits made by the local authorities (kommun) and a requirement to sit the National Test examinations every two or three years, homeschoolers who were officially recognised received little attention from the state, so long as the visits were carried out and the Tests passed. If any of the Tests were failed, the right to further homeschool was usually denied even though pupils who failed the exams in the state school were allowed to resit them. Though the latter requirements were inconvenient and forced homeschooling pupils to follow the Swedish National Curriculum when most wanted to pursue other types, it was a great improvement on what was to follow, and most homeschoolers were more or less content with them. It wasn't everything we wanted but it was livable.


Since 2009 and thoughout 2010 (in those kommuns which gave permission to homeschool - usually they didn't), homeschooled pupils were required to attend school all day for two days a month and to attend at other times to receive extra tuition in subjects it was felt they were weak at, which was usually another 4 part-days a month, making a total of 6 day's monthly attendance at school. (Local kommun's did vary in their requirements and treatment). Thus in this writer's case, his children were attending school for about 20-25% of their educational time, another major disruption in the continuity of our homeschooling programme. At this time it was impossible to follow any other curriculum except the school's on a week-to-week basis, thus destroying the author's plan for his children to receive their educational certification in Britain.


Swedes, whose education system has traditionally come under strong German influence during both its Nazi and Communist phases - 1933-91), have never been allowed to experience the kind of freedoms that homeschoolers enjoy in Britain, the United States or other parts of the world. And because the homeschooling community has always been so small (about 50 families at most - since most Swedes have never even heard of homeschooling), Swedish politicians and educators have never bothered to inform themselves about the subject and so consider it an irrelevence.


Accordingly Swedish legislators have made it illegal with the same degree of casualness and indifference (not to mention arrogance, as you will see) as was their ignorance of what it actually is in spite of a concerted attempt by homeschoolers to raise public awareness towards the end of 2009 and since. To Swedes, then, homeschooling is currently about as remote to their experience as aliens landing on earth from another planet.


The purpose of this page is therefore to:


    1. Change that perspective, by showing Swedes - citizens, educators and politicians - a marvelous way of alternative education long since validated academically elsewhere as sound and successful;


    2. Inform them that homeschooling is actually a human right guaranteed by both the United Nations and European Union (to which Sweden is bound)- Sweden's government action to ban it in 2010 was therefore illegal, and is so viewed by homeschoolers here; and


    3. Make the Swedish public aware of the terrible persecution homeschoolers are going through (see, for example, the heart-breaking story of the state kidnapping of Domenic Johansson, the heafty fines inflicted on some families in Uppsala and Gothenburg, and read about Swedish political refugees who have gone abroad in search of feeedom) because of a flawed and uncaring political system rooted in a totalitarian mindset.


The author is himself a life-long, university-educated retired educator, writer and lecturer, with considerable experience in both forms of education, and wrote his first academic study on homeschooling for the Swedish Government in 2009 - which it apparently refused to read. We hope the Swedish public will be more open-minded and that the freedom-loving international community will lend us its support.







Copyright © 2009-2010 C.C.M.Warren, M.A.(Oxon) - All Rights Reserved

Last updated on 14 December 2010