Home Schooling Ban

Interesting commentary here:

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What’s difficult to understand about home-schooling? Parents have a responsibility to educate their offspring. Like self-government, this is a natural and axiomatic imperative. We can choose or be coerced to defer / outsource this responsibility to others, but the default situation is that we do it ourselves. State education was invented to support the industrial revolution - to train the future workers so they could operate the machines but not question their economic and social predicament.

If you want to educate your child or children yourself, this is your inalienable right, regardless of what Emperor Macron (or his wife) decrees. To rant and rail against it is to manifest inferiority. Just do it.

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That’s certainly very enlightening.

Of course another view could be thatif you choose to live in a country you should obey its laws. A government makes the decisions and laws that it feels are best for society as a whole. Sometimes that means limiting individual freedoms.

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On the whole, the target of these new measures aren’t the well-intentioned parents home schooling their kids, it’s unregistered schools that are flying under the radar saying the kids are home schooled and in fact they’re being indoctrinated as a future djihadistes (bit strong I know but that’s what the headlines are showing without saying it and that’s what the man in the street thinks) France wants French kids growing up French with french values, normal :wink:

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Not in France it isn’t.

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Not sure this is yet clear Véronique. The conclusion to the article I linked earlier is:

Les associations attendent donc impatiemment le texte du projet de loi. Elles sont prêtes à monter au créneau si elles se sentent lésées et défendre ce droit à s’instruire librement inscrit dans les lois Ferry elles-mêmes.

Also, there are I understand live cases still at the European Court of Human Rights (arising in Germany - but France will also be bound by the results).

Moreover, surely the point about ‘inalienable rights’ - or human rights - is precisely that they can’t be taken away - and laws which attempt to do so - and there is of course a sad history of such attempts - are eventually found to be themselves illegal.

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It is fairly likely that there will be a massively increased quantity and variety of hoops for everyone to jump through for the sake of stopping the sectarian ‘schools’. Having eg the inspection générale and the IA/IPR round every 2 seconds waving the Bulletin Officiel and a wodge of boxes to tick might put people off. I don’t suppose it will be outlawed but it will be made extremely difficult and irritating. You might not, for example, get access to the online continuous assessment exam bank if you home school, or not have the papers marked - so no Bac. I can imagine all sorts of things of that type.

@vero are you anti home schooling?

I don’t really have an opinion either way about home schooling - I know children who have been home-schooled up to lycée entry who have done very well indeed. But they needed at some stage to have a bit of intellectual cut and thrust and come up against their contemporaries in order to acquire a bit of resilience and repartee. And pass exams.
I have also come across some who have missed out on higher education (and indeed just a proper well rounded education at any level) because their parents were incompetent and selfish.
I suppose it depends on what the set-up is (how subjects like chemistry and physics requiring equipment are dealt with, getting someone in for modern languages and classics if parents aren’t up to it, providing sufficiently challenging content, teaching analytical and essay-writing skills, all that sort of thing) and what the academic aspirations and possibilities of the child are. I think it is easy for parents to think they are doing a great job when they aren’t in fact doing their child any favours.

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A friend of mine her and 4 brothers where home schooled to the age of 16 bye there parents that what I whold say They where the hippie types so the school was not near any ting useful for any young person The missed out on so much not only the social thing that comes from school but allot of education to 3 of don’t have any contact with their parents anymore because they blame them to much for not getting a good start at education And life

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If one chooses to think only in terms of nation states and their associated statutes and consequently fail to question the legitimacy of “authority” then I can well understand how one’s logic can seem watertight. All the best! :slight_smile:

A well-formatted victim of the system might say the same thing. It’s telling that the French have an expression for someone who has come through the rigours of the French education system: “Vous êtes bien formate!” :slight_smile:

There is life! :slight_smile:

No it’s not. Children are not the property of their parents to be treated in any way they see fit.

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There is complexity in the issue of the human rights of parents in relation to both their children and the state. My guess is that on reflection most people would acknowledge that neither the rights of parents nor of the state should be absolute: it’s a question of drawing the best compromise we can, in the interests of the child. But if you accept this, then the fact that all children are different becomes a crucial consideration - and it is surely difficult to argue that for all of these very different children one kind of school is the best of all possible solutions.

Probably most people contributing to this discussion have their own anecdotal experience of the success or failure of home education; it is absolutely certain they will know of cases where schools have failed children - hence my plea earlier in the thread for legislation that may be held to contravene either human rights, or the fundamental constitutional settlement in France (which is how most people regard the Ferry Laws) to have a very firm evidence base.

So where is that evidence? In all the discussion here I still see no real evidence (beyond anecdote) that proper home-schooling has any ill effects - and if you search the internet you will find many studies showing positive results.

I hate religious extremism, and see no place for religion in education except as a topic within history, etc - but the question for me is:

Are extremists or terrorists generally home educated - or are they in fact a product of the school system?

Or is Macron in fact playing with the fire of some kind of ‘culture war’ - minority scapegoating?

Entry level straw man fallacy at work here. I did not assert that my children are my chattel or property or that they can be treated “in any way”. I simply intended to convey that it is my duty to educate my children.

Over 99.5% of people think that professional teachers will do a better job & that kids will be socialised better. Homeschooling has all the appearances of a cult eg your rude & off the wall comments in this thread

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“No, it is not.” - is not an argument. Straw man fallacies will be called out. Nothing rude about that. Just a simple correction and encouragement to consider your thinking, or to embark on such.

Your “99.5% of cats prefer whiskers” sourceless statistic adds little to your case. All the best!

“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” - J. Krishnamurti.

I suspect Macron is employing the same tactics that Johnson and Patel have in their recent “lefty, do-gooder” lawyers speeches. Appeal to the common man whom they can probably hear muttering “Quite right”

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