Un/Homeschooling

Lesson 6: Record Keeping

Meeting Legal Requirements

Most places have compulsory schooling laws, so homeschooling families must learn how homeschooling fits in with those laws and what is legally required of them. Parents may be annoyed that they must record learning activities and meet other requirements when this record keeping does not fit with their personal philosophy. However, these requirements must be met in order for our children to continue homeschooling.

It’s a good idea to seek legal information from a variety of sources. You may go to an educational authority and be told that homeschooling is illegal since your area’s laws don’t explicitly authorize homeschooling, then learn from a local homeschooling group that it is possible by registering your home or church as a school, or some other trick. Other sources of your area’s laws and regulations are a courthouse or law library. Often the most reliable place to get information about homeschooling regulations is from a local homeschooling group. They can tell you not only what the law says, but also how it is enforced.

“While school officials may seem to be the most obvious, reliable source of legal information about homeschooling, this is not always the case. School officials often know little about alternatives to public schools; when this is the case, they sometimes provide information about what they think the law says, or even what they think the law ought to say, instead of what the law actually says. Where school funding is dependent on school attendance, as is most often the case in the United States, you’ll sometimes get a fairly discouraging summary of the law. In some states, you may get perfectly accurate and reliable information, including offers of curriculum and other support, but it’s difficult to tell unless you have some idea of the law from other sources as well.” - Mary Griffith, author of The Unschooling Handbook.

You may be required to submit an education plan or curriculum to your local school district, or to file documents with your local educational authority, or to register your home as a private school. Many areas also require homeschoolers to record attendance (learning days), and to complete a specified number of days per year. You may have to be creative to fit your child’s learning experiences into such a form.

Areas range in level of regulation from none to registration only, record submission, periodic testing, curriculum approval, to teacher certification of parents. The feedback from such regulation as records submission, curriculum approval, and testing may be simply for parents’ information or they may impact whether or not your child may continue homeschooling.

Although many homeschooling regulations may seem unfair, we must comply with the laws until we change them. Homeschooling families around the world are challenging the laws. A recent win involved the case of decorated Vietnam veteran George Theiss, who on November 18, 2004, won his claim for veteran’s benefits to help care for his dependents as long as each child is a member of his household and pursuing a course of instruction at an approved educational institution. The general counsel for the Veterans Administration had previously issued an official opinion that homeschooling did not count as an ‘approved educational institution,’ but the United States Court of Appeals for Veterans' Affairs sided with Mr. Theiss.

“Throughout the world education is under the control of governments. This is extremely dangerous. Governments ought to have no authority over education. The work of education should be in the hands of men of wisdom, but governments have got it in their grasp; every student in the country has to study whatever book is prescribed by the education department. If the government is fascist, students will be taught fascism; if it is communist, it will preach communism; if it is capitalist, it will proclaim the greatness of capitalism; if it believes in planning, the students will be taught all about planning. We in India used to hold to the principle that education should be completely free from state control. Kings exercised no authority over the gurus. The king had absolutely no power to control education. The consequence was that Sanskrit literature achieved a degree of freedom of thought such as can be seen nowhere else, so much so that no less than six mutually incompatible philosophies have arisen within the Hindu philosophy. This vigor is due to the freedom of education from state control.

“The status of teachers has sunk so low that they feel themselves to have no authority at all. They must follow whatever path the government directs. They are under orders, the servants of authority. They may perhaps modify the government schemes by a comma here or a semi-colon there, but they cannot do more than that. Today there is an attempt to expand education, and the number of schools and of teachers is being increased, but the spirit of the true guru is not there. good teacher means one who is a good servant; a bad teacher means a bad servant; good or bad, he remains a servant.” - Vinoba Bhave, an educational philosopher born in the Indian state of Maharashtra in 1895, identified by Ghandi as his spiritual successor.

• Homeschool Legal Defense Association, http://www.hslda.org/laws/default.asp Provides information on US laws. The site categorizes states by their level of regulation of homeschooling, and lists the requirements of each state.
• HLDA’s International Page, http://www.hslda.org/hs/international/de... Lists links to information on laws in other countries.

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