The Swedish government is poised to ban homeschooling, making attendance at state-run or state-regulated schools compulsory for all children. The law will make exemptions only on medical grounds and for foreign workers.
The government’s justification for the law rests on the idea that children deserve a comprehensive and objective education, regardless of the “religious or philosophical” views of their parents. Most complaints seem to be coming from religious homeshoolers, but this should be very troubling to secular libertarians as well.
While guarding children against the (genuine) threat of indoctrination by parents and giving them an objective and neutral education seems like a noble idea, laws which transfer power from parents to the state are very dangerous in practice.
Some people are bad parents, and I don’t have any principled moral objection to concerned neighbours preventing (physical or psychological) abuse. Banning homeschooling, of course, does far more than limit the opportunities for indoctrination by bad parents; it prevents flexible and context-sensitive schooling by good parents. I know many in the Parents for Liberty group at Fr33 Agents Social are fans of homeschooling, for example.
More importantly, though, empowering the state to prevent bad parenting also empowers it to engage in indoctrination itself. We may be able to prevent a few instances of bad parenting, but only at the risk of recreating the collectivist horrors we saw last century in the form of Fascism, Communism, and Eugenics. The Swedish government might not be too illiberal (relatively speaking) at the moment, but we must be aware that governments are very capable of madness: we’re only ever one good panic away from totalitarianism.
For a more light-hearted look at the problems of public schooling, try this song from Fr33 Agent Hannah “Hanarchist” Hoffman:
Brad Taylor is a graduate student in Political Science at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He blogs at 
Thanks for posting. That’s the same bogus justification that other European countries are going with. Sick stuff: “We own your children.”
I don’t believe a government has the right to abolish homeschooling, nor do I think education is the government’s job. Government should be small, limited, and subject the The People.
‘children deserve a comprehensive and objective education, regardless of the “religious or philosophical” views of their parents.’
Statism apparently is not a religion or a philosophy. When they start teaching anarchism in schools, I’ll believe their claim on objectivity. Till then the issue only is whose loony philosophy should the kids be brainwashed into – their parent’s or the bureaucrat-with-a-gun’s.
I homeschool in the states and I can tell you that it isn’t just Sweden that thinks they own the kids. I am on one board that seems to believe parents do not own their kids, period; and if they catch wind of this article, they’d support that statement 100%.
Yes, I have complete freedom (and I am an atheist, so religion doesn’t play any part in it), but this saddens me—this attitude that parents do not own their kids. I agree about the protection of religious indoctrination (and I feel as though I know a few homeschoolers who do this), but it is a slippery slope to ban homeschooling altogether because of it.
Instead, the best way is to put some restrictions (some) on homeschooling. I mean, we already have them in some states (and some moreso than others) and I wouldn’t want the state telling me *what* curricula I can use, but there has to be a way to prevent the indoctrination without ruining it for all of us.
I feel really badly for Sweden right now. Religious or not, homeschooling is a viable option and should be made available to all.
Toni
Children’s entitlement to care and education does not constitute a mandate for the state. It instead constitutes a mandate on the conscience of everybody. It is sheer laziness and lack of imagination to simply conflate the latter with the former. But distinguishing the two is precisely the work for those who advocate the voluntary society.
in what ultimately boils down to an indoctrinational turf war between socialists and muslims, one is stuck with the rotten odor of that familiarly flatulent cliche: “the lesser of two evils”
on one hand, I kinda want to almost side with the government here, as this is all about liberating children from the abusive myopia of a “religious extremist” (read: muslim) upbringing, on the part of mind crushing patriarchs who want to cripple their child’s mind so that it can learn the quran and nothing else.
unlike in america, where public schools are often incapable of teaching anything other than disorder and violence and decay, swedish public schools are safe, nice places, effective at imparting the curicula they promise, for better or worse. no one’s asking for homeschooling for fear the kid will end up assaulted — its almost entirely brainwasher parents.
the other side of this, of course, is that this reasoning becomes a blatant power grab for the welfare statists to claim ownership of the kid’s mind, on excuse of protecting such from the backwards belief that the ancestral faith owns it.
in truth, neither side has any business claiming any ownership of a kid’s consciousness, and the guidance needed by children due to their ignorance and naivete should not be misread as such a claim. but practical applications of hard-to-draw-the-line issues are not usually possible, all the less so when both sides believe that hoi polloi is held property, with the only dispute being between quasi reasonable masters and totally unreasonable ones.
Of course it’s bad when religious extremists indoctrinate their children in ways which reduce their chances of a flourishing life. The problem is that there is no way to intervene in those cases without intervening in many others and giving the state more power.
Children are always going to be in an asymmetric power relationship with somebody. The question is who can be more trusted with authority, parents or the state?
Poor Swedish kids. This is scary.
I never meet or even herd of a home schooled kid in sweden, I just always assumed it was already illegal…
What i find even more interesting about it is that i have to read about it on an american site.
Have a look at my appeal to the Swedish Government:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT9TN8bFwhE