Roland Meighan of the University of Nottingham School of Education, a longtime observer of the alternative education movement in Britain, wrote a fascinating article,
"Home-based Education Effectiveness Research and Some of its Implications," in volume 47 of Educational Review (November 1, 1995), beginning at page 275.
Meighan sums up the international trends in his abstract by writing, "In the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere, a quiet revolution has been taking place.
More and more families are taking the option of home-based education in preference to school attendance.
The evidence supports only two generalisations about this development.
The first is that families display considerable diversity in motives, methods and aims.
The second is that they are usually very successful in achieving their chosen aims."
Professor Meighan's article notes an estimate from the time of his article of over 1 million homeschoolers in the United States.
He points out that there were as few as twenty families known to be homeschooling in Britain in 1977, but as of the time of his November 1995 article, there were almost 10,000.
Indeed, the London Evening Standard newspaper reported on Monday, January 15, 1996 that 15,000 families are estimated to be homeschooling in Britain, which is a 50 percent increase over the year before.
It is thought that 100 children a month may be leaving Britain's state schools to begin homeschooling.
Site of a British homeschooling publication and organization.
Other Pages of This FAQ
Feel free to browse the other pages of the Homeschooling Is Growing Worldwide FAQ,
besides this Homeschooling in The United Kingdom page, for more detailed information.
The overall structure of the FAQ is like the outline below:
Basic information and links about homeschooling in Canada, a country with thousands of homeschoolers.
This Homeschooling in The United Kingdom page can also be considered a subpage of the Learn in Freedom! Internet Resources Hot-List (links) page on this site.
More specific pages for states of the United States and for countries around the world will be added as my schedule permits.
Please send me any information you have about the number of homeschoolers in any place you know about.
A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body.
John Stuart Mill On Liberty (1859)
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