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    Problematising home education: challenging ‘parental rights’ and 'socialisation'

    Monk, Daniel (2004) Problematising home education: challenging ‘parental rights’ and 'socialisation'. Legal Studies 24 (4), pp. 568-598. ISSN 0261-3875.

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    Abstract

    In the UK, Home Education, or home-schooling, is an issue that has attracted very little public, governmental or academic attention. Yet the number of children home educated is steadily increasing and has been referred to as a 'quiet revolution'. This article neither celebrates nor denigrates home educators, its aim, rather, is to identify and critically examine the two dominant discourses that define the way in which the issue is currently understood. First, the legal discourse of parental rights, which forms the basis of the legal framework, and secondly a psychoanalytical/common-sense 'socialisation' discourse within which school attendance is perceived as necessary for healthy child development. Drawing on historical, doctrinal human rights and psychoanalytical sources and post-structural and feminist perspectives, this article suggests that both discourses function as alternative methods of governance and that the conflicting ‘rights claims’ of parents and children obscure public interests and fundamental questions about the purpose of education.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Additional Information: Legal Studies was published by Elsevier Science in 2004
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Business and Law > Birkbeck Law School
    Research Centres and Institutes: Gender and Sexuality, Birkbeck (BiGS), Social Research, Birkbeck Institute for (BISR)
    Depositing User: Sandra Plummer
    Date Deposited: 01 Feb 2006
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 16:46
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/312

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