Homeschooling in Sweden

Your child belongs to the state. Or so some government authorities in Sweden seem to believe.

Key quote:

Just a month ago [Sweden's] Social Welfare Committee, which kept Swedish homeschooler Domenic Johansson separated from his parents for more than three years, appealed a June decision that upheld the parental rights of his father and mother, Christer and Annie Johansson (left). In 2009, Swedish police seized seven-year-old Domenic after boarding a plane bound from Sweden as the family was minutes from departing to do missionary work in India. Initially, state authorities "permitted" the parents to see Dominic one hour every five weeks, but they haven't seen Dominic since December 2010.

I teach in a community college, and we do not homeschool or son (yet), so in a sense I don't have a dog in this fight. In my professional experience, homeschooling is either done very well (which is most of the time), or else it is done in a truly hideous fashion.

However, it is not the government's right to block homeschooling simply because they do not like the parents' reasons. Concern that a child may receive a poor education at home is not by itself a valid reason: if the government really believed that, it is safe to say there are many public schools which would have been shut down long ago. The burden of proof to deny a homeschool education must be set very high - or we cannot honestly call ourselves a free society.

One of the most disturbing lines to come out of last year's US elections was the one about the government being "the one thing we all belong to". Such a view assumes people are the property of the state, whether its advocates will admit it or not.

Christians belong to the one true God. Government is a God-ordained institution, but it is not a God-substitute.