Homeschooling Your Children Abroad

If you are moving abroad with children, you have several education options to consider. You can place them in public or international schools or you can choose to homeschool them. You can read more about all of your education options in our article “Selecting an International School”.

Americans have homeschooled their children for centuries, but the Baltimore, Maryland-based Calvert School pioneered a comprehensive private program in the early 1900′s as a solution for American children quarantined at home during a series of epidemics. In the years following, the homeschooling program proved useful for missionary and traveling families. Since that time homeschooling has become an accepted education option in America and for expats living throughout the world. Even world travelers like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie homeschool their children.

To provide you with a clear understanding of the homeschooling option, we spoke with representatives of the Calvert School and the Global Village School, an Ojai, California-based school that has been in business since 1999. “Homeschooling, broadly speaking, is the practice of educating kids outside of the public school structure,” Global Village School spokesperson Tanya MacGumerait explained. “Public schools as we know them today are a very recent development, dating back to the 1840′s. Public schools did not outnumber private options until around the start of the twentieth century. So, for much of human history, we educated ourselves in ways that were outside of a formal legal structure. Much of the early backlash against public schooling came from families who wanted to provide an explicitly religious context to the education of their children. Today, there are many different motivations for homeschooling.”

Increasingly, American families who travel constantly or live abroad are turning to homeschooling as a good, inexpensive education option. “The Calvert School serves many expats who live in remote areas with no schools, are dissatisfied with local schools, are concerned about their child’s ability to learn the local language easily or adapt to the local education system or have a child with special needs,” said Martha Cole, the Calvert School spokesperson.

But not all countries allow children to be homeschooled. Germany, for example, forbids it. Check homeschooling regulations under Live/Education for the country or countries you are considering for your move.

You can also check with the Home School Legal Defense Association for countries not listed on our site.

So how does homeschooling work? The Calvert School, which currently offers only K-8 instruction (9 – 12 will be phased in beginning in 2014), ships an “education in a box” to its customers for the full school year. It includes lesson manuals, textbooks, workbooks, activity pages, test booklets, science kits and other material. Calvert also provides online resources such as video tutorials, quizzes, grade books, e-text books and offers an iLibrary resource for research.

Given the ubiquity of the Internet, you might think that an “education in a box” approach is a bit old fashioned, but Ms. Cole reminds that the Internet has not penetrated some locations of the world and not everyone has a computer, although both issues are rapidly disappearing.