As more Canadians are declining to enroll their children in public schools in favour of home education, a legal association helps families overcome political and social obstacles. Home School Legal Defence Association (HSLDA) was founded in 1991 and represent homeschoolers in the courts and provincial legislatures, and working to promote parent choice in education in Canada. HSLDA is "an outgrowth" of HSLDA USA, and works with the Global Home Education Exchange. Approximately 1.5% of Canadian children are homeschooled. Canada’s home education sector doubled during the COVID-19 lockdowns, Statistics Canada date shows. Prior to the pandemic, 40,608 students were enrolled in home education. The number quickly grew to 83,784 by the 2020/21 school year — especially among the little ones, with an increase of 136.2% in Grade 1 and 134.5% in Grade 2. Over a 10-year period, the number of Canadian students educated at home rose from 25,920 in 2012/23 to 54,738 in 2022/23. A report from the Fraser Institute indicates while decades ago families chose homeschooling for ideological or religious reasons, where “families wanted their education to better reflect their beliefs,” now research shows families are opting for home education for “practical reasons.” These could include flexibility for their children to join intensive extracurriculars like athletics or music, families that travel a lot or live remotely, or for students with learning and behavioural needs who need extra attention not available in public schools. Further, with technological advancements and the rise in work-from-home models making parents more available to teach their kids at home, resources are now more accessible and homeschool groups more common. .UCP NOTEBOOK: How party faithful voted on key motions.Homeschooling, however, comes with robust legal requirements. While homeschooling has always been around, the matter fell “into a grey area under the law” in the early ‘90s, where “families in Alberta in particular faced the threat of fines, jail time, or even having their children apprehended for daring to home educate.”“Ultimately, it came down to court battles and changes in the legislature,” HSLDA president Peter Stock told the Western Standard. When people realized as individual families they didn’t have the resources to defend themselves, a large group of hundreds of families got together to hire a lawyer to defend themselves in court and the legislature — which ultimately led to the founding of the non-profit organization HSLDA. HSLDA “got started in response to a threat to family autonomy and the right to choose the type of education parents felt was best for their children,” said Stock. Since then, the organization has fought multiple court battles on behalf of families choosing to homeschool their kids — and though it’s now legal across Canada, HSLDA “faces more challenges than ever at the individual family level.”Patty Marler, HSLDA Government and Media Relations, told the Western Standard the association “protects families across the country from whatever legal challenges may come their way,” including preventative and non-emergency legal guidance, emergency legal counsel, support in every stage of homeschooling and planning, record keeping, and assistance fulfilling legal requirements.” “We lobby governments and advocate for home education freedom — parental freedom to choose their home education method, academic curriculum, evaluation, location and scheduling, and peer association. .'RACE MATTERS': Toronto school board releases anti-white ‘core beliefs’ statement.The legalities of home education vary by province. Some have provide options and resource reimbursement, while others — especially Quebec — “make it very difficult to home educate, offering little flexibility, strict oversight, frequent interventions and an overall environment that makes it difficult to flourish as home educators,” she said, adding the latter is “disappointing” and “HSLDA continues to advocate for greater freedoms in these provinces.”“However, provinces will, at times, come up with policy, legislation or interpretations of policy/legislation that challenge home educators… There is a bias against homeschooling in the education world, thus the protection HSLDA offers is vital.”Stock, who homeschooled his own children, said there are a litany of obstacles in addition to legalities, such as “pressure from school boards and investigations by social services.” He elaborated the organization sees challenges to home education freedom coming from primarily two sources: financial motives and political (ideological) motives. Financial motives manifest through provincial education grants of $12,000 to $16,000 (depending on the province) per student annually that go to school boards based on the number of students enrolled — meaning when a family opts to homeschool their child and withdraws them from the publicly funded system, “the school board is losing out.”“So if you lose five students, you've lost a teacher's salary,” said Stock, adding school boards and teachers “have this incentive to oppose home education in principle, not because it's bad education, but simply because they lose out.”.EQUITY OVER EDUCATION: Ottawa school board considers ‘inclusive’ high school grad — passing marks not necessary.The other major conflict in home education is at the political level, based on an ideological bias. “You get people who believe that only the public system can provide quality education — or they want things taught (in a certain way), or they want to see kids indoctrinated,” said Stock, illustrating his point about ideological education with “nations where there is a heavier form of totalitarianism.” “Home education is illegal in communist China, North Korea and places like that,” he said. “You have to have your kids sent to the public system to be indoctrinated, (where it’s) not about education at all. There'll be an argument, ‘well, we're not going to learn what we want them to learn.’”“In the Western world generally, we have more of a perception that when public services are provided, they're exactly that — they're services that we can choose to take advantage of or not unless we feel best. And that's the way the system should work.”“But some people have this idea that they know better than parents what's good for our kids, and that's where we run into that ideological challenge even in Canada. That does happen.”As for successful outcomes for home schooled students, they tend to be well adjusted socially, especially in a community-based environment, and do well in university. Stock said Canadian universities and colleges “have long had alternative pathways to admissions” that don’t require a traditional high school diploma. “They have other methods of evaluating the (students’) aptitude and the prerequisites that students achieved,” he said. “Quite frankly, we're using better curriculum, better material, taking better and more challenging courses, and our kids are very well prepared by the time they get to the post secondary level.”In fact, said Stock, "I would say the better universities in the country actually give preference to home educated students, because they see once they arrive at the institution, they have greater academic success.”“The reason is, in the home education environment, you actually develop self-study habits and tend to be more advanced academically.” .Toronto schools abandon terms like ‘men,’ ‘women’ when teaching 10-year-olds reproductive health .Homeschool groups have always existed but have grown in popularity. In more populous neighbourhoods, a home school group has on average 50 to 100 kids, and in smaller communities, an average of 20 to 30. “They reach out, they find one another, and then they meet regularly,” said Stock. They not only do lessons through “shared learning” but they also play sports and do other activities like theatre, choir and youth group. “We're able to avoid a lot of that wasted time. We get our formal book-learning done in the morning, maybe in two or three hours, and then we've got the afternoon free for other activities.”HSLDA offers resources to help families homeschool their children, including curriculum consultants, exceptional needs consultants and a digital library with over 3000 audio and ebooks that families can draw on. The association also directs parents on where to find specific curriculum resources, for example a Grade 5 math textbook. “There are over 25,000 titles available to homeschooling families,” said Stock. When asked what advice Stock has for young families making a decision on homeschooling for the first time, Stock had two pieces of guidance: Not to feel pressure to commit to the long term, parents can try it for a year and see how it goes based on the child’s needs, and to utilize available resources from HSLDA and other groups that offer similar support. “It's not a journey they have to venture out on on their own,” said Stock.
