UNICEF’s top education officer in Brazil has launched a vituperative attack on homeschooling, opposing a proposed law that would recognize home education as a legal option for Brazilian parents.
Homeschooling is flourishing in Brazil in the absence of national regulation. However, in 2018, Brazil’s Supreme Court stated that while homeschooling was a constitutionally acceptable practice, a federal law recognizing it was needed.
Families who homeschool in Brazil have been working to obtain legal recognition for 25 years. Numerous bills have been proposed in the last decade, but none of them have been taken up by the National Congress, Brazil’s federal legislature. However, these efforts are now gaining momentum. Brazil’s recently elected president, Jair Bolsonoro, pledged upon taking office to work to legalize homeschooling, and a recent change in the leadership of the National Congress resulted in an agreement to move the homeschooling bill forward.
Opponents of homeschooling, fearing that the bill will pass, are pressuring the people’s elected representatives to impose unreasonable burdens on parents who seek to homeschool, such as annual evaluations by third parties and even a requirement that all homeschooling parents hold a university degree.
Italo Dutra, UNICEF’s top education officer in Brazil, recently released a statement calling homeschooling a “risk” to children’s rights. Homeschooling, he says, threatens “harm to children and adolescents … because the school is fundamental to guaranteeing the right to learning, socialization, and a plurality of ideas, in addition to being an essential space for the protection of girls and boys against violence.”
Against decades of evidence to the contrary, the UNICEF statement promotes the notion that government schooling is the only way for children to be educated, socialized, and prepared for life in a pluralistic society. However, this statist ideology is in conflict with U.N. human rights treaties and reports acknowledging that home education is a human right and must be respected in a country’s educational system.
After the fall of the Axis powers in World War II, representatives of the free world gathered as the newly formed United Nations to enshrine human rights that had been threatened by totalitarian regimes and ideology. Education was one of these rights. Responding specifically to the Nazi regime’s use of Germany’s education system to indoctrinate children into its inhumane ideology, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms in article 26.3 that parents have a “prior right” to decide what kind of education their children shall receive.
Similarly, the U.N.’s International Covenant on Economic, Cultural and Social Rights, which Brazil has signed, states in articles 13 and 14 that private learning institutions must be respected and that parents have a human right to ensure that their children’s education conforms to the family’s religious and philosophical convictions.
Other U.N. reports support the inclusion of homeschooling as a right in education. In 2006, Werner Munoz, then the U.N.’s special rapporteur on the right to education, stated that homeschooling should be allowed as part of the educational rights of children and parents. In 2020, UNESCO’s World Education Monitoring Report recognized the growing prevalence of homeschooling and noted that “countries are increasingly making the option available under relatively simple conditions.”
This April, the present special rapporteur, Koumbou Boly Barry, leveled a strong critique against authoritarian tendencies of public education systems, calling them “assimilation machines with reductive objectives, including blind obedience to the rules, norms and moral values of society; training aimed at meeting the needs of the labor market; the propagation of systems of domination; and adherence to State, nationalist, or religious ideologies.” Barry urged U.N. members to safeguard, among other rights, the “freedom of parents to provide their children with a religious and moral education in line with their own convictions” and the right of groups and individuals to seek out or create private educational options.
Not only does UNICEF Brazil’s statement disregard these warnings, it ignores plentiful evidence of homeschooling’s success. The United States boasts the world’s largest homeschooling population. Decades of research have shown that homeschooling works, both academically and socially.
Results of a weekly pulse survey by the U.S. Census Bureau suggest that as many as 14-16% of U.S. households with children are homeschooling. Given average family sizes, this means probably between 8 and 10 million children are being homeschooled in the U.S. today (an outcome of the COVID-19 pandemic that I predicted last May). Most states simply require that parents notify authorities that they are homeschooling and teach certain required subjects. They are not required to have any kind of teaching certificate or minimum academic credential. This minimalistic regulatory approach has worked well and provided the freedom and flexibility to allow home education to grow to what it is today: a robust education system that gives children the opportunity to learn and grow in a safe, nurturing family environment.
Brazil’s proposed law would take homeschooling out of legal limbo and open up new opportunities for millions of children to learn in new and creative ways. UNICEF’s misguided opposition does nothing for the children and families of Brazil and is out of touch with what other, more authoritative U.N. sources are saying — and with reality itself. Homeschooling is neither risky nor harmful, as millions of children in the U.S. and hundreds of thousands in other countries know. UNICEF and the U.N. should retract these statements immediately.
Homeschooling works! We urge policymakers in Brazil to disregard the spurious UNICEF report and continue their work of establishing the right and freedom to homeschool.
Michael P. Donnelly is a senior counsel at the Home School Legal Defense Association.
