The right to be included: Homeschoolers combat the structural discrimination embodied in their lawful protection in the Czech Republic

• Main Author: Irena Kasparova
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Kura Publishing 2015-09-01
• Series: International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education
• Subjects: Homeschooling; Structural discrimination; Education; Difference
• Online Access: https://iejee.com/index.php/IEJEE/article/view/104/101

There is a 240-year tradition of compulsory school attendance in the Czech Republic. To many, compulsory school attendance is synonymous with the right to be educated. After the collapse of communism in 1989, along with the democratization of the government, the education system was slowly opened to alternatives, including the right to educate children at home, expressed in Act no. 561/2004. This inclusive law has had exclusionary consequences for many families who wish to choose this mode of education. The situation reveals a clear struggle over various forms of capital in the field of education, as famously described by Bourdieu (1998). The article, based on a longitudinal ethnographic study of homeschooling families, maps the structural discriminative dimension of the law and displays the strategies that the actors have adopted in order to combat them.