A Swedish parent has been fined €11,000 for homeschooling his daughter even though Swedish law does not .jpg)
explictly ban homeschooling.
Jonas Himmelstrand, author and leading campaigner for the rights of homeschooling parents, and his wife have been fined by the Swedish Supreme Administrative Court for home educating their daughter for one year, the school year 2010-2011.
The fine was imposed even though the family now live in Finland.
The Swedish Association for Home Education, of which Mr Himmelstrand is a member, have condemned the court’s ruling saying that it proved that Sweden had outlawed homeschooling in practice.
In a statement, the group said that the ruling “raises questions about the Swedish rule of law”.
The statement says: “According to the Swedish law of fines (viteslagen) 9 § a fine may not be issued if the objective ”has lost its significance” which is the case with the family no longer resident in Sweden. The Swedish law of fines does not support using a fine as punishment or as a general preventive action.”
The statement also points out that the fine imposed on the Himmelstrands “is five times higher than what any other family has had to pay in recent years” and comes despite the fact that the family moved to Finland in early 2012 and now home educate in accordance with the Finnish school law which is far more lenient towards homeschoolers.
The verdict will be appealed to the European Court.
The ruling is the latest chapter in a running dispute between Himmelstrand family and the Swedish authorities.
Between 2008 and 2011, the Himmelstrands fought in the courts for the right to home educate in the town of Uppsala where they lived at the time.
Mr Himmelstrand works as an educational consultant and is the President of the Swedish Association for Home Education – ROHUS. He has addressed the Iona Institute on the subject of Swedish childcare on two occasions.
The family have three children, all home educated, and live in a form of political exile on the Aland Islands in Finland since February 2012 after they were advised by social services in Uppsala to move there if they wanted to continue to homeschool their children.
The statement said that the ruling “confirms that the current centre-right government has outlawed home education in Sweden”.
It pointed to a number of other cases on homeschooling, including that of an orthodox Jewish home educating family in Gothenburg who had their application for home education turned down by the Supreme Administrative Court.
The only reason given by the court was that there were not the “exceptional circumstances” required by the new school law.
Sweden differs from the majority of Western democracies and joins Germany whose school law from 1938 explicitly forbids home education.
The statement added that the Association received a lot of mail from concerned parents asking how to homeschool in Sweden.
It said that the rise in interest was “understandable as the quality of Swedish schools is declining with poor academic results, disorder in the classrooms, an all too common inability to handle children with special needs, and a level of bullying which creates a great distress for many families”.