Education at Home or Homeschooling in the Spanish Constitutional Court Doctrine

Abstract

Homeschooling makes an adequate bank of samples to set out constitutional legal issues of an enormous importance in relation with freedom involved in the right to education. We ultimately need to clearly set out if the freedom of teaching (art. 27.1 of Spanish Constitution) and the parents right to their children’s education (art. 27.3 of Spanish Constitution) allow the parents to impose on their children an educational model such as homeschooling where the parents reject conventional school and skip the right to enroll their children in a school based on their ideological, religious or educational beliefs. Such right is established by law so as to guarantee the right to/ duty of compulsory basic education (art. 27.4 Spanish Constitution). The crux of the matter resides in the fact that educational freedom makes a condition of the minor’s own interest, which is the premise of the educational system and which consists of exerting the right to education in a way that it will have as its main goal the free development of the person’s character and the transfer of the constitutional values as stated by the so-called constitutional diary (art. 27.2 of Spanish Constitution). Even though the Constitutional Court doctrine claims that the constitution does not state the obligation to follow the basic primary and secondary education on a mandatory basis it does acknowledge the fact that this choice of the ruler is the most adequate to facilitate the right to education and to guarantee the constitutional principles which, so as to worship such right it restricts the parents educational rights to aside from school.