Conference Program

This autoethnographic paper explores the annual negotiations surrounding compulsory assessments for unschooled children in Italy. While unschooling is grounded in self-directed learning, community participation, and the recognition of children as active citizens, families in Italy must confront yearly examinations based on school curricula and standardized evaluation.

Drawing on lived experience as a parent of unschooled children, the paper examines encounters at the interface between families and schools. These interactions involve efforts to establish dialogue with teachers, principals, and educational authorities while explaining learning pathways that do not follow age-graded programs, disciplinary boundaries, or conventional instructional methods. Particular attention is paid to tensions arising from assessment procedures modeled on classroom learning.

The analysis highlights recurring experiences of misunderstanding, skepticism, and, at times, hostility. While unschooling families seek recognition of learning emerging through projects, community participation, reading, volunteering, travel, digital exploration, and everyday life, schools often struggle to evaluate knowledge beyond familiar academic formats. This creates a paradox: educational pathways broadly consistent with the learner-centered principles of the Indicazioni Nazionali per il Curricolo (2012) remain difficult to recognize within standardized systems.

The paper argues that this friction is not merely pedagogical but civic. The right of children to be acknowledged as legitimate learners is also a question of democratic recognition and educational pluralism. It concludes by proposing alternative assessment models, including portfolios, narrative documentation, community review panels, and mixed committees involving librarians, cultural educators, and independent educational officers. Such approaches may better capture diverse learning trajectories while fostering constructive relationships between institutions, families, and young citizens.

Parents have the primary responsibility to provide their children's education. In Italy this parents’ right and duty is guaranteed by the Constitution. At the same time, a welfare state has the duty to ensure that all children have access to (a possibly good) education. The boundary between state’s authority and family rights in education is a contentious, evolving legal and ethical space. When children are unschooled the parental (and children’s) range of choice is much wider and includes the places and times of learning, the approaches, the social groups, the learning context, the contents, the curriculum, the learning language(s) and even more. Might this mean that the state’s supervisory power about education is less wide in unschooling than in schooling? Where is the "border line” between state’s authority and parents’ rights in unschooling? If some of the state's and parents' competences overlap, how can this overlap create synergy and cooperation in the child's best interests instead of friction? In recent years state pressure on parental choices and the consequent friction between state’s authority and unschooling families have both increased. The investigation into this interplay between family autonomy and state intervention highlights how most state interventions in the educational field, at least in Italy, especially towards unschooling families, are inspired less by democratic principles or solidarity, support and a spirit of collaboration than by the need to control, to influence and interfere, as if unschooling were a kind of insubordination.

The choice of unschooling is often criticized as an individualistic withdrawal from civil society. Drawing on a situated and experiential perspective as an unschooling parent, this presentation challenges that narrative. Building on English et al. (2024), it examines unschooling as a form of “democracy without curriculum,” where learning emerges through participation, relationships, and shared decision-making rather than externally imposed educational structures.

Although contemporary educational theories increasingly emphasize learner-centered approaches, institutional schooling often limits genuine autonomy through compulsory curricula, standardized assessment, and age-graded progression. Unschooling pushes student-centered principles further by recognizing children’s capacity to direct their own learning and participate meaningfully in decisions affecting their lives.

The paper focuses on unschooling as a process of mutual parent-child transformation. Creating a democratic learning environment requires adults to engage in a continual process of deschooling, unlearning assumptions rooted in performance, control, surveillance, and standardized outcomes. Following Illich (1971), this involves questioning the tendency to equate education with institutional instruction. Adult authority is not abandoned but reconfigured through dialogue, collaboration, and co-research.

From this perspective, the home becomes a porous social space where learning, care, and citizenship are continuously enacted. Rather than preparing children for future participation, unschooling recognizes them as citizens in the present, actively engaged in cultural, relational, and community life.

The presentation argues that unschooling is not civic disengagement but a practice of democratic renewal grounded in relational care. It concludes that regulatory frameworks imposing school-based standards risk undermining educational pluralism and limiting democratic innovation, whereas unschooling offers a living example of citizenship practiced through autonomy, responsibility, and mutual care.

Unschooling is often seen as a phenomenon that emphasizes individualism to the detriment of the social, public dimension of the individual. Empirical data and literature on unschooling, however, lead to completely different conclusions. The characteristics of this approach and its practice highlight how the relationship between public and private sphere can be deeper, richer, more multifaceted and advanced than in other educational and learning approaches. The educational system's beginning and ending point is the person. The Italian Constitution includes among its foundation principles a commitment to removing obstacles that impede "the full development of the human person." Unschooling creates the conditions for all the aspects that ultimately constitute the person to emerge and develop. This approach finds the concept of interest as the key to every activity. Interest is the moment of convergence and synthesis between the subject's interiority (the private) and the world (the public sphere) (Stern, 2006). Interest is the vital nucleus that begins and sustains the process of shaping the person, arising from the encounter between the public and the private sphere, where its propulsive and necessary action transmutes the individual's inner temperament into the character that will be the figure of their person (Bollea, 1995). In unschooling, learning dynamics unfold in real contexts, both cultural and natural, and there, without pre-orders or prescriptions, study and research paths are liberated and unfold, where the individual penetrates the public sphere, gathers its stimuli, and investigates its components and connotations.

This contribution presents the progress of a joint PhD research project between the University of Paris Nanterre and the University of Bologna, focusing on the analysis of home education in the Italian and French contexts.

The two legal systems adopt profoundly different models. In Italy, homeschooling is subject to parents’ annual notification of their educational choice and compliance with the obligations laid down by current legislation; in France, following the 2021 reform, it is instead subject to a system of prior authorisation that restricts access to it to specific conditions laid down by law.

Building on this difference, the research examines home education as an educational and social practice, with particular attention to families’ motivations, the ways in which learning pathways are organised, and the effects produced by the different regulatory frameworks.

After outlining the theoretical framework, the research objectives and the methodological design adopted, the paper presents the initial results of the empirical survey conducted in France using a questionnaire administered to a sample of families. The focus is specifically on unschooling experiences, examining their pedagogical motivations, how learning pathways are organised, and the impact of the authorisation scheme introduced by the 2021 reform.

The findings highlight how the new regulatory framework has affected the possibility of practising unschooling, altering the strategies adopted by families and, in many cases, leading to the initiation of administrative and legal proceedings against those who have continued to provide home education without the authorisation required by law.