FAQs

Q - What is Home Education?

A - Home education is the oldest form of child education. It honors and represents a parent's preference or wish to facilitate the education of their children themselves. Home education encompasses exposure of the learner to the knowledge, skills and values required by an active community member and citizen of the modern world and for admission to further education, higher education or employment.

Q - Why are more homeschool associations necessary?

A - The home education movement emphasizes the need for extensive consultation due to the diverse and distributed nature of the movement. If government actually takes cognizance of this, parliament might decide to have public hearings all over the country, as they did for the Expropriation Without Compensation constitutional amendment proposal. If this is the case, there might be as many as 3 public hearings in each province. Without provincial associations, there will be many public hearings without submissions on home education, due to the limited capacity of national organizations.

Q - What is required to establish an association?

A - It is not necessary to have many members in order to establish an association. Ten members electing three executive committee members could be enough. Neither is it necessary that people must attend a physical meeting in order to establish an association, or that the association must charge membership fees.

Q - What are constituency offices?

A - South Africa’s electoral system is one of proportional representation, meaning that MPs and MPLs are not elected from geographical areas in the way that ward councilors are elected in local government. This does not mean that representatives are not expected to interact with the public. Parliament makes available to each party represented in Parliament a 'Political Party Constituency Allowance' and political parties must use these funds to operate constituency offices. These are about 350 Constituency Offices around the country where members of the public can approach elected representatives.

Q - How to arrange a meeting?

A - Contact the constituency office in your area. There might be various constituency offices in your area, and you can choose the office of the political party with whom you feel most comfortable to engage.