Abstract:

The interest of parents about parent-led home-based education is increasing in many countries around the globe for a long period of time, yet the phenomenon itself remained of rather limited scope in most countries. The consequences of disruption of regular education provided by schools due to a Covid-19 pandemic has increased the interest in home-based education even more as millions of families were pushed to practice some sort of home-based education due to school closures. Using the data from the representative public opinion polls conducted in Czechia between 2016 and 2020 this paper aims to analyse the attitudes of the general public towards the legal possibility for parents to educate their children at home. It will pay attention to demographic, socio-economic, political, and ideological underlying factors that may shape their attitudes towards the home education. In addition to that the events of Covid-19 pandemic provided us with a rare opportunity to observe whether (or to what extent) the public opinion towards home-based education was influenced / changed by the “natural large scale experiment” of many families with education of children in home-based settings.

Keywords:

Home-based education, Covid-19 pandemic, representative public opinion polls.