Swimming Against the Stream: Rationales, Challenges, and Survival Strategies of Homeschooling Families in Indonesia

Homeschooling has become an educational trend in Indonesia since the early 2000s, not long after Suharto stepped down from power. The homeschool parents grew up within the highly centralized, hegemonic education system of his New Order regime. Their decision to homeschool is an embodiment of the courage to question and resist the hegemony, although not without difficulties. Using historical and legal trajectories, personal memory, an internal survey, and other organizational documents, the author offers an insider perspective on the homeschooling phenomenon in Indonesia. The questions central to this chapter are: which families choose to homeschool, what factors push them away from schools and pull them towards homeschooling, what challenges do they face, and why do they struggle to organize themselves? One interesting finding is that, unlike their counterparts in the West, the majority of Indonesian homeschool families were motivated to homeschool because of academic considerations rather than religious ones. I also argue that the entrenched educational paradigm that equates education to schooling and doubts parents’ capability to teach their own children underpinned many problems faced by Indonesian homeschool families.