I am not sure which category Bern fits into.
There is a Facebook group dedicated to homeschooling in Switzerland which may be helpful for you.
If your location is Fribourg (I assume not Freiburg in Germany), how can you homeschool in Bern canton?
I’m with Island Monkey, I can’t really see the point especially if your kids are moving to another country and need to start afresh making friends, etc.
Tom
This from a 2014 thread on the subject referring to Bern canton:
“Actually, it is allowed, but you have to have a teacher sponsoring you. The teacher doesn’t have to instruct your kids personally, but they have to sign to be an “advice” person. You do have to state your reasons for homeschooling on the form. You need the signature/support of a teacher, and the Schulinspektorin comes once a year to look at what you’ve done in the last year.”
The websites about homeschooling are so full of ego and knowing better and telling everybody how much better they are, I can't stand it.
The world is diverse and you have to be exposed to different experiences and different life plans than only those your parents have. You have to learn to be exposed to people who do not share the life plan of your parents.
Parents are teachers anyway, they educate and ideally give their children a wide scope of experiences the school cannot and will not give them.
I'm not denying that homeschooling can be very successful, too. But good homeschooling also includes contacts to other children, partaking in the social life of society around. This needs careful planning of conscientous parents.
The home -schoolers I know are quite complicated people - no school they choose could do their wonderful kids justice. Maybe the schools were better off without them :-)
But children are also resourceful - if homeschooled or not, they will grow up, do it their way and become happy or unhappy people :-)
Another friend's husband who is a teacher is involved with a group that is establishing a free school - whatever that means. We sent our boys to a Steiner preschool. Maybe another possibility that might be a fit for your family. So there are options out there for those that choose not to go the conventional roste.
At this point we are very happy with the public school our kids attend. It was a rough beginning and we may not always agree with the teachers' methods and opinions but in the end the advantages greatly outweigh the disadvantages. (I would never have the patience to have my kids around me 24/7. Worked well until the age of around three but after that a little break was welcome. )
A close friend of mine, homeschooled by parents with very similar ideals and educational philosophy but in different circumstances, had a very negative experience.
But that's true of kids who go through the same class in the same public or private school as well. Even in the same school with same teachers, some will look back on their school days as positive and inspiring, others the complete opposite, for most it'll be a mixed bag.
What it's done is make me extremely reluctant to generalize on what educational methods are best for children or families in general... or to assume that I even know what will be best for my family in particular. So rather than doing loads of research when they turn 4 and making a one-off, informed decision - "homeschool/local school/private school/international school is the best fit for us and therefore my children will go to that" - I need to commit to looking, often and hard, at how our choices are working out. Are my children thriving? If not, what do we need to change?
Looking back now, my friend's experience could have been much more positive if she and her parents together had been able to pause, reflect, and make some different choices. As I bet a lot of people's school experiences could, not just homeschool kids. But when you're in the thick of it that's hard to do... and when parents are teachers are bus drivers are janitors, it's peculiarly hard to take yourself out of the thick of it long enough for any meaningful reflection. That's why I reckon most homeschool families would benefit a lot from summer camps, part-time attendance at local schools, or other forms of educational "respite care" so to speak. Rather than talk people out of homeschooling altogether (like I said, my personal experience was fantastic) I'd prefer to emphasize the importance and availability of these support strategies... the fact that homeschooling doesn't have to mean going it alone.
In Kanton Bern you need permission and have to work together with a teacher. You and your child will be inspected (once a year or so). Looks like www.bildungzuhause.ch is a semi-official club that works as a hinge for government and parents. They also seem to try to offer what Mathnut mentions above, seminars and meetups for information exchange.
Only time I heard about this was with families living in the boondocks or very straightlined religious families?
To give you an idea, the homeschoolers' group where I grew up (Midwestern US, rural shading toward suburban) was a pretty diverse mix of the following:
- religious families with a range of more or less religious/cultural concerns, some curricular and some peer-pressure based;
- hippy/creative families who worried that typical classroom settings would stifle individuality and prepare kids only for a life of conformity and meaningless wageservitude;
- academically intense families who found the local public schools not challenging enough and the private schools too religious;
- special-needs families who felt undersupported by the local system and believed they could do a better job themselves.