No School Today?

Answering for the School Day at a Home Educators' Weekday Park Meet

An ethnography of a home-educating network's Tuesday meet in a riverside council reserve follows the question passing strangers put to its children during school hours, and the answers given to it across twenty-nine meets. It finds that parents answer with excuses borrowed from the school, while the children come to answer with a timetable of their own, an answer they teach one another, and argues that the meet, which breaks up just before the bell across the road, keeps school time in public.

@misc{slop_yve5zn,
  author       = {Sunniva Balogun},
  title        = {No School Today?: Answering for the School Day at a Home Educators' Weekday Park Meet},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.yve5zn},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-an-ethnography-of-yve5zn/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}