Studying at home for GCSEs and International GCSEs

I wrote a little yesterday about studying for and taking GCSEs at home. I said that this was a full time job and perhaps gave the impression that it meant unrelenting work at the task through all the waking hours. Somebody asked whether it would be possible to work in the evenings while doing this and so I think that I have probably not explained very well. Perhaps it would help to take a specific example of studying for a GCSE and see how it can work.

One of the most daunting things when considering the formal teaching of children with a view to their taking GCSEs is that the subjects sound so vast and all embracing that you don't know where to begin! I mean history, for instance. There's just so much of it! Does my kid need to know everything, from the Egyptians to Tony Blair? What about science? Where do I even start? Fortunately, it is all a good deal simpler than we think. For whatever subject you wish to teach, there is a specification. This sets out in great detail precisely what your child will need to know to pass the exam. Let's look at a specification for one of the IGCSEs; biology, for example. You can see it here. Just click on the link and download the PDF for the specification:

http://www.edexcel.com/quals/igcse/igcse09/biology/biology/Pages/default.aspx

This all makes it a lot clearer. Your child doesn't have to know everything about biology; just what is listed here. We printed out a copy of the specification and then ticked off the topics as we covered them. Then when we did them again, we made another tick and a third during revision. It really was that simple. This is free; you don't need to buy a lot of textbooks and revision notes, there are plenty of books in the library and also in charity shops. We never spent more than three hours or so each morning working at academic stuff. Because few homes have laboratories attached to them, this is a traditional teachers' objection to the teaching of science at home; 'How will they do the experiments and practical work?' This is a lot of nonsense, as the teachers very well know. Most of them avoid any practical work anyway these days, because the kids can't be trusted not to injure themselves or each other. In fact, at home one can do far more than would ever be undertaken in a school setting. This ties in with what I said about only working for a few hours in the morning. let's see how.

Having read up on one small aspect of the specification in the morning and looked at what several books have to say about it, we can then fool around in the afternoon and evening having fun in a way that is really conducting experiments to reinforce what we read from the specification that morning. Suppose we dealt with this part of the IGCSE Biology Specification:

Fungi: These are organisms that are not able to carry out photosynthesis; their body is
usually organised into a mycelium made from thread-like structures called hyphae, which
contain many nuclei; some examples are single-celled; they have cell walls made of
chitin; they feed by extracellular secretion of digestive enzymes onto food material and
absorption of the organic products; this is known as saprotrophic nutrition; they may store
carbohydrate as glycogen.
Examples include Mucor, which has the typical fungal hyphal structure, and yeast which
is single-celled.

Yeast, eh? Have we tried putting a little sugar and water in the bottom of a jug and then stirring in some baking yeast? It will, after a while, froth up. Hmmm, must be producing Carbon Dioxide as a by-product. How can we test for this? Easy, just put a lighted match into the jug. If it goes out, this means that the air has been driven out and only Carbon Dioxide remains. If you are also doing chemistry, you can then experiment with the Carbon Dioxide at this point, pouring it over a candle to extinguish it or from the jug into a glass. Kids are fascinated at the idea of pouring an invisible gas. You could try brewing some wine or beer, which ties in with another part of the specification about industrial fermenters. If you have a garden, you can start a compost heap and observe the fungus in action as it decomposes the food scraps. Put a few moistened crumbs of bread in a transparent plastic cup and seal the end with cling-film. Put it in the airing cupboard and fungus will grow in the dark. This is also useful for distinguishing between fungus and plants which need light to grow. You can actually observe the mycelium mentioned in the extract from the specification which I gave above. Back to yeast again, you can seal a slice of banana in a sandwich bag and then another slice with a little yeast sprinkled on it. Which goes mushy first and why? In fact the academic work of following the specification only takes up a small part of the studying. Even if you are working, the sort of things which I discuss above can easily be undertaken in the evening or at weekends.

This is just a tiny instance of how the process works, but I can promise readers that it is not at all a hard thing to teach GCSEs in this way. In fact it is a lot of fun. The important thing is to plan ahead a bit and gear some of your outings as well to the specification; visits to museums and lectures and so on. Quite a few parents do GCSEs with their children and most families have a great time at it. The idea that taking examinations destroys all the fun in a child's learning is one of the greatest myths current in British home education. It is actually great fun!

'It’s academically nearly impossible for one person to teach all that is included in a modern high school curriculum'

The above quotation comes from the Director of the Catholic Education Foundation, but is not of course an exclusively Catholic view of home education. Among many teachers and other education professionals, I would say that it is the standard model. How can a parent hope to teach every subject, from physics to history, mathematics to chemistry, English literature to music? The fact is of course that many parents do exactly that. We certainly managed it here without any great problems. Today I want to look a little at the whole business of secondary home education. I am not going to discuss whether a parent should teach in this way. I am aware that many parents think it wrong to decide in advance what their children should learn and so this piece will be irrelevant to them.

As I dare say readers know, my own daughter passed eight IGCSEs at A*. She also passed Grade 5 classical guitar and Grade 6 acting with LAMDA. I alone taught her these things. Now three possibilities occur to one here. The first is that my daughter is some kind of brainbox who can achieve wonderful things purely because she is so clever. The second possibility is that I am a Renaissance Man; a fantastically knowledgeable polymath with an amazing flair for teaching. The third possibility is that anybody can teach their teenage child to a very high academic level and that all it really takes is a lot of research and an enormous amount of hard work on the part of both parent and child. I will not leave readers in suspense any long; the third explanation is the correct one.

Teachers, like garage mechanics, plumbers, builders and the members of practically every other trade, wish to make it appear that what they are doing is very difficult and can only be undertaken by highly trained professionals. Obviously they have to do this. Where would mechanics be if we all started learning about engines and fixing our own cars? A lot of what teachers do is related purely to schools. The supervision and control of thirty children, the administrative paperwork, all the up-to-date jargon, the National Curriculum; none of this has the least relevance to a parent teaching one or two children at home. For this, all that is needed is to download the subject specification and find out what knowledge and skills are needed to pass that particular GCSE. If the topic is history, you don't actually need to be an historian, or indeed have any prior knowledge of any of the historical periods that the child will need to know about. When my daughter was choosing her options for history, she wanted to do Imperial Russia 1855-1917. My heart sank; this was not a time or place about which I knew much. However, a few books from the library and charity shops and hey presto; we were on our way. It was the same with other subjects. Even teaching the guitar requires no previous knowledge of the instrument. I literally cannot play one note on the guitar, but it did not prove a handicap in teaching the thing.
Many parents underestimate their own abilities. They have been subtly brainwashed over the decade by the notion that professionals know best. Teachers often manage to convey the idea that they know all about the subject that they are teaching, but this is seldom the case. If they are teaching about the First World War, then before each lesson, they swot up on what they will be telling the kids, make photo-copies, track down a useful video; all the stuff that any reasonably intelligent parent could do.

What is needed to teach a child at secondary level is the realisation that this will be a full time job. The key to academic success, as measured by GCSEs and A levels, is a lot of time spent studying. Unles your child is some sort of genius, then the more hard work undertaken, the better the results. The parent must study even harder than the child. In order to get the ideas across, the parent must read all about them before the lesson and thoroughly absorb what it is wished to teach the child . You don't need to know this stuff beforehand and you can forget it later, but during the lessons themselves, you must be prepared for any questions and if you can't answer at once, you need to be able to point out the book which does contain the information.

The standard government benchmark of a 'good' education is five GCSEs including mathematics and English at Grade C or above. This is such a pathetically low expectation that one is gripped by despair. That half the children in this country fail even to attain this hideously low standard is an indictment of the educational system in this country. I cannot imagine why 99% of parents continue to be satisfied with this dreadful situation. The remedy is really in their own hands.

A Catholic perspective on home education

I found this interesting; looking at home education from one Catholic point of view.


http://www.osv.com/tabid/7621/itemid/7963/Homeschoolers-sometimes-at-odds-with-dioceses.aspx

Home Education in New Zealand

Here is a very optimistic and upbeat account of home education in New Zealand:


http://www.bayofplentytimes.co.nz/life-style/news/right-at-home-with-learning/3951948/

Why are so many home educators so weird?

My heart sank when I read in the newspaper about the couple who had decided to raise their baby as 'genderless'. I guessed, long before it was revealed in the text, that they would turn out to be home educators and so it proved. The giveaway was the photograph of their oldest son. He has long plaits, androgynous clothing and of course cannot attend school because of bullying. And he wears dresses. Below is a news item with the best photograph of this child (readers are not to read any significance into the fact that this is the Daily Mail; it just happened to have the best pictures of this truly strange family):

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1391772/Storm-Stocker-As-gender-experiment-provokes-outrage-poor-childs-future.html

How did I guess that the family home educated? Easy, really. Their son looks really weird and would obviously be regarded as a complete freak wherever he went. Apparently, boys bully him and when he went to a playground wearing a pink dress, the girls did not want anything to do with him either. I have noticed in the past that pictures of boys who are being home educated often show a child with very long hair and/or a generally strange appearance such as would immediately set him apart from any other boy of a similar age. None of this is brilliant advertisement for home education and the case of baby Storm has certainly provoked people to look at the idea unfavourably. It does not help that the Stockers are, inevitably, radical unschoolers. I can assure readers that the average parent is not impressed to hear about a child who only learns what he wants, when he wants. In cases like this, most mutter to themselves that the kid needs a haircut and ought to be sent to school where he will be educated properly.

I suppose that the newspapers are bound to focus upon peculiar families; freak shows like this sell papers. I rather suspect that home educating parents have a tendency to be a little more odd than the average parent anyway, although mercifully, few are as downright odd as the Stockers! Items like this in the papers and on the television do not really help advance the cause of home education. They serve merely to underline the popular feeling about home education, which is that it is the province of cranks and nutcases. This is a pity and it would be good to see some more positive coverage of the topic, with success stories of a conventional sort. When our masters are considering changes in legislation, I cannot think that stories about home educating families like the Stockers help matters much!

'Home Educators are at the forefront of exploiting technology for educational achievement'

One of my favourite people who regularly comments here, claimed yesterday that:

'Home Educators are at the forefront of exploiting technology for educational achievement'.

I am a particular fan of this individual because quite apart from any other consideration, she provides us with a textbook example of the use of language by somebody with semantic pragmatic disorder. It would be interesting to meet her child and see if there is a genetic component to this. This is however, by the by. The idea that home educators are pioneers of technology, simply means that rather than filling their homes with a lot of expensive books and teaching their children, not a few such parents rely instead upon the Internet. All the information in the world is there, right? And our children can take control of their learning by finding out what they want to know, yes? It is at times like this that one wishes to move the keyboard out of the way and bang one's head up and down on the desk like a woodpecker.

It is quite true that almost any piece of information one might require may be found on the Internet. Unfortunately, useful and true information makes up only a tiny fraction of what is to be found in cyberspace. It is dwarfed by the sheer quantity of mad nonsense there. A child wishing to find out who the first people in America were can certainly discover about the pre-Clovis controversy and the Norse settlement in Newfoundland. Side by side with this is information from the Mormons, alleging that ancient Israelites settled in North America, other stuff claiming that the Japanese visited the country before Columbus, and also a lot of really mad sites about Atlantis and the lost continent of Mu. Very few children have enough basic knowledge of history and archaeology properly to assess the rival merits of these various theories. In a book on the subject aimed at children and published by a respectable publisher, the sensible theories will be given prominence and it will be made clear that this is what most experts believe, while the crank ideas might rate a footnote. Without this guidance, children can start to fall prey to any amount of idiocy.

Another problem of course is that children most generally waste their time on the Internet anyway, spending hours gossiping with their mates and emailing each other strange images. They may assure their parents that they are researching some pet project, but this is all too often untrue.

This whole business ties in with what I was saying yesterday about the problem with home educating parents not keeping in touch with modern developments. Ten years ago, the educational world was alight with the idea that the 'Information super highway' was the way forward. This is still the predominant idea in almost all state schools, but independent ones have been a little more cautious and tended to rely more upon books. This is often reflected in their exam results. Quite a bit of research has demonstrated that computers in the classroom do not really have such a great benefit for children and can in some cases cause harm.

The reasons for home educators enthusiastically adopting technology in this way are simple to understand. In the first place, they genuinely believe them to be of great benefit to their children's education; they have swallowed the early hype and not read of the doubts which are beginning to creep in. Secondly, the majority of homes have Internet access and filling the house with hundreds of books can be expensive. Why bother, when all the information is on the net? Anyway, things are changing so fast that those books will soon be out of date anyway. Once again, these parents are probably not aware of the evidence which suggests that those children who go on to achieve academic success tend to come from homes full of books where screen time is far lower than the national average for children of similar age. The converse may well be proved true in the future; that those children coming from homes with few books and whose screen time is above average, will be predisposed to academic failure.

Periplus in the news

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23954400-home-pupils-to-learn-via-net-at-virtual-school.do

Working outside the mainstream

Imagine for a moment a group of mavericks supposedly following some scientific discipline but working entirely on their own, completely cut off from mainstream science. Let us say that they are physicists. Physicists though with this one vital difference; hardly any of them have actually studied physics. They do not keep in touch with modern research on physics and they refuse to read the scientific journals which would keep them in touch with the latest developments in the field. Most of them are attached to idea which were disproved in the 1960s. They have developed their own theory of physics, but refuse to cooperate with other physicists in trying to test this theory. They know that it is true and that their ideas work and that is all there is to it! Besides, many of them are hostile to orthodox physics and believe that the motives of most physicists are suspect and that they are perpetuating a system of physics which is corrupt and dangerous; largely because they are in the pay of the government.

If you simply substitute the word 'teaching' or 'education' in the above paragraph, you might get some idea of how conventional educationalists, as well as many ordinary people, view home educators. Home educators are, by and large, hopelessly out of touch with mainstream education and yet insist that they have made a marvellous discovery in the field, a discovery that other, orthodox educationalists reject, probably because they are in the pay of the government. Until home educators move a little closer to the centre and start learning more about the latest research on their chosen subject, that is to say education, and start cooperating in research and sharing their data; they will remain outsiders. Just imagine somebody who claimed to be a physicist and yet rejected the idea of quarks because he was stuck in the mindset of the 1960s, before experimental evidence emerged for the existence of quarks. This is just what many home educators are like with their clinging to the educational ideas which were all the rage in the sixties and seventies.

Possible free virtual school for home educated children

The day before yesterday, on May 24th, a new company was incorporated and registered at Companies House. It is called Periplus Home Education and the website may be found here:

http://periplus.org.uk/


Now it is true that the founder of this enterprise, John Edwards, has the misfortune to look and sound like a used car salesman, but this should not prejudice us against him. He was until last year the head of a failing school, details about which may be found here:

http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/s/2070465_parents_concern_over_college_in_special_measures


A number of local authorities have received this communication, touting for business for this company, which is essentially a virtual school:

A national internet based “Free School” for home educated students
Periplus Home Education* is currently seeking expressions of interest to demonstrate the viability and sustainability of an application for the first state funded ‘school’ for home educated students. Using the new government legislation, they are currently engaged in consultation with government ministers and potential partners with respect to opening an Internet based, nationally available “Free School” for secondary age children, which, if successful, would open in September 2012. A critical and urgent step however, is an indication of the likely demand for such a school.
Home education allows great flexibility and removes the need to follow a prescribed curriculum and these freedoms are important. Whilst the model currently being developed to meet the required parameters for a state funded school cannot provide unlimited flexibility, there would be vastly more than in a normal school.
If the proposal is accepted (and this is not guaranteed) it would allow your child to continue receiving their education at home, albeit with a likely increased structure and some regulation. It would provide access to GCSE and other examinations and most importantly, it would be fully funded by the government and therefore completely free to you. It would provide access to the very best live teaching over the internet by highly qualified professional teachers in small classes with access to the best education resources on the market. At the same time, you would maintain a certain degree of autonomy over your child’s education and preserve many of the advantages that home education can bring.
Whilst the target size of the 11-16 school is 300-400 students, given that there are some 20-80,000 home educators in the UK, this is possibly an underestimate of the number that may be interested, but the proposals can be scaled on the basis of the number who reply. The admission criteria to such a school will be based on parents having shown a commitment to home education over time. It is intended that the school would demonstrate that home education can be very successful.
Although the proposals are well advanced, a vital step is securing the commitment of a sufficient number of home educating parents to the principle of “sending” their child to this internet school from September 2012. Responses from students currently aged 8-15 are especially important.
If you would like to be part of this unique school and to receive a state funded home education for your child please respond by completing and submitting the questionnaire, as soon as possible on the following link http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/511387/home-education
or follow the link on the periplus website www.periplus.org.uk/free-school
in order to help demonstrate the required level of interest. If you know anyone who home educates that might be interested, please direct them to the questionnaire. We will then complete the proposal in the tight timescale required. We will keep those who respond informed of the progress of the application, and will only use your information to consult you further or seek your views about the detailed planning for the school as necessary.
The proposal in its current form is to create a school for 11-16 year old students, If you are interested in a 5-11 version of such a school or wish to continue post 16 please also express an interest. We will then consider the viability of extending the current plan.
*Legislation prevents schools from being run for profit – this proposal is therefore wholly non commercial and is being undertaken as part of our commitment as a social enterprise organisation..


Although it is not the sort of thing which would have interested me, I suppose that there are parents who would like the idea and I am wondering what others think of the this.

Organising lessons while pretending to do quite another thing

There is among many British home educators thought to be something inherently wrong in forcing one's opinions upon an innocent child. Who are we to say that our idea, that the kid should study his multiplication tables this morning, is any better than the child's wish to surf the Internet? Because some people are absolutely passionate about this and very articulate in explaining why teaching to a curriculum is bad for children and likely to put them off learning for life or make them neurotic, a lot of home educating parents who teach their kids feel faintly guilty about the practice and tend not to mention it to other home educators. They are perhaps afraid of being thought of as pushy parents or even parents who are careless of their child's psychological health. A natural consequence of this is that quite a few parents teach their children to a curriculum of their own devising, while denying vehemently to those around them that they are doing anything of the sort. Let us look at any example of this; a mother who follows a structured approach, teaching her child to read, do mathematics, learn about biology and so on, while still maintaining the fiction that what is happening is being driven by the child himself.

Before we look at the clip below, may I make two points? First, I think that this looks like a great example of home education and very similar to the methods I myself used. This is not a denunciation of the mother; rather an expression of bewilderment that she seems to be slightly uneasy about admitting that she is teaching her child. Secondly, yes I am well aware that autonomous education can include teaching is the child asks for it. This is not the case here. I spoke in detail to the film crew and they were adamant that the child actually wanted to play Super Mario and that everything in the film was instigated by the mother and not the child. Quite right too, that is what parents are for!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYGKF5j74Yw

What is curious about this is that we are definitely watching a lesson being taught. The child has not asked to sit there and find out about birds, although he has in the past expressed an interest in the subject. The mother has decided that this is what they will do, by asking loaded questions, 'Shall we watch birds now?'. She is in control of the learning, by having the computer and choosing which website to look at. The child does not ask what the difference is between birds which walk and those which hop. His mother thinks that this is something he should know and so tells him. Left to his own devices, he would be playing with the wii. Because a laptop is used and the child is sitting on the kitchen worktop, it all looks very informal and we do not immediately notice that a lesson is taking place. If he were sitting in a chair and the mother were putting stuff up on a blackboard, it would be just the same; she is teaching her child what she thinks he should know.

So far, so good. This is just how I taught my own child at home. What I find astonishing is that the mother feels the need to pay lip service to the ideology that she is not teaching. We are told that she is an autonomous educator and that there are no lessons. This is so completely weird that one has to do a double-take. No lessons? We have just watched a lesson about the lifestyles of birds. She is teaching the child his times tables. What is strange is that although she is a teacher who plans her son's education and gives him lessons, she feels it necessary to deny this and pretend that he is in control of his own learning. Only in England would this happen!

How the introduction of registration and monitoring have not harmed a home education movement

This piece from Ireland is interesting, mainly because the parents seem just to be getting on with educating their children, rather than agitating against new laws. Perhaps there is a lesson here for parents in this country:


http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/health/2011/0524/1224297612453.html

Don't mention the Bible!

I gained a good deal of pleasure from the accusation levelled at me yesterday by a well known figure in the home education world that I am a hypocrite. Elizabeth, part of the double act 'Luke and Elizabeth' whom some readers may have come across, felt that I was a hypocrite for mentioning that I thought that the Bible was inspired by God and that it's moral values were good ones to teach to a child.

One of the things which I have noticed in recent years is that as long as one talks of any scriptures or belief system which does not involve the Bible, people will be respectful and not offer any criticism. After all, we live in a pluralist society and must be tolerant of all faiths and none. What better way of showing our tolerance and adherence to the multicultural society than listening gravely and with a straight face while somebody tells us that he reads the Qu'ran, is a Buddhist, Pagan, Scientologist or follows Hare krishna. It costs nothing and allows us to feel virtuous. The exception to this rule is anybody who talks of, quotes from or shows any respect for the Bible. Such people are, almost by definition, hypocrites and self-righteous bigots. This ethos may be partly formed by television, where any character in either a drama or documentary who is seen with a Bible is shown to be unpleasant. If it is fiction, then as soon as we see somebody with a Bible, we know that this person is at best slightly eccentric, like Dot Cotton from Eastenders, or at worse a psychotic killer or child abuser. No normal people in television dramas have Bibles in their homes or attend church. Documentaries where people are seen next to Bibles invariably portray them as bigoted fools and often unstable and dangerous fools at that. It is almost a rule of modern television, that the Bible is shorthand code for madness and hypocrisy.

Yesterday, even referring to the contents of the Bible was enough to get me branded a hypocrite. I don't follow the ethical system of the Bible myself; I am not a Christian, but even suggesting that it was inspired by God and that its values were worth teaching was sufficient to reveal me as a self-righteous bigot.

I love this attitude, which says so much about our society. The people who feel this way have generally not read the Bible, nor would they have one in their homes. They would be happy for their friends to see a copy of the Qu'ran or a book about Buddhism, but they would rather die than have anybody see a Bible laying around the place! I have no objection at all to anybody regarding me as a hypocrite, I am certainly that. But they really should found this belief upon stronger grounds than the fact that I approve of the moral code contained in the Bible. Such condemnation says far more about them and their own beliefs than it can ever say about me and mine.

Train up a child in the way he should go

It is no particular secret that I had two main reasons for educating my own child entirely at home. One of these was that many maintained schools are so terrible now that one simply cannot rely upon them to deliver even the most rudimentary education effectively. The other motive was religious. I wanted my daughter to grow up learning about God and not to be over-influenced by the mores of today's society. I lived in Israel for years and am a Zionist who believes that the Bible contains a good deal of solid information regarding what the Lord requires from us. We must care for the feeble and sick, be loving and kind to strangers, protect the widow and orphan; stuff like that. The two passages which underpinned the plans for my daughter's upbringing were Proverbs 22: 6, 'Train up a child in the way he will go and when he is old, he will not depart from it' and also from Proverbs, 1: 7, 'The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, but fools despise wisdom and instruction'.

I am aware that at this point many readers will be dismissing me as being a cross between Dot Cotton on Eastenders and a gun toting, Bible waving loony from the American deep South, but so be it! I have an idea that in fact many British home educators like having their children at home for precisely similar reasons to mine. I don't mean that their children's earliest writing practice was, like my daughter's, copying out the Commandments. I am thinking in a broader sense about transmitting their own particular values to their children and trying to counter what they see as dangerous and pernicious trends which affect children at school adversely. I have the impression, and it is no more than that, that a lot of home educators are at least as much concerned about how their child's character is formed as they are about what academic progress the kid makes when a teenager.

One seldom hears parents of school children speaking enthusiastically about the habits and belief systems which their children have acquired at school. I can't remember when last I heard a mother say, 'Johnny has learned some really sound values since he began secondary school'. Most parents fret about the negative effects which other children have upon their own child, in a moral and ethical sense. Those who keep their kids at home with them are spared this. Of course it is not really the done thing these days to talk openly about the moral and spiritual education of children, but whatever terms we use, I think that this is still a big concern for many of us. I have an idea that whatever else has prompted people to undertake the education of their children themselves, this plays a big role in reassuring them that they have made the right decision.

Real reasons for not sending children to school

It is very rare for any course of human action to be taken or adopted for one single reason. There are usually ostensible motives, the ones we reveal to others, but also there frequently exist other, perhaps less creditable explanations for what we do. Often, we do not acknowledge these hidden motives, even to ourselves. Perhaps we arrange for an elderly relative to be admitted to a hospital and then transferred to an old people's home. On the face of it, we are doing what is best for her and reap the credit for being a good niece. In fact, we are thoroughly fed up with going round her house twice a week to attend to her needs. Getting her into an institution may well be in her best interests; but that is not really why we have done it.

Of course, it is not always a case of an apparently altruistic motive concealing a base and ignoble one. It just as often happens that somebody will affect to be callous and hard and will present his actions as being based upon his own self interest, when in fact he is doing a genuine good deed! Humans are very complicated like that.

I was thinking about this recently apropos of home education. In my own case, the explanation which I regularly advance for not having sent my daughter to school is that I could provide her with a far better education at home than she could ever have received at school. This is demonstrably true, but is not really the reason for my failure to enrol her at a school. The truth is that I enjoyed her company tremendously when she was two and three and was very reluctant to deprive myself of it just because she turned five. I was essentially being selfish.

Why do some people choose not to send their children to school? I am sure that there are as many motives for this action as there are home educators, but I also have an idea that these motives fall into several broad categories. One of these is without doubt the same thing which motivated me to home educate. A mother loves her child so much and gets so much pleasure from her daughter or son, that she wishes to hang onto the child and not be deprived of his company during weekdays. There can be varying degrees of this and it can be a positive or negative motive. If it is because the mother really loves being with the child and would miss him; that would be a positive thing. If on the other hand, it is a fear of being left alone all day; this would be a negative reason, not really connected with the child at all.

Quite a few home educating parents have very bad memories of school themselves. Either the teachers failed to recognise their intelligence or the other pupils treated them badly. They are already prejudiced against school and this predisposes them to view schools as bad places. If they do send their children, then at the first hint of a problem they will deregister them. These are parents who are not really making rational decisions, but are the victims of their own pasts. A surprising number of home educators were unhappy or bullied at school and it is an odd coincidence that they go on to claim that their own children suffered similarly. In many cases, this is clearly a projection of their own anxieties onto their children.

However much evidence we manage to produce in support of our decision not to do what everybody else does and send our children to school, it is very often the case that such evidence is not the reason for our action, but merely justification for a decision which we have already taken on other, possibly less rational grounds. We are not and nor should we be purely logical where our children are concerned and there is nothing wrong with making choices based only upon natural love and affection for our offspring.

The trouble might start when the justifications which we produce for not sending our children to school are faulty or do not match up with the available objective evidence. Those opposed to the practice of home education then seize upon such discrepancies and accuse us of having hidden purposes and sinister reasons for wanting to keep our kids at home with us. What are they really up to? Obviously, this is not about the child's education at all! In a sense, they are quite right. Nobody really chooses to spend twenty four hours a day, seven days a week in the company of a toddler or teenager for purely educational reasons. There is always more to it than meets the eye.

Opening our eyes and seeing the bigger picture

One of the things which never ceases to amaze me is the way in which people commenting here apparently go out of their way to confirm what I am saying. I have remarked before that some of them seem almost like my sock puppets. The day before yesterday I posted about the New World Order and its popularity with some home educators. Somebody promptly posted a link to an Internet site called UK Column:

http://www.ukcolumn.org/articles/public-denied-right-%E2%80%9Csee-justice-being-done%E2%80%9D-manchester-trial-alleged-paedophile-martin-smi

This is of course a New World Order conspiracy site, one of those places where people who believe that the United Nations are taking over the world hang out. Even more perfectly for my purposes, the piece about Martin Smith is also to be found on David Icke's site! You couldn't, as they say, make it up.

One person commenting here seems to be hinting that there is something fundamentally unsound about Education Otherwise. He drew our attention to the case of Lianne Smith, who was a regional organiser for EO, involved in a local authority's Children's Services, married to a paedophile rapist and also killed her children. We were urged to 'open our eyes' and asked if we could see 'the bigger picture'. I interpreted this to mean that it was being suggested that this case was the tip of the iceberg and that other stuff like this was going on with Education Otherwise. I assume that this was the same person who posted details of a number of American home educators who abused or murdered their kids.

Now in any large organisation, one is bound to get the odd paedophile. This goes for children's charities as much as it does for insurance companies or banks. Enterprises involving children are bound to attract such characters more than most. This is because they offer the opportunity to gain access to children. This is why the child abusing scoutmaster has become such a stock figure and also why CRB checks are necessary. Such people gravitate towards schools and youth organisations, swimming pools and playgrounds. Some of them, those determined to surrender to their perverted lusts, get jobs at such places. For this reason, I always took it for granted that Education Otherwise was bound to have its share of child molesters hovering in the background.

Having said all this, as far as I am aware there have only been two verified incidents of this sort. One was the case of Lianne Smith and the other that of the longstanding trustee responsible for child protection, whose husband allegedly had unfortunate tastes of this sort. Obviously there are others who have not yet come to light, that is inevitable, but is the whole charity riddled with this sort of unsavoury activity? It seems unlikely. It is not however inconceivable and it might be helpful is the person who was hinting at this could give more details here. I am open minded about the possibility, but we certainly need a little more evidence. As I said above, one finds paedophiles all over the place and it would be surprising if EO did not turn out to have a few, but the suggestion seems to be that there are more than just a few. Can anybody shed any light on this idea?

Some 'Christian' home educators in America and their strange beliefs

Although I am probably preaching to the converted here, I want to say a few words about the practice of some 'Christian' American home educators of beating their children. There have been a number of cases in recent years of such people killing their children who, oddly enough, often seem to have been adopted. Somebody gave a link to a piece about one notorious family involved in this sort of child abuse. It may be found here;

http://johnnyvoid.wordpress.com/2006/03/22/us-fundamentalists-to-hold-child-abuse-seminars-in-the-uk/#comments

As somebody who raised his own child according to Biblical precepts, a number of things strike me about this business. The first is the inherent implausibility of Jesus saying, 'Let the little children come unto me' and then whipping them with a length of plastic tubing! Another point which springs out at one is that these idiots don't really seem to know the Bible at all. One only has to read what this supposed minister says:

' Heed the warning, taken from Proverbs in the Old Testament, that sparing the rod will spoil the child'

I dare say that any real Christian will be well aware that one will not find the advice to 'spare the rod and spoil the child' either in the Book of Proverbs or anywhere else in the Bible! It was of course said by Samuel Butler, a seventeenth century author. Of course there are passages in the Bible which seem to condone the beating of children, but then again Deuteronomy 21: 18-21 goes even further than this. It says:

'If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them: Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place; And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die'

How cool is that? I can have my kid executed if he is cheeky to me or gets pissed too often! Do these fundamentalists really want to introduce the death penalty for naughty children as well as corporal punishment? After all, it is there in the Bible. Idiots. These people depend upon a false dichotomy in their appeals for others to be cruel to their children. They say, correctly, that lack of discipline in childhood is a bad thing and then go on to claim that either you are in favour of children running riot and doing as they please or you accept the need to whip them regularly. This is such an illogical assertion that one can hardly take it seriously. It is perfectly possible to raise a well disciplined child without beating him. Or, to forestall an objection from some readers, without using shame, ridicule or verbal abuse either. If I had been unable to bring up my children without hitting them, then I do not think that I would have been much of a parent.

What I really loathe about these people is that their hitting of children is not done in a moment of temper, but is planned well in advance. Many parents strike their children because they lose patience with them or are feeling stressed. This is understandable and I would be the last to condemn such a parent. To decide ahead of time though to do this and to go to a shop and buy the things necessary to whip a child is absolutely inhuman and bears no relation at all to the teachings of Jesus or anything which we know about his character.

The New World Order

The accusation is sometimes levelled at me that I have a distorted view of the British home education scene because I rely too much upon what is said on the Internet and do not spend enough time mixing with real home educators. This is a fair point and I would be the first to concede that much of what one sees on sites such as Home Ed Forums and HE-UK is not at all representative of ordinary home educating parents. Indeed, I made that very point during the fuss about Schedule 1 of the Children, Schools and Families Bill. The point is that these Internet groups have a very great and wholly disproportionate influence upon what is going on with home education in this country. Opposition to changes in the law are generally coordinated via these lists and forums. For this reason, it is worth keeping a close eye on them.

Something which I have noticed, and I am not alone in this, is the extent to which those who have a high profile on these places are often adherents of strange ideas such as the New World Order. This was shown very clearly the other day when the owner of one of the largest lists expounded his geopolitical world-view. While every other rational person in the world is aware that sub-Saharan Africa has for many years been teetering on the brink of starvation and gripped by regular famines which kill millions of people, this individual believes that Europe will be building a bridge across the Straits of Gibraltar and importing most of its food from Africa. This is all tied in somehow with the bombing of Libya and the invasion of Iraq. This is of course classic New World Order conspiracy theory. If it were an isolated example, it would hardly be worth mentioning, but it is not. I have exchanged emails and spoken on the telephone with a few of the well known figures on the Internet home education campaigning front and have been surprised to hear both the New World Order idea and even David Icke mentioned favourably.

If you read the lists and forums with this in mind, a lot becomes clear. Just as in some home educating circles in the USA, many of these people believe that attempts to monitor home education are part of a wider attack on liberal parents being coordinated by the United Nations/Illuminati/New World Order/sentient reptiles from outer space. It's all tied in with Big Pharma and the military-industrial complex, you see.

Before anybody asks, no I don't believe that the majority of British home educators are mad enough to believe in stuff like this. But when some of the most influential groups 'supporting' home educators are influenced by nonsense of this sort, it is bound to have an effect. Has anybody noticed that even on this blog, nothing ever happens by accident? When Blogger helpfully installed an anti-spam filter here without my asking for it, some comments vanished. At once, the assumption was that I was censoring people. When the Department for Children, Schools and Families website was being reorganised a while ago, the 2007 guidelines went missing for a while, along with a lot of other stuff. Coincidence? I don't think so! Many of the people on the home education Internet circuit thrive upon conspiracy and the idea that they are being persecuted by dark forces. They clearly enjoy believing that they are the targets of a wider international conspiracy to suppress freedom. This is one of the reasons that stories from Sweden and elsewhere are so popular; it confirms that they are fighting a battle across the world.

I am not going to direct attention at individuals, but if readers care to look at a few of the lists with what I have said in mind, they might spot some of what I have been talking about here.