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.