Ostensible and real motives for home educating

Something which I have begun to suspect in recent years is that those who choose not to send their children to school are generally  motivated by something a little deeper than the reasons which they give to others. This is certainly the case with me and also with many of the home educating parents who open up about their past lives.

I was looking again at the blog written by the mother who left this country to avoid trouble with social services about her children’s welfare. One entry is written in the third person about a child who, I gather from the comments, is actually her. She says:



Once upon a time there was a 6 year old school-girl...
She was skinny & freckly & a little bit plain & awkward.
She hated school & had few friends. She was always much happier at home.
Sometimes she would be picked on by the other pupils for not being 'typical' or conforming to the 'norms'...



One of those commenting on this, also a well-known British home educator, says,



That could have been me, although they did not know I was bright they criticised all the time and I got two years of the bitchiest teacher going, she picked on and exposed the shy ones



Now neither of these two women have said in the past that they decided to home educate their children because they were themselves unhappy at school. In fact I have never seen or heard of such a claim anyway being made by a home educating parent. It is just that when we do hear home educators mentioning their childhood experiences of school, certain patterns seem to emerge. Typically, these include being unhappy at school, having few friends, being isolated and teachers who fail to recognise genius or at the very least talent and high ability. I am not about to name names, but this constellation of life events has been observed in very many high profile home educators, as well as an awful lot of others.

It is fascinating to relate this to my own experiences and apparent motives for home educating. Now I have often said that I was motivated by the realisation that I could give my child a far better individualised education than she would receive at school. I have also said that I believed that God has given us a duty to direct our children’s upbringing and education. Both of these motives are perfectly true, but they are in a sense ’cover stories’. The fact is that I hated school and did not feel inclined to inflict upon my own daughter something which I found so loathsome and distressing. I have noticed just this same phenomenon in so many other parents. You learn that they took their kid out of school because she was being bullied or had some obscure special educational need that was not being effectively catered for. Then, some time later, it comes to light that the parent herself hated school and was very unhappy there.

The truth of the matter is, I think, that so ingrained in our culture is sending your children off to school, that it takes a little more than a calm and balanced decision to break with the tradition of schooling and decide to go it alone. Very many children are bullied, many are on the autistic spectrum or have school phobia; very few of the parents of these children take the step of removing their child from school entirely as a remedy for the problem. It takes something a little extra to prompt such an eccentric move and this is often provided by the flashbacks suffered by the parent about her own school days.

I would be interested to hear what readers think about this. How many thoroughly enjoyed their time at school and who was unhappy; did anybody feel that her ability was overlooked by the teachers? I am not, as I say, going to give names, but I have collected a huge number of personal reminiscences from different sources which cover practically every well-known home educator or researcher of whom most of us have ever heard. All tend in this   same direction.

Educating bullied children at home

According to what little research has been conducted in this country about home education, one of the main reasons for deregistering children from school and educating them at home is because they have been bullied at school. The Education Otherwise survey in 2003 found this, as did the study by York Consulting in 2007. It is probably a fair guess that this is still the chief motive for the home education of previously schooled children in Britain.


One of the problems with bullied children is that they all too often go on to become bullied teenagers and then bullied adults as well. You frequently find that a child who was bullied at primary school, even if he is transferred to a secondary school where nobody knows him will be bullied there as well. Just as there is a bullying type of child, so too is there a bullied kind of child. It is a complicated subject, but the Americans have name for this; they call it ’victim precipitation’. It is nothing to the purpose here to consider why some children are prone to being bullied, it is enough to realise that it happens. In such cases, withdrawing the child from school and educating him at home is not always the best course of action; not by a long chalk.

Some of those children who get picked on are socially awkward, others might be on the autistic spectrum. There are also those whose home background might have made them appear a little strange to their classmates. It only takes something slightly different and out of the ordinary to attract the attention of the bullying type. I hope this does not sound like victim-blaming, because it is nothing of the sort. I am rather thinking about how things are in the real world. Unfortunately, colleges and the workplace can mirror the situation in schools. The peculiar work colleague can also come to the attention of those of a bullying disposition and have his or her life made a misery in the workplace.

If a child is  slightly different from others and has as a result been bullied, then withdrawing him from school and causing him to spend all day with an adult is unlikely to help him be more like his peers. Indeed, it is likely to have quite the opposite effect. If after spending years like this, he then goes to college, then the slight differences in the eight year-old might have grown into the frankly odd behaviour of the young man of sixteen. The bullying can then begin anew. I know of a number of cases where this has happened.

I am perfectly well aware that many schools fail lamentably to tackle bullying with sufficient rigour. Obviously, no parent will stand by and see her child being picked on and taking him away from the bullies can often seem the best solution. It may well be a good short term solution, but it is also quite possible that by doing this one is storing up even more trouble for the child in the future. Ideally, the school and other services should help the child; try to find out whether there is a way of preventing him from providing such a tempting target to bullies. This could be done by psychological assessments, counselling and behavioural therapy. Of course the bullies should also be dealt with ruthlessly; they too need help to make them behave like decent human beings and not like cruel young savages.

All parents fight fiercely to protect their children and will do anything at all that they feel necessary to look after their interests. If schools were to do their job properly and deal with bullying by referring both bullies and bullied to the appropriate services, then a lot of home education would no longer be necessary. I cannot think in general that it is healthy for children who are having difficulty surviving in a group of their peers, to be taken out of this social setting to spend all day with their mums. At the very least, it will hardly serve to make them more normal and like other children of their age! Perhaps when the Education Committee considers what support local authorities are providing for home educated children, this is something at which they could look. By putting in enough resources and help earlier on when problems rear their head, it might not be necessary for most of those children to be taken out of school  in the first place.

Incidentally, may I beg anybody commenting on this piece not to use the neologism 'bullicide', nor to repeat claims that sixteen children a year are driven to suicide by bullying? A couple of charities make a good income from bullying and they have a vested interest in the phenomenon; it is what brings in their funding. The 'sixteen suicides a year' gag is part of their mythology and bears no relation to the real situation.