Home education; individual or group

Perhaps the most valuable aspect of home education for me was the spontaneity; the ability to drop everything and focus on something that the child actually had an interest in at that moment, rather than expecting her to study what I felt she should be doing at that moment. In 2006, for example, she was working hard at calculus, when the news came that a whale had become stranded in the Thames in central London. We dropped everything and raced off to see this. Spur of the moment acts like that are seldom possible if you are responsible for a class of thirty children! Not all home educators feel that way, of course. Some are happier working in groups and planning things weeks or months in advance. This was brought home to me by a couple of comments made on the previous post here.

Here is a genuine question for readers. You and your eight-year old home educated child are visiting a zoo and  a group of schoolchildren are being given the chance to stroke an armadillo. Your child is fascinated by this and wistful that she cannot take part. Do you (a.), slip into the area and mingle with the school group, thus enabling your kid to do something educational that she really wants to do right this minute? Or would you, (b.),  ’have arranged a group HE visit with them‘ at some unspecified future date, assuming that it proved possible and that your child was still excited about armadillos a month or two down the line? Most of the parents I have known, would have chosen (a.), but somebody commenting here suggested (b.). I found this very odd.

I have an idea that some parents who take their children from school do not feel easy about assuming sole responsibility for their children’s education. Far better to continue fixing things up in groups, just like school. Fancy only thinking of your own kid’s education; surely education is a group activity! The same person who would not have dreamed of nipping in and joining a school group, because it might have been against the rules, said, ‘You're happy to have taken advantage of opportunities for yourself but couldn't care less about all those who might follow you into that situation?’ Well, I wouldn’t have put it quite that way, but certainly my primary aim was to provide my child with an education that suited her. Why on earth should I have assumed that anybody else’s child would happen to be mad keen on armadillos at that moment and be desperately anxious to stroke a real one? This honestly does not make sense to me.

I suppose that many parents do have a superstitious reverence for rules and regulations. I had an idea that this was more common with those who sent their children to school than it was with home educators, but perhaps I am wrong. The current fuss about the National School Film Week is a case in point. If we were still home educating I would guarantee to get us into a showing of any of the films which are on in October. I can think of half a dozen methods offhand. All of them would involved individual action and breaking rules, which would apparently not suit some home educators. If the aim of parents is to make a fuss and draw attention to themselves, then they can of course continue to flood the comments at the Film Education Facebook page with angry remarks about justice. If their aim is to get their kids in to see the films though, they could try either of the following ideas.

First, you could turn up at the showing and simply ask one of the teachers if you could join their group. Since many of those people will have booked up ten seats and only have five kids, you could explain about the £50 fine that they were likely to incur and make out that you would be doing them a favour to boost their numbers. Or you could just trust to luck and walk through into the cinema and bluff it. The cinema staff are unlikely to care who watches the film! A more reliable way would be to create a hotmail account in the name of a fictitious school and try to book up ten seats in that way. Ring up the  National School Film Week and just act as though you are the secretary of this school. They are unlikely to have a master list of all the schools in the United Kingdom and even if they do, just say that you are a new academy school and that is why there is no record of you yet. Book ten seats and away you go.

I am frankly amazed at the behaviour of those parents who are currently cutting up rough about the National School Film Week. Not just because they are queering the pitch for those parents like me who would simply have got round these new rules and attended the films anyway, but because it suggests to me that they are humourless types who don’t really live in the real world. Of course organisations set up with schools in mind are not going to care overmuch about the interests of eccentric parents whose children don’t go to school. So what? If your aim is actually educational, that is to say if you want your child to see one of these films, then there is no problem; just work your way round the rules as best you can. It is a stupid rule, why not break it? If on the other hand you prefer to waste time that you could be spending on your child’s education by engaging in fruitless dialogues with idiots, well then you go right ahead and do that. I have an idea that many genuine home educators will be carrying on as I have suggested above and simply making the necessary arrangements for their children’s education. Why go out of the way to make life difficult for yourself and others?

National Schools Film Week

Like many home educating parents, I frequently used to muscle in on school activities at museums, zoos and anywhere else I could manage. Lectures, handling sessions, behind the scenes tours; you name it and I would be there, tagging along with my young daughter and trying to look like all the other teachers. Sometimes, we would get chucked out, often nobody had the nerve to challenge us. Those were great days! There were events organised with schoolchildren in mind to which only a few home educators actually turned up. I remember with particular pleasure the Zimbabwean sculpture workshop at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. The idea was to make the museum more accessible and attractive for black schoolchildren and so they engaged three Zimbabweans to teach the kids how to carve soapstone using traditional, African methods. They had budgeted for thirty schoolchildren; in the event, nobody at all turned up, apart from  five home educating parents and their kids, all of whom were white. This meant that my daughter had virtually one-to-one tuition in sculpting stone for a whole afternoon.


I have been thinking about all this because of the fuss going on on various home education lists and on the Facebook page of the National Schools Film Week. As some home educators will know, this offers free showings of films at cinemas to schoolchildren. Not just schoolchildren, of course, home educated children can also go along if they want; we did ourselves when my daughter was younger. The details of this event may be found here:



http://www.nationalschoolsfilmweek.org/
 




Now because this is aimed primarily at schoolchildren and is free, many teachers book up parties of kids to go to see films and then don’t bother to turn up. This is precisely what happened with the Zimbabwean sculpture workshop which I mentioned above. The result might be a cinema opening and showing a film for just three or four children. To prevent this happening, the charity behind this, Film Education, have decided that they want at least ten children at each showing, just to make it worthwhile for everybody to turn up and run the projector and so on. They are also threatening to ’fine’ schools £50 if they book up a sessions and then don’t turn up. Anybody see anything wrong with all this? Of course not, it is perfectly reasonable. Cue the sort of mad response in which some home educators specialise. This is ‘discrimination’ and ‘bias’ against home educators. It is outrageous, how dare they try and prevent home educated children from joining in this event!

See what happens when you try to get home educators to follow exactly the same rules as everybody else? The comments on the face book page are now boiling over with rage and people are threatening legal action against the charity. You couldn’t, as they say, make it up! On the HE-UK list, people are being urged to bombard the charity’s website with angry messages. There is also a bizarre suggestion that the Charity Commission should be contacted. Let’s see what the stated aim of the charity is, according to the information which they supplied to the Charity Commission:



FILM EDUCATION PROVIDES FREE, CURRICULUM-BASED RESOURCES WHICH TEACHERS USE TO TEACH VARIOUS SUBJECTS THROUGH THE MEDIUM OF FILM. FILM EDUCATION ALSO PRODUCES FREE FILM SCREENING PROGRAMMES FOR SCHOOLCHILDREN, MOST NOTABLY NATIONAL SCHOOLS FILM WEEK.


See the mention of teachers and schoolchildren? This is because the charity is really concerned with schools. They don’t mind home educated children joining in the activities, but on the same terms as everybody else. Which is of course sheer anathema for many home educating parents…

It is idiots like this who give home education the bad name which it has with many ordinary people who might otherwise feel well disposed or at least neutral towards the idea. Instead of just jogging along and working the system like everybody else, they always seem to need special consideration. The rules never apply for them. Whether it is attending free cinema performances, provision of which is now being treated by some of these clowns as some sort of human right, or getting places at a further education college; they must never be expected to conform to the same standards as the rest of the world. No wonder so many people grow weary of their antics and get the impression that all home educators are either bloody-minded barrack-room lawyers or else frankly just raving mad.

The trouble with ALAN

It is not uncommon to read or hear statements by home educating parents to the effect of, ‘we have decided not to do GCSEs’. Since it is usually parents who possess both the money and knowledge to arrange the things, this may be better translated as, ’I have decided that my child will not be taking any GCSEs’.


I have discussed before here the disadvantages for home educated children of not having GCSEs. These range from difficulty in getting a place at college when they are sixteen to limiting the choice of university at eighteen or nineteen. Still, as I have been reminded, not everybody wishes to go into further or higher education. Some young people are eager to enter the world of work at once. Here too, problems can arise form the decision not to sit GCSEs. When over 99% of children in the country are taking GCSEs or IGCSEs, those without a single one to their name do tend to stand out somewhat and not in a favourable way. The news that a sixteen or seventeen year old has not attended school for some years and has no GCSEs suggests to many potential employers that he has either been excluded, has learning difficulties and/or has feckless parents. This is an unfortunate impression to be creating when looking for work! Not everybody is familiar with home education and even those who have heard of it can have difficulty working out whether or not a child who has been subjected to this experimental procedure has the necessary skills to make him a valuable member of the workforce. In short, how does the employer know that this young person can read and write, carry out arithmetical operations and so on? For many parents , the answer is for their  child to sit adult literacy and numeracy tests.

Here is some information about adult literacy and numeracy tests or ALAN for short:



http://www.edexcel.com/migrationdocuments/Adult%20Literacy%20and%20Adult%20Numeracy/ALAN%20brochure%20for%20web%2030-4-09_A4.pdf
                                                                              

These are pretty popular with home educating parents as a way of proving that their child is literate. They are supposedly the equivalent of a GCSE, although in reality they are nothing of the sort. They certainly demonstrate that a teenager can read, write and do simple sums, but that is about it. Still, surely this is better than nothing? It at least provides some evidence for an employer that an applicant is not utterly lacking in academic skills. Sadly, these things are not a brilliant advertisement for children. The very phrase, ’adult literacy’,  brings forth images and associations to the average mind which would better be left untouched.

For the ordinary person, the expression ’adult literacy’ is connected with ’illiteracy’. Adult literacy courses, adult literacy qualifications and so on are widely thought to be remedial activities undertaken by adults who did not learn to read and write while they were at school. This is not at all the impression that one hopes to make when applying for a job; that one was until recently illiterate! Most employers glance at educational qualifications and want only to see five ’good’ GCSEs. Anything less than this marks an applicant out at once and not in a good way. The thought that somebody has not attended school and as a result has taken adult literacy qualifications is not really a good start.

Parents might think a little carefully about how their child will present to the outside world in later years. It is all well and good that home educated children are, at least according to their parents, cleverer, more sensitive, spiritual, creative and compassionate than other children. None of this will be much use if they look to outsiders like hopeless dropouts that have been learning to read and write at remedial classes!

The fight for children’s rights

The struggle to provide children with rights and end their status as mere chattels or belongings of their parents has been a long and bitter one. At every stage, the cry by parents has been the same; ‘The state has no business intruding in family life and is harming the rights of parents by doing so.’

In the 19th Century, many children were forced to work down mines and up chimneys from an unbelievably early age. They had no rights in the matter at all. Each time some piece of legislation prevented, for example, children under the age of ten from going down coal mines; there was outrage, principally from parents. How dare the state dictate to mothers and fathers what their children should or should not do? This was an assault upon the rights of parents and indeed the very institution of the family. If a father could sell his eight year-old son to a chimney sweep for £5, what on earth business was it of anybody else?

Nowhere was this outrage more indignantly expressed than when the government tried to secure the right of children to receive an education. The 1861 Newcastle Report into the State of Popular Education in England summed the case up neatly. It said:



Any universal compulsory system appears to us neither attainable nor desirable. An attempt to replace an independent system of education by a compulsory system, managed by the government, would be met by objections, both political and religious.



Wiser counsels prevailed and in 1870 the Elementary Education Act was passed, popularly known as Forster’s Act. A decade later, education was made compulsory for all children between the ages of five and ten and there was a huge uproar. Parents led the complaints, comparing the British government with that of Prussia; a grave insult indeed! The crux of the matter was that this was an erosion of parents’ rights to raise their children as they saw fit. Compulsory education was an attack on the family. In the ten years following the making of education compulsory for children, prosecutions of parents for the non-attendance at school of their children were running at over a hundred thousand a year. It was the commonest offence in England, apart from drunkenness.

Every single attempt to increase the rights of children, which of course means giving greater duties to their parents, has been met by strong opposition by parents. The governments of the day have had to lead the way, fighting apathy, sloth and reactionary parents in order to furnish children with more legal rights and protection under the law.

In recent years, we have seen two examples of this tendency. One has been the efforts of the legislature to make it a criminal offence to strike children. This has met with only limited success. Parents have fought ferociously to retain their right to beat children. Incredibly, even now in the 21st Century, there are those in this country who feel that they should enjoy the ’right’ to hit their kids! Any attempt to abolish this ’right’ is met by howls of protest and the familiar claim that the state is intruding where it has no business to be; that is to say into family life.

The other recent example of this reactionary and backward-looking trend is of course the campaign by some parents a few years ago to force the state not to enquire to closely into whether or not children were receiving a suitable education. Again, parental ’rights’ were cited and the government was told that any move to check up if children not attending school were actually being educated was an attack on the family by the state. Just as when the 1870 Elementary Education Act was being planned, the case of Germany was brandished by parents fighting against any diminution of their supposed rights. That this was essentially about the rights of parents and not of children can easily be seen by the language being used. The right of children to an education was scarcely mentioned, it was all about the ’right’ of parents to home educate.

Although the calling of a general election in 2010 ended the hopes for this latest extension of children’s rights, the cause is not entirely lost. A first step would be at the very least the registration of all children who are not attending school. Such a move is now planned by Wales and there are signs that Scotland too has such a scheme in mind. If this happens in those two countries, then introducing such registration in England would be merely an exercise in bringing this country into line with what is happening elsewhere in the United Kingdom. As has always happened throughout history, the reactionaries will howl their protests, but we must hope that this time they do not get their own way and that one more step is taken in ensuring that the most vulnerable members of society are properly protected and furnished with the rights that they deserve.

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.

On the nature of rights

Readers are probably aware of the home educating parent who fled the country a few months ago, with the assistance of Maire Stafford, Neil Taylor and others. She is now settled in Ireland, from which country she writes a blog detailing the persecution which she claims to have suffered in this country. Reading this provides a perfect example of the sort of disordered thinking which afflicts so many British home educators. Here is an extract:




You may THINK you have the right to freedom, privacy, autonomy of thought & deed... water, food shelter... a vote, equality, peace... education, heath care, social welfare, free speech... to not be victimised or offended or endangered or killed... but the 'rights' you believe yourselves to have are not written in stone... & I actually gravely doubt the reality of many of them... they are but a mirage. They are merely privileges accredited to us by others... they are hard won & can be easily lost.



Now there is nothing actually wrong with this; it is more the construction that she places upon the facts that is a little out of kilter. We will leave aside the idea that any of us have a right not to be offended, surely a strange idea, and examine her surprise at the possibility that the ‘rights’ which we are accorded might change over time. This is clearly of course a cunning piece of special pleading. Like so many home educating parents, she believes that she is possessed of a ‘right’ to educate her own children and believes that this ‘right’ could be under threat. It might help if we considered the general idea of rights.

‘Rights’ are not of course a natural phenomenon like gravity or light. It would be absurd to talk of an oak tree’s ‘right’ to water and light. Rights exist only in the human world and are something devised by humans. That is the first point. The second is that ‘rights’ are constantly changing; some appear, while others vanish. So far, I agree with the exiled home educator whom I quote above. Where I differ from her is that she seems to regard this as some alarming discovery to which she must draw our attention so that we can join her in being opposed to the situation. To me though, this continuous varying of rights  it is a very  proper activity. Why is it a good thing? Let us consider a couple of rights which, thankfully, no longer exist.

Until 1991, a wife could not be raped by her husband. A man had a ‘right’ to have sex with his wife, even when she withheld  her consent. This had been tested a number of times in the courts and upheld. I wonder how many readers were sorry to see the loss of that ‘right’? Helping a slave to escape in this country was as one time a violation of the ‘rights’ of the owner of the slave. It was tantamount to theft of his property. Here again is a ‘right’ which has been abolished. Most of us are glad about this. The right to an education was only guaranteed by law to children in this country in the late 19th century. This right has been modified in the past, with regard to school leaving age and other things and will certainly be changed in the future.

I have remarked before, that many home educating parents in this country are reactionaries in this question of rights. They are fearful of change and see any change in rights as being a bad move and one likely to harm their interests. I am sure that slave owners in the 18th century felt just the same when their ‘rights’ were under threat! Those of us with a more open view of the matter are glad to see change and recognise that rights and duties in a society are always fluctuating in this way; some increasing and others diminishing. New laws about education, immigration, work, social security and many other things will confer new rights and remove others. This is how history progresses. It seems to me that a lot of home educators, like the one in Ireland mentioned above, wish only for things to remain as they are. If they had had their way and a change in the law had been resisted by interested parties, then the 1991 judgement which had the effect of outlawing marital rape would not have taken place. At every touch and turn, they oppose change and ask nothing more than for the current collections of rights to remain fossilised. You will observe that she expresses regret that the rights which we now have are not set in stone. Nothing would be more terrible than for this to happen.

The rights of parents and children with regard to education are not a special catagory which should be immune from change. Sometimes they are extended and at other times restricted. Each change is advocated by some and resited by others. There can never be unanimous approval of any new right or abolition of an old one; the best we can hope for is wide agreement, following which those of us who differ in our view of the matter must go along with the majority.  Instead of digging our heels in and stubbornly fighting against any extension to children's rights or diminuation of the rights of parents, we should  ask ourselves only what best enhances the rights of the vulnerable party in the case. To give one final example, until fairly recently parents had the 'right' to beat their children. This right has now largely been removed. I think that removing this parental  'right' was a good idea, because it had the effect of increasing the rights of children. This is precisely how I see the current debate about home edcuation; as an attempt to decrease parental 'rights' and increase those of their children.

'Cruelty to children

One of the less attractive features of the campaign against Graham Badman’s proposals becoming law, was the psychological cruelty inflicted by a number of parents upon  their children, some of whom had special educational needs. During my own daughter’s childhood, I always conceived it to be a major part of my duty,  to protect her from distress and shield her from worry. To reassure her, in fact, that she was safe and that there was nothing to worry about.  This was not at all the line taken by some home educating parents in the run-up to the passage of the Children, Schools and Families Bill through parliament! For them, this was a golden opportunity to make their children anxious and in some cases hysterical with fear; simply so that they could claim that their children were being harmed by the very discussion of increased regulation of home education.

This is not a history lesson and if this sort of cruelty had ended with the abandonment of the CSF Bill in 2010, there would be little point in raking over the ashes. Unfortunately, it has not and there are still parents who are determined to exploit vulnerable children in order to make political capital of them. Consider this, which was less than three months ago:



http://www.home-education.biz/blog/education/dealing-with-highly-intrusive-parasitic-public-servants




Look at the advice given in the above post:



Always tell your children how much you love them and how, if ever they were taken from you, you would never, ever stop looking for them. Encourage them to respect their instincts and always to question the morality of authority. Make sure they learn their personal details as soon as they are old enough and tell them that wherever they are and whatever the circumstances they can always contact you.


I can imagine nothing more likely to terrify a young child out of her wits than to suggest the possibility that she might be snatched from the security of her family. It is the sort of thing which would cause most children to lay awake at night in terror, waiting to be taken. Why would you do that to your child? The answer is that you can then use your child’s response to brandish at local authorities or other people who wish to discuss a change in the law. ‘Look,’ you can tell them, ‘You have upset my child and she is now nervous and clingy, because she is frightened that social workers are about to snatch her away from her family.’

This was done by quite a few parents during the aftermath of the Badman Review. They used to boast about it on various lists. One mother announced that her son, who had developmental problems and was on the autistic spectrum, had had a ‘major meltdown’ when she told him that the authorities would be able to take  him away from her for interrogation alone! I had hoped that mistreatment of this sort had ended, but judging from some of the things I have been hearing lately, it has not. There are still parents frightening their children in this way and warning them that the government wants to enter their homes and perhaps take them from their families.

I am expecting to see more of this sort of thing when the enquiry starts in Wales about the possibility of registration of home educated children. Incidentally, despite Alison Sauer’s irritation at my mentioning the proposals contained in the bill which the Welsh Assembly hopes  to pass in the next year or so, I observe that others have picked up on the thing since I posted about it here. As I suspected, few people knew of it, but this has now been remedied. I am all in favour of change in the law, but I certainly believe that it should be discussed openly beforehand.