Welcome to the Mad Hatter's Tea-party

I have recently observed that many comments made here tend to create an Alice in Wonderland air, completely divorced from the real world and quite impossible for any normal, sane person to follow . This tendency has accelerated over the last week or so until the comments to my posts are starting to read like a transcript of conversations which might have taken place at the Mad Hatter's Tea-party. The day before yesterday I posted a quite unexceptionable piece about Michael Gove, speculating on the possibility that he might introduce compulsory...

Read More

'Simon Webb types are bad for us'

I simply had to mention this gem. At the recent Hes Fes conference, time lay so heavily on the hands of the participants that they apparently fell to talking about me. It was decided that;'Simon Webb types are bad for us. Although maybe he was shown to be lone voice. Got more publicity than should have.''Shown to be lone voice'? Odd that none of those present remembered that of the two thousand two hundred responses from home educating parents which the Badman review received, a third of those who responded were definitely in favour of registration....

Read More

On the passing of GCSEs without systematic study or help from parents

I sometimes think that my daughter must be the only teenager who worked hard to achieve her GCSEs, just as I must be the only parent who put in a lot of effort to help her do so. According to practically all our friends, their children did no revision or studying at all and it is a miracle that they managed to get strings of As and A*s. The parents also generally claim to have done nothing to help the children pass their examinations; they were themselves too busy to do anything to help and so their child's academic success is a mystery to them....

Read More

Michael Gove and the home educators

I have always taken it rather for granted that Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education, is a bit of a weasel. His appearance is distinctly musteline and he is after all a career politician. Still, he was the darling of the home educators during the run-up to the election. He valiantly denounced Schedule 1 of the Children, Schools and Families Bill and promised that the Tories would always stick by home educators. In January he said:' I do not believe that the current system is perfect, but it is fundamentally important that we respect the...

Read More

A curious case of apparently autonomous education

I am often accused of ignoring evidence for successful autonomous education, although this is not really true. I examine everything in this area closely whenever I get the opportunity. So I was intrigued a couple of days ago when somebody posted the following here;' My AS child took science GCSE's as a way of consolidating her knowledge, and was very disappointed when she realised that her knowledge already far exceeded that which was necessary for the GCSE course. She got A*s without doing a stroke of work. She is completely self-taught, and was...

Read More

Insulting home educators

Over the last couple of days several people commenting here have told me that they have felt insulted. This was because I have in the past said unflattering things about autonomous home education and this means that as autonomous home educators themselves they have been personally maligned. I have to say that this strikes me as absolute nonsense. Three points need to be considered.The first point is that many parents of autonomously educated children are abnormally sensitive to any criticism of their methods. They see even casual observations as...

Read More

The terminology of disability

I was faintly taken aback yesterday to find somebody here asking me if I was on the autistic spectrum simply because I had not found something she said offensive. She had written a pastiche of my profile on here which was apparently intended to offend me but which I found mildly amusing and finished off by saying, 'Offensive, isn't it?' I responded in a humorous vein by asking innocently,'Offensive to whom?'To which she replied,'Really? Are you sure you are not on the autistic spectrum? 'I think, although it is difficult to be sure, that she was...

Read More

The strange case of facilitated communication

During the late eighties I was working in a residential unit for autistic adults with severe learning difficulties. This was quite exciting because these people had absolutely no spoken language and some of them were prone to launching murderous assaults upon anybody who annoyed them in any way. They had all be recently released from long term institutions such as Harperbury Hospital in Hertfordshire, as part of the care in the community programme. While I was working there, we were approached by a group of people who offered to help us communicate...

Read More

Home education and the curse of anecdata

I am grateful to my daughter for teaching me about the word 'anecdata' in recent months. This word could have been coined with home education in mind! Anecdata means presenting various scraps of anecdotal evidence together in such a way as to suggest that it supports some pseudo-scientific idea; in other words presenting random, isolated stories together in such a way as to make them look like proper data.One of the things that I have noticed time and again when dealing with home educators and talking about home education is that it is very tricky...

Read More

The 'S' word

It is the one subject which everybody raises when talk turns to home education. Doesn't she get lonely? Aren't you worried that he won't be able to get along with others when he grows up? What do you do about socialisation?Like almost all home educating parents I find this sort of thing extremely irritating. After all, one only has to observe the way that schoolchildren generally are raised and the way they behave to see that there is something pretty strange about their socialisation, never mind home educated children! I have been thinking about...

Read More

Resistance to change

The British are in general a conservative nation. They tend often to oppose change almost as a matter of principle, without weighing the merits of new proposals. This is particularly noticeable with the educational system. When universal, compulsory education was suggested in the nineteenth century it was widely opposed as being 'un-English'. The Newcastle Report in 1861 looked at the state of educational provision in Britain. The authors concluded that:Any universal compulsory system appears to us neither attainable nordesirable. An attempt to...

Read More

Providing proof that a suitable education is taking place

According to Ian Dowty, who is of course a lawyer specialising in home education, a recent court case in Oxfordshire ruled that the burden of proof in establishing that a home educated child is receiving a suitable education falls upon the parents. In other words, the onus is not upon the local authority to demonstrate that the child is not receiving an education, but the ball is in the parents' court to show that the child is. This is quite interesting, because many local authorities are dubious about the 'evidence' produced by parents to show...

Read More

A sad but not unusual story

Over on the EO list a few days ago there was a rather sad message which cast light upon two different aspects of home education in this country. Some guy has a sixteen year-old daughter who wishes to go to college. She needs four GCSEs to do the course which she wants and now her father is asking how to go about this. This is the first aspect of home education in the UK which is illuminated. Not just on the Internet lists but among ordinary home educating parents is a vague belief that one can get into college or university without any formal qualifications....

Read More

Michael Gove's dilemma

One has to feel sorry for Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education. He played a blinder when he was in opposition by pretending to be outraged at the plans for regulating home education. Who can blame him? It was such a fantastic chance to embarrass the Labour government and help scupper one of their flagship bills. Still, it is looking increasingly as though this unprincipled piece of realpolitic will be coming back to haunt him in the future.Gove apparently thought that his Academies Bill, about to be rammed through parliament at breakneck...

Read More

A note on moderation

The more alert among you will have noticed that I have been moderating comments for the last few days. I have taken this step reluctantly because of one individual. This person, who lives in Hampshire, has a number of problems. Now I have no difficulty at all with people insulting me and disagreeing with me violently. However, this particular person has made some pretty sleazy comments about another home educator in Hampshire and these really were a bit much. I have deleted them. As far as I am able to make out, he wants to be served with a School...

Read More

Possible disadvantages of giving children too much choice

It is an article of faith for many British home educators that their children should have as much freedom as possible to direct their own lives. It is taken as axiomatic that this freedom to decide upon what is learned, how time is spent and even upon such things as bedtimes is a good thing for the child. I have been thinking this over since my daughter's friend came to stay from America. This girl is twenty one and was raised in a completely free way; not attending school and with a huge amount of responsibility for her own life, starting from...

Read More

Coercive education

It is curious that the term 'coercive' education or learning should be used in a pejorative sense, as many home educating parents in this country seem to do. I can offhand think of no better way to introduce children to a wide variety of new ideas and experiences.Before we go any further, a personal anecdote. A few years ago the local authority had money to spare for activities for young people during the summer holidays. These ranged from archery and kayaking to assertiveness training and musical workshops. My daughter signed up for everything...

Read More

Chinese whispers

One of the most fascinating aspects of home education as encountered on the Internet is the extent to which fanciful and misleading stories about it have a tendency to multiply like fruit flies. One need only make an untruthful claim such as, 'The Children, Schools and Families Bill would have made it a criminal offence not to register as a home educator' and although there is not a shred of truth in the statement it soon assumes a life of its own and will be endlessly quoted and repeated with various exaggerations. So we read on one site a few...

Read More

Giving children a shove

Every time I write here about a curriculum or indeed any sort of planned structure for a child's education, I am sure to be told of the innate curiosity which children exhibit. This sense of wonder and longing to find out about the world is portrayed by autonomous educators and unschoolers as a holy thing, a spark which must be carefully fanned into flame rather than being smothered beneath the dead weight of a formal curriculum. This is all fair enough and there is a good deal in it. Children are inherently curious and do have a huge desire to...

Read More

Chess parents and others

There has always been a fairly strong tradition in home education for parents to push their children to develop one talent or ability to the exclusion of all other interests. The intention is usually to create some sort of genius in a particular field. Ruth Lawrence and mathematics, Venus and Serena Williams in tennis, Judit Polgar in chess; there are many examples of this, all overseen by home educating fathers. Now there is a fine line between encouraging a child in a pre-existing interests or hobby, as opposed to deciding on the child's behalf...

Read More

The Johansson case - a correction

A few days ago I was wondering about the reasons for Dominic Johansson being taken into care. I picked up on this comment by somebody close to the family;''Christer was once involved in an alternative on-line news mag that expressed politically incorrect ideas and as near as anyone can tell, this was the reason his home schooling plans were opposed.'I speculated in a post that this on-line magazine might have had something to do with the physical punishment of children, but am now happy to make it clear that it was nothing of the sort. It is in...

Read More