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...

Read More

'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...

Read More

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.a...

Read More

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/39519...

Read More

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...

Read More

'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...

Read More

Periplus in the news

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

Read More

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....

Read More

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_measuresA...

Read More

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...

Read More

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.h...

Read More

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,...

Read More

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...

Read More

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...

Read More

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-smiThis is of...

Read More

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/#commentsAs somebody...

Read More

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...

Read More

More news from the USA

Following a high profile murder case involving home education, some are calling for stricter monitoring:http://www.nwitimes.com/news/opinion/editorial/article_fb8b8b2f-25b3-5d7d-8deb-37227ee631a3.h...

Read More

Brainwashing children

Very few four and five year olds would, I suspect, if left to their own devices choose to leave the company of their parents and go off to spend all day with strangers for most of the week. Fortunately, we don't give them the choice, otherwise schools would be standing half empty! Some want to go, it is true. Many small children though, want nothing more than to carry on being with Mummy all day. One way round this is not to let them get used to this peculiar arrangement for too long. After five years, this sort of attachment can get to be a bad...

Read More

Schools and special needs scams

I visit a number of blogs, forums and lists; some of them sensible and many of them completely mad. On the sensible ones, if somebody says something really offbeat or bizarre, then other people will comment saying that this is an exaggeration or that the person is going a little too far. This is in contrast to the loopy places, where each person tries to top any strange claim by going one better. If one poster asserts that there are alien corpses at Area 51, then somebody else will claim that aliens are actually walking among us. This goes on until...

Read More

Socialisation.

Interesting piece from an American source;http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=298...

Read More

The 'Ibiza Loophole'

I have explained before that when my oldest daughter was at primary school, we used to withdraw her from school for one day a week in order to make sure that she at least received some sort of education in basic literacy and numeracy. This was in addition to the four or five occasions a year when we went off for anything from a long weekend to a fortnight to stay on a farm in the Brecon Beacons. Haringey, our local authority, were not happy about all this. If readers think that I am a bit of a stroppy bastard when dealing with home educators, then...

Read More

How schools corrupt the natural relationship between parents and children

When my daughter was ten or eleven, two of our friends decided they would home educate as well. It all looked so easy. My daughter obviously enjoyed learning and was very happy and polite. She would be reading Dickens in a corner when they visited, whereas their own children only watched cartoons and talked about trashy television programmes. They hated the effect school was having on their kids and most importantly of all; the children themselves were not actually learning much. In both cases, it turned out to be a stressful and upsetting enterprise...

Read More

The democratic process subverted (Again)

We live in a representative democracy. This means that we elect people democratically, whose job is then to represent us in the legislature. This is not direct democracy; we do not gather in the market place to vote on whether we should build a new fire station or dig another well. Having elected our representatives, they look after our interests for us until the next election. Very rarely, we are given the chance to offer an opinion directly on something which our representatives propose to do. I remember voting on one such occasion in 1975 and...

Read More

The joy of home education

One of the things that must surely strike anybody who spends any length of time at all on one the various home education forums and lists, is the amount of anger and anxiety which one encounters there. In a sense, this is only to be expected. After all, many of these things were set up to support home educators who needed help and support; ergo, those who are managing fine tend not to hang around those places. We are told though that one of the most popular lists now has over fifteen hundred members and in a sense represents the interests of all...

Read More

Another disturbing case of home education

See what some home educators are like? If only the local authority had been making regular monitoring visits.http://www.news24.com/World/News/Children-in-bin-Laden-house-home-schooled-20110...

Read More

Off-rolling children with Special Educational Needs

Following the piece I did a couple of days ago about forced deregistration, I was emailed by several parents of children whose difficulties had made the school wish to get rid of them. Incidentally, it is interesting that these parents wished to email me privately, rather than putting their stories here in the comments for everybody to read. Two of them told me that this was because they actually taught their children and thought that they would be the subject of attack from some of the more aggressive types who comment here. I have had emails...

Read More

John Holt and his assertions

I have been idly leafing through my old copy of How Children Fail. This is such a dreadful book that it is something of a mystery to me why it has been so popular over the years. For those fortunate enough to be unaware of his work, Holt was a teacher and wrote a number of books criticising education in schools. He does not produce evidence for his views, other than basing them upon trivial events which he witnessed in the schools where he was teaching. His books are written as though by a guru, whose word one must simply take on trust for the...

Read More

The limits of society's legitimate interest in the welfare of children

I have been spending a lot of time in Stamford Hill recently, an area of North London where I used to live. It is home to a very large orthodox Jewish community. The children of this group are pretty much cut off from ordinary life in twenty first century Britain. They watch no television, have no computers or games consoles, do not play in the park or hang out listening to pop music. Their homes contain few books other than those of a religious nature and they all dress like eighteenth century Poles and Lithuanians. Many do not attend school regularly,...

Read More

Forced deregistration for the purpose of home education

The claim is currently being made that the change in the pupil registration regulations, the so-called twenty day rule, is needed because of the problem of forced deregistration or off-rolling. This is odd, because when local authority officers met the Children, Schools and Families select committee on November 4th 2009, they did not say anything at all about this as being the reason that they wanted the twenty day rule. Instead, they specifically stated that it was to allow a 'cooling off' period for parents and for the school to have a chance...

Read More

A scheme worth looking at in this country

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/indiana-gov-mitch-daniels-signs-historic-voucher-bill-into-law-121328389.h...

Read More

Following a curriculum or following a child's own interests

I have noticed that the deep distaste among many home educators for curricula is often expressed in the form of a false dichotomy. The idea is promoted that a curriculum would harm the child's development and stunt his love of learning by preventing him from pursuing his own interests. In other words, either a child can be completely free to follow her own interests or she can be taught. One or the other, but not both. This might well be the case for a child trapped in school. Schools take up so much of a child's free time, that when they actually...

Read More