Kelly Green and Gold

I have remarked before upon the way that anybody disagreeing with the prevailing orthodoxy among home educators tends to be shouted down and where possible suppressed. The only reason of course that I began this blog in the first place was because I had been barred from all the Internet lists on home education! One gets the feeling that only those who follow a certain ideology and have a particular attitude towards matters such as the Badman Review and so on are welcome on those lists. I have also found the same thing happening with some blogs; I comment in a perfectly courteous and good natured fashion and a few hours later my comment is deleted. Since both the list owners and those keeping the blogs are keen to brandish their libertarian credentials, I find this odd and a little inconsistent.

The latest example of this is on the blog Kelly Green and Gold. I was surprised when reading the submissions to the select committee last year to find one from somebody who was not a citizen of this country and did not even live here. I must confess, I found this strange. It would be as though I had heard of a government enquiry in Uganda or South Africa and not liking the law that was being proposed, decided to submit evidence of my own in an attempt to influence their legislature. It would be a bit of a cheek if I were to do so!

Somebody recommended to me that I read the blog written by Kelly, the American/Canadian who submitted the statement to the select committee. I did so yesterday and found that she had been posting about two things which I have noticed before being said by parents in this country. Firstly, there was a gloating reference to a teacher in her country and an education welfare officer in ours who had been discovered to be using child pornography. She went on to link this to the supposed attempt to pass a law making it possible for local authority officers to see children alone, without their parents being present. This was a reference to Schedule 1 of the Children, Schools and Families Bill 2009. The inference was clear; if such a law had been enacted, home educated children would have been at risk from paedophiles working for the local authority.

Now while it is quite true that Graham Badman suggested this, there was never any realistic prospect of the idea finding its way onto the statue books. It would have required a wholesale revision of our common law! Badman is not a lawyer though and this was just one of his ideas. When the CSF Bill was actually published, it was made clear that any such interview would only take place with the agreement of both the child and her parents. It was also made plain that this sort of interview was not intended to be a routine event, but rather was something which might have happened only in very rare circumstances. I pointed this out in comments on Kelly's blog. Here is her post, with my comments;

http://kellygreenandgold.wordpress.com/2010/09/10/here-be-monsters/#comments


Her response was swift. She posted a piece referring to me as a troll or monster and saying that any further comments of mine would be deleted at once. I have noticed before that many home educators call anybody who disagrees with them 'trolls'. I have even been accused of trolling on my own blog, which is a truly surreal notion. I have not yet, even by the most dedicated autonomous educator, been described as a monster though! Her post about me may be found here;

http://kellygreenandgold.wordpress.com/2010/09/17/are-trolls-monsters-or-just-irritating/


I answered, again in a good humoured fashion saying;

'Dear me, harsh words indeed! There were certainly problems with Schedule 1 of the Children, Schools and Families Bill 2009, but children being seen alone by local authority officers without the presence of their parents was not one of them. I felt this was worth pointing out. You say that I am ‘ well-known in the home education community for these kinds of tricks’, but I am probably better known for being a lifelong, ideological home educator, whose own daughter never spent a single day in school. As such, I am very concerned about home education and do not feel that it is helpful to perpetuate misleading rumours about things like the CSF Bill, such as that it would have given education workers the right to see children alone without their parents. Including this inaccurate piece of information in a post mentioning paedophile teachers and education workers would naturally lead to the inference that these two topics were connected.'

True to her word, this was deleted almost immediately. This leaves all subsequent people commenting free to say further misleading things to which I am unable to respond. I find this particularly staggering in view of the fact that this blog is touting a self-published book of Kelly's called A matter of Conscience - Education as a fundamental freedom. This is precisely the kind of libertarian slant to which I referred above. Home educators often claim that they are pursuing their lifestyle in the name of freedom. Part of the book deals with media bias and what is described as 'combating uneducated, unsubstantiated opinions and hate speech about home-based education'. That anybody could write about these topics and then react to the views of a home educator with whom she apparently disagrees by calling the person a monster or troll and then refusing to allow any response says all that I need to know about this woman! 'Monster'? Sounds a bit like hate speech to me......

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Amusing piece about unschooling

I found this piece from Canada irresistably amusing;


http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Lakritz+boss+think+going+unwork+today/3467499/story.html

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More about maternal deprivation

Yesterday's post led to an alarming degree of harmony and agreement with the views which I expressed. This is disturbing and I hope it will not become a regular event. I am still looking at the idea of maternal deprivation and disrupted contact with the small child's attachment figure, which is as I said yesterday almost invariably the mother. I know that most home educating parents would sooner sell their children to a vivisectionist than allow anybody to conduct psychological tests or assessments upon them, but even without formal testing I think that it is possible to see some good effects of being close to the mother during childhood, rather than being sent off to school. These centre around the relationship which older home educated children seem to have with their parents.

We looked yesterday at some of the ill effects of maternal deprivation. Bowlby and others documented the stages of a child's reactions to being separated from his mother. There are tears and protests, followed by listlessness and depression. After a while the child becomes detached emotionally and this leads observers to suppose that he is happy with his situation. He is not though and blames his mother for the situation in which he finds himself. This produces in later years hostility towards the person whom he blames for the separation, that is to say the mother.

One of the strange things that I have noticed when talking to friends about their relationships with their children is the number of them who seem at their wits end during adolescence. There seem to be shouting matches between them and their children, even shoving, grabbing and the occasional blow. All say that they sense a lack of respect for them and that their children speak to them with contempt. I am honestly baffled by this and it runs counter both to my own experience and to common sense. One would think, and I have certainly found it to be the case, that as children grow older it should be more and more possible to reason with them and hold sensible conversations. It is true of course that teenagers often get irritable and that their choices are not always the best, but surely one would expect a person who was almost an adult to be a more reasonable being than one who is just a child? This does not seem to be the case with those of my friends' children who are, or have been, at school.

Now I know some parents whose children have not been to school and I am in contact with others by telephone or email. In every case, they report that they get on perfectly well with their adolescent offspring. Sure, there are disagreements as there are bound to be in any family, but all say that it is actually easier as their children are older, rather than harder. I would be interested to know what readers hear have found as their children have become teenagers.

Of course, not all home educators have taught their children from birth. Some of the children will have been to school. This does not seem to make any difference to the generally affectionate relations which seem to survive adolescence. I can see why that should be as well. Some at least of the typically horrible behaviour of children who have spent all their lives at school and nursery can be interpreted as anger and resentment at their mother for not protecting them; in effect they feel that their mother abandoned them. This resentment can, as Bowlby observed, manifest later in various ways including the development of an anti-social personality. Children who have been bullied or having other problems at school and then been deregistered, will surely look upon their mothers in precisely the opposite light. Instead of being subconsciously bitter that their mothers abandoned them or failed to protect them, they will be grateful to their mothers for rescuing them.

As I say, my own personal experience is that my daughter's adolescence seems to be pretty smooth and a natural continuation of childhood. Nobody is shouting here or going mad about anything. This cannot be because I am a particularly patient and tolerant person; I am anything but. I think that it is probably because my daughter knows that I love her and enjoy her company and that this has always been the case. She has been shocked by the way that some of her friends talk about their parents. They say that they hate them. I really would be surprised to hear that this is the case with many home educated children.

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Separation anxiety and the psychological health of schooled children

I always find something a little sad about September, not least because of the sight of all those children returning to school. I cannot help noticing that the little ones attending primary school seem really little these days. This is not just one of those things that happen as one grows older, like policemen looking younger; the age at which children start formal education genuinely has dropped over the years.

The legal situation in the United Kingdom is that children have to begin full-time education in the term after their fifth birthdays. Hardly any child is enrolled at school that late though. It has become a universal practice for children to be offered a place at school a year earlier than this. Subtle pressure is placed upon parents to accept these offers, because it is made plain that if they don't take the place now, it may not be available the following year. This is all of a piece with the official notion in this country that children are actually better off in institutional care than they are at home with their mothers and fathers. Socially caring governments announce proudly that every four year old shall be entitled to a school place, every three year old a nursery place and eventually all two year olds will be guaranteed the right to nursery or day care. I suppose the eventual aim is that the baby should be whisked away from the mother almost as soon as it is born and taken off to day-care. This is of course the situation in Sweden.

I have been re-reading some of John Bowlby's work lately. Bowlby of course developed Attachment Theory and invented the term' maternal deprivation'. Briefly, he suggested that a human baby, like other young animals, forms an attachment with one person for the first few years of life. This person is, for purely biological reasons, usually the mother. If the connection between the child and this attachment figure is broken or disrupted during the first five or six years of life, Bowlby found that there could be serious and irreversible consequences. These ranged from delinquency and depression through to reduced intelligence and increased aggression. In cases where the attachment figure is separated entirely from the child, as can happen in long hospital stays and children's homes, he found that the result could be the creation of an affectionless psychopath. He called the feelings of the child on being separated from his mother, 'separation anxiety'.

Now most of Bowlby's work back in the fifties and sixties was with children who had been removed entirely and permanently from their mothers for various reasons such as breakdown of the family and long term illness. He thought that any disruption of the maternal bond was a bad thing, but fifty years ago children remained at home with their mothers until after their fifth birthday and so he did not investigate the type of maternal deprivation with which we have become familiar today. It is always hazardous to postulate a cause and effect relationship for two events based simply upon the fact that one follows the other. There is the risk of falling into the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy of reasoning. Nevertheless, I cannot help but observe that the decreasing age at which small children are regularly separated from their mothers in this country has coincided almost precisely with an increase in rates of delinquency, depression, aggression, antisocial behaviour and various other negative behaviours in young people. If Bowlby was right, and most professionals today believe that he was, then taking a child from her mother regularly at the age of two or three is likely to cause psychological harm in many of them. The earlier this removal from the mother occurs, the more likely is the damage to the child.

Even if we do not subscribe to every detail of John Bowlby's ideas about maternal deprivation, there is a host of other good reasons for not sending two and three year-olds into full-time education and day-care. Small children learn essential skills not from other children but from adults. Skills like how to hold a conversation, for example. A child's cognitive skills are also best developed in the company of an adult and not other children. Thrusting a small child into a group of other children and depriving her of the loving one-to-one care of a parent strikes me on an instinctual level too as a shockingly bad idea!

The idea that a baby should go off to day-care, nursery and school almost as soon as it can breathe has become ingrained in the thinking of early years professionals in this country. While it is true that there are homes where the child is not receiving sufficient stimulation and care and would probably be better off spending the day elsewhere, there is no reason at all to suppose that such homes are particularly common. This wholesale removal of small children from their mothers and fathers on a regular basis and an increasingly young age strikes me as very bad idea for many reasons. I am aware that many home educating parents are fanatically opposed to anything which looks even remotely like formal testing and examination of their children, but I have a strong suspicion that any examination of the psychological health of adolescents who had not been removed from their families in this way might well show significant differences from those who had been hustled off to such institutions during their early childhood.

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Letting children choose...

A few days ago I wrote about the idea of giving children and teenagers the facts about things and then letting them make their own choices. I expressed the view that this is the last thing that most parents do and that in general our idea of 'giving them the facts' means launching a ruthless and sophisticated PsyOps campaign in order to bring them into the fold and compel them to adopt our own prejudices about the world. I want today to consider the wisdom of allowing them to make choices about their long term future in the first place, whether or not they access to objective information. In other words, even when they have got hold of the facts, should they be given a free hand in choosing what to do? Should we ask our children if they wish to study for and sit examinations? Should we let them decide whether they attend school or are educated at home?

Anybody with a child or teenager will be familiar with the experience of seeing their child do something dangerous or mad and then asking the child afterwards, 'Why on earth did you do that?' The answer is usually a shrug of the shoulders and perhaps a few words of explanation along the lines of 'I don't know' or 'It seemed like a good idea'. I did any number of stupid things as a teenager. One that sticks in the memory is the day I was walking past a multi-story car-park with some friends. I was fifteen. Without any warning, I suddenly bolted from the group and ran to the car-park. I then climbed up the outside, right to the top. I could not even today, over forty years later, explain why I did this; it just seemed a good idea at the time! I am sure that adult readers will have their own cringe-making memories of doing stupid things at a similar age. These might include girls having unprotected sex with complete strangers, swallowing pills containing unknown substances, getting into a car driven by a drunk person and hitch-hiking home at two in the morning. It's what teenagers do.

The reason that children and teenagers do all sorts of silly and hazardous things is because they do not have the ability which adults have of seeing the probable or possible consequences of their actions. They act now and think later. For a twelve or thirteen year-old, the present is real and the future a vague and meaningless abstraction. A month is long time, a year is an eternity and five years in the future is an inconceivably distant point even to contemplate. This is of course very right and proper. We would not really want our children to be constantly fretting about the future; if they can't live for the present now, whenever can they? This does mean though that they are not really the best people to make plans for five or ten years in the future. We do that better because we are used to it. For us, a ten year plan is quite a manageable chunk of time. After all, it is less than half the term of the average mortgage! Asking a twelve year-old to envisage what he will be doing in ten years, on the other hand, is utterly mad. He cannot possibly know what steps he should be taking at the age of twelve to secure his long term future. We see this very clearly when children at school are choosing their options for GCSEs. Here is some advice given to thirteen and fourteen year-olds in Year 9 at a local secondary school;

' You'll be studying these subjects for the next two years, so it's important that you enjoy doing them. What could be worse than being stuck in a classroom doing a subject you wished you'd left behind?
That said, you should also try and think about the future. Do you need this subject for your future plans such as university or a job?'

This is sheer lunacy! They don't have any future plans for jobs or university at thirteen; not unless they are very weird and atypical children. What sort of factors do these kids really take into consideration when they choose their options? Here are some genuine quotations from actual children in Year 9. 'I wanted to do history 'cause my mates are doing it'. 'I'm not doing RS, I hate that Miss Jones that takes it'. 'Art's easier than geography'. 'I hate French!'.
These are children for Heaven's sake, you can't possibly expect them to make a reasoned decision, weighing up the various pros and cons, considering their future job or university course.

Now I know that we home educating parents have children who are smarter/more sensitive/sensible/thoughtful/artistic/socially aware and so on than schooled children, but all the same, their brains are still wired up in the same haphazard and irrational way as other teenagers. You can't even rely upon them to put their dirty clothes in the washing machine; how on earth can we depend upon them to make serious decisions about their adult life? These decisions are likely to have long lasting effects upon their lives. Studying or not studying for GCSEs, choosing which subjects to study, taking an OU course, that sort of thing

So If allowing our kids to decide is a little too risky, then who on earth should we expect to make choices about their future, including the nature and extent of their education? Wait! I think I know the answer to this one. That would be us as the parents and responsible adults, making the decisions on behalf of our children based upon our superior knowledge and infinitely greater ability to plan ahead. Frankly, the idea of abdicating responsibility for my child's education and allowing her to make the choices at a young age would have struck me as foolhardy and reckless in the extreme. The only sufferer from such a course of action would have been my daughter herself and that alone was good enough reason for not doing it.

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Eton is better than home education

I have been thinking about what somebody said here yesterday, which was to the effect that home education is inferior to an education at a private school. The writer expressed the opinion that if he had the money he would gladly send his son to an independent school in preference to educating him at home and specified Eton as his first choice.

Now I have to say at once that I do not agree with the proposition that home education is somehow a poor cousin in the wider world of education. I cannot imagine that my daughter would have done any better at Eton or Roedean than she did at home. In a sense though, this is irrelevant. The fact is that people educate their children at home for reasons that are a good deal more complicated than merely providing a better education for them. This is because most parents have far more wide-reaching ambitions for their children than that should simply be 'educated' efficiently. I am confident in asserting this, because time and again every survey of home educators in this country has come up with many more motives for home education other than that of education alone.

What sort of ambitions do parents have for their children apart from their acquiring a sound knowledge of physics, chemistry, history and so on? I think that we all hope that their children become kind and compassionate. Very few of us would like our children to grow up into greedy, selfish and cruel individuals. For many people, this aspect of childhood development, moral and ethical development, is of greater importance than any academic work. They feel that teaching their children to be decent human beings is something which they can best accomplish at home. I felt precisely the same and if I had to choose between having a kind and good natured child and having one who was very clever but sly and spiteful, then I would choose kindness over brains every time. Fortunately, I have not found intelligence and a compassionate nature to be incompatible with each other, which is a great mercy! Often, parents who are very concerned about this sort of thing worry that spending all day with a bunch of other kids is not likely to be very helpful in the cultivation of a sensitive and thoughtful disposition. Watching groups of teenagers in public these days often puts one in mind of Lord of the Flies.

In fact I have a strong suspicion that very few parents embark upon home education solely for the educational benefits. These benefits may reveal themselves as the education at home progresses, but they are not usually the initial reason why the parents decided upon home education. I also have a suspicion that if most of the parents here were offered the chance to enroll their children at an expensive independent school, perhaps some old relative offered to pay for the child's education, most would refuse without hesitation. I know that I would have done. The truth is that although I know very well that my daughter received an education at least as effective as she would have done at an independent school, there was far more going on with the whole home education business than just learning and examinations. Even had I been persuaded that she would be able to learn as much at a school, I would still have been very reluctant to send her there. As a matter of interest, would any readers send their children to a good independent school if they were given the finance for it? In my case, this is neither idle speculation nor sour grapes. Just down the road in Woodford there are two very good independent schools; Forest and Bancroft's. Both offer scholarships and a couple of my daughter's friends got in like that. I suppose that had I wished, I could have worked on Simone and persuaded her to sit the examination and perhaps take up a place at one of these schools. I briefly toyed with the idea, but it was never a serious consideration.

The change in lifestyle caused by not sending a child to school is so radical that I do not believe anybody except another home educating parent can really appreciate what is involved. While it is quite true that the educational benefits are or can be dramatic, even in the most fanatically structured home, actual teaching takes up only a small part of the time. After all, the kid is likely to be awake for fifteen hours or so each day and you really can't work systematically for more than two or three hours of that time. Home education must therefore be motivated by a good deal more than the desire simply to spend a few hours a day teaching your child.

Home educators in general love their children's company and want to spend a lot of time with them. They wish to be the main influence on their children's development and are especially concerned with what used to be called character building. Whether they are devout Christians or atheist humanists, home educating parents are very keen to transmit their own values and beliefs to their children. They ask their children questions about what they see in the world and watch on the news and then in turn tell their children what they themselves think about things. One might be confident that an independent school would teach chemistry efficiently; I doubt one could expect that the teachers there would take as much interest in cultivating the moral characters of the children in their care!

While it is probably true that maintained schools are inferior educationally to many independent schools, this is for most home educators wholly irrelevant. they do not want their children at school, they want them at home. This is why I would be surprised to see any great enthusiasm among home educators for setting up one of Michael Gove's famous free schools. Perhaps another expression needs to be coined for home education, a phrase which emphasises that education means far more than merely academic work.

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Giving children the 'facts'

A few days ago I was writing here of the folly of allowing children to make important decisions about their long term future, arguing that it is far better if adults make decisions on their children's behalf. Several people commented, telling me that they felt that children should be 'given the facts' and allowed to make their own choices. This is such a grotesque idea that I couldn't help chuckling out loud. Giving children the facts! As if any parent ever does such a thing.

The topic under discussion was of course education and the taking of examinations, but the principle is the same whatever 'facts' we are supposedly giving children in order for them to come to their own decision. Whether the subject is further education, racism, health, nuclear power, homophobia or vegetarianism; the last thing any parent supplies or intends to supply are plain facts. Let us take one example and look at it in detail. We won't use education, because I always manage to annoy somebody when I write about this. Perhaps, I had better steer clear of racism and homophobia as well. Let's look at something upon which every parent in the country would agree; the undesirability of our children taking up smoking.

Now there are many reasons why we don't want our children to start smoking, but the chief one is that we don't want them to develop lung cancer. Of course there are many other problems associated with smoking, ranging from bad breath to Buerger's Disease, but without doubt the main fear is of our child dying of cancer as a consequence of cigarettes. So if we suspect that our twelve or thirteen year old daughter might be tempted to experiment with smoking, we tell her that a good reason not to do so is that smoking causes cancer. Now this is so misleading a statement as to be practically a lie, but we persuade ourselves that, as the Jesuits claim, 'If the end is lawful, then the means are likewise lawful'. Are we really giving our child the facts and letting her make her own decision? Not a bit of it. What are the facts?

To begin with a woman who smokes has just over one chance in ten of developing lung cancer in the course of her life. Therefore 90% of women who smoke for the whole of their lives will not get lung cancer. Secondly, one must smoke for at least twenty or thirty years to increase the risk of lung cancer to a statistically significant level. In other words, if a girl starts smoking at fifteen and then smokes until she is forty, she is in no more danger of lung cancer than a non smoker. The blunt statement which practically every parent in the land delivers to her child, 'Smoking causes cancer' is thus revealed to be a deliberately untruthful piece of crude scaremongering. We might truthfully say that under some circumstances smoking might cause cancer, but that the development of the disease is also associated with a large number of factors which we do not yet fully understand. Doesn't really sound as catchy as 'Smoking causes cancer', does it?

If we really wanted to give our teenage daughter the facts, then instead of telling her that 'Smoking causes cancer', we would say something like this;

'Well Mary, you have to bear in mind that the vast majority of women who smoke for the whole of their lives do not develop lung cancer. It is pretty rare and the chances are ten to one against your getting it, no matter how many cigarettes you smoke. Also, you could safely start smoking now and then carry on until you were forty without really increasing your risk of the disease. This is because the development of cancer in this way is also the result of a huge number of other factors unconnected with smoking, such as genetic disposition and other matters, some of which could relate to lifestyle. And remember, if you stop for five years, then your chances of lung cancer drop to the same level as a lifelong non-smoker!'

These are the facts about smoking and the teenage girl. Hands up any parent who would dream of presenting the matter like this, simply setting out the facts and leaving the girl to make up her own mind? Has anybody here ever pointed out to her daughter that the odds of a lifelong female smoker developing lung cancer are ten to one against? None of us do this, with smoking or anything else. Instead, we decide what we think is good for our children and then do what we can to manipulate them psychologically into adopting our view of the case. Vegetarians do this with their children and so do people who disapprove of nuclear power stations. Parents who home educate do not give their children the 'facts' about schools, education and the prospects of getting into university, any more than they give them the 'facts' about smoking. They start instead from a position of knowing what the right view on the question is and feeding their children a selection of biased information and black propaganda so that they too adopt the 'correct' view, i.e. their parent's view.

Giving our children the 'facts' is such a ridiculous idea that I wonder any parent could suggest it with a straight face. What we mean by this expression is really transmitting our own particular set of prejudices to our children, ruthlessly editing out all that we disagree with personally in the process, along with anything we think might be bad for our children to know about. If we do this with a life and death matter such as cancer, how much more likely are we to do it with a relatively trivial issue such as the importance of acquiring formal qualifications?

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