Autonomous education in practice

I have been criticised here recently, and not for the first time, for my portrayal of autonomous home education in the two newspaper articles which were published last summer. Among the accusations levelled at me in the past was that I had put forward a grotesque caricature of autonomous education and thus misrepresented the whole thing to the readers of the Times Educational Supplement. I wrote of autonomous education;

' The idea is that the child should be free to follow their own interests at their own pace. They may, for example, look out of the window and see an unusual bird. This may cause them to investigate ornithology and then study biology generally. Of course, this approach just might work with a bright and inquisitive child whose parents are on hand to facilitate their learning. Equally likely is that the child will see the bird, mutter “So what?” and carry on playing Grand Theft Auto IV.'

Before we watch the clip below, which is from a BBC programme about home education, let us look again at what I wrote. Looking out of the window at birds; this leading, perhaps, to a study of biology; the possibility that kids would rather play computer games. I mean, preposterous! Where do I get off trying to foist such a monstrous and distorted idea of autonomous education upon readers? Now watch the clip below, which is about an autonomously educating parent.




The first thing to strike any impartial observer is how spookily accurate my description of autonomous home education proves to be in this particular case. One gets the distinct impression from his body language and general demeanour that young Christopher is indeed muttering 'So what?' and hoping to continue playing Grand Theft Auto IV, or in his case Super Mario. Anybody would think that I had based my article upon this programme! Since it was filmed six months after the publication of the piece in the TES, this is hardly possible. There is of course no mystery about it. The 'Let's look out of the window and study the birds in the garden' line is a pretty popular gag with autonomous educators hoping to get their kids interested in nature. They don't even need to leave the house! The preference of some children for playing computer games as opposed to studying ornithology is also a general theme among many autonomously educated children, as well as those attending school. Let's face it, an awful lot of eight year old boys want to do little more than run round like mad things until they are worn out and then flop down and watch television or play computer games. Why would autonomously educated children be any different? I also have quite a few people, including autonomously educating parents, contacting me privately to discuss this sort of thing.

The real reason that I enrage some parents is not because I am a know-it-all Smart-Alec and irritatingly smug bastard (Although it would be a rash man who discounted this aspect of my personality entirely when seeking an explanation for my spectacular lack of popularity among autonomous educators). The truth is that I often describe how things are rather than how people wish to pretend they are. This can indeed be annoying. I am no ideologue and am hugely interested in how things really work, as opposed to how they are supposed to work. Hazlitt said, 'Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.' This is why I gain such keen enjoyment from the observation of certain types of education; because of the yawning chasm which separates theory from practice.

Incidentally, lest anybody suggest that the clip above is highly artificial because the mother and child might have felt under pressure due to the presence of a camera crew; this was not the case according to everybody involved. The team actually spent a couple of days there and after a while the child more or less took them as part of the background. These people were quite shocked to find that it was possible to keep a child out of school in this way. Their views on this kind of 'education' were well worth hearing and cast light upon how ordinary people see autonomous learning!

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Brave New World and the Epsilon Minus babies

The last time that I posted on the subject of the influence of a baby's environment upon her subsequent development, several people said that they assumed that I had been talking only of home educated children. Frankly, this is a bit weird! Precisely the same processes operate upon all babies, even those who go on to attend school when they are five. I cannot make out whether or not all home educating parents are aware of this though. Some commented that 'We get it', while others denied that it was so and claimed that pre-verbal babies were capable of aiding their parents in reaching common preference decisions about environment and other matters.

Let me try once more and see if I can put into in plain language exactly what I was driving at a few days ago. If a baby is born into a house where the television goes on in the morning and stays on all day without a break, then the baby will take this to be normal life. Having known no other life, this will become her yardstick for normality. Visiting a house which is completely quiet might make her feel uneasy, because it is so different from what she is used to. A child, on the other hand born into a home without a television, radio or computer, might grow up finding silence the norm. She might become distressed if taken on a visit to a house where a loud television is blaring out all the time. That's because she has formed a different idea of what constitutes normality. There is nothing we can do about this; there is no such thing as a neutral home. However, these initial conditions will affect the child. If a child grows up in a home with no books and sees nobody reading for pleasure, then she is hardly likely to ask to read a book. She might not even be aware that such an activity as 'reading a book' even exists. One seldom sees characters on the television reading a book and so the activity would be unknown to her. She may in theory be able to express her wishes and make the choice of being read to by her parents, but she might lack the very words to make the request, to say nothing of the mental concepts which would make asking for the thing possible. Similarly, a child who grows up in a house without a television is unlikely to ask to 'watch television'. Again, she might not even be aware of this as a choice. Both children have been stunted in a sense and their very ability to make a choice restricted. This has happened as a result of choices made by their parents before they were even born. The environment which they first encounter has been chosen for them.

What is important is that these first two or three years of life in an environment devised entirely by others will have an effect upon the way that the child's brain develops. When she is able to express choices, the range of her choices will be dictated by the conditions in which she spent the first few years of her life. Since as we agree, she had no say at all in these conditions, it follows that her parents have, perhaps unwittingly, affected her ability to make a free choice. This happens in all families. I would be very interested to hear of any way of avoiding this, a method for creating a neutral background upon which the child can express her opinions without being predisposed by her early months and years. Every home in Britain either has a television or does not have one. Similarly, every home either contains books or does not. We all have Internet access or do not have it. We have a radio on during the day or we do not. We play music sometimes, often, all the time or never. Each of these choices, choices made by us as adults, will affect our baby's view of the world, help them to decide what is a normal place and what is strange and unfamiliar. In other words, it will tell them how to view the world and give them a mental framework within which to think, work and make decisions. This seems so self-evidently the case, that I have been a little surprised to find that some parents are denying that this is so.

By the time a child is old enough to start making choices about how she wishes her environment to be, the wiring in her brain is already in place, the neural arrangements which might guide her towards the flickering coloured lights of the television or computer screen or in the direction of the black and white pieces of cardboard and paper which we call books. Those first few years are crucial in this and for those years, the child has been conditioned, one might almost say brainwashed in a Pavlovian way, by her parents. This is true in the homes of home educated children, just as it is in the homes of children who will later attend school. Somebody commented here a few days ago claiming that a pre-verbal child could express wishes and thus lead to her and her parents finding a common preference. This is a grotesque notion. A baby in a home without books could not possibly indicate at the age of six or nine months that she wished to have a book; the very concept would be absent from her brain. Similarly a baby of the same age would be quite unable to let her parents know that she wished them to disable their Internet access or sign up to cable television. All these choices are made by the adults without any reference to the child. These adult choices have a profound effect upon the baby and in turn decide the nature of her choices as she grows older; dictate what she is even capable of choosing and asking for.

The truth is that all parents are as ruthless in conditioning their children to make certain choices about their future lives as the most fanatical behavioural psychologist! The conduct of the parents, what they do in front of their babies and small children, how they speak, their leisure activities, the extent of their social lives, the type of sleeping arrangements; all these give an enormously powerful message to the developing child about what constitutes 'normal' behaviours. By the time the kid is old enough to ask questions and make choices, she will already be doing so from a predetermined position; a position predetermined by her parents. I make no comment on whether this is a good or bad thing; that it happens, both with autonomous and more traditional families, is indisputably true.

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Home education and autism

Even across the immeasurable gulf of cyberspace, I can almost hear the sharp intake of breath as readers ask themselves what sort of offensive claptrap I am going to come out with on this topic. After all, am I not renowned across the country, and for all I know the world, for my crass insensitivity about home educated children with special educational needs?

Something which one of the regulars here said yesterday has put me in mind of autism. She mentioned that some years ago people were offering 'cures' for autism, based upon a variety of crank systems. I had quite a few dealings with such things at one time and I was wondering how this might tie in with the home education of children on the autistic spectrum. According to the Ofsted report on home education published this year, over a quarter of the parents to whom they spoke had a child with either a statement or who were at the 'School Action Plus' stage. In addition to this, there were other parents who said that their children were on the autistic spectrum. The overall impression is that quite a number of home educated children have or are supposed by their parents to have, autistic features. This tends to agree with what one sees on the Internet lists and elsewhere; that a sizable proportion of home educated children have special educational needs and of these, quite a few are autistic in varying degrees of severity.

Now it is an interesting fact that the parents of children with autism are more likely to fall prey to conmen and purveyors of fake remedies and snake oil than are the parents of children with some other special needs. Why should this be so? The problem lies in the possibility or claimed possibility of a 'cure'. If your child has Down's Syndrome, then you know where you are. Extra chromosomes, an epicanthic eye fold; the child has Down's and that is that. The same applies to neural tube defects like Spina Bifida or blindness. It has after all been almost two thousand years since anybody was able to make the blind see. You know where you are with these conditions. The case is slightly different for the parent of a child with autism. After all, he looks like every other kid. Maybe there is something that can be done? Perhaps this is like fixing a broken leg, rather than coming to terms with a life long disability? At one time, autism was thought to be caused by purely psychological factors; the so-called 'refrigerator mother', for instance. If it had been caused by a failure to bond, then surely there might be a way to rectify this deficit in later life? Others suggested that the problem lay in the circulation of the Cerebrospinal fluid and various other outlandish explanations, all of which were accessible to treatment.

I have written before of my experience with 'facilitated communication' and autism, but I also witnessed some pretty awful scenes with other treatments for this disorder. I wonder if anybody remembers holding therapy? The idea was that if you could hold an autistic child very tight, squeezing him to you and forcing him to stare you in the eye, then the bonding between mother and child could be repaired. If he refused to look you in the eye then you had to use 'tactile stimulation' to make him. This meant poking and prodding. I was around when Esther Ransome's husband Desmond Wilcox made a documentary about this and for a while it was very popular. Another idea was craniosacral massage. This entailed rubbing the child's head in order to reduce blockages in the circulation of the fluid there. It was also a complete fraud. Then there was the light therapy, the Higashi Method and any number of other 'cures'.

How does this tie in with home education? One of the things that one notices about most of the home educated children with special educational needs whom one hears of or encounters is that they tend to have Specific Learning Difficulties or SLD. This means that their difficulties lie in one or two specific areas, rather than being global. Often, as in the Ofsted report, autism is sufficiently prevalent to be mentioned. There are two possible explanations for this. The first is that children can be pretty dreadful to each other generally and they are especially dreadful to anybody who is a bit strange or out of the ordinary. Under these circumstances, withdrawing a child from school is simply a protective measure to protect her from further distress . There is a second possibility though, which may well be combined with this desire to rescue a child from an unpleasant situation. It is this.

As I said above, while one hears a good deal from home educating parents whose children are on the autistic spectrum, one seldom hears from those whose children are blind or confined to a wheelchair. I have puzzled over this a good deal. I am wondering whether it might be the case that those whose children have a definite, obvious and lifelong handicap come to accept this more readily than those whose children have autism. It occurs to me that parents who decide to educate their AS children at home might subconsciously be seeking some sort of 'cure', or at the very least be hoping at the back of their minds that undertaking this unusual form of education might effect a great change in their child's condition. This could go some way to explaining why so many home educated children with special needs are on the autistic spectrum and so few are physically disabled or suffering from severe learning difficulties. In the latter case, their parents know that little improvement is likely in their child's condition, but the parent of an AS child might be hoping desperately that if they work hard enough with their child, some day something might 'click' and they will see a dramatic improvement in the condition.

I have no idea whether this hypothesis has any merit, but if it has none, then there must be another reason for the number of autistic children one hears of being educated at home. There must also be another reason why so few children with severe learning difficulties seem to be de-registered from school and home educated. I would be interested to hear of anybody's theories on this.

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Autonomous educators embrace the statement of educational intention for the next twelve months!

A couple of days ago, I wrote about the reservations which some autonomously educating parents evidently felt about the idea of providing their local authority with a statement outlining their educational plans for the coming year. A number of parents gave quite convincing reasons why this could not be done. A recent post on one of the lists has reminded me of what a lot of hypocritical poppycock all these objections are!

In order to continue claiming Child Benefit after the age of sixteen, it is necessary to prove that your child is still in full-time education. Parents, even those educating autonomously, suddenly have no hesitation about filling in a form and outlining all the subjects which their children will be studying in the coming year and detailing how many hours will be spent in these studies. This is of course the very thing that they are seemingly unable or unwilling to do for the education department of their local authority! Could it be that the cash incentive of another two years of Child Benefit is enough to overcome their deep-seated, ideological objections to this practice? Apparently so!

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Making money from the HE Internet lists

I am sometimes accused of making money from home education. This is quite untrue, but I have noticed lately that a few new people are using the Internet lists to sell their products and services to the home educating community. Personally, I find this a bit much, but I suppose it's none of my business really. Still, as regular readers will be only too aware, that has never stopped me from passing comment in the past!

Perhaps the most shameless example of this new breed of entrepreneur hoping to cash in on home education is Kelly Green in Canada. She is currently pimping her self-published book A Matter of Conscience on the lists. This consists of large and indigestible chunks of material from her blog Kelley green and Gold. It's quite a catchy title, with its overtones of ethical concern; it sounds as though it could be written about the struggle against apartheid or the civil rights movement in the Deep South during the sixties. It is at any rate a good deal more imaginative than the title of my own book. I mean Elective Home Education in the United Kingdom, how uninspiring is that? I have to say though that I find Ms green's style of writing unendurably turgid and almost incomprehensible. On page one, she tells us that her great, great grandmother was a native American. That's the sort of personal touch wholly missing from Elective home Education in the United Kingdom ! My editor was utterly ruthless and I don't think that she would have felt that my great, great grandparents' ethnicity helped in any way to inform the debate on home education. A few paragraphs later, Kelly Green says;

' Germany, on the other hand, seems to be a society in constant struggle with the idea of difference, an interesting case study in irony and backlash when it comes to tolerance and the acceptance of minority groups.'

What on earth does this mean? Where is the irony in this situation? We can only guess. Or take this, a few lines later;

'our ability to engender the future together, to imagine it, to develop it in a playful and positive way.'

Does she know what she means by 'engender' in this context? Why should we consider the future in a 'playful' way, rather than in a serious and considered fashion? What would be the advantage of thinking about the future of society playfully, rather than systematically and carefully?


It will be noted that she is using Lightning Source for this book, which is a bit of a giveaway; it is a favourite company for Vanity Publishing. I doubt she could have found a proper publisher for this sort of nonsense.

Another person trying to make a fast buck by advertising on the home education lists is Patricia Hope. One cannot help wondering if this is her real name. It reminds me of Patience Strong, who used to do those ghastly little bits in the papers years ago. Anyway, Patricia Hope will sell you either pencil cases or the secret of happiness; links to both her enterprises are helpfully included every time she comments on any of the lists. The secret of happiness involves paying her $40 an hour for counselling, so I think I'll pass on this for now. I can usually buy a decent pencil case at WH Smiths , so I shall be giving this a miss too. These sites also offer links to her daughter's business, which is putting one in touch, for a price, with angels!


Paula Cashmore in the Midlands will, for £60, come round to your house for a couple of hours and explain to your friends and relatives why you want to educate your children at home. Yes, I thought this a little steep too, as well as completely pointless. For £240, she will come round for a couple of hours, speak to you on the telephone for fifty minutes each week and answer your questions by email. Or, you can just join a few lists and support groups and ask all the questions you like for nothing; the choice is yours. This business cashes in on the anxiety which some people feel about visits from the local authority. Instead of allaying these fears, Ms Cashmore exploits them and tries to kid vulnerable parents into thinking that you need the help of a professional to get through a routine meeting with a local authority officer. Just as with Patricia Hope, the name Cashmore seems a little odd, a little too apposite.

There does seem to be a bit of a cottage industry springing up around home education lately. Not that there is any harm in that, but I do have reservations about so many people using the support groups to tout for business. The way that it works is that these people will post pretty pointless comments, often just agreeing with a previous poster and then including a link to the commercial site that they are operating from. I am glad to see that one of the lists which I am on has put a stop to this now.

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Another of my 'straw men'

One of the problem when dealing with home educators is that they tend to argue every point with great tenacity, even about things that everybody else in society accepts as being more or less true. There is of course nothing wrong with that; I am famous myself for disagreeing with those around me. Sometimes though, home educating parents take this a bit far and even establishing the most minor fact becomes so laborious and time consuming a process that all but the most rugged and determined lose heart!

The expression 'straw man', like the word 'conflate', is impossible to avoid lately when exchanging views with home educators! I honestly can't remember the last time I read a post on one of the HE Internet lists where some government agency or one of their lackeys was not being accused of conflating one thing with something else quite different. As for 'straw men'; why, anybody would think that I was running a scarecrow factory here from the number of complaints I receive about my straw men, which home educators apparently keep stumbling across whenever they visit this blog! The latest straw man that I have been apparently setting up is the idea that for many parents, their only source of information is the Internet. Somebody commenting here a few days ago said,

' Do you know any parents that rely soley on the internet? Or is this another straw man argument?'


The suggestion that I am setting up a straw man by hinting that a lot of parents rely only upon the Internet for information is a prime example of the difficulty which I mentioned at the beginning; that home educators seem to inhabit a different world from everybody else. That many parents do indeed rely solely upon the Internet to acquire information is undoubtedly the case and the fact that somebody would question this only goes to show just how out of touch some home educators are.

Let us suppose that a child's homework entails finding out the exports of Chile. There are many ways to get hold of this information. One could go to the library and get a book out about South America, one could reach down a book of one's own and look up Chile, one could watch television in the hope of a documentary about Chile being on that evening, ring up the Chilean Embassy and ask them; the list is endless. In the real world though, children and their parents will just go onto the Internet to find this out. I would be surprised if many parents would suggest the library or television as the first port of call for homework about Chile. Many homes these days do not have encyclopaedias or other reference books in them. Almost all would use the Internet. For many people, this is more or less the only way that they would ever think of getting information which they wanted.

According to several people who commented here a day or two ago, this is not always the case with home educating parents, which I am glad to hear. For the average family though, this is where information is almost exclusively acquired now in day to day life. Schools do not recommend, as once they did, that children go to the library to research homework. Instead, they tell them to look things up on the Internet. Many secondary school pupils go through the whole five years without being given a book at all. No maths books, no history books, nothing at all; everything is done via electronic media supplemented by photo-copied sheets. Many homes too have no books in them at all, let alone reference books. Those that do have books often only have a few thrillers and the children might have some Jaqueline Wilson novels. Otherwise, that's it. The only magazines are likely to be those dealing with the lives of footballers and pop stars. All information must perforce come from the computer terminal. I wonder how the person who made the comment which I quoted above thinks that the average parent finds things out for their children? In other words, if a child needs to know what year Napoleon was born, or the date of the Battle of Trafalgar or a million and one other things, does this person really think that most parents pop down to the library to find out?

This depiction of modern family life is no straw man, simply how things are today in many homes in this country and the fact that a number of home educating parents are unaware of how things have changed in recent years is a little bit alarming. It also makes trying to discuss things heavy going, because before one can even begin to debate, it is necessary to explain how life in modern Britain actually works! These people are constantly claiming that their children get out and about and meet all sorts of people, but I don't think that the people they are meeting can be ordinary, everyday folk of the kind which I know. If they were, then the distorted and unrealistic view of the modern world which some of these characters seem to have might stand a chance of being modified or even changed completely. They would discover that for a great many families in this country, parents and children, the Internet is the first and in many cases the only port of call when they are seeking information.

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My daughter's views on politics

For those of you who cannot get enough of my daughter and me, a fairly general sentiment I believe, here is a chance to hear what she has to say about the political situation in this country. She is at the Labour Party Conference in Manchester today and was asked to help field calls on a phone-in on Radio 5 this morning. The more cynical among you, and indeed almost everybody in the United Kingdom who is not one of her parents, may well be scratching their heads
at this point and asking, 'What on earth does a seventeen year old girl know about anything?' This is a fair point and one which I am forced to concede! Any way, for those who do want to hear what she has to say, the phone-in starts at 21 minutes into the programme.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00twwdm/5_live_Breakfast_Your_Call_29_09_2010


There are also a number of strange people with provincial accents, but I wouldn't listen to them too closely. The good Lord alone knows where they find these peculiar individuals! I didn't realise before that anybody actually lives in the North of England; beats me why these types don't move to the Home Counties like everybody else.

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