Internet lists and home education

A couple of people have pointed out lately that just because one or two people on Internet lists relating to home education are fretting about some topic or other, does not mean to say that this is representative of home educating parents in general. This is of course absolutely true. The main lists might typically have a few hundred people on them and only forty or fifty who regularly take part in debates there. If we assume that there are eighty thousand parents of home educated children in this country, these forty or fifty individuals, many of whom are not technically home educators anyway, are not indicative of the feelings and concerns of ordinary parents. I have myself made this point strongly in the past, including to the Children, Schools and Families select committee.

The problem is that those handful of people on the Internet lists tend to be pretty powerful in shaping opinion among home educators, even the opinions of those who do not hang out on the Internet overmuch. They are a major source of rumour and misinformation. It only takes one person to visit the HE-UK list, for example, and pick up a story about local authorities demanding to weigh and measure home educated children, and before you know it she has told people in the home educating group which she goes to with her child. From there, these fantasies take on a life of their own. So even people who do not even own a computer can get to hear that there is a sinister plan by local authorities to weigh and measure their children in order to check whether they are being starved to death.

To ignore the influence of the home education Internet lists would be a great mistake. It is true, as I have remarked, that they contain a fairly high percentage of cranks and nutcases, far higher than in the home educating community generally, but the nonsense which they come up with there filters through to the wider community. Some of those on these lists make it their life's work to spread the stories dreamed up their fellow conspiracy theorists into the outside world. Every time an article on home education appears, whether in a national or local newspaper, members of those lists will fill the comments section of any online editions with the latest rumour from the lists to which they belong. This means that people outside the home educating community also become affected by the foolishness which is frequently on display in places like the EO and HE-UK lists. The delusions of what somebody here called, 'four or five people on the Internet' thus end up becoming a background to any debate on home education.

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Councils checking the health of home educated children

A current concern on some of the Internet lists ties in perfectly with my post earlier about the readiness of some home educators to believe any old rubbish as long as it shows a local authority in a bad light. The latest story is that some local authorities, Oldham in the North of England and Ceridigon in Wales have been mentioned, are insisting that home educated children are weighed and measured or forced to see school nurses regularly. I shall be posting more fully on this tomorrow, because these rumours are actually damaging the provision for children with special educational needs, some of whose parents have fought hard to gain access to health services.

In the meantime I will only say this. We used to spend a lot of time in the Brecons until a few years ago and so I know Aberystwyth and so on pretty well. I also know some home educating families there. So as far as the local authority in Ceridigon making home educated children see the school nurse, I can absolutely assure readers that it is a lot of nonsense. The man responsible for Elective Home Education in the district is Stuart Bradley and he may be contacted on 01970-633656. Before ringing him, I spoke to a home educating parent so that I could compare what I was told with what Stuart Bradley said. There was a perfect match. In fact Ceridigon have a policy of not making visits as a routine procedure. When a family comes to their attention, they send out a form and if when it is returned, there does not seem to be anything out of the ordinary, that's it. No visit. They don't want to make visits, because it would mean driving up into the mountains and all over the countryside. The school nurse is available for those parents who specifically request an appointment. Some do and some don't.

This is a typical example of what I was talking about earlier today, in which the home educators work themselves up into an indignant frenzy about nothing. As I say, I shall post more about this topic tomorrow.

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Green ink

For many years I wrote for Prediction magazine on subjects such as angels, crystal healing, auras, opening the third eye and many other outlandish things. The last time I did anything for them was in the November 2001 issue, when I revealed the surprising fact that far from becoming extinct sixty five million years ago, dinosaurs are still to be found in central Africa! Now anybody who writes this sort of stuff for a magazine like Prediction can hardly complain if he receives some pretty strange letters from readers. I have some of them in front of me now and very interesting they are too. They look a bit weird, some of them written all in green, others alternating green with red and yellow; a few with important passages heavily underlined or in capital letters. It is however not the appearance, but the content which I wish to discuss today.

There are several common features to many of these letters, the great majority of which were sent by unbalanced or disturbed individuals. Firstly, almost without exception these are anxious and angry people. They see dangers to which others are blind and they cannot understand why others do not realise things as clearly as they do themselves. The threats vary; some fear invasion from outer space, while others think that the Jews are taking over the world. (This last puts me in mind of the Vaken site which Dominic Johansson's father is involved with!) Many of them have written to the government to complain and cannot understand why their letters remain unanswered. Almost all of them feel that they are being persecuted in some way or other. People are laughing at them, orthodox science ignores their discoveries and their new theories of relativity or cosmology are being suppressed by the establishment. Quite a few of these letters are absolutely incomprehensible; it is impossible even to guess what the writer means. A few think that the government is trying to poison them with vaccinations, fluoride in the water supply or invisible rays. Although these letters are all written, as far as I know, by people unknown to each other, they are so uncannily similar that one feels that some overarching syndrome must be responsible.

When I mentioned a few days ago that a home educator's blog post had been composed in alternating colours, some jumped to the conclusion that this was a dig at the individual concerned. It was not. If it were a case of the occasional person displaying the same symptoms which I have observed in my correspondents from Prediction, then it would hardly be remarkable. One finds strange people in any group. There is a bit more to it than that though. I belong to quite a few online communities and lists. Some of these are religious groups and others political. It is the same with my wife and daughters; between us we have pretty wide experience of such things. Now one expects the odd strange person in these groups and they are certainly to be found. There is no doubt that there are plenty of cranks on the Internet. In general though, the tone is fairly amiable and tolerant. This is the case whether the group is discussing the real presence of Christ in the communion wafers, art deco glassware, the care of ferrets or the Labour leadership contest. How different, how very different, is the atmosphere on some of the larger Internet lists relating to elective home education!

One notices that many home educators, whether posting on Internet sites, talking to newspaper reporters or making submissions to government enquiries, are enormously fond of spotting sinister conspiracies which are invisible to others. They are also angry and anxious for much of the time about threats to which the average citizen is oblivious. One also finds it pretty obvious that a lot of them have the feeling of being persecuted. It is not uncommon for them to believe that the government wishes to poison their children by means of vaccines. They write to the government regularly and are baffled as to why nobody in orthodox education can see that their methods are so much better than those currently being used. It is not at all infrequent to find that one has no idea at all what they are trying to say.

It was to this general atmosphere that I was alluding when I posted on the topic of the mental health of home educators. I was not suggesting that the great majority of home educating parents are mentally ill, although of course many are a bit strange. I meant to convey the idea that there is fertile ground in this community for mad stories to take root and that many home educators seem ready and willing to believe anything, however bizarre. I think that the presence of what seems to me to be a higher than usual number of unbalanced individuals makes this situation worse. I honestly believe that some of these people are suffering from what used to be called persecution mania. The problem is that because of the feverish ambience which one finds already existing in some groups of home educators, these unfortunate people find a willing audience for their stories of persecution by the government or other agencies. Instead of saying to the person telling these garbled and paranoid tales, 'Come and sit down and have a nice cup of tea; you're not yourself today.', those to whom the mad fantasy has been recounted then begin hyperventilating themselves and rush off to tell their friends and relatives that the sky is falling! They never seem to ask themselves the one question which one should always ask of any rumour; is this true?

I cannot see any sort of remedy for this. The truth of the matter is that an awful lot of home educating parents do feel that they are the targets of government persecution, as well as persecution by many other sinister and shadowy groups. The obvious explanation is never enough, there must always be a conspiracy lurking in the background. Somebody offers to protect their child against the dangers of meningitis and they suspect Big Pharma of wanting to poison their baby. The Department of Education revamps its website and at once the rumour spreads that they are deliberately suppressing the 2007 guidelines for local authorities. This is happening all the time. I no longer write for Prediction and so do not get any letters from the readers of that strange magazine. However, reading the online views and opinions of some home educators more than makes up for this. The problem is of course that I am not the only one who reads these opinions. I shall be posting in a day or two about the number of other people who read the lists avidly and belong to the communities who are not home educators. The effect upon these people when reading some of the nonsense one sees is, unfortunately, to say 'They must be mad!' This is not helpful when trying to persuade the government that home edcucators need to be left alone.

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Interesting document

I thought that readers might like to see this;


http://www.c4eo.org.uk/themes/safeguarding/files/ehe_report_final_to_dfe.pdf

As soon as you read that this was, 'an exercise aimed to scope the landscape', you just know that you are going to disagree with the authors!

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A rift in the lute

Home educators reserve a special kind of loathing and detestation for those home educating parents whom they see as betraying them by playing footsy with our legislators; some of whom wish to introduce new restrictions on home education. The present writer knows this to his cost!

The fact that Alison Sauer, who is a member of all the main HE lists, has not come forward to deny the rumours circulating about her involvement with Graham Stuart and his new guidelines, makes it a racing certainty that she is, as she has told her friends, tasked with writing them. She has not been doing so unaided. Fiona Nicholson's name has also been mentioned and it is true that she was the first person whom I thought of in this connection. I find it unlikely now. I had quite an amicable relationship with one home educating mother, exchanging emails regularly, until I was unwise enough to crack a light hearted joke about Fiona on this blog. Whereupon my pen-pal was furious, because she was a good friend of Fiona's. This same person has now been asking questions on Graham Stuart's facebook wall. She would hardly be asking about these new guidelines if Fiona Nicholson were mixed up in them. I have been assured by an anonymous person here that Education Otherwise deny having anything to do with this business. This may be so, but if it is then it is odd that they have not issued a public denial, especially in view of the feverish interest in this matter. I can't somehow see EO being sidelined in this way.

There are two points of view about this whole question. The first is a feeling that after the Badman review and the collapse of Schedule 1 of the CSF Bill due to the calling of the election, the government has no appetite for a fight with home educators. They have been warned off by the great opposition which was witnessed and are happy to leave things as they are, at least for the next few years. The other point of view, expressed by Graham Stuart, is that civil servants in the Department for Education are still intriguing for a change in the legal situation. He claims that in order to fight this, he is producing a set of guidelines which will prevent any new moves regarding registration, monitoring and so on. This line does not really add up. The ink on the 2007 guidelines wasn't dry before the agitation started for new legislation. There was barely eighteen months between the publication of the guidelines and the launching of the Badman review. How can Graham Stuart assure anybody that this will not happen with his new, improved guidelines?

This affair is opening up cracks in the home educating community already, before these guidelines have even been seen. Mike Fortune-Wood, whose own Internet list receives only half a dozen comments a day now, is irritated that the Badman Review Action Group list is becoming popular. He has suggested that it is time for this to close down, presumably so that everybody will hang out on HE-UK instead. Some people though are agitating to make the BRAG list the focal point for anything happening about Alison Sauer's guidelines. And as I said above, Education Otherwise has still to say anything at all about this, which is very strange. If, as is claimed, they are nothing to do with it, have they no opinion on the matter?

I suspect that when we see them, these guidelines are likely to prove shocking to some people. I say this for the following reason. The 2007 guidelines are perfectly clear and easy to understand. Home educating parents were very happy with them and they made the legal situation very plain. Since the law has not changed, what is the need for a new set of guidelines? There is only one answer. Under the pretext of averting an even worse outcome, these guidelines will move in the direction of more local authority involvement with home educators. if this were not the case, then there would be no need to draw up new guidelines in the first place; the 2007 ones are perfectly adequate. I am surprised that so many home educators went off into the woods with Graham Stuart. My own feeling is that anybody who would place their trust in this fellow must really bear the consequences. I cannot resist ending with a famous old limerick;

There was an old woman of Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger.
They came back from the ride
With the woman inside
And the smile on the face of the tiger.

I feel that those who have gone off for a ride with Graham Stuart in this way might very well find that the smile is on his face when they return!

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Good practice in elective home education in North Yorkshire

I thought that this clip from Youtube might be worth watching. It shows the sort of thing which can happen when there is a little bit of good will on both sides. Interestingly enough, I understand that Alison Sauer helped train the local authority officer who features in it.




I love the fact that the father remarks that he enjoys the group because 'it is about education'! Whoa, steady on there! Radical stuff. What else would a home education group be about, one wonders? Very revealing comment.

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Reviewing books with the home educators

Writing a book is a thankless task. One spends months researching, writing, revising, preparing the index, listing all the references, proof reading and so on and the whole thing takes ten times longer than you could possibly imagine. Then when it is published, people either don't buy it or those who do, read it and say that it is lousy! It is perhaps inevitable, to say nothing of depressingly predictable, that home educators should seek to turn this natural sequence of events back to front and begin their criticism and condemnation before the book has been published and read. This saves them the trouble of reading the thing I suppose, but when in addition they expect the author to set up and run a correspondence course in academic referencing systems, one somehow feels that the limit has definitely been reached.

Yesterday I had the fascinating experience of observing the convoluted mental processes of some very odd people. A number of them seemed to be aggrieved about a book which they had not yet read and of which they could know absolutely nothing. Nevertheless, the criticism was as serious as that of practically any book of which I have ever heard. The accusation that I am persecuting people by thinking about home education, for instance. One unfortunate person claimed that;

'Anyone that cynically writes a book purely for financial gain which it claims “identifies key areas of conflict between home educators and local authorities and suggests ways that these can be resolved to everyone's satisfaction” and then denies persecution of Home Educators is either demented or delusional.'

This was in response to a post which I made about the mental health of some home educating parents. That anybody could possibly see identifying key areas of conflict between home educators and local authorities as persecution tells us a good deal about this person's own mental state. Another comment said in connection with this, as yet unpublished, book;

' When a Judicial Review of Metropolitan Police Force policy finds against them for discrimination and persecution'

That is two posts in quick succession made by people who feel that either I or the Metropolitan Police are persecuting them. Fairly typical of a certain type of home educating parent, one might say, and pretty ironic in view of the topic of the original post upon which they were commenting!


Others had different concerns. Several people felt that I had written the thing under false pretences, because I was;

'claiming to be part of the HE community (that's your position of authority for writing this book isn't it?)'

This is such mad nonsense that it is hard to know how to respond. The blurb on the cover says it all;

'Simon Webb educated his daughter at home and has a blog on home schooling. He has also worked for many years with children who have special educational needs.'


Hmmm, no mention there of the home educating community. I cannot imagine who is making all this stuff up. If this is the reaction before it even hits the shops, the good Lord alone knows what people will be saying when they actually read the thing!

I think it worth making two points. Firstly, I asked several times on this blog whether anybody would be interested in contributing to a chapter on autonomous education. My original idea was that autonomous educators could have a chapter in which they expressed their views in their own words and that local authorities could have a chapter in which they stated their opinions. This could be followed with a chapter in which the two parties tried to find common ground. Nobody was the slightest bit interested in this and I gained the distinct impression that the parents both here and on the main Internet lists did not want to have their views publicised in this way. That is fine, but I can hardly be blamed when I am then compelled to put the case for autonomous education myself. Since this book is really aimed at education professionals rather than the lay reader, it means that I have had to explain autonomous education to teachers, local authority officers and so on in my own words. I would have preferred autonomous educators to put the case themselves. It is no good complaining at this late stage about the book; I tried to get others involved, but nobody wanted anything to do with it.

The second point is this. There is absolutely nothing to stop anybody from writing a book about home education themselves and finding a publisher for it. I cannot see why so many people are fretting now about how I have referenced the thing and what my views are. If people want to write a book about autonomous education, there is nothing to stop them doing so. It is true, as somebody pointed out yesterday, that Jan Fortune-Wood has written books on this subject, but these are a little outdated and peculiar. I feel sure that there is scope for something about the modern home educating scene written from an autonomous viewpoint and published by a proper publisher; something which major bookshops will stock. I am not really the man to do this. I have written a book from the standpoint of a highly structured home educator. This was only to be expected. I honestly cannot see why this would irritate anybody. There are currently books about autonomous home education and I have never felt persecuted by them! I feel that the field is open for a new book on this and perhaps instead of bitching about the fact that I have actually bothered to write a book, some of those commenting yesterday could write one of their own?

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