A possible motive for not teaching a child

For many of us, what we call the 'motives' for our actions are often nothing of the sort. Rather, we make a decision subconsciously, often based upon primitive and irrational impulses, and then afterwards justify our resulting actions by constructing an elaborate intellectual explanation which makes no reference at all to our initial gut feelings. We might for example find the taste and even the texture of meat is disgusting to us and makes us feel sick. This is the instinct. Later, after we have decided not to eat it, we construct an intellectual basis for this instinctive disgust based upon the ethics of the thing and call it an ideology such as vegetarianism. Many belief systems arise in this way, beginning as a simple desire or dislike and then becoming codified and provided with an apparently logical foundation.

When my daughter was seven, I used to enjoy her company enormously. I still do enjoy being with her, but when she was little it was an absolute delight. I cheerfully spent days with her, roaming the countryside, visiting London, playing games, simply revelling in her company. I disliked telling her what to do or imposing any discipline upon her, because then that tended to alter the simple, joyful relationship. I would much sooner have been her playmate than her teacher. This is what I mean by an instinctive, primitive feeling. This desire simply to take pleasure in her company and be damned to the consequences was very powerful. It was an essentially selfish craving though. I was gaining great pleasure from being with her and just doing the things that she liked. True, she was happy too and it sometimes seemed that the best thing for her was to allow her to enjoy this fleeting and ephemeral present happiness and not fret about what would happen when she was fifteen or twenty.

Of course, being a middle aged man, I knew perfectly well that an entire lifestyle for my child based upon nothing more than her childish wishes would not necessarily be an good for her when she was older. Days spent wandering round the countryside having picnics and making bows and arrows certainly have their place in a happy childhood, but if that is all there is too it then the adolescent who results from this way of life might be an ignorant one who is ill equipped for life in a modern, industrial society. True, I taught my daughter a skill passed down to me by my father on these expeditions; how to make a bow and arrow from young branches, but that's not likely to be much use in today's world!

Now there were plenty of ideological grounds upon which I could have continued this lifestyle every day. She was certainly learning about different kinds of tree and animal. I told her about farming and the water cycle, all kinds of useful things in fact. To continue living and raising my daughter like this every day would have been dishonest though. The real reason that I wanted to carry on all the time in that way had nothing to do with her education and everything to do with my own wishes, especially my wish to be her companion and not her adult teacher. Besides, we got on much better when I wasn't telling her what she should be doing and allowed her to set the pace.

Had I allowed my daughter's life to develop in that way, it would have been a purely selfish choice, because I wished to have a certain kind of relationship with her and follow a particular lifestyle. I don't doubt that I could have used sophistry to justify such a course, but it would have been intellectually dishonest.

Now that my daughter is seventeen, both she and I have very happy memories of the afternoons and entire days that we spent simply doing stuff for the sake of it. Because of the path which she is currently pursuing though, she is even more glad that I trained her to sit down quietly at a table for an hour at a time and study one subject rigorously. That skill will stand her in good stead, no matter what she chooses to do with her future life. The ability to distinguish different toadstools has not proved to be as useful in her life today; about as useful in fact as the ability to make a bow and arrow! The desire to be friends and companions to our children, rather than parents and teachers, is a very seductive one. It is a desire though which, for our children's sake, we must resist. The child of a paleolithic hunter gatherer might be able to acquire by means of casual conversation while roaming through the forest and fields, all that is necessary to equip her for her future life; a twenty first century child in modern Europe will almost certainly not.

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A 'war' on home education?

I have been exchanging emails with some parents in America who say that a worldwide attack upon home education seems to be taking place. They used the expression a 'war' on home education. I can in a way see what they mean.

Here are a few of the developments in the last couple of years which have alarmed home educators. In February 2008, a court in California ruled that only parents with a teaching qualification were entitled to educate their children at home. This ruling was not enforced however. A year later, the British government announced an enquiry into home education. The result was very nearly a law which introduced restrictions to the practice. Although this law didn't make it onto the statute book, there have been several rumblings which suggest that the matter is far from over. In June this year, Sweden passed a law which forbade home education except in 'exceptional circumstances'. These 'exceptional circumstances' have yet to be defined. This new legislation also paved the way for the criminal prosecution of those who failed to send their children to school. In Russia recently, it was announced that the law on education is to change. Currently, 'family education' is explicitly recognised in law; the new education law which will be passed by the end of the year makes no mention at all of this form of education. The stated aim is the modernisation of education in the Russian Federation. There are estimated to be over a hundred thousand home educated children in Russia and, as in other parts of the world, the numbers are growing.

The latest development comes from Botswana in southern Africa. Last month the police raided the homes of several Seventh Day Adventist Christians who were teaching their children at home. They seized teaching materials and the parents were summonsed to appear in court. The judge ruled a couple of days ago that since the children were entitled under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) to a good education, then they should be enrolled in school. They suggested that being educated at home was an education 'on the cheap' and therefore against the spirit of the UNCRC. It is felt by some American home educators that the UNCRC is being used as a vehicle to force parents to send their children into state education and that this is also behind the new, tough Swedish approach to the matter. America is one of only two countries in the world not to ratify the UNCRC; the other is Somalia.

In this country too, some home educating parents sense a conspiracy against home education. Even the inclusion of a storyline on home education in a drama series set in a school, Waterloo Road, was seen as being part of a coordinated government campaign to portray home education in a poor light and thus prepare the way for new regulations.

The truth is that various countries are growing uneasy about home education. Often, as in the case of the united Kingdom, this is not because of any opposition to home education per se, but because of the suspicion that home education is being used as a cover for other things. Thirty years ago, practically every child in Britain attended school. Those who did not were pursued vigorously and made to do so. The situation was similar in the United States, with all but a handful of children attending school. Now there are many children in both this country and the US who are not pupils at any school. Some of these children are being educated at home and some are not. This is also the situation in a number of other countries and the numbers are growing inexorably each year.

As we have seen, some American states, Texas for instance, are becoming uneasy because the number of those being taken out of school with the claim that they are going to be home educated is growing so rapidly that even the home education organisations are baffled. Both school authorities and home educators themselves are beginning to think that these high numbers of new 'home educators' are being used to mask dropouts from the school system. A similar stunt is worked in this country, with local authorities tacitly allowing truants and disruptive pupils to leave school under the pretext of home education. Central governments are trying to put a stop to such practices and one of the ways of doing so is by introducing new legislation which will make it harder for parents to register their children as being home educated. An inevitable result of such laws is that genuine home educators are apt to find their lives being made a little more difficult.

I do not myself see anything sinister in these news stories from around the world. True, there are one or two countries like Germany and Sweden who have an historic aversion to home education, but most countries tolerate it to varying degrees. However, as the practice spreads and becomes more popular it is inevitable that some parents and schools should latch onto the idea and use it as the basis for scams of their own. These can range from ridding a school of awkward pupils to keeping a child at home in order to abuse her more easily. It is usually these peripheral activities that concern governments, rather than home education itself.

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Creating angst ridden young children in the name of freedom

One of the most terrifying discoveries which we make as adults is that every day we face a literally infinite number of choices. For many of us, this is such a frightening thought that we block it out and deliberately reduce the choices which are open to us. We do this by defining ourselves as 'good parents' or 'Christians' or even 'socialists'. These labels are all ways of limiting the options open to us. If we call ourselves 'good parents' then the option of starving, killing or abusing our children is removed. If we are 'Christians', then we cannot steal or commit adultery and so on. This can be reassuring when we are faced by countless choices. The truth is that we are all of us really no more than the sum of our actions, which are in turn the result of the choices we have made.

This freedom to act is of course the source of existential angst, the terrible anxiety with which infinite choice fills us. Kierkegaard, an early existentialist put it thus:

'Dread is the dizziness of freedom which occurs when freedom gazes into its own possibility'.

One could hardly live like this, getting up each day and not knowing if one was going to make breakfast, stand on one's head, run out of the house naked or cut the kids' throats and then burn down the house! It is for this reason that we suppress many of our choices and lead fairly mundane and predictable lives. Few adults can live comfortably with the prospect of infinite choice.

If this is the case with adults, how much more so is it likely to be the case with children. If we as adults are terrified of staring into that abyss of absolute freedom to act as we wish, imagine what a child would feel! This is one of the reasons why we restrict the choices available to children. For the average child, even making the decision whether to have cereal or toast can be quite enough, without being presented with a range of literally unlimited options. Our children tell us this plainly when they are young. A child has sheets of blank paper, an array of coloured pencils and complete freedom to draw anything. Typically, he sits there for a while and then says to his mother, 'What shall I draw?' The fact that he is free to draw anything in Heaven or on Earth, or even something from his own imagination is just too much for him sometimes. Our children say things like, 'I'm bored, what shall I do?' or they ask us what they can read or a thousand other questions. Too much choice is confusing and a little scary for children, just as it is for most adults.

It isn't just the choices that are alarming. With freedom of choice comes responsibility. Now as an adult, I am quite happy with this. I have chosen to write this blog post and if it irritates people, as quite often seems to happen, I alone take responsibility for that. Many adults don't like this feeling of being responsible. They try to dodge the issue by claiming, 'I didn't have any choice' or, 'My husband made me do it', or 'I couldn't do that because of the children'. Once again, we see adults anxious to avoid the consequence of their choices, not wanting so many choices. Thrusting such responsibilities upon children can be cruel. It is frightening for a child to feel that he is in control and not his parents. A large part of the security of childhood consists of this feeling of being protected and cared for, of having little responsibility and accepting that others make decisions on your behalf. There will soon enough come a time when the child becomes an adult and has to face being grown-up and taking responsibility for her decisions. There is certainly no need to hasten this process by passing control of important matters to the child and allowing her to assume the responsibility at a young age.

Some adults revel in this autonomy. They love the feeling of being in control of their own lives, making decisions and choosing what will happen next. Others prefer somebody else to make their decisions for them. As parents, we gradually allow our children small amounts of autonomy as they grow older, the aim being that one day they will become self-sufficient adults who control their own destinies. Making them into autonomous beings at too young an age may be harmful to their psychological health. They are being given power that they are not really able to handle. This is because part of being an autonomous person is that you are able to fully appreciate the likely consequences of your actions. You balance the possible outcomes and decide on one course of action or another. Adults can do this and foresee what might happen as a result of their actions even a quarter of a century from now. Think of somebody arranging a mortgage of twenty fives years; the person is looking into the distant future and visualising what will happen. This takes years of practice and we all of us, even after fifty years or so of doing this, still make poor choices. Children are simply not capable of doing this. It is enough for them if they can imagine six months ahead, never mind twenty years! They cannot, nor should they be asked to, make decisions which will affect their lives for decades to come. The long-term consequences of such choices are simply too great and beyond their comprehension. They will have to live with those consequences for many years and it is simply unfair to put this responsibility upon them in childhood.

When adults seek to establish their own autonomy by claiming the freedom to make decisions and to abide by the consequences of those decisions, it is very right and proper. This is called growing up and it is sad that some outwardly grown-up people never seem to reach this stage of maturity! To hasten this developmental stage by forcing children to assume autonomy is a different matter entirely. In such a case, their autonomy is not a freely chosen path, but one thrust upon them by their parents. The result of being compelled to accept adult autonomy in this way might well be to precipitate prematurely the angst of which men like Kierkegaard wrote. In short, it is likely to do more harm than good,

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What's the hurry? My child can always take GCSEs and A levels later if she wants to

Whenever I write about teenagers studying for GCSEs, several people always remark that there is no reason why qualifications have to be taken at home at the same age that they are at school. Why shouldn't a twenty year old take GCSEs if that is what she wishes? What's the hurry?

There are two main reasons why it is a good idea to get fourteen and fifteen year olds to sit their GCSEs at the same age as schoolchildren. Parents who talk vaguely of their children sitting these important examinations 'later' usually have a mindset which is twenty or thirty years out of date. At one time it was quite possible to take evening classes at a local college, either free or for a nominal amount, and take any GCEs or GCSEs which one had failed at school. It used to be quite common. These days of course, hardly any FE colleges do such a thing. The only GCSE exams which they handle tend to be re-sits and these are generally limited to those who have already taken them at school. They are not for home educated children as a rule. Because by this age, they will probably not be amenable to being taught by their parents, most will need to do the GCSEs via a correspondence course. These typically cost around £300 for each subject.

A far more important reason for taking examinations at the age of fourteen or fifteen is this. Most teenagers at that age do not have the sort of distractions which we have in adulthood. They do not have to work for a living, few of them have partners and children, they do not have to worry about paying rent or any of the other things that adults concern themselves with. They are free to concentrate solely upon their studies. This lack of distractions makes it far more likely that they will achieve good grades. How many nineteen and twenty year olds want to sit down day after day learning about the causes of World War I or how to solve quadratic equations? At that age, there are usually far more interesting things to be doing, like going to the pub or having romantic entanglements! Better by far to study like this as a child than as an adult.

A levels, if taken even a year or two after everybody else, prove an even greater problem. Because of the coursework involved and the higher level of academic work, it is very hard to do A levels except at a college or sixth form. I have in the past mentioned that it is almost impossible to get on an A level course at college unless you already have five GCSEs at grades A*-C, but there is another consideration. If you start studying for A levels over the age of nineteen, you have to pay for them. This is quite pricy. There is also the fact that as a young person of twenty you will be compelled to spend every day with a bunch of sixteen year-olds, not something that many young men and women would relish.

These are some of the reasons why if examinations are going to be taken by a young person, they should be taken at the same time as everybody else of the same age. The idea of 'taking them later' is a bit of a chimera. I have known one or two twenty year-olds study at college for A levels and it has not worked out terribly well. It may happen, but I have never heard of it, that a nineteen or twenty year old takes five GCSEs. This would be very unusual though and probably expensive. The fact is that if a child reaches the age of sixteen without taking GCSEs, then that is probably it as far as GCSEs and A levels go. She will, if she enters formal education at all after this age, find herself limited to BTECs. New Diplomas and vocational courses. Nothing at all wrong with these of course, but is would surely be better for the sixteen year-old to have as wide a range of choices as possible in her future academic career, rather than being diverted into certain channels purely as a result of her parents ideology.

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Bullying and home education

In view of the number of home educated children who have been de-registered from school due to bullying, I thought that this piece from the Guardian might be of interest.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/aug/20/self-exclusion-bullied-children

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Amusing video of home educated teenager

I found this clip of a teenage American girl educated at home, very amusing.

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Is the social aspect of home education more difficult for women than it is for men?

We can make this broad generalisation about men and women; that men are often more competitive and seek to engage in one upmanship, whereas women tend more to seek agreement and consensus. Tell a man that your favourite season is autumn and he will like as not say, 'Oh I hate autumn. Spring is the season I love'. He will then spend half an hour telling you why his choice of season is better than yours'. Say the same thing to a woman though and the chances are that she will say, 'Oh yes, I love autumn too'. The two women will then forge a link through their common love of a particular season. Women will do this even if they secretly hate autumn! With men, everything is a form of warfare and seeking tactical advantage. This is true in conversations and also in their social lives. For women, the opposite is the case. They are constantly seeking common ground and finding what they have in common. This can pose a problem for the home educating mother, a problem which is not faced by the home educating father.

For the home educating father, the differences between his chosen style of childrearing and education become just another way of getting one over on other men. He does not mind being the loner here, as long as he can show that his choice is better, more sensible and yields higher results than the other guys. This is why the children of home educating men must have two million IGCSEs, be chess champions or the youngest professors of mathematics in American history. For women, this is not an advantage at all. When the other mothers say how much they are looking forward to the end of the summer holidays so that they can be rid of their kids again, what can a home educating mother say? She can hardly agree with them, because it is obvious that she does not feel that way at all. When friends are talking about how good school is for their children, again the home educating mother is placed in an uncomfortable position. She can hardly agree, because of course she has demonstrated by her decision to home educate that she is not very keen on schools. The best she can do is keep quiet on the subject. Unfortunately, this can be interpreted by other mothers as a reproach to their own choices or even worse, smug superiority on the part of the home educating mother. In other words, the finding of common ground and the natural search for consensus is disrupted. The problem is that talking about our children is quite a big part of most parents lives and if every conversation about kids and their education ends up with an awkward silence or in one side or the other feeling that she is the object of disapproval, it does not do much for friendships.

In short, home education for a man can fit in perfectly with the male way of socialising, which is in any case based upon proving that he is shrewder and better at arranging things than anybody around him. Whether it is demonstrating that his car is faster than anybody else's or his child more gifted, he is still playing the same basic game. For most women though, the business of home education forces them to play a completely different game, one with which they may not be at all comfortable. They are put, unwillingly, into a situation where they cannot agree with those around them and find themselves in opposition to other people. It is interesting to see women set up home educating groups. Ostensibly, these are for the benefit of their children and designed to give the kids a chance to socialise. I am sure though that the primary purpose is to give the women themselves a chance to socialise and spend time with others who have made the same choice about education that they have.

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