He was one as well!

Many years ago, I used to spend a lot of time in the company of homosexuals. Hardly surprising, since I was hanging round the Gay Liberation Front, who at that time had a commune in Penge. Something which I noticed was that a certain type of 'gay' person, usually the camp, theatrical ones who sprinkled their conversation with Polari, constantly claimed that many famous people were or had been homosexual. They would say, 'That Henry Cooper; he's gay. Well known fact' or 'Everybody in theatre knows about Sean Connery'. Something which I soon noticed was that nearly all the people to whom they referred were actually not homosexuals at all. If it wasn't that, it would be the Ancient Greeks. They would rave on about how enlightened that society was, where men could commit sodomy at the drop of a hat and nobody would think twice about it.

I have been reminded of all this while glancing through the newly revamped Home Education UK website. There is a section on it called 'Famous People'. Now I am assuming that these are supposed to be not just famous people, but famous people who were actually home educated. Just as with my 'gay' friends, I cannot help but notice that half the people here were no more home educated than I was. Charles Dickens, for example. Unless you count a spell working in a warehouse when he was a small child, there is no possible way that Dickens could be described as home educated. Is working in a warehouse an acceptable form of home education? No wonder the local authorities in places like Suffolk are getting a bit edgy these days! Franklin Roosevelt? Went to boarding school. The Wright brothers? Attended both elementary and high school, although truanted a bit and were once suspended.

I am not going to go through the entire list of names, except to say that the great majority are dubious. Joan of Arc? How many village girls in France five hundred years ago did go to school? As I say, this all reminds me very much of a tiny minority group claiming that loads of famous people shared their own peculiarity. I would be curious to see a list of people who were genuinely home educated by choice. Oh yes, I almost forgot. Davy Crocket. I wonder how many schools there were around when he was growing up on the wild frontier?