I recently spent the evening with an old friend. We have broadly similar backgrounds and outlooks on life, in fact we went to school together. He is a militant atheist, whereas I go to church every Sunday. It struck me, not for the first time, how curious it is that two people can both have access to exactly the same information and examine the same evidence and then come to diametrically opposed opinions about what it all means. I look at the world and see the work of a benevolent Creator-God; he looks at the same world and sees a complete absence of the numinous and divine. I cannot help but notice a similarity between this and the situation with the methods people use for educating their children at home.
Here is the common ground which I share with many people who eschew formal teaching and systematic instruction of their home educated children. We agree that schools often make learning a stultifyingly dull task and that this has the effect of making many children reject education. We think that schools are a pretty bad way of educating our children and prefer to assume responsibility for the job ourselves. We find that teachers at schools often manage to make even the most interesting topic boring and that their teaching methods are not very effective. We want our children to have more time to explore aspects of the world that they find interesting; for them to be free to pursue their own enthusiasms. We do not like the regimentation at school and have an idea that the teaching there is geared to the lowest level and neglects those of greater intellectual ability.
My conclusion from all this is that my daughter deserved better and more effective teaching than that available at the local maintained school. The conclusion which some other parents draw is that their children should not be taught at all.
To me, when a system or machine is not working well, the obvious solution is to improve it and try to make it work better. If the teaching is not working properly, I assume that something is wrong with it and that one must try and make it better. Others seem to think that the answer is to abandon it entirely! It appears to me so obvious that if something is defective or not working as best it could, then the first step would be to try and mend it, to see if it can be improved with a little tinkering. My first impulse is definitely not scrap it without trying to fix it and then try and make do without the thing completely! This though seems to me to be precisely what some home educating parents are up to when they rail against formal teaching and structured education by the use of a syllabus. Having found one system of teaching which does not work very well, their answer is apparently to say to themselves: 'This method of teaching does not work; therefore I shall reject teaching'. This is a bit rummy and I can't help but think that either they or I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere.
