I have for several years entertained the suspicion that home educators are the most quarrelsome and disagreeable special interest group in this country. I am increasingly inclined to believe that some of them must be quite literally stark, raving mad.
The Open University has been a very good thing for home educated children in this country. It has enabled them to gain access to places at universities such as Oxford and Exeter, which might otherwise have been denied them. The OU is one of the most progressive and enlightened universities and given how helpful they have been to home educators and their children, you might think that the news that they are thinking of running a course to teach people about home education would be greeted with pleasure. You would? Why, you gullible fool! Don’t you realise that the OU are all part of the military/industrial complex, in the pocket of Big Pharma, part of the New World Order and probably controlled by the Illuminati? Who funds them? Central government of course and they are heavily involved with orthodox educationalists. What sort of course would they run on home education?
The first angry and suspicious emails have already begun arriving at the Open University and unless I am very much mistaken in my understanding of British home educators, this small trickle will soon become a mighty flood; thus persuading the OU that many home educating parents in this country are completely off their heads.
What are the objections to the Open University teaching about home education, say as part of a course about education and childhood development? Where shall we start? For one thing, they might not let home educators check what sort of things they will be saying before they start the course. This is of course perfectly true. When the OU run a course on Comparative Religion, they will certainly ask leaders of various faiths for their views, but will not allow them to vet the materials used. This is because the OU is independent. Imagine if the only things they were allowed to teach about Islam were those things approved by various Imams. Their impartiality would be shot to pieces at a stroke.
Another problem seems to be that local government officers might take such a course and then think that they know as much about home education as parents. It does not bear thinking about! Suppose that home educating parents wanted to go on the course and did not have the money to afford it? This would mean that the OU was discriminating in favour of professionals and against parents. Perhaps the maddest objection of all is one being promoted by a former head teacher, who fears that such a course might become compulsory for any parent who wished to educate her child. This would mean that a de facto register of home educators would be started and those who were too poor to afford the course would not be allowed to be home educators! You see what might happen? Home education in this country would be restricted to the wealthy. And all because the Open University went blindly ahead and began to teach a unit about it. As one person puts it:
'this would be a very dangerous step towards needing some sort of licence to home educate, and an agreed/prescribed method of doing it.'
All this is so completely loopy that I feel like putting my head in my hands and groaning. At the moment many home educating parents enjoy excellent relations with the Open University. I have a suspicion that this why they are considering running a unit about home education; because they have seen what a good thing it is. They wish to show people that it is a rising trend and that it is something worth learning about. Whether they will still be feeling so amiably disposed towards home educators after they have been on the receiving end of one of the home educating community’s famous campaigns, remains to be seen.
