Chinese whispers

One of the most fascinating aspects of home education as encountered on the Internet is the extent to which fanciful and misleading stories about it have a tendency to multiply like fruit flies. One need only make an untruthful claim such as, 'The Children, Schools and Families Bill would have made it a criminal offence not to register as a home educator' and although there is not a shred of truth in the statement it soon assumes a life of its own and will be endlessly quoted and repeated with various exaggerations. So we read on one site a few months ago that, 'under a new law, children will be removed from their parents and interrogated alone'! I'm sure we all have favourite examples of this sort of thing. A lot of this happens when home educators in Europe contact American groups and ask them to publicise some case or other. These lies and half truths then often find their way into respectable newspapers. I was thinking about this recently in connection with what I have been writing about Sweden. There are some pretty uncanny similarities between the Johansson case and that of the Williams family whom I mentioned the other day. Both are good instances of how the game of Chinese Whispers may be played on the Internet.

Readers are probably quite familiar now with the Johansson business. I have given up trying to get to the bottom of this affair, because as time goes on the stories change and become more elaborate. Those interested in the case also make things up as the mood takes them. It is apparent though that the basic thesis, that Swedish social workers snatched a child from his parents to prevent them from home educating him, is not the full story. Five years ago, a similarly heart-rending story was doing the rounds on American home education sites. This concerned a child in this country of the same age as Dominic Johansson. He was called Peter Williams and the story was that his parents were being persecuted by their local authority in Hampshire because they wished to teach their son at home. Here is one account from an American site;



I received an email from the mother of this chess prodigy asking for a little publicity regarding her fight with her LEA. It seems that being the best under-7 chess player in the country doesn’t count as receiving an education. The LEA is threatening to arrest the parents and to force the kid into a g-school.
I hope that Education Otherwise will set the edu-crats straight.
UPDATE: If you’re particularly inspired to contact the case officer directly, he can be reached at
Mr. XXXXXXX
Ass. Principal Education Welfare Officer
New Forest Local Education Office
Southampton
England
United Kingdom
Phone number is XXXXXXXXXXX
I especially like that “Ass.” part. The other potential contact person is
Mr. XXXXXXXXXXX
Hampshire County Council
Winchester
Hampshire
S023 8UG
England
United Kingdom
Phone number XXXXXXXXXXX

I have removed the personal details. This is spookily similar to the sort of appeal currently being made for the Johanssons. Even the details being given for officials to contact is the same tactic. Note also the untruthful statements included. 'The LEA is threatening to arrest the parents'. Of course this is not true. Nor is it true that the child was the best under 7 player in the country. Three months later, on another American site, this had become, 'An 8-year-old homeschooled British boy who reportedly is the best under-10 chess player in the UK ' How's that for progress? The source of these assertions was the father's claim that his son was the best player of his age in Britain; a claim unsupported by any exteranl evidence and then endlessly exaggerated by others.

Now of course with the perspective afforded by the passage of a few years, we see that this case was not really as advertised. The local authority, Hampshire, was not opposed to either home education or chess, but were in fact worried because the child's father appeared to be both completely mad and also wholly incapable of educating his son. Both fears have been shown to be fully justified over the years. Fortunately, Hampshire have kept on the case, with the result that the child now has private tutors for at least some of the time. I have a feeling that five years down the line, we might well have learned something pretty similar about the Johanssons.

At one time, circulating information about some perceived injustice was a slow and laborious business. Newspapers often used to check what they were told before publishing and gaining access to a world audience was very hard. All that has changed now and a story can be published to the world almost instantly, just as I am doing now! The problem is that many of these stories will be mad or untruthful. This is just as true of stories about home education as any other subject which one comes across while browsing the net.

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The Johansson case - a correction

A few days ago I was wondering about the reasons for Dominic Johansson being taken into care. I picked up on this comment by somebody close to the family;

''Christer was once involved in an alternative on-line news mag that expressed politically incorrect ideas and as near as anyone can tell, this was the reason his home schooling plans were opposed.'

I speculated in a post that this on-line magazine might have had something to do with the physical punishment of children, but am now happy to make it clear that it was nothing of the sort. It is in fact called Vaken which means 'awake' or 'wake up' and I don't think one could really call it 'politically incorrect' at all. Raving mad and anti-Semitic, yes; but not politically incorrect! After all, they replace the word 'Jew' most of the time with 'Zionist', thus conforming to the most up-to-date and acceptable left wing version of anti-Semitism. It is full of the most outlandish conspiracy theories about the Jews taking over the world, the freemasons, 9/11, all the usual nonsense in fact. I am not over keen on anti-Semitism, but I really cannot see anything on this site to justify taking a man's child from him. Which still leaves the central mystery of this whole affair unchanged; why was Dominic Johansson taken by social workers?

It is intriguing to see the rather ambiguous statements by Jonas Himmelstrand, the president of the Swedish National Association for Home Education, (ROHUS). He said of this case;

'Homeschooling was not the only issue regarding taking Dominic Johansson in custody by the social services. But having read the court verdict with all the issues, there stills seems to be no reason for this severe action. The young boy has most likely been much more hurt by the custody action than the conditions in his family. One cannot avoid the thought that the prejudices and lack of knowledge about homeschooling, could have been the pivotal reason for the custody action.'

Home schooling was 'not the only issue'. We have heard that the child had some tooth decay, but this was only discovered after he had been taken into care. He had not had the usual vaccinations, but while this is a little unusual it would not be grounds for taking somebody's child. The Vaken website is barking mad, but I can't see this being a reason. Notice that Himmelstrand says, ' prejudices and lack of knowledge about homeschooling, could have been the pivotal reason'. Once again, it is hinted that the home education was not the only or even the main reason. On the Friends of Dominic Johansson site, there is this curious statement;

'By December 2009, the Johansson family had been terrorized by the Social Board of Gotland for more than sixteen months; had their home swarmed and searched by armed Swedish police'

Now why on earth did the police raid the Johanssons' home? What were they looking for? This could hardly have been in connection with home education; there must have been something else going on. There are tantalising hints about this business scattered all over the place. One thing which I have noticed is that the people who are writing about the case a long way from Sweden always seem to think that it is only about home education. Those actually in Sweden, particularly those who have dealings with the family, are saying that home education was not the only reason for the actions of the social workers. Irritatingly though, they never tell us what those other reasons were.

Incidentally, people have contacted Google in an attempt to have this blog taken down. This is not the first time that this has been done; in fact it is the fifth. The first person to try this stunt was our own Mike Fortune-Wood of Home Education UK last year. This is usually done by telling a lot of lies and accusing me of all sorts of bizarre things.. Google are used to this now and they never take any action. Judging by what has been said, I gather that the latest effort was by somebody connected with the Johansson case.

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A right to school

As I am sure we all know, the Swedish parliament recently approved a law which would ban home education in all but 'extraordinary' circumstances. It will be absolutely forbidden for purely philosophical or religious reasons. There are few home educators in Sweden, but an attempt if being made to fight for the supposed right of parents to home educate there. This is the Dominic Johansson case and an application has been made to the European Court of Human Rights. Those making this application know very well that it will fail, but they are carrying on in the hope of attracting attention to their own cause; the wider one of 'parental rights', not just in Sweden but across the world. The claims made will fail because the European Court is bound by precedent: that is to say they must follow decisions already made by the court in the past which clarified the law.

In Germany some years ago a case was fought all the way to the Federal Constitutional Court, which upheld Germany's ban on home education. In 2003 this case was taken to the European Court of Human Rights. The parent who brought the case argued that Germany's ban on home education contravened the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. This provides that a state shall respect parents' rights to ensure that their child's education will be in conformity with their own religious and philosophical beliefs. In September 2006, the court gave
its ruling.

The European Court gave as its opinion that the plaintiff in the case was not the parent but the children. The court went on to say that children were unable to foresee the consequences of their parents' decision to home educate, due to their young age. They further stated that schools were part of society and that the rights of parents did not extend so far as for them to be able to deprive children of their place in society (Brussels Journal 2006). It was clear that there was nothing to stop Britain or any other country in Europe from banning home education entirely.
The crucial point here is the final decision was that children not only have a right to an education, they also have a right to go to school. There seem to be pretty strong legal grounds for this argument. Daniel Monk, senior lecturer in law at Birkbeck, has written a number of papers about this. The thesis is that school is such an integral part of society that it would be wrong to deprive a child of the experience. This is completely separate from any right to an education; it is the same point ruled by the European Court. Since this is an experience of life common to everybody in countries like Britain, Germany and Sweden, it would be wrong to prevent a child from taking part in school. In later life, the child would find herself at a loss when all those around her had a common framework for their memories of childhood. It would be turning a person into some sort of oddity, something of which the child herself could not hope to be aware
until she reached adulthood.

I am sure that everybody reading this has been shaped by their childhood and that school formed a very strong part of that childhood. It could hardly be otherwise; everybody on this site spent every day at school for over a decade! If I lacked that common framework which we all share, a childhood moulded and defined by school, then I might well feel myself to be something on an outsider in later life. This is what people like Daniel Monk argue and the European Court of
Human Rights agree with him. School is a fundamental right for children.

One can quite see why this point of view drives home educators mad! It hints that their decision to keep their children at home is an essentially selfish one, disregarding the future psychological welfare of their children. This is not at all how home educating parents want to think of themselves. Nevertheless, there does seem to be something in this idea. For most of us the first place where we encounter unfairness and cruelty is school. It also provides our earliest experiences of the abuse of power, boredom and various other things which we shall come across again and again in our lives. Perhaps it can be seen as a training ground for handling these things in later life. Interesting that Ofsted expressed this view recently when they suggested that it was good for every school to have at least one useless teacher; it will give children a valuable lesson in incompetent people in authority. this will stand them in good stead in later life. John Holt mentions in Why Children fail that a mother spoke to him once and told him that he was wrong to make his lessons so interesting. Her argument was that in adult life children would be
bored much of the time and the sooner they get used to it the better.

I have already discussed the possible motives of those helping the Johanssons to take their case to the European Court. I am sure that the three representatives named on the application know about the court's decision in 2006 and that this will not be overturned. I can only assume that they are going to the court purely for propaganda purposes. Personally, I am not sure how wise this is, because an unfavourable decision will simply draw the attention of other European countries to the fact that they can ban home education tomorrow if the wish and nobody will be able to do anything about it. I am not sure if this is a good idea.

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