Learning the old fashioned way; autonomous education, the oldest method in the world

One of the most endearing features of autonomous home educators in both this country and the USA is the way that many of them seem to be convinced that they are doing something daring and revolutionary by leaving their kids to learn what they wish. They apparently believe that this is a radical idea; that they are on the cutting edge of educational theory! Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact there is something rather quaint about those who choose to adopt this antiquated method of educating their children.

Modern humans have been around for at least 10,000 years. Until perhaps 3000 years ago, there was nothing at all like a modern school. For the first 97% of humanity’s existence, home education was the only game in town. Gradually, the idea of sending children to be educated by strangers became popular. It was a slow process. In Elizabethan England, only about one child in eight attended school; all of them boys. In other words, as recently as the 16th century, only one child in sixteen in this country went to school. Things continued in this way for another three hundred years or so. Most children were educated at home. One of the commonest ways of undertaking this was to let the children themselves choose what to learn; or indeed whether they wished to learn anything at all. The best way to see how this worked is to look at a fictionalised account of home education in the early part of the 19th century. Pride and Prejudice is generally reckoned to give a good picture of life among the upper classes at that time. Here is Elizabeth Bennet describing the education which she and her four sisters received;

Such of us as wished to learn, never wanted the means. We were always
Encouraged to read…those who chose to be idle, certainly might.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that this sort of education, especially for girls, was very common at that time. As for the ordinary working class child; home education was almost universal.

As a matter of fact, it is universal, compulsory schooling which is the radical alternative in education; not home education, which has been around for at least a hundred thousand years. Those who choose this path are not blazing some new trail, but turning backwards to an older way of life. They put one in mind of the American Amish, who prefer to follow a deliberately archaic way of life. The one thing that radical unschoolers and autonomous educators are not is revolutionary.

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Home educators in a panic...again

I sometimes despair of the home education scene in this country. Many parents, particularly those who belong to internet lists and forums seem to be prone to running round like headless chickens at any available opportunity. Once again, my unwelcome views on the latest of these flaps are being censored on the EO support list and so I thought that I ought to reassure those who are genuinely worried and want the facts.

The latest fear centres around a consultation on what the government call raising the participation age and the rest of us think of as raising the school leaving age. As part of this, there is an intention to define just how many hours constitute a full time education. This has nothing to do with home education, but is to prevent unscrupulous employers from pretending to run apprenticeships and just getting teenagers to work full time.

How does this affect home educators? Well, it doesn't; not in the least. The consultation document makes this perfectly clear, when it says:


'it is at the discretion of the home educator as to what form that education takes'

and

We do not want to set regulations for home education that do not exist pre-16'

In other words, the situation for home educated seventeen and eighteen year olds will not change. Still, what about the whole business of defining full time education? Could that affect home educating parents? Hardly. The favoured figure for the minimum number of hours of education spread over the whole year is five hundred and thirty four hours. Since home education takes place every day, this would mean less than an hour and a half a day!

In spite of the fact that there is nothing to worry about, threads are appearing on various lists marked 'urgent'. Why do people do this? I very pleasantly drew attention to what is actually said in the RPA consulation and my message was not posted, on the grounds that this is 'meta' discussion. This is absurd. Those wishing to spread panic and alarm are allowed to voice their views; it is only when I quoted from the actual document that the discussion apparently became 'meta'. In other words and as usual, facts are not welcome in the debate!

I have remarked before that there seems to be something of a cottage industry in raising fears of this sort and pretending to be working to protect home educating parents from supposed new threats. When I have the time, I shall post more about this.

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In which it is shown that home education can deliver at least as good an academic result as that likely to be gained at school

When first I told people that I would not be sending my daughter to school, there were many negative reactions. These ranged from predictions that she would be unable to get a job or go to university, to the fear that she would grow up introverted and weird. None of these things have happened. I have not mentioned it before here, although others have referred to it, but my daughter has a place at Oxford to study philosophy, politics and economics; otherwise known as PPE. Her A level results this morning were as hoped and so she is now assured of starting at Oxford in a month or so.



To my mind, the place at Oxford is not so much an endorsement of my teaching as a recommendation for home education in general. I am far too irritable and impatient to be a good teacher and gaining a place in this way at university was my daughter’s doing, rather than a tribute to my teaching skills. I honestly believe that any family prepared to put in the work and make all the necessary arrangements could do exactly the same as we have done. This proves, to me at least, that home education can be better than any school, even the most prestigious independent ones. Nobody needs qualifications themselves to undertake it, nor do they need much in the way of prior knowledge. All that is needed is the determination to push on with the project and not to be discouraged by anybody else’s opinions. I lost count of the number of people over the years who claimed that it was impossible to study science at home or take GCSEs in history without expert, professional teaching. These people are quite wrong. Anybody can teach their child any subject in the world, even if they know nothing at all about it to begin with. Parents and children learn together.



I suppose that the reason that I am putting posting this, apart from the natural parental pride in my child, is this. I doubt that the fact that a home educated child has secured a place at Oxford University is likely to become widely known. As far as anybody knows, this is the first time that a child who was completely home educated during the statutory ages from five to sixteen has been offered a place at Oxford in recent years. I would like this to become known among other home educators, not as a personal advertisement for my own methods but simply to show other parents that the thing is possible. I firmly believe that any home educating parent could do at least as well as I have managed in this field. Many of them will be able to do better. Home education is perfect for one-to-one tuition and the chances of getting good grades in GCSEs and so on is much higher with this type of education.



Incidentally, I am aware that for some home educating parents, all this is an irrelevance. I do not wish to engage any more in sterile and pointless debates about whether we should or should not teach our children without their initiating the process. The fact is that most parents hope that their children will do well academically. I am making the point here that home educating parents are ideally placed to ensure that their children do do well in GCSEs, A levels, university admissions and so on. Not attending school between the ages of five and sixteen is not only no bar to such achievements, but actually makes them more likely and far easier to attain.

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Home educated prodigies

The history of home education is littered with cases of supposedly brilliant children whose parents were convinced that they would be world champions in some area or another. Sometimes the chosen field is physical; tennis or gymnastics. In other cases it is intellectual; mathematics or chess, for example. Below is a recent piece from The Washington Post about this sort of thing:



http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/home-schooling-for-child-athletes-raises-questions-large-and-small/2011/08/05/gIQASWDR4I_story_1.html





I do not think personally that children under the age of fourteen or so are really able to make informed choices about this sort of thing. It often looks as though the parents are fulfilling some need of their own in these experiments. Sometimes, matters seem to turn out well enough, as with the Williams sisters and their tennis. On other occasions, the child’s life seems to have been blighted by the pressure of living up to parental expectations. There is also the unfortunate fact that 99% of children whose parents believe them to be geniuses at tennis, gymnastics, mathematics or chess, turn out after adolescence to be nothing of the sort. This can be very dispiriting for both parent and child. It can also be damaging for the child’s future life. In addition to the loss of self-esteem, having to accustom one’s self to the notion that one is not after all a world champion, there is all the time which has been spent on that one chosen activity to the detriment of the child’s general education.



Home education does seem to be a fertile breeding ground for unbalanced childhoods of this type. Not that they are very common of course, simply that such odd upbringings are possible with home educated children in a way that school would not generally allow. I wonder what the long term prospects are for home educated children who have been raised in this way? I have recently been re-reading Joan Freeman’s book; Gifted Children Growing Up. For those about whom she writes, all of whom went to school, the eventual outcomes seemed to be pretty good. These were children who were objectively very bright. I would be intrigued to know whether the sometimes feverish atmosphere in the homes of the home educated gifted child produces radically different outcomes. Does anybody know of any research on this?

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A black mark for Lincolnshire County Council

I had the misfortune to be in Lincolnshire over the weekend. For those unfamiliar with this ghastly part of the country, it provides a glimpse of Britain before the Industrial Revolution; peopled as it is in the main by half-witted agricultural workers. My wife’s family live there and so we have to visit the county pretty regularly. Mind you, they live in Grimsby, which is positively cosmopolitan and sophisticated compared with the little hamlets one finds tucked away between the potato fields. Most of the inhabitants of these places look like inbred mutants who might have wandered off the set of The Hills have Eyes. Still, enough about my daughter’s family. While we were there, I looked in on a family I know who teach their own children. I don’t really mind this myth that I never meet real-life home educators, as long as people realise that it is a complete nonsense. I was given a copy of a letter which they recently received. Blogger won’t let me put pictures here at the moment and so I shall have to type it out. It says:

Dear Mrs. XXXX,
We are doing a review of children electively home educated from XXX, to ascertain if sufficient support is being provided to yourselves and child/ren from Lincolnshire County Council. It is also important that we understand that the educational provision your child is receiving is an appropriate and comprehensive one.
In order to undertake this review we have agreed that an Education Welfare Officer will visit you at a time convenient to yourself. It would be helpful if you are in agreement, that this officer talk to your child to hear from her first hand how they are finding the education provided, and whether there is anything else we need to assist them in providing additional support services.
It is also important that we understand whether there are any additional needs in relation to your child and whether we can provide any assistance.
I am sure that you will find these visits helpful to your family.

Seldom have I seen such a horror! If somebody wished to check on the education which I was providing for a child, the very least I might require is that the people doing the checking were themselves educated to a reasonably high standard. This is manifestly not the case here; the letter being written by somebody unable to express herself in ordinary, plain English. This communication is couched in what I call ‘ill-educated formal’. This is a style of writing beloved of the barely literate, who use odd constructions which they fondly imagine deceives readers into believing that the letter has been penned by an educated and intelligent person! Almost unbelievably, the above letter was signed by the Assistant Director of Children's Services! Let us look at this monstrosity in a little detail.

It begins ‘Dear Mrs. XXX’ and then goes on to refer to ‘yourselves’. This is of course an illicit concordance between the singular ‘Mrs. XXX’ and plural ‘yourselves’. The same solecism occurs a few lines down with ‘your child’, singular, and ‘how they are finding’, plural. Awful basic grammatical error, which alone suggests that the writer has not been educated beyond primary school. And why on earth talk of support being provided to ‘yourselves’? The correct word here is ‘you’; not ‘to ascertain if sufficient support is being provided to yourselves’, but rather ‘to ascertain if sufficient support is being provided to you’. The use of ‘yourself’ instead of ‘you’ is of course another turn of phrase popular with the illiterate and inarticulate. This is also to be found a few lines later, ’ at a time convenient to yourself’. Why not simply, ’at a convenient time’?


The second sentence begins, ‘It is also important that we ..’ In order to use the word ‘also’ in this way, it must first have been show that a previous item was important. This was not even hinted at during mention of the review of electively home educated children. On another note, one is tempted to ask to whom all this is important. Important for the child? The parent? Lincolnshire County Council? It is heartening, if a little surprising, that Lincolnshire will be talking to these children to find out, ‘how they are finding the education provided, and whether there is anything else we need to assist them in providing additional support services‘. Are only home educated children to be favoured in this way, or will the local authority be speaking to children at their schools to see how they are finding their education and whether there are any additional services which they could do with?

All in all, I do not think that this letter would encourage me to engage with Lincolnshire County Council. It is semi-literate and incoherent; not at all a good advertisement for an education department!

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More about parents of children on the autistic spectrum

A few days ago I posted a piece which seemed to me to be pretty sympathetic and uncontroversial. In it, I mentioned that the parents of children on the autistic spectrum had for many decades, at least since 1943, been noticed frequently to be a little strange and somewhat different from other parents. I speculated that this might be due not so much to their also having autistic features or mental illnesses, both popular current ideas, but rather to their experiences as parents of a child who is outwardly ‘normal’ but who behaves bizarrely. As a result, I was called ‘callous’ and accused of ‘ignorant idiocy’.

While I have been away, I have been exchanging emails with professionals in this particular field and last night did a quick trawl of the literature. As I suspected, this was not a new idea and was in fact the most reasonable explanation of what many who work with such families have long observed. One person commenting on the original piece clamed that over 70% of children on the autistic spectrum have a parent who is also on the spectrum. I could not find any reference to this and would be glad to hear more about this idea. I have in front of me volume 15 of Developmental Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry, published by Sage in the USA and written by Laura Schreibman. It is a standard work on the subject of autism. On page 51, we find the following, apropos of the etiology of the disorder:

It has been widely demonstrated that a child’s behaviour has effects on the behaviour of the caretakers (e.g. Bell 1968, 1971; Yarrow Waxler & Scott, 1971). It is certainly reasonable to assume that any lack of social responsiveness evidenced by the parents might be a reaction to the lack of social behaviour, excessive tantrums and bizarre behaviour of their autistic children (e.g. Rimland, 1964; Rutter, 1968; Schopler & Reichler, 1971).

I found other references to this phenomenon but, as I have remarked before, this is a personal blog and not an academic journal and I do not think it necessary to reference these posts too extensively! It is enough to say that this was not some weird idea of mine but is part of mainstream thinking on this subject.

I think that rather than taking issue with what I specifically said about this matter, those objecting wished to close down any discussion about the origin and etiology of the syndrome. This does not strike me as being at all a good idea. I mentioned the old idea that parents were solely responsible for their children’s autism. It is careful research which exploded this notion. I really don’t see that it would be a good idea now to stop any further debate or research on the subject. I have seen this sort of thing happen before with autism. Some years ago, it was noticed that a greatly disproportionate number of African and Caribbean children were presenting with autistic features. In one London borough where I worked, this group represented around 40% of the population and yet about 80% of the children on the autistic spectrum were black. This was such a hot potato politically, that nobody would discuss it and this delayed research, with bad consequences for the families concerned. Suppressing facts and trying to prevent discussion of these things is seldom a good idea and almost inevitably harms the kids themselves in the long run. The more that we discover about this disorder and its causes, the better.

This topic is important for home educators, because autism seems to be commoner among home educated children than in the wider school population. When we find that one particular group has higher incidences of autism, whether it is Nigerians or home educating families; it is of interest. I cannot see that exploration of this could be a bad thing.

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Indigo Children

I have written before of a tendency among British home educators to embrace crackpot beliefs and unconventional ways of thinking. These typically range from homeopathy to the New World Order. Over the last few months, I have been told of another such loopy idea which has apparently become very popular in some quarters. This is the idea of the so-called Indigo Children. Now I have of course heard of the Indigo Children, but was not aware that it was flourishing in this country. Like so many other weird belief systems, it started in the USA. Put briefly, the idea is this. Some children who have been diagnosed as or exhibit the signs of having an attention deficit or being hyperactive, are really very special and misunderstood by the rest of the world. Far from having special educational needs, they are really the forerunners of a new kind of human. This is curious, because others have observed that many home educating parents have the idea that their children are very talented and empathetic; although in ways which cannot be measured by conventional means.

Indigo Children have a number of characteristics. They behave as though they are very special and important. They are intolerant of authority and do not react well to being told what to do. They are amazingly sensitive and talented, but not in ways that schools recognise. They will not submit to the ‘ritualised behaviour of society’; in practice, this means that they refuse to wait their turn in queues and so on. Many of them have been diagnosed as having ADHD.

Now all this is very interesting. There are two possible explanations for conduct of this sort. One is that these kids have been sent to the Earth by a higher power to lead us all into the Age of Aquarius or something of the sort. In other words, they are truly special, but our blinkered eyes are unable to recognise how important and special they are. The second possibility is that these are spoilt brats who have been indulged by their parents and allowed to get away with murder and that when they start school and find that they are not the centre of the universe, they take the news badly!

I have been given the names of a number of parents who are well known on the British home educating scene who, it is claimed, believe that their children are Indigo. I have no idea whether any of this is true, but it does seem to tie in neatly with a lot of what I have observed. Quite a few of the home educated children in this country have been diagnosed with special needs of one sort or another. In America, this is the group from whom the majority of the Indigo Children are drawn. Many British home educators do seem to think that their children are fantastically sensitive and have all sorts of abilities which conventional education has failed to recognise. The very idea of their taking GCSEs like all the other kids is absurd; they are far too special for such mundane things as examinations.

I am wondering if any readers have heard about this at all? As I say, I am not claiming that this it is actually the case that the Indigo Children business has taken a hold among British home educators; merely that I have been told by several people that this is the case.

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Funding college places for home educated children

Graham Stuart and Nick Gibb do a double act and reveal that local authorities can allow home educated children to attend college and then claim the cost back from central government:


http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2011-07-18a.66262.h&s=home+education#g66262.r0

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Wigan appoints home educating parents to monitor home education

It looks as though Wigan has decided to adopt the so-called 'Tasmanian Model' of monitoring home education. They have appointed two parents who are themselves home educators and who will be inspecting the provision of other parents. This is in sharp contrast to the usual sort of person doing this job, who is typically a former teacher. The fun and recriminations have already begun and we shall have to see how this new scheme actually works in practice.

Here is how Wigan, a town in Greater Manchester, went about finding somebody to do the job for them:


http://www.wigan.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/BD24787B-61A0-4ED8-9F76-59891A4AFCCE/0/SLALetter.pdf

In the interests of lively debate, I thought that readers might care to know that Wigan feels that:

' we have a duty to ask for evidence that a suitable education is being
provided.'

I seem to recollect that some parents do not believe this to be true...

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Early childhood experiences and their possible role in the creation of childhood disorders such as ADHD and so on

I wrote briefly yesterday about the hugely dysfunctional families with which I worked some years ago. The children of these families all had various problems and these were caused, or at the very least greatly exacerbated, by the way that they were raised. It was not until I had been thinking about the common factors in these families that I noticed an eerie similarity to the way that some home educators recommend that children be treated in childhood.

A lot of the things which afflict children, ranging from dyslexia to ADHD, are not random bolts from the blue. These syndromes are all too often associated with common factors in early childhood. Take ADHD, for example. The impulsiveness, sleep disturbances and other features of attention deficit are often noted in children who have no sort of consistent parental discipline in their lives. It is also connected with kids who do not have regular and age appropriate bedtimes. In other words, if a child’s wishes are never thwarted and he is allowed to do what he likes; he is far more likely to grow up displaying low levels of ability to control his behaviour and more liable to grow angry if his immediate wishes are frustrated. If his internal body clock has not been properly set by regular bedtimes, then he might end up being frantically active at midnight and very sleepy during school the next day. This is one example; there are many others. The way that parents raise their children has an impact upon the type of disorders with which they later present. A chaotic and disorganised lifestyle is often coupled with problems like ADHD.

Of course the trend these days is to pretend that children’s problems are like illnesses which have struck for no apparent reason; certainly nothing to do with parenting. Anybody who works with kids knows that this is nonsense. Now the sort of chaotic families with whom I worked would allow their children to stay up to all hours. This was part of their lifestyle. They would go visiting friends until one or two in the morning and took the kids with them. The result would be that the kids would not get enough sleep and their body rhythms would become screwed up. They would always be tired during the day, but wide awake at night. Even at home, the concept of ’bedtime’ was unknown. They would sit up with their parents until they fell asleep on the sofa and then be put to bed when the parents themselves went to bed, perhaps at two in the morning. Discipline was frequently non-existent. The child ate on demand, was very often allowed to do anything at all, as long as it did not irritate the parents.

It is not hard to see how this kind of lifestyle caused problems when the child began school. The kid would be unable to follow instructions and sit still for story time. Nobody had ever made him sit still quietly; of course he would have trouble starting now. He would fall asleep during lessons and be unable to obey simple requests. If he couldn’t get his way, he would scream and become aggressive. Many of these kids were diagnosed with ADHD as a consequence.

The treatment to which these children were subjected had no underlying ideological rationale. Their parents simply carried on their own lives and left the children to their own devices; expecting them to fit in with the parents’ lives. It is odd though how similar themes emerge in some home educated children. Some home educating parents refuse to enforce a bedtime. They allow their children to decide what they should do, when and what they should eat. There is minimal or wholly non-existent discipline and structure. One cannot help but wonder whether the high number of home educated children with special educational needs of the ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia type could be a by-product of certain kinds of parenting. In other words, do they end up being home educated because certain syndromes strike their children at random or are the disorders themselves precipitated by the style of upbringing? I shall explore this thesis further over the next few days.

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Respecting childhood autonomy

I explained yesterday that one of the most beloved figures in British home education was a raving lunatic who publicly advocated small children being able to work down coal mines, drive cars on public roads and have sex with any adult they cared to. I pointed out that these views made him very popular with the more thoughtful type of paedophile; the kind of man who seeks justification for his depravity. As a result of this, I was told by one person commenting that I had sunk to a new low! The most curious comment was by Elizabeth, who felt that my post was ‘beyond the pale’. She went on to say that ‘It would not be taking a child seriously to stand by and watch while they make a bad choice‘. In other words, if her child makes a sensible and wholesome choice, she allows it. If the choice is bad, she will seek to prevent the child from exercising this choice. How this differs in any way from conventional parenting, I have no idea.

At any rate, the general view seemed to be that no parent would follow Holt‘s advice on matters relating to sex. Let us assume for the moment that this is true. If parents who advocate childhood autonomy would not go as far as to allow their child to choose to go to bed with an adult, how far would they be prepared to go down the road of childhood autonomy? An apparently innocuous example which several parents have mentioned on this blog is the question of teeth cleaning. I have seen this topic crop up elsewhere on home education blogs, forums and lists. Let us then take it that some home educating parents who allow their children autonomy do not compel them to clean their teeth. This is of course not in the same league as allowing them to have sex with adults, is it? Indeed it is not; it can be worse.

Like most adults, I was forced to clean my teeth twice a day as a child. I did not always want to, but this made no difference. Many children, particularly two and three year-olds dislike teeth cleaning and parents almost invariably ride roughshod over these objections. Not some home educating parents though. They believe that children should be allowed to ‘choose’ not to undergo teeth cleaning if they are strongly opposed to the practice.

When I reach for the toothbrush last thing at night, it is not because I have been thinking about dental hygiene and the latest research on caries. It is rather a conditioned reflex. I have been trained, like one of Pavlov’s dogs, to clean my teeth before I get into bed. This is what parents generally do with their kids around teeth cleaning. They make the child get into a fixed routine of doing the thing every night until it becomes a part of the child’s innermost being. Eventually, the child will internalise the procedure and feel guilty if he fails to clean his teeth regularly. This is excellent. The results of neglecting teeth cleaning can extend far beyond a few cavities in the baby teeth. Only recently, a piece of research was published which suggested that regular teeth cleaning is associated with enhanced female fertility:

http://acovi.com/bad-dental-hygiene-can-affect-fertility/226077/


There is also a well established link between heart disease and poor oral hygiene. This is quite apart from the obvious danger that decayed teeth can lead to abscesses in the gums and below teeth. This can bring about blood poisoning and every year, people in this country die from such things.

A three year-old child is quite unable to make an informed choice about the long term implications of failing to maintain healthy teeth and gums. He is unlikely to be concerned about fertility or heart disease. All he cares about is the momentary irritation of the sensation of the tooth brush tickling his gums. Establishing a routine of dental hygiene is vital in early childhood and must become second nature to the child. Only then will he be sure to maintain the practice into adult life. It must become a conditioned reflex, a Pavlovian response to getting ready for bed at night.

Failure to instil the teeth cleaning habit in small children, while being done on the grounds of respecting their ‘rights’ and autonomy, runs the risk of shortening their lives and impairing their fertility. This is dangerously irresponsible. This is one example of respecting the autonomy of the child which we all know is currently practiced by some home educators. There are others, equally damaging to their child’s future physical and mental heath. The failure to set the developing child’s body clock correctly for a diurnal life, caused by not insisting on regular bedtimes, for example. Under the guise of being liberal and right-on, these parents are harming their children and laying up problems for their future. Holt’s ideas about all this are monstrously wrong and following any of his advice is likely to harm children. Chuck out How Children fail and destroy any copies you come across of Escape from Childhood! The man was a dangerous crank.

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The ultimate autonomy

No suggestion made during Graham Badman’s review of elective home education caused more anger than the idea that home educated children might be at increased risk of sexual abuse than those at school. Why do professionals suspect this? There are probably two main reasons. First, home educated children often seem closer to their parents than those at school. Antagonism between parents and children, common with school children and which typically reaches a climax during adolescence, is thought to be normal. When people see a teenager getting on amicably with her father, they think it is a bit creepy! One only has to look at the clip on Youtube of me and my then fourteen year-old daughter, when it was hinted that there was something unnatural about a girl of that age who seemed to be happy in her father’s company!

There is another reason why some professionals are uneasy about home education, which has to do with its ideological basis. Two of the big influences on British home education are AS Neill, who ran Summerhill school and John Holt, an American teacher. Both had strange ideas about children and sex. Neill believed that children should be free to have sex whenever they wanted to and without restriction. This was part of his school’s ethos and probably a reaction to his Scottish upbringing during the late 19th Century. John Holt is something else and since he is so popular with home educators, his ideas are still influential. He is actually very popular and influential with another minority group, which I only found out last week.

I was talking to a friend of mine who is involved in child protection; it does not matter in what capacity. She is quite interested in and not in the least hostile towards home education. During a conversation, I happened to mention John Holt’s name and she wrinkled up her nose. ’Oh, you mean the paedophile’s best friend’, she said. I was a little puzzled about this. I know the views which Holt expresses in books like Escape from Childhood, but this was the first I had heard of paedophilia. She showed me some sites advocating paedophilia. These were not pornography sites, but places where adults argue the theoretical basis for their being able to enjoy sexual relations with children. I will not provide links; I dare say that those interested enough will be able to find them. She then showed me John Holt’s name scattered about on these awful sites. Militant paedophiles seem to have adopted him as their guru! His writings provide, just as they do for home education, justification for the practice of paedophilia. This is, to say the least of it, unfortunate.

Now I don’t know whether any readers here are aware of Escape from Childhood, but I have a copy in front of me. It is not the best known of Holt’s work. In it, he says that not only should children not be compelled to attend school, but that they should also be free to have sex with adults if they wish. He explains the reasoning behind this; I don’t personally find it convincing. And yet here is a rather alarming thing. There are essentially two types of autonomous home educator in this country. One type imposes the normal rules of childhood upon children, with the proviso that education is the child’s choice and that the kid is free to choose what and when she learns. In the more extreme form, that advocated by the Taking Children Seriously movement for instance, the child has complete freedom to choose everything. There are no bedtimes, the child is not made to clean his teeth, wear clothes, get up in the morning. If he wishes, he can eat nothing but sugar. Children are completely masters of their own lives. We have had people on here supporting this type of lifestyle.

The problem is that if you give children that degree of autonomy, then it is only a short step to giving them the freedoms which John Holt supports. That is to say the ability to choose to go to bed with anybody of any age. Holt does not see why a nine year-old girl should not have sex with a forty year old man and this too is the logical extension of the arguments advanced by some militant autonomous educators. Now I have no reason to suppose that any of them actually put John Holt’s advice into practice, but the very fact that one of home education's favourite writers is also the darling of the more articulate paedophiles might be enough to raise eyebrows. When people start following his advice on childhood autonomy, you have to ask yourself how far they are prepared to go along the road which he advocates. I have an idea that Holt’s popularity with both home educators and paedophiles might be the cause of some of the child abuse notions which have in the past gone the rounds.

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Children’s rights

We looked yesterday at New World Order ideology. Today, I wish to consider one aspect of this theory and how it has permeated, one might almost say contaminated, British home education and those connected with it in any capacity.

In the early 1970s, I was very heavily involved in the Children’s Rights movement in this country. For some of us who went to school during the fifties and were teenagers in the sixties, the helplessness of children was an absolute scandal. They could be beaten without any legal redress by parents and teachers and any adult who wished could strike them a passing blow with impunity. It was not uncommon for park keepers or even bus conductors to hit children and they had no legal remedy. In many ways, their position was almost that of slaves in the eighteenth century. Gradually, this changed and a good thing too. One area where these changes are currently being opposed in Britain is in the field of home education.

I mentioned yesterday that one of the big things with American home educators was ’parental rights’. This means, among other things, the right of parents to hit their children whenever they want. This is an important issue in the USA. Another aspect is the right of parents to allow their children to carry and use firearms. Both these ’rights’ would be under threat if America ratified the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child. The USA and Somalia are the only countries in the world which have not ratified this treaty. Home educators in America, of which there could be as many as two million, are among the most vociferous opponents of the UNCRC.

This attitude has crossed the Atlantic and is now prevalent among British home educators as well. Perhaps it has something to do with the Internet and the ease with which crazy ideas are able to travel the world so readily these days. At any rate, British home educators are also very keen now on their ’rights’. Parental ’right’ to home educate has become a big thing on the home education scene here. I have quite a different perspective on this and I rather think that my own viewpoint was more common twenty years ago than it is now. It is based upon the idea of children’s rights, which has, as I mentioned above, been very important to me for forty years or so. When my daughter was little, she had the right to the best possible education which I was capable of providing for her. If I was able to provide the best education at home, then I had a duty to do this; no matter what sacrifices this entailed my making. If on the other hand, I was unable or unwilling to provide a decent education at home and a local school could give her a better education, then my duty was to send her there. Where ’parental rights’ entered into all this, I really could not say. This was my duty.

Reading the 2007 guidelines for local authorities on home education is very revealing. A child’s right to education is mentioned only once in this document, but the parents’ right to home educate rates five mentions. Interesting, no? Government pronouncements on home education these days always talk of parents’ ‘right to home educate’. I suppose that this is in keeping with the spirit of the age. We are all very concerned now that nobody’s rights are infringed and if we fail to acknowledge the parental right to home educate, then who knows? Perhaps they will be bringing a case against us under the Human Rights Act? This is a disgustingly craven way for the government to behave. The reason that they are so keen to emphasise parents’ supposed rights in this matter is that it is the parents, as adults, who will cause trouble. They are the people who must be fawned around and placated. You will notice that there is ten times more talk of parents’ right to home educate whenever anybody is talking about this subject, than there is of children’s rights to education. This is awful and it is a definite step backwards, as least as far as children’s rights are concerned.

As I say, this kind of thinking has drifted over here from the USA. It is popular with both right wing Christians and New World Order nuts; both of whom are over-represented on the American home educating scene. I am horrified to see British parents adopting this reactionary viewpoint and look forward to the day when a more progressive stand is taken on the matter and children’s rights move to the centre of the debate on home education, where they belong.

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More about dead children, particularly black ones.

We looked yesterday at the emotive argument often used by home educators, that of the bullied child who had been educated at home and then forced back to school with tragic consequences. We found, as I had suspected, that nobody knows of a single case of a home educated child being forced back to school, let alone of one who subsequently suffered any harm as a result.
Of course, home educators are not the only ones who wheel out suffering children to bolster their arguments. During the select committee hearings in 2009, I was astounded to hear the present Children’s Commissioner, Maggie Atkinson, offer her reasons for supporting Schedule 1 of the CSF Bill. She said;

‘I would give you two words, and they are the first and second names of the child who died — Khyra Ishaq’

Khyra Ishaq was of course not only a sweet looking little girl, she was also dead and black; a winning combination if ever I heard one for a debate of this sort! Those who are worried about children being at home with their parents have a history of using dead kids in this way. Some of the legislation which many home educators feel is against their best interests was introduced in the wake of Victoria Climbie’s death. The reports about this actually had a picture of Victoria printed on the cover; perhaps the most flagrant example of using a dead kid to make one’s point when fighting or supporting new laws. Another photogenic, little black girl; how cool is that? And what's more, she's dead. Ha, let's see anybody disagree with the measures we propose now! Those who used Khyra Ishaq and Victoria Climbie in this way were clearly not familiar with the old adage that hard cases make bad law!

The problem is that both sides in these debates seem to be working from a blinkered perspective. Home educators claim quite correctly that some children are bullied so badly at school that they are driven to despair and suffer horribly. They go on to assert that home education offers a refuge to such children and removes them from the bullies. This is to ignore the fact that a huge amount of bullying also takes place in the home and that for some children, school can itself act as a refuge from bullying and abuse. Those opposed to home education are able to point to the occasional case of a child being educated at home who has suffered bullying, abuse or even died at the hands of her parents. They too ignore an important fact; that almost all child victims of domestic abuse and murder are registered pupils at schools.

Using dead children can be a pretty good knock-down debating point, whether you are discussing the merits of exporting powdered baby milk to less economically developed countries, mass vaccinations or the building of a nuclear power station. A debate about home education is the perfect excuse to bring in the dead children and blame your opponents for their deaths. As somebody pointed out yesterday, I have myself been guilty of this! On home educating lists, we often see mention of ’bullycide’ and the figure of sixteen deaths a year from bullying. I tried to track down the source of this figure a few years ago and could get no further than a registered charity which was making a good income from bullying and refused to tell me how they calculated this often mentioned statistic. The problem is that on both sides of the home educating debate are entrenched interests and people who are absolutely convinced that they are right. Neither side begins by examining the evidence and then seeing where it might lead and what the implications are. Instead, they start by believing either that home education is good and right or that it is dangerous and wrong. They then set out to gather evidence to support of this predetermined position. One can always find children who have been bullied at school and then been home educated. Similarly, one can always find other children who have been mistreated at home and who view school as a sanctuary. It is true that every so often a child who is being educated at home in this country is tortured or murdered, but then far more children at school suffer in this way.

It would be nice if a group of home educators and a bunch of social workers, teachers and other professionals could get together and examine all the available evidence in a neutral and dispassionate way, seeing where it might lead. They might possibly discover that they have more in common than either side has suspected. I don’t really expect this to happen any time soon; but it is an interesting idea! Of course, this is pretty much what was supposed to have happened at the select committee hearings in October 2009, but I have to say it did not really work that way. All parties were only interested in furthering their own special interests; not in discovering new truths.

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The Ofsted report on home education

Just to remind readers, Ofsted did conduct a survey about home education at the end of 2009 and beginning of last year. the report may be found here:


http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/Ofsted-home/Publications-and-research/Browse-all-by/Documents-by-type/Thematic-reports/Local-authorities-and-home-education


Some of the topics which have been discussed on this blog are mentioned in this report, such as special needs and off-rolling.

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Social ineptness and awkwardness considered as a possible cause, rather than consequence of home education.

Those who followed the comments on the recent article in The Independent about some Hollywood starlet’s decision not to send her children to school, will have noticed an old and familiar accusation being made; that home educated children grow up to be weird loners, unable to interact normally with others.

Now before we go any further, I have to say that I have no evidence at all that this is so; I simply have not met enough adults who were educated at home to form an opinion. I have met one strange person who did not go to school, but the overwhelming majority of people who present as odd or unable to get along in society did go to school. So I am not putting it forward as an hypothesis that a greater proportion of adults who were home educated are actually socially inept. This is however what is commonly asserted by those who disapprove of home education.

Having got that out of the way, a home educating mother with children on the autistic spectrum contacted me recently, wondering if I could float this idea on the Blog; the possibility that if we meet such adults who were home educated, it might be that they were home educated because they already had difficulties in being with groups of people and that this behaviour could simply linger on into adulthood. She had noticed that the Ofsted survey of home education which was released last year showed a large proportion of home educated children with special educational needs. Other surveys have revealed the same thing and judging by anecdotal evidence, many such children are on the autistic spectrum.

Might it be possible that if a large number of children with autistic features or traits are removed from school because they have difficulties coping with large group situations, then these children might retain this aspect of their characters as teenagers and adults? If so, then any social awkwardness or dislike of group settings, would not have been caused by their being home educated at all. It is rather that this bit of their characters caused their parents to home educate them in the first place. In short, we would be in danger of muddling up cause and effect.

As I say, neither I nor the mother with whom I exchanged emails are asserting that this is so; merely wondering whether this might provide a possible explanation for those strange adults that people who are opposed to home education seem to meet so often. Of course another and to my mind more likely explanation is that those people who claim to encounter so many strange home educated adults are not telling the truth about this anyway and could just be inventing the idea to prove a debating point. The fellow commenting on the Independent article, for instance, claimed to have met four socially awkward adults who had been home educated. I find it unlikely that anybody unconnected with home education would have met four people in the course of everyday life who had been educated at home; it is after only less than 1% of the population. That they would all have been noticeably strange seems to me improbable.

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Short BBC piece about home education

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-13681216

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Home educated or missing from education?

There is currently considerable disquiet on one of the home education Internet lists about the case of an apparently home educating mother in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham. She has been referred, under circumstances which remain obscure, to social services. The assumption is that the referral was prompted by her home educating, rather than any other concern. Of course, without knowing a good deal more about the family than the mother chooses to reveal to an Internet forum, it is impossible to know what is really going on here. Let us assume for a moment though that the case is as presented and that somebody in Barking and Dagenham's education department has tipped off social services about the home education and raised it as a concern. What are we to make of this? I know a little about the situation in this borough because, as I have mentioned in the past, my wife works there in a role which brings her into contact with many exceedingly dysfunctional families with young children. I would not say from what I have heard that home education is very common in this East London borough, but what is not at all rare is parents not sending their children to school, which is an entirely different matter. A number of parents drift into the habit of not sending their kids to school regularly because they have chaotic and disorganised lifestyles. They stay up late, take their children out visiting with them until one or two in the morning and then neither the kids or the parents wake up in time for school the next day. If this happens a few times and nobody takes any firm action, some parents simply stop sending their children entirely after a while. The school sometimes colludes with this and it has been known for schools to hint that if parents were to tell them that they were moving, that it would then be possible for the school to remove the child's name from the register. This suits the school, who don't want a load of fuss and extra paperwork and also the parent who does not want to have to get up early to take the kid to school. Truancy reflects badly on the school as well as the parents and most schools like to avoid having too much truancy. It suggestes that there is something wrong with their school and if a way can be found to remove a persistent truant from the register, many will jump at the chance.

Of course this is not home education at all; it is a child missing from education. However, without looking into such families a little and visiting the home, talking to the child and so on, it is impossible to gauge the true state of affairs. Children from this sort of home background often are at risk in one way and another. The mother might be in the habit of leaving the kid at home while she goes out in the evenings; I also know of several cases like this where the mother was on the game or using drugs.

In a number of local authority areas now, a child not at school is being regarded as being, prima facie, at risk. This is not a desirable state of affairs and yet a very understandable reaction among those who wish to protect the interests of vulnerable children. Often, a single home visit is enough to filter this sort of family our from genuine home educators.

Parents like this are not the only ones who fail to send their children to school. There are a lot of foreigners living in Barking and Dagenham these days, particularly Albanians, and some of these families do not want their children to attend school. There are various reasons for this, none of which involve home education and this is another group who cause concern. I am not really at all surprised that the mother who has posted about being referred to social services has had a visit of this sort. The aim is always child protection and there is no sinister agenda which entails the persecution of real home educators. The goal is simply to check that this is a home educating parent and not one of the other categories of parents who simply do not send their kids to school.

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Home Education in New Zealand

Here is a very optimistic and upbeat account of home education in New Zealand:


http://www.bayofplentytimes.co.nz/life-style/news/right-at-home-with-learning/3951948/

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Why are so many home educators so weird?

My heart sank when I read in the newspaper about the couple who had decided to raise their baby as 'genderless'. I guessed, long before it was revealed in the text, that they would turn out to be home educators and so it proved. The giveaway was the photograph of their oldest son. He has long plaits, androgynous clothing and of course cannot attend school because of bullying. And he wears dresses. Below is a news item with the best photograph of this child (readers are not to read any significance into the fact that this is the Daily Mail; it just happened to have the best pictures of this truly strange family):

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1391772/Storm-Stocker-As-gender-experiment-provokes-outrage-poor-childs-future.html

How did I guess that the family home educated? Easy, really. Their son looks really weird and would obviously be regarded as a complete freak wherever he went. Apparently, boys bully him and when he went to a playground wearing a pink dress, the girls did not want anything to do with him either. I have noticed in the past that pictures of boys who are being home educated often show a child with very long hair and/or a generally strange appearance such as would immediately set him apart from any other boy of a similar age. None of this is brilliant advertisement for home education and the case of baby Storm has certainly provoked people to look at the idea unfavourably. It does not help that the Stockers are, inevitably, radical unschoolers. I can assure readers that the average parent is not impressed to hear about a child who only learns what he wants, when he wants. In cases like this, most mutter to themselves that the kid needs a haircut and ought to be sent to school where he will be educated properly.

I suppose that the newspapers are bound to focus upon peculiar families; freak shows like this sell papers. I rather suspect that home educating parents have a tendency to be a little more odd than the average parent anyway, although mercifully, few are as downright odd as the Stockers! Items like this in the papers and on the television do not really help advance the cause of home education. They serve merely to underline the popular feeling about home education, which is that it is the province of cranks and nutcases. This is a pity and it would be good to see some more positive coverage of the topic, with success stories of a conventional sort. When our masters are considering changes in legislation, I cannot think that stories about home educating families like the Stockers help matters much!

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