More about Pastor Warren

I thought that readers might like to read a little more about Pastor Warren and his strange beliefs. The NCCG, which he founded and controls, is regarded by some as a cult. See:


http://www.nccg.info/strangebeliefs.html


Readers will be surprised and perhaps sightly disconcerted to learn that gay people are not the only ones who have demons in them; those born out of wedlock suffer from the same problem! So too do schizophrenics and even flu is caused by demons. And of course, they are piloting the flying saucers.....

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A 'war' on home education?

I have been exchanging emails with some parents in America who say that a worldwide attack upon home education seems to be taking place. They used the expression a 'war' on home education. I can in a way see what they mean.

Here are a few of the developments in the last couple of years which have alarmed home educators. In February 2008, a court in California ruled that only parents with a teaching qualification were entitled to educate their children at home. This ruling was not enforced however. A year later, the British government announced an enquiry into home education. The result was very nearly a law which introduced restrictions to the practice. Although this law didn't make it onto the statute book, there have been several rumblings which suggest that the matter is far from over. In June this year, Sweden passed a law which forbade home education except in 'exceptional circumstances'. These 'exceptional circumstances' have yet to be defined. This new legislation also paved the way for the criminal prosecution of those who failed to send their children to school. In Russia recently, it was announced that the law on education is to change. Currently, 'family education' is explicitly recognised in law; the new education law which will be passed by the end of the year makes no mention at all of this form of education. The stated aim is the modernisation of education in the Russian Federation. There are estimated to be over a hundred thousand home educated children in Russia and, as in other parts of the world, the numbers are growing.

The latest development comes from Botswana in southern Africa. Last month the police raided the homes of several Seventh Day Adventist Christians who were teaching their children at home. They seized teaching materials and the parents were summonsed to appear in court. The judge ruled a couple of days ago that since the children were entitled under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) to a good education, then they should be enrolled in school. They suggested that being educated at home was an education 'on the cheap' and therefore against the spirit of the UNCRC. It is felt by some American home educators that the UNCRC is being used as a vehicle to force parents to send their children into state education and that this is also behind the new, tough Swedish approach to the matter. America is one of only two countries in the world not to ratify the UNCRC; the other is Somalia.

In this country too, some home educating parents sense a conspiracy against home education. Even the inclusion of a storyline on home education in a drama series set in a school, Waterloo Road, was seen as being part of a coordinated government campaign to portray home education in a poor light and thus prepare the way for new regulations.

The truth is that various countries are growing uneasy about home education. Often, as in the case of the united Kingdom, this is not because of any opposition to home education per se, but because of the suspicion that home education is being used as a cover for other things. Thirty years ago, practically every child in Britain attended school. Those who did not were pursued vigorously and made to do so. The situation was similar in the United States, with all but a handful of children attending school. Now there are many children in both this country and the US who are not pupils at any school. Some of these children are being educated at home and some are not. This is also the situation in a number of other countries and the numbers are growing inexorably each year.

As we have seen, some American states, Texas for instance, are becoming uneasy because the number of those being taken out of school with the claim that they are going to be home educated is growing so rapidly that even the home education organisations are baffled. Both school authorities and home educators themselves are beginning to think that these high numbers of new 'home educators' are being used to mask dropouts from the school system. A similar stunt is worked in this country, with local authorities tacitly allowing truants and disruptive pupils to leave school under the pretext of home education. Central governments are trying to put a stop to such practices and one of the ways of doing so is by introducing new legislation which will make it harder for parents to register their children as being home educated. An inevitable result of such laws is that genuine home educators are apt to find their lives being made a little more difficult.

I do not myself see anything sinister in these news stories from around the world. True, there are one or two countries like Germany and Sweden who have an historic aversion to home education, but most countries tolerate it to varying degrees. However, as the practice spreads and becomes more popular it is inevitable that some parents and schools should latch onto the idea and use it as the basis for scams of their own. These can range from ridding a school of awkward pupils to keeping a child at home in order to abuse her more easily. It is usually these peripheral activities that concern governments, rather than home education itself.

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Progressive education

For most of recorded history, the formal education of children entailed an adult teaching a body of knowledge or skills to those a good deal younger than himself. Perhaps the earliest reference we have to schooling of this kind comes from a clay tablet unearthed in Nippur, in Iraq. Dating from around 1700 BC, it says;

The man in charge of Sumerian said: 'Why didn't you speak Sumerian?' He caned me. The teacher said: 'Your handwriting is unsatisfactory.' He caned me. I began to hate learning...

Sounds a lot like my own school days!

There were experiments with other methods of education, especially from the late eighteenth century onwards and including places like Summerhill, but until the 1960s, most schools remained pretty much the same as they had been in Victorian times and before. Rows of children, sitting at desks, facing the front and being handed knowledge by the teacher in charge. No nonsense about the teacher as friend, guide or facilitator; this was the teacher as pedagogue. Those of us who were at school in the 1950s will remember classes of over forty primary school children being taught in this way; all sitting quietly at their desks, copying down what had been written on the blackboard.

The 1960s saw many changes in society. The legalising of homosexuality and abortion, the pill, abolition of censorship, increased freedom of young people and of course enormous changes in the way that schools were run. These changes were part of the revolution which was taking place generally in society at that time. The scrapping of the 11+, the introduction of new and informal methods to primary schools, these are the kind of things I am talking about as regards schools. The changes to primary schools were especially dramatic. Many schools chucked out the desks and arranged the classrooms with small groups sitting around tables. Everything became a lot less formal. Much of what was happening in schools at that time was known by the general term of 'progressive' education.

It is important to realise that the motivations which prompted these changes to the traditional classrooms and teaching methods were philosophical rather than empirical. I mean by this that it was not that objective observers studied what was happening in schools and concluded that the techniques used there were not working. Instead, it was noticed that schools were still being run in a very old fashioned and authoritarian way and this seemed to be increasingly at odds with the changes taking place in the rest of society. The feeling was that it would be nicer if children could stop being regimented and made to sit quietly in rows and if they, like others in sixties society, were allowed more freedom for self expression. Thus did 'progressive' education begin to take over British schools.

From this progressive educational movement grew many of the teaching methods which are common today in schools. Collaborative learning, discovery learning, enquiry-based learning; all these flourished as a result of the ideas which became popular in the 1960s. A lot of the child centred teaching methods used by home educators had their roots too in this period. As I said above, the adoption of all these techniques was not a result of any sort of educational research or evidence that the old, didactic methods had been found wanting. Rather, it was an ethical and philosophical decision because many people felt that it was wrong to boss children about so much and make them sit still while adults taught them. It is important to understand this distinction and not to muddle up the ethical basis for child centred educational methods with any supposed educational benefits. This is not to say that there are no such benefits, but if there are, then these are definitely by way of being a by-product of the whole business.

As I have pointed out recently, questions are now being asked in some quarters about the efficacy of progressive educational methods. Some evidence is emerging which suggests that these methods may not be as effective as straightforward, old-fashioned teaching. Anybody who has watched 'collaborative learning' in action in a classroom setting will readily understand these concerns. It is not uncommon in a primary school to see an entire morning wasted on letting a group of ten year olds find out which substances will float and which will sink in a tank of water. The huge amount of time wasted in some of these episodes puts British children at a great disadvantage educationally compared with the children in some other European countries where more traditional teaching is the norm.

In any debate about unschooling, child centred learning, natural learning, autonomous education, enquiry-based learning and other strands of the progressive education movement, it must always be borne in mind that the motivation behind these things has always been social and ethical, rather than educational. If progressive education were a great improvement in terms of education alone, then we would by now be reaping the fruits of it in a big way. That this does not seem to have happened is causing an increasing number of professionals in the field to start scratching their heads and asking what the educational benefits have been of this revolution.

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A common frame of reference

I don't think that any home educating parent subscribes to the popular myth of the home educated child as a socially inept misfit, irrevocably harmed by his selfish parents' insistence on not allowing him to join a peer group and attend school like everybody else's kids. Certainly, the available research does not seem to bear out this widely held view. Both Rudner in Achievement and Demographics of Home School Students ( Education Policy Analysis Archives Volume 7, No. 8 1999) and also Shyers in Comparison of Social Adjustment between Home and Traditionally School Students (University of Florida, Ph.D Dissertation 1992), found no evidence at all to show that the social skills of home educated children were inferior to those of children at school. Quite the opposite in fact! Both found that home educated children actually scored higher than the schooled. Their social skills tended to be better than those of children confined to classrooms.

There is one way, however, that the home educated child cannot help but be something of an outsider, both during childhood and also in later life. Everybody has been to school. Black or white, Muslim or Christian, rich or poor, male and female, young and old; it is practically the only thing that everybody in this country has in common. The experience of childhood is shaped and defined by school to such an extent that it becomes an integral and assumed part of the background of all the citizens of the United Kingdom. It is a great unifying factor.

Talk to anybody at random and they will have a fund of anecdotes about their childhood, all of them coloured by the background of school. Breaking up for the summer holidays, cold winter's days on the football pitch, school dinners, playtime, the experience of belonging to a close group of friends, even encountering bullying; for almost everybody you meet, this is common ground.
Not so of course for the child educated at home. True, her life might be happier than that of the schoolchild; at least that is what her parents tell themselves. But different, certainly. The children met once a week at a home education group are not the same as the closely knit bunch of friends seen every day for six hours or so at school. Better perhaps, but definitely not the same. Swimming regularly with a parent is not at all the same as changing for PE with your friends at school. Walking to and from school with friends is a different experience from walking to the library or museum with your mother.

Children educated at home by their parents are thus deprived of a common frame of reference shared by everybody else in the country. Even those who have thoroughly enjoyed the experience of being home educated can feel a little wistful about this when all their contemporaries are chatting about school days. Because school still lingers on in the hearts of us, even forty or fifty years after we leave. A lot of adults still have a mental association with September as 'back to school'. It is impossible to see a bunch of schoolchildren without fleetingly remembering one's own school days.

Of course, for the home educating parent, these memories might be more likely to be painful than for most people. It is curious to note the number of high profile home educators whose time at school was unhappy. It may be coincidence, but it looks to me rather a leitmotif of the home educating parent; that they were often bullied or otherwise unhappy at school. Not all of them of course, but a remarkable number make throwaway remarks which reveal that whatever their ostensible motives for home education, the experience of their own school days is a factor in the decision to home educate.

Going to school is, as I observed above, the one thing which we all have in common. I have never met a man of my own age who hadn't been to school and I suspect that this is the case with all the other home educating parents who might be reading this. We all do what we feel to be best for our children, I take that as given, but we should think very carefully before setting our children apart in this way from everybody else in the country whom they are likely to meet!

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The strange case of facilitated communication

During the late eighties I was working in a residential unit for autistic adults with severe learning difficulties. This was quite exciting because these people had absolutely no spoken language and some of them were prone to launching murderous assaults upon anybody who annoyed them in any way. They had all be recently released from long term institutions such as Harperbury Hospital in Hertfordshire, as part of the care in the community programme. While I was working there, we were approached by a group of people who offered to help us communicate more effectively with our residents. At that time most of them knew only a few Makaton signs; Makaton is a simplified version of British Sign Language. The method which was now suggested was facilitated communication.

Facilitated communication was very popular among some of those working with non-verbal autistic people at that time. It worked a bit like a Ouija Board. A large piece of cardboard with the alphabet printed on it was used and the autistic person's arm was held by the communicator and they were 'helped' to point to the letters. The person with severe learning difficulties who had never spoken a word in his life could then communicate by spelling out messages; the whole idea being that these people had actually learned to read and spell by themselves, quite unknown to anybody else. In fact they didn't have learning difficulties at all, they were really just normal people locked into bodies which would not obey them.

It sounded odd to me as I knew all these residents very well and simply could not believe that they could really read and write. The thesis was that their aggressive behaviour was caused by their inability to make themselves understood. Anyway, we went along with it and I watched with interest. it soon became clear to me that the whole thing was nonsense. rather than 'helping' the resident to spell out the words, the facilitator was, whether consciously or not, using the persons hand as a pointer and making up the messages herself. I began asking questions and making notes about what was happening, upon which a curious thing happened. The whole thing stopped working at once. It turned out that close observation had the effect of destroying the trust which existed in the room and damaging what was taking place. I agreed to stop taking notes and limited myself to asking questions of the facilitators when we were alone. It then appeared that even the presence of a sceptic was enough to disrupt what was happening. I was banned from even sitting in on the sessions.

I managed to get this stopped in the end, because the residents own money was being spent on this swindle and it was outrageous. Tests were carried out in the USA on this process and it was found that if the facilitator could not hear the questions being asked, then the autistic person could not answer. It was conclusively demonstrated that, as I suspected, the whole thing was ridiculous.

I mentioned Ouija Boards earlier and this was very similar to my experiences with contacting the dead. Because whenever I have taken part in seances or anything similar, exactly the same thing happens. It will not work while I am present. Very odd.

I have for years been suspicious of any unusual phenomenon which people grow angry about when questioned. I am also very suspicious of any sort of activity which is destroyed or disrupted by being watched or which stops taking place when a cynical observer is present. Transcendental Meditation, the transubstantiation of the Host, summoning up the dead, spoon bending, dowsing and so on are all like this in some way. So of course is autonomous education.

While I was allowed on lists such as HE-UK and EO, I asked many questions about autonomous education. The aim was not to make people angry but to try and make some sense of the thing. I soon discovered that people grew angry and defensive very quickly when questioned about this subject. The idea seemed to be that one should take the existence of this on faith and that it was bad form to be sceptical about it. This is how people react when questioned about their religious beliefs. I also noticed that when discussion turned to research, parents claimed that they would not want an unsympathetic observer to conduct research into autonomous education because their cynicism might harm the educational process. Hence the attempt to organise a boycott of the Ofsted survey last year and the determination of many not to take part in the Department for Education's longitudinal study of home education outcomes. This is similar to the way that dowsers will not allow objective observers to test their abilities. Those using telekinesis to bend spoons or clairvoyance to talk to predict the future also dislike being observed by non-believers. Their powers often fade under lack of sympathy!

There is another similarity between facilitated communication and autonomous education. Parents often follow these unconventional treatments when they feel that they have been failed by orthodox medicine and education. So it is in many cases with autonomous education. Conventional schooling has been a flop for their child and so they turn to alternative methods. An alternative method which cannot be measured, assessed or, most important of all, ever disproved. This has to be an attractive prospect. My child was written off as a failure/bullied/struggled/could not cope, but it was nothing to do with her at all; it was the system which failed. I have seen this many times in the field of autism with not only facilitated communication but also Holding Therapy, mega-vitamins and various other things.

Mind, I do not say that autonomous education actually does fall into the same category as some of the other belief systems which I discuss above; only that its adherents behave in the same way. As far as I am concerned, the jury is still out, but I have to say that my own inclination is moving in a certain direction.

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