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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The need for more doctrinal diversity

I cannot help but notice that a number of people commenting here lately subscribe to the doctrine of predestination. Don’t get me wrong, some of my best friends are Calvinists, but there do seem to be more than an average number here. Mind, there are Calvinists and Calvinists. I have noticed that the further north they come from, the stricter they tend to be about condemning others to perdition. It is to be hoped that those commenting on here have been living in the south long enough to soften their views on matters such as unconditional election and reprobation!

If this trend continues, I might have to start a recruiting drive for Arminians, but I am hoping that matters will not reach this point. Can any non-Calvinists on here now declare themselves? I have an idea that C is a Christian, but we know nothing yet of her theological stance. She seems a reasonable and enlightened woman and I have great hopes that she will turn out to be a Universalist of some sort.

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Home education

I sometimes find listening to the debates of home educators in this country rather like the conversations at the Mad Hatter’s tea party; incomprehensible and lacking in all logic and coherence. Take the exchange yesterday on one of the home education support lists. A woman whose home educated son plays the cornet, wishes him to take music examinations. There were three main suggestions. Two of these were that the mother should contact a school or use a private teacher. The third was from a man who felt that taking examinations in music were unnecessary. This is all very strange.

I am not at all musical, to say the least of it. Nevertheless, I thought that music should be part of a balanced education and felt that it was worth my daughter learning to play a few musical instruments. I accordingly taught her the recorder, piano and guitar. My only knowledge of all this was that I could read music; an ability which anybody could teach themselves in a week or so. I certainly cannot play the guitar or recorder! I mean literally cannot play a single note on either instrument. This does not matter at all. In the end, my daughter dropped the recorder and went on to get Grade 5 at classical guitar and Grade 2 at piano. This was easy enough. One can send off to the ABRSM for the syllabus and then buy the music for the pieces for the examinations. It is also possible to buy a CD of the pieces being played, so that one knows how they should sound. Scales will need to be learned as well, but this is just donkey work and rote learning. No musical ability is required. Anybody can teach any musical instrument at all without any prior knowledge or experience.

Why then all the talk of schools or private teachers? Surely the beauty of home education is that the parents take control of the process and wrest it away from professionals? This minor exchange on a list which has over one and a half thousand members seems to me to shed some light upon the state of home education, at least in Britain. As soon as something slightly out of the run-of-the-mill crops up, the natural impulse seems to be to turn to a professional, rather than to tackle it one’s self. I have been thinking a lot about this business this morning, wondering what it says about the mindset of many home educators. Have they been indoctrinated into believing that anything in the way of formal education must be conducted by a qualified teacher? If so, why are they home educating?

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The Deuchars family; an apology

It was hardly possible to move here yesterday for all the Deuchars of various ages milling around the place. They had come here because I had mentioned the Open University in connection with home education and then stayed to denounce me because I had said that their family had a Christian background; a wholly unacceptable suggestion that both were at pains to deny. One quite sees their point. In much of the British home educating scene, ’Christian home educator’ is more or less synonymous with child-beating religious fundamentalist. I am happy to acquit the family of the damaging allegation that they have a Christian background, which both mother and daughter seemed at pains to deny!

I have in the past been curious to know whether or not Shena Deuchars used the ACE materials and as somebody else raised the subject yesterday, thought it worth adding my own two pennorth. This too provoked irritation, not only on the part of the mother, but also her daughter Katherine who zoomed in at once to abuse me, even ticking me off for not using their church’s full name. Sometimes, people from the United Reformed Church, which was formed in 1972 from an amalgamation of the Congregational Church with the Presbyterians, are referred to, both by themselves and others, as being ’United Reform’ for short. Katherine thought that this was gibberish, although it is not uncommon to hear Methodists, for example, say of somebody, ’Yes, he’s United Reform’, in the same way that one might say ’He’s C of E’. They mean by this to signify that the person is a member of the United Reform Church.

I can see that in future I shall have to be very careful what I say about any matter which might be thought to touch upon the Deuchars, mother and daughter both! No more mention of the Open University, for instance; talk of the OU being thought in Swindon to be a coded attack on their family. It would also be wise perhaps to avoid saying anything further about Christianity, Exeter, law, proof reading or copy editing; one cannot be too careful in avoiding the causing of inadvertent offence. I reserve my own opinionated teenage daughter as an ultimate deterrent; only unleashing her if the situation calls for a devastating response. I can see that others have a lower threshold for going nuclear in this way!

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Academic success for the home educated child

As is well known, I am a great believer in the efficacy of home education. That is why I did not send my daughter to school for a single day. I found the whole process enormous fun, but also very hard work. In all the cases which I have personally encountered, home educated children have succeeded academically only with the input of a huge amount of teaching and encouragement from their parents. It is alleged though, that all this effort may be quite unnecessary. Some parents apparently restrict their role to that of facilitator. The child learns to read without much work on the part of the parents, then goes on to ask to study at the Open University and ends up at a real university; the whole enterprise driven by the child’s desire to learn. In this scenario, the parent only helps when specifically requested and hardly does any teaching at all and that only when the child asks to be taught. It is an enticing vision and could in theory save much trouble and anxiety on the part of home educating parents!

Something which I have observed about both home educating parents known to me and also to the parents of children at school known to me, is that the more that they are involved with their child’s education, the better the child does academically. Another thing that I have noticed is that the harder they have worked, the more that they are prone to deny that they have put any particular effort into the business of their child’s education. I have seen teenagers do marvellously well at sixth form and go on to a Russell Group university and heard the parents express surprise and tell all their friends that they do not understand how the kid managed it. From their accounts, you would think that the child was lazy and that the parents themselves had never bothered overmuch with involving themselves in the matter and yet, here it is; the child is off to the London School of Economics. All this with no hard work on the part of either parent or child. Of course it is all nonsense. These parents have conveniently forgotten the tutors that they paid for every week, the summer schools they arranged, the arguments with the child in which they forbade the kid to go out at weekends and made him stay in and revise instead, the music lessons, the attending church for ten years to get the child into the right school, the appeals when the place was turned down, the letters to teachers; all the paraphernalia of the parent who wants her child to get on.

Why do parents airbrush all this from their family history? There are two reasons. First, nobody likes a pushy parent and it looks a bit sad when a mother is so desperately anxious for her child to succeed. Secondly, the less effort put in by both parents and child, the cleverer the kid appears to be. Nobody went to any trouble and hey, he got to the LSE anyway. Must be a genius!

If the children that end up at good universities are those whose parents put in the most effort, the ones who fail academically often have parents who do not involve themselves in the education and just let the kid get on with it. Most schools see this a lot. Is this the case with home education as well as school? It is hard to say. I know that quite a few home educating parents start off with the idea that Jimmy will organise his own studying and that left to his own devices he will learn not only to read but also pick up calculus and eventually beg his parents to let him study physics with the OU. I have no idea how often this actually happens, but there are certainly quite a few parents who realise in dismay that at the age of fourteen, their son can barely write his own name and has no intention of doing anything much other than cruising the net all day. Some of these parents regret their chosen educational approach and wish that they had organised the child’s education more methodically. I have no idea what the proportions are between these two groups. That is to say, I do not know how many go on to shine academically after being given charge of their own learning and how many just slump in front of a television of computer screen. Judging by my experiences with schooled children, the prognosis for home educated children whose parents push them is likely to be better than those who give them unlimited choice, but it could well be argued that home education and school are so radically different as to make such comparisons meaningless.

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Manipulative local authority officers and others

Yesterday, somebody commented here pointing out that local authority officers might try and manipulate children into saying that that they would rather be at school. This was thought to be a particular danger if the child were allowed to speak alone to such people.

As far as local authority officers asking loaded questions and trying to manoeuvre a child into saying that he wishes to go to school rather than be home educated; of course this happens. It is however only half the story. Local authorities may do this, but so too do parents. Some do it when their children express the desire to stay at home and not go to school. They say things like, ‘Wouldn’t you miss your friends if you were at home with me all day?’ Home educating parents do the same sort of thing to keep their children with them. A child might say that he wishes to go back to school and his mother will say, ‘Oh, don’t you like being with me any more?’ Local authorities are not the only people capable of asking trick questions!

It is not uncommon to see home educating mothers posting on the lists and forums, saying that their children have asked to go to school. Other members of the lists suggest helpful little bits of emotional blackmail and other tricks the parent can try to dissuade their kids from pursuing this reckless course of action. Not one person ever posts the correct answer for these mothers, which is: ‘Let the bloody child go to school if he wants, you selfish witch!’

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Children’s rights: Part 2

In response to the piece on children's rights which I posted the day before yesterday, somebody commented as follows:

‘ How do you feel about the right my children have to choose what and when to learn? Do you think it should be removed?’

This is an excellent point, although not at all straightforward. My answer is that I do not believe that it should be removed, but enhanced. There are two main points to consider in responding to this. The first of these, the extent to which young children are capable of making informed decisions about the education and medical treatment which they wish to receive, I have covered many times in the past. I wish today to look instead at the question of how we are to know what home educated children are actually choosing. We know of course that in some extreme cases, home educating parents do not respect the choices that their children make. One can hardly believe that Theresa Riggi’s children would choose to be hacked to death. What though of the run-of the-mill home educating family? How may we be sure that the children in such families are choosing what happens to them? Of course, we cannot really conduct a survey and so must be restricted to speculating and examining anecdotal evidence.

When my daughter was little, many people tried to persuade her that she should go to school. For instance, her grandparents told her that it was against the law for her not to go to school, a boy at Sunday School said that she would never get a job when she grew up unless she went to school and one teenager claimed that I would be sent to prison if I did not send her to school! I was always happy for people to express such views and allowed my daughter to deal with the matter as she felt best. There were two reasons for this. First, these opinions made her think about the whole not going to school thing, which was good. Secondly, it gave her a chance to deal with ill informed individuals who were saying things which might upset her; something she is bound to encounter in later life! For the same reason, I always left her alone with the local authority officer who visited each year and I arranged for her to give her views to Graham Badman when he was investigating home education. She had far more to say to Graham Badman than I did.

So far, so good. My daughter was exposed to many people who opposed home education in principle and in most cases, I was not present. This is good. It means that from an early age she was forced to confront the choices she made and ask herself if they really were her choices. At any stage, she could have been swayed by others and have chosen to go to school. I mentioned Graham Badman above. I want to consider how some other home educating parents reacted when their children wished to give their views to him. As part of his review, Badman visited a number of groups running for home educated children. One of these was in Kent and it was connected with Ann Newstead, who at the time was a trustee of Education Otherwise and was there during the scene I describe below.

Graham Badman arrived at the group with his minder from the DfCSF and spoke to the parents, many of whom expressed strong opinions about what their children wanted. At one point, he wandered off while his sidekick was harangued by the parents. It was then noticed that he was asking the views of the children themselves. Horrors, there was no telling what the kids would say to him! In fact he was asking them about how they viewed home education. One child said that she wanted to be a vet and Badman asked whether she had any idea about what qualifications she would need to fulfil this ambition. Everything was very amicable and the children were enjoying being given the chance to express their own views. This ended as soon as some parents saw what was happening. They charged up and ’rescued’ their children. The kids were given the impression that they had narrowly escaped being grabbed by the child-catcher and the overall feeling generated was that this was some sort of stranger danger. So agitated were the parents, that a couple of the children became upset. They did not know what was happening or what they had done wrong. That was the end of Badman actually being able to listen to the views of any home educated children that day; it was made clear to him that the children’s views should be transmitted by the parents and not taken directly from the kids themselves.

This was not an isolated example and whether or not it led to the recommendation in Badman’s report that local authority officers should be allowed to speak alone to children, I don’t know. Does anybody see the nature of the problem here? The person who commented a few days ago asked whether I thought her children should be free to choose how they learn. The difficulty is that she is the one who is telling us about her children’s choices; not her children themselves. Quite a few parents are determined not to allow any local authority officer to visit their homes. Those who do seem reluctant to allow their children to speak alone to such people. I cannot for the life of me see why. I dare say that some of these EHE advisors are opposed to home education and perhaps one or two would try to argue with a child and advise them against home education. So what? Why would any parent object to that? I simply don’t get this. When my daughter told me that her grandmother, the woman in the library, person at church, boy at Woodcraft Folk and so on had criticised home education, I would ask her what she thought about their opinions. What did I know; perhaps she secretly wanted to go to school?

And so in answer to the comment with which I began this piece, I think that up to a point children should be able to choose the content and style of their education. Establishing that they, rather than their parents, have chosen this is likely to prove tricky. As long as so many home educating parents are anxious to prevent their children speaking unguardedly to others about home education, one cannot but have the sneaking suspicion that the education being provided has more to do with an adult’s ideological beliefs, rather than her child’s informed choice.

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