Reactions to my home educating

When first it became apparent to my friends and professional acquaintances that I had no intention of sending my daughter to school when she was four or five, there was a general feeling that the experiment would soon fail. As she grew older and started becoming obnoxious, as schoolchildren so often do, I would surely find that spending so much time with the child would drive me mad. Or just wait until she hit puberty! Then I would find the whole thing intolerable, with my daughter screaming abuse at me and refusing point-blank to do as I asked. Even if I could stick at it, what of the poor child’s future? She would have no GCSEs, no prospect of going into higher education, no friends, no social skills. A pretty bleak prospect, all in all!

Of course, a dozen or so years down the road and none of these gloomy predictions have proved to be anything near the mark. The reaction has now changed to one of sourness and my being told that I have been ‘lucky’. Lucky that I have avoided the adolescent rows that nearly all our friends have endured from their children, lucky that my daughter studied hard and did well in her exams, lucky that she has a place at a good university, lucky that she does not lie to us, steal from us, smoke dope; the list is endless. Of course ’luck’ does not really enter into the matter at all. I thought that a lot of the problems of childhood and adolescence are caused by allowing other children to become the dominant influence, rather than the family. I do not think that most schools are up to the job of teaching effectively and so avoided them. These are not questions of luck, I made a series of what seemed to me to be rational choices. Like most home educating parents, we had to make considerable sacrifices to achieve our object. Both of us could only work part-time, which meant a greatly reduced income. I certainly had less freedom than most of the fathers whom I knew. Still, the rewards were also correspondingly greater as well, so I don’t think that I have got the raw end of the deal. Most of those who predicted disaster for my own daughter, view their own adolescent daughters with despair and there seem to be terrible breaches between them and their children.

All in all, the whole home educating enterprise has been a huge success for our family and I shall in a way be sorry to see it end in the autumn. However, all good things come to an end and I shall have plenty with which to occupy myself in the coming years. Which brings me neatly to another point. I observe that some people seem dismayed at the amount that I am writing on this blog. Why this should be, I really could not say; nobody is, after all, compelled to come here and read what I have to say. Indeed, judging by the apoplexy which my views evidently provoke in others, it would perhaps be best if some of my readers gave this place a wide berth! Others seem concerned that I am spending too much time replying to comments here. One hardly knows how to answer such a criticism. It seems to me only courteous that if somebody has taken the trouble to respond to what I have said, then I should listen to their criticism and reply. The fact is, I write tens of thousands of words each week and a few hundred expended on this blog and the other one which I write is neither here nor there among all the other writing in which I am engage. Like many people, I constantly flick back and forth while writing between google, my blogs, the news, spotify and a dozen other places. I suppose that the only remedy which I am able to suggest for those who either dislike my views or are anxious about how frequently I express those views, is not to come here so often themselves. Reading what I have to say does not seem to be a pleasant experience for some and their continued presence here strikes me as being more than a little perverse. Resist the temptation to read this blog, you guys. You know you will feel all the better for abstaining from this pernicious habit!

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The new biological determinism

I tentatively suggested yesterday that some developmental problems in childhood might not be entirely biological in origin. It says something about the modern world that the very idea was greeted by some with anger and disbelief! Why should this be? The answer is historical.

Fifty years ago, practically any mental or development problem was thought to be a consequence of the environment. Autistic children became that way because of remote and unaffectionate parents. Schizophrenia was produced by bad family dynamics. Reading problems were caused by poor teaching, badly behaved children had not received any discipline and all other childhood disorders could generally be traced back to the mother’s actions or lack of action. In the wider field, homosexuality was a result of too much motherly love and alcoholics were weak people who lacked self control. This then was the prevailing paradigm until a few decades ago.

Then it was discovered that certain disorders and syndromes were associated with a distinctive arrangement of genes. The pendulum swung right away from social and psychological explanations for the things mentioned above and we found a genetic cause for practically everything; even stealing and rape were thought initially to have a genetic ’cause’. Obviously, this ’hard’ version of genetic causation is absurd. To give an example from my own life; both my parents were alcoholics, as are my brother and sister. I was myself a little too fond of alcohol and so thirty years ago, I stopped drinking. No doubt in anybody’s mind that if anyone carries the alcoholic gene, it’s me! Now if I went down to the off licence this afternoon and bought a bottle of whiskey and got drunk; would that be caused by my genes? Of course not, it would be my own idiocy to blame. Even when genes give a certain predisposition, there is plenty of leeway for individual choice and the effect of the environment. So too with childhood disorders.

Commenting here yesterday, somebody said apropos of a certain childhood syndrome:

‘Or shall we accept that research is showing that some peoples brains are wired differently and respond to stimuli differently.’

Well of course we shall accept that! It is without doubt true. However it does not explain anything at all. When the baby is born, this wiring is not really in place. The neurones are all there and they are getting ready to make the connections. It is quite true that in the case of children with ADHD or dyslexia the wiring is sometimes, although not always, a little different. How did this come to be? Was it a predetermined response to the genetic instructions or was it caused by the first years of life and the lifestyle of the developing infant? Or, which is far more likely, was it a subtle combination of both? Might it be that the newborn baby had a slight inclination in a certain direction, an inclination which the early environment might bring out and allow to flourish?

The difficulty in accepting that everything, from Heller’s Syndrome to dyslexia, is caused by biological factors is that the families of children presenting with certain disorders do often seem to have certain characteristics. Of course, this does not mean that the families have caused the problem in the first place. Children who are very poor readers often have parents who are semi-literate. Is this environment or heredity? Hard to say. Perhaps the parents have a genetic tendency to dyslexia and it is this which makes them poor readers. They might simply have passed this genetic disorder on to their child. On the other hand, perhaps not having good role models for reading has had a bad effect on the growing child and not taught him the value of literacy.

One thing is clear to me and that is that this is not a popular line of enquiry! Vox populi, vox dei! I shall accordingly drop this particular musing and return to the more practical and vastly less controversial topic of home education. We are as parents eager to take the credit for all the good aspects of our children's characters and often try to unload the less desirable traits onto the influence of others. Sometimes the blame can be laid at the door of fellow schoolchildren who have led them astray, but genetics allows us to lay responsibility for certain parts of our child's behaviour on long dead relatives! It's not Jimmy's fault or mine; his grandfather must have given him the poor reading/hyperactive/bad behaviour/night owl/alcoholic gene.

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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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Testing children at two

It is an unfortunate fact of life that one can always rely upon some of the more vociferous home educating types to oppose anything sensible and support any crackpot idea going the rounds. Some of them seem to have a positively uncanny knack for attacking any initiative likely to benefit children. This is particularly so with things concerning very young children. The so-called ’nappy curriculum’ and the recent announcement that children will be ‘tested’ at two to see how they are doing, being good examples of this tendency.

So why is a it a good idea to check how children are developing when they are two? What possible business of the state’s is it, if my two year-old boy is ’playing nicely’ with other children? This is statism gone mad! Well no, not really. Apart from the obvious advantages to small children of picking up very early any signs of Autistic Spectrum Disorder, language delay, hearing loss and so on; there are other reasons for this move. These are the need to protect the weak and vulnerable in society. Not just the children who are being tested in this way, but also those whom they may later encounter in life. Let me explain.

Twenty years ago, I helped run a support group in East London for mothers with babies and small children. These were parents who were not coping and wanted support. There was a psychologist, a Community Psychiatric Nurse, a social worker and me. The mothers went off for a discussion led by the social worker and CPN, while the rest of us, which included some creche workers, organised activities for the children. (This is of course how why it was possible for me to take my baby to work with me from the age of three weeks old!)

It was often possible to predict fairly accurately what would become of these children when they grew up. This is depressing, but quite true. I have subsequently heard of how these children ended up in their early twenties; I still have a lot of dealings in the area. For instance, one boy of three was ferociously angry and aggressive with all females. He would kick and punch his mother, who did not resist, simply saying feebly: ’Oh, Jadon, don’t’ (His name was not really Jadon, by the way). Jadon would target any little girls in the group, rushing at them and knocking them over. He would spit at women and lash out at them. I was the only man working in this project and consequently the only person there whom he respected or would allow to have anything to do with him. We need not go into the reasons for his behaviour, which was not really his fault. He had witnessed his mother being beaten by various men, for one thing. The point about Jadon is that we all knew perfectly well that unless drastic action was taken, he would go on to be abusive to girls in later life. The mother stopped coming and we lost track of her. A couple of years ago, when he was twenty one, Jadon was convicted of a particularly brutal rape. Nobody who knew him as a three year-old was the least bit surprised.

This is the sort of thing which make it a really good idea to see how children are behaving socially at two; one can often tell how they will then be behaving at twenty two. For many of us, the measure of a good society is the extent to which it protects and looks out for the interests of its weaker members. Too give another reason why it is good to identify children who are unable to play appropriately and interact well with other children at the age of two, one need only look at schools. It only takes one or two disruptive children who are unable to sit down and listen to a story being read, to make teaching in a primary school class very difficult. If in addition to being unable to sit down, these children wander round the room physically attacking other children, then all teaching will become impossible. The teacher and any assistants will simply have to focus on these disruptive children and the quiet and well behaved kids who want to learn, will end up being ignored. This happens a lot. This means that other children’s education is damaged, which is not fair, unless we spot these children early on and take steps to help them. One can often identify these children too at the age of two.

I have an idea that many of those home educating parents who object to identifying children of this sort early on, come from nice homes and find it impossible to imagine the sorts of things about which I have been talking. Believe me, it is possible to spot children who will lead chaotic, disorganised lives very early and it is sometimes possible to do something about it.

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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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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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