Great to read Graham Stuart's speech in the house of commons earlier today; I was worried that a rush of power to the head had changed Graham Stuart's support and understanding of HE, but credit where credit is due, he listened, took note, researched and admitted he'd got it wrong - a rare thing indeed in a politician.
Very interesting to read the comments of old adversaries such as Barry Sheerman too.
Also good to see Local Authorities illegal interpretation of HE shown up and recorded in Hansard.
Starts at the bottom of column 1216 here
Showing posts with label home education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label home education. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Friday, August 6, 2010
The Children Were Educated in a School
That is the headline we never see when a tragedy unfolds, ok so it's hardly big news is it? Most children go to school. This is something that social scientists refer to as an "unmarked identity", that is: something which is taken for granted, a social norm. Home educated children, by contrast, have a "marked identity" - something which is defined in my OU text book like this:
"... the marked identity never goes unnoticed and usually carries a negative value."
The BBC, as ever, loves to point out the marked identity of home education, it can't seem to help itself even when other journalists manage to write perfectly good copy without resorting to the spreading of prejudice against a minority group which has had more than it's fair share of attacks in the past 18 months.
Maybe, if every time a child died, the fact that they had attended that great social safety net that is a school was pointed out to them, people might start to question this form of education too. >hollow laughter<
This story is what has prompted this mini rant, if you haven't already seen it. Home Education Forums has an excellent rebuff on it's blog here.
"... the marked identity never goes unnoticed and usually carries a negative value."
The BBC, as ever, loves to point out the marked identity of home education, it can't seem to help itself even when other journalists manage to write perfectly good copy without resorting to the spreading of prejudice against a minority group which has had more than it's fair share of attacks in the past 18 months.
Maybe, if every time a child died, the fact that they had attended that great social safety net that is a school was pointed out to them, people might start to question this form of education too. >hollow laughter<
This story is what has prompted this mini rant, if you haven't already seen it. Home Education Forums has an excellent rebuff on it's blog here.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
My BBC Complaint
Yes it's a rant I'm afraid.
*Home Educators have been waiting months for the grave robbing activities of the government and press to start up again, and here we have it.
Graham Badman said himself in his own report, which the government accepted in full, that he found NO EVIDENCE that home education was being used as a cover for abuse. He knew about the Ishaq case at the time he wrote the report. He is now pouring forth vitriol because he was caught out using dodgy statistics and bare faced lies in order to do his master's bidding.
Such a pity that a Great British institution is in the pockets of it's masters over at LIEbour central. More gongs for the boys no doubt.
Slandering a minority group by using a dead child, a child who died because of the lack of care of the authorities, authorities who already had the power to save her, is disgusting, and you should have your license to broadcast removed as a result."
ETA: Maire's complaint here
Debs complaint here
Firebird is keeping a Media Watch here
Jax complains here
If you'd like to make a more effective complaint than my rant (wise!) there is great advice here
Will add more as they are blogged
*Home Educators have been waiting months for the grave robbing activities of the government and press to start up again, and here we have it.
Graham Badman said himself in his own report, which the government accepted in full, that he found NO EVIDENCE that home education was being used as a cover for abuse. He knew about the Ishaq case at the time he wrote the report. He is now pouring forth vitriol because he was caught out using dodgy statistics and bare faced lies in order to do his master's bidding.
Such a pity that a Great British institution is in the pockets of it's masters over at LIEbour central. More gongs for the boys no doubt.
Slandering a minority group by using a dead child, a child who died because of the lack of care of the authorities, authorities who already had the power to save her, is disgusting, and you should have your license to broadcast removed as a result."
ETA: Maire's complaint here
Debs complaint here
Firebird is keeping a Media Watch here
Jax complains here
If you'd like to make a more effective complaint than my rant (wise!) there is great advice here
Will add more as they are blogged
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Handing the Floor to Gatto
Take Back Your Education
By John Taylor Gatto
09 February, 2010
Yes Magazine
More and more people across America are waking up to the mismatch between what is taught in schools and what common sense tells us we need to know. What can you do about it?
Nobody gives you an education. If you want one, you have to take it.
Only you can educate you—and you can’t do it by memorizing. You have to find out who you are by experience and by risk-taking, then pursue your own nature intensely. School routines are set up to discourage you from self-discovery. People who know who they are make trouble for schools.
To know yourself, you have to keep track of your random choices, figure out your patterns, and use this knowledge to dominate your own mind. It’s the only way that free will can grow. If you avoid this, other minds will manipulate and control you lifelong.
One method people use to find out who they are becoming, before others do, is to keep a journal, where they log what attracts their attention, along with some commentary. In this way, you get to listen to yourself instead of listening only to others.
Another path to self-discovery that seems to have atrophied through schooling lies in finding a mentor. People aren’t the only mentors. Books can serve as mentors if you learn to read intensely, with every sense alert to nuances. Books can change your life, as mentors do.
I experienced precious little of such thinking in 30 years of teaching in the public junior high schools of Manhattan’s ultra-progressive Upper West Side. I was by turns amused, disgusted, and disbelieving when confronted with the curriculum—endless drills of fractions and decimals, reading assignments of science fiction, Jack London, and one or two Shakespeare plays for which the language had been simplified. The strategy was to kill time and stave off the worst kinds of boredom that can lead to trouble—the trouble that comes from being made aware that you are trapped in irrelevancy and powerless to escape.
Institutionalized schooling, I gradually realized, is about obedience in exchange for favors and advantages: Sit where I tell you, speak when I allow it, memorize what I’ve told you to memorize. Do these things, and I’ll take care to put you above your classmates.
Wouldn’t you think everyone could figure out that school “achievement tests” measure no achievement that common sense would recognize? The surrender required of students meets the primary duty of bureaucratic establishment: to protect established order.
It wasn’t always this way. Classical schooling—the kind I was lucky enough to have growing up—teaches independent thought, appreciation for great works, and an experience of the world not found within the confines of a classroom. It was an education that is missing in public schools today but still exists in many private schools—and can for you and your children, too, if you take time to learn how to learn.
On the Wrong Side of the Tracks
In the fall of 2009, a documentary film will be released by a resident of my hometown of Monongahela, Pennsylvania. Laura Magone’s film, “One Extraordinary Street,” centers on a two-mile-long road that parallels polluted Pigeon Creek. Park Avenue, as it’s called, is on the wrong side of the tracks in this little-known coal-mining burg of 4,500 souls.
So far Park Avenue has produced an Army chief of staff, the founder of the Disney Channel, the inventor of the Nerf football, the only professional baseball player to ever strike out all 27 enemy batsmen in a nine-inning game, a winner of the National Book Award, a respected cardiologist, Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Montana, and the writer whose words you’re reading.
Did the education Monongahela offered make all these miracles possible? I don’t know. It was an education filled with hands-on experience, including cooking the school meals, serving them individually (not cafeteria-style) on tablecloths, and cleaning up afterward. Students handled the daily maintenance, including basic repairs. If you weren’t earning money and adding value to the town by the age of seven, you were considered a jerk. I swept out a printing office daily, sold newspapers, shoveled snow, cut grass, and sold lemonade.
Classical schooling isn’t psychologically driven. The ancient Greeks discovered thousands of years ago that rules and ironclad procedures, when taken too seriously, burn out imagination, stifle courage, and wipe the leadership clean of resourcefulness. Greek education was much more like play, with studies undertaken for their own sake, to satisfy curiosity. It assumed that sane children want to grow up and recognized that childhood ends much earlier than modern society typically allows.
We read Caesar’s Gallic Wars—in translation between fifth and seventh grades and, for those who wanted, in Latin in ninth and tenth grades. Caesar was offered to us not as some historical relic but as a workshop in dividing and conquering superior enemies. We read The Odyssey as an aid to thinking about the role of family in a good life, as the beating heart of meaning.
Monongahela’s education integrated students, from first grade on, into the intimate life and culture of the town. Its classrooms were free of the familiar tools of official pedagogy—dumbed-down textbooks, massively irrelevant standardized tests, insanely slowed-down sequences. It was an education rich in relationships, tradition, and respect for the best that’s been written. It was a growing-up that demanded real achievement.
The admissions director at Harvard College told The New York Times a few years ago that Harvard admits only students with a record of distinctive accomplishment. I instantly thought of the Orwellian newspeak at my own Manhattan school where achievement tests were the order of the day. What achievement? Like the noisy royalty who intimidated Alice until her head cleared and she realized they were only a pack of cards, school achievement is just a pack of words.
A Deliberate Saboteur
As a schoolteacher, I was determined to act as a deliberate saboteur, and so for 30 years I woke up committed to making the system hurt in some small way and to changing the destiny of children in my orbit in a large way.
Without the eclectic grounding in classical training that I had partially absorbed, neither goal would have been possible. I set out to use the classical emphasis on qualities and specific powers. I collected from every kid a list of three powers they felt they already possessed and three weaknesses they might like to remedy in the course of the school year.
I pledged to them that I’d do my level best inside the limitations the institution imposed to make time, advice, and support available toward everyone’s private goals. There would be group lessons as worthwhile as I could come up with, but my priorities were the opportunities outside the room, outside the school, even outside the city, to strengthen a power or work on a weakness.
I let a 13-year-old boy who dreamed of being a comic-book writer spend a week in the public library—with the assistance of the librarian—to learn the tricks of graphic storytelling. I sent a shy 13-year-old girl in the company of a loudmouth classmate to the state capitol—she to speak to her local legislator, he to teach her how to be fearless. Today, that shy girl is a trial attorney.
If you understand where a kid wants to go—the kid has to understand that first—it isn’t hard to devise exercises, complete with academics, that can take them there.
But school often acts as an obstacle to success. To go from the confinement of early childhood to the confinement of the classroom to the confinement of homework, working to amass a record entitling you to a “good” college, where the radical reduction of your spirit will continue, isn’t likely to build character or prepare you for a good life.
I quit teaching in 1991 and set out to discover where this destructive institution had come from, why it had taken the shape it had, how it managed to beat back its many critics for a century while growing bigger and more intrusive, and what we might do about it.
School does exactly what it was created to do: It solves, or at least mitigates, the problem of a restless, ambitious labor pool, so deadly for capitalist economies; and it confronts democracy’s other deadly problem—that ordinary people might one day learn to un-divide themselves, band together in the common interest, and take control of the institutions that shape their lives.
The present system of institutionalized schooling is a product of two or three centuries of economic and political thinking that spread primarily from a militaristic state in the disunited Germanies known as Prussia. That philosophy destroyed classical training for the common people, reserving it for those who were expected to become leaders. Education, in the words of famous economists (such as William Playfair), captains of industry (Andrew Carnegie), and even a man who would be president (Woodrow Wilson), was a means of keeping the middle and lower classes in line and of keeping the engines of capitalism running.
In a 1909 address to New York City teachers, Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said, “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity to forgo the privilege of a liberal education.”
My job isn’t to indict Woodrow or anyone else, only to show you how inevitable the schools you hate must be in the economy and social order we’re stuck with. Liberal education served the ancient Greeks well until they got too rich to allow it, just as it served America the same way until we got too rich to allow it.
What Can You Do About All This? A lot.
You can make the system an offer it can’t refuse by doing small things, individually.
You can publicly oppose—in writing, in speech, in actions—anything that will perpetuate the institution as it is. The accumulated weight of your resistance and disapproval, together with that of thousands more, will erode the energy of any bureaucracy.
You can calmly refuse to take standardized tests. Follow the lead of Melville’s moral genius in Bartleby, the Scrivener, and ask everyone, politely, to write: “I prefer not to take this test” on the face of the test packet.
You can, of course, homeschool or unschool. You can inform your kids that bad grades won’t hurt them at all in life, if they actually learn to master valuable skills and put them on offer to the world at large. And you can begin to free yourself from the conditioned fear that not being accepted at a “good” college will preclude you from a comfortable life. If the lack of a college degree didn’t stop Steve Jobs (Apple), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Michael Dell (Dell Computer), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Ingvar Kamprad (IKEA), Warren Avis (Avis Rent-a-Car), Ted Turner (CNN), and so many others, then it shouldn’t be too hard for you to see that you’ve been bamboozled, flummoxed, played for a sap by the propaganda mills of schooling. Get rid of your assumptions.
If you are interested in education, I’ve tried to show you a little about how that’s done, and I have faith you can learn the rest on your own. Schooling operates out of an assumption that ordinary people are biologically or psychologically or politically inferior; education assumes that individuals are sovereign spirits. Societies that don’t know that need to be changed or broken.
Once you take responsibility for your own education, you’ll join a growing army of men and women all across America who are waking up to the mismatch schools inflict on the young—a mismatch between what common sense tells you they’ll need to know, and what is actually taught. You’ll have the exquisite luxury of being able to adapt to conditions, to opportunities, to the particular spirits of your kids. With you as educational czar or czarina, feedback becomes your friend and guide.
I’ve traveled 3 million miles to every corner of this country and 12 others, and believe me, people everywhere are gradually waking up and striking out in new directions. Don’t wait for the government to say it’s OK, just come on in—the water’s fine.
John Taylor Gatto wrote this article for Learn as You Go, the Fall 2009 issue of YES! Magazine. Gatto was a New York State Teacher of the Year. An advocate for school reform, Gatto’s books include Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling and Weapons of Mass Instruction.
YES! Magazine encourages you to make free use of this article by taking these easy steps. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
By John Taylor Gatto
09 February, 2010
Yes Magazine
More and more people across America are waking up to the mismatch between what is taught in schools and what common sense tells us we need to know. What can you do about it?
Nobody gives you an education. If you want one, you have to take it.
Only you can educate you—and you can’t do it by memorizing. You have to find out who you are by experience and by risk-taking, then pursue your own nature intensely. School routines are set up to discourage you from self-discovery. People who know who they are make trouble for schools.
To know yourself, you have to keep track of your random choices, figure out your patterns, and use this knowledge to dominate your own mind. It’s the only way that free will can grow. If you avoid this, other minds will manipulate and control you lifelong.
One method people use to find out who they are becoming, before others do, is to keep a journal, where they log what attracts their attention, along with some commentary. In this way, you get to listen to yourself instead of listening only to others.
Another path to self-discovery that seems to have atrophied through schooling lies in finding a mentor. People aren’t the only mentors. Books can serve as mentors if you learn to read intensely, with every sense alert to nuances. Books can change your life, as mentors do.
I experienced precious little of such thinking in 30 years of teaching in the public junior high schools of Manhattan’s ultra-progressive Upper West Side. I was by turns amused, disgusted, and disbelieving when confronted with the curriculum—endless drills of fractions and decimals, reading assignments of science fiction, Jack London, and one or two Shakespeare plays for which the language had been simplified. The strategy was to kill time and stave off the worst kinds of boredom that can lead to trouble—the trouble that comes from being made aware that you are trapped in irrelevancy and powerless to escape.
Institutionalized schooling, I gradually realized, is about obedience in exchange for favors and advantages: Sit where I tell you, speak when I allow it, memorize what I’ve told you to memorize. Do these things, and I’ll take care to put you above your classmates.
Wouldn’t you think everyone could figure out that school “achievement tests” measure no achievement that common sense would recognize? The surrender required of students meets the primary duty of bureaucratic establishment: to protect established order.
It wasn’t always this way. Classical schooling—the kind I was lucky enough to have growing up—teaches independent thought, appreciation for great works, and an experience of the world not found within the confines of a classroom. It was an education that is missing in public schools today but still exists in many private schools—and can for you and your children, too, if you take time to learn how to learn.
On the Wrong Side of the Tracks
In the fall of 2009, a documentary film will be released by a resident of my hometown of Monongahela, Pennsylvania. Laura Magone’s film, “One Extraordinary Street,” centers on a two-mile-long road that parallels polluted Pigeon Creek. Park Avenue, as it’s called, is on the wrong side of the tracks in this little-known coal-mining burg of 4,500 souls.
So far Park Avenue has produced an Army chief of staff, the founder of the Disney Channel, the inventor of the Nerf football, the only professional baseball player to ever strike out all 27 enemy batsmen in a nine-inning game, a winner of the National Book Award, a respected cardiologist, Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Montana, and the writer whose words you’re reading.
Did the education Monongahela offered make all these miracles possible? I don’t know. It was an education filled with hands-on experience, including cooking the school meals, serving them individually (not cafeteria-style) on tablecloths, and cleaning up afterward. Students handled the daily maintenance, including basic repairs. If you weren’t earning money and adding value to the town by the age of seven, you were considered a jerk. I swept out a printing office daily, sold newspapers, shoveled snow, cut grass, and sold lemonade.
Classical schooling isn’t psychologically driven. The ancient Greeks discovered thousands of years ago that rules and ironclad procedures, when taken too seriously, burn out imagination, stifle courage, and wipe the leadership clean of resourcefulness. Greek education was much more like play, with studies undertaken for their own sake, to satisfy curiosity. It assumed that sane children want to grow up and recognized that childhood ends much earlier than modern society typically allows.
We read Caesar’s Gallic Wars—in translation between fifth and seventh grades and, for those who wanted, in Latin in ninth and tenth grades. Caesar was offered to us not as some historical relic but as a workshop in dividing and conquering superior enemies. We read The Odyssey as an aid to thinking about the role of family in a good life, as the beating heart of meaning.
Monongahela’s education integrated students, from first grade on, into the intimate life and culture of the town. Its classrooms were free of the familiar tools of official pedagogy—dumbed-down textbooks, massively irrelevant standardized tests, insanely slowed-down sequences. It was an education rich in relationships, tradition, and respect for the best that’s been written. It was a growing-up that demanded real achievement.
The admissions director at Harvard College told The New York Times a few years ago that Harvard admits only students with a record of distinctive accomplishment. I instantly thought of the Orwellian newspeak at my own Manhattan school where achievement tests were the order of the day. What achievement? Like the noisy royalty who intimidated Alice until her head cleared and she realized they were only a pack of cards, school achievement is just a pack of words.
A Deliberate Saboteur
As a schoolteacher, I was determined to act as a deliberate saboteur, and so for 30 years I woke up committed to making the system hurt in some small way and to changing the destiny of children in my orbit in a large way.
Without the eclectic grounding in classical training that I had partially absorbed, neither goal would have been possible. I set out to use the classical emphasis on qualities and specific powers. I collected from every kid a list of three powers they felt they already possessed and three weaknesses they might like to remedy in the course of the school year.
I pledged to them that I’d do my level best inside the limitations the institution imposed to make time, advice, and support available toward everyone’s private goals. There would be group lessons as worthwhile as I could come up with, but my priorities were the opportunities outside the room, outside the school, even outside the city, to strengthen a power or work on a weakness.
I let a 13-year-old boy who dreamed of being a comic-book writer spend a week in the public library—with the assistance of the librarian—to learn the tricks of graphic storytelling. I sent a shy 13-year-old girl in the company of a loudmouth classmate to the state capitol—she to speak to her local legislator, he to teach her how to be fearless. Today, that shy girl is a trial attorney.
If you understand where a kid wants to go—the kid has to understand that first—it isn’t hard to devise exercises, complete with academics, that can take them there.
But school often acts as an obstacle to success. To go from the confinement of early childhood to the confinement of the classroom to the confinement of homework, working to amass a record entitling you to a “good” college, where the radical reduction of your spirit will continue, isn’t likely to build character or prepare you for a good life.
I quit teaching in 1991 and set out to discover where this destructive institution had come from, why it had taken the shape it had, how it managed to beat back its many critics for a century while growing bigger and more intrusive, and what we might do about it.
School does exactly what it was created to do: It solves, or at least mitigates, the problem of a restless, ambitious labor pool, so deadly for capitalist economies; and it confronts democracy’s other deadly problem—that ordinary people might one day learn to un-divide themselves, band together in the common interest, and take control of the institutions that shape their lives.
The present system of institutionalized schooling is a product of two or three centuries of economic and political thinking that spread primarily from a militaristic state in the disunited Germanies known as Prussia. That philosophy destroyed classical training for the common people, reserving it for those who were expected to become leaders. Education, in the words of famous economists (such as William Playfair), captains of industry (Andrew Carnegie), and even a man who would be president (Woodrow Wilson), was a means of keeping the middle and lower classes in line and of keeping the engines of capitalism running.
In a 1909 address to New York City teachers, Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said, “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity to forgo the privilege of a liberal education.”
My job isn’t to indict Woodrow or anyone else, only to show you how inevitable the schools you hate must be in the economy and social order we’re stuck with. Liberal education served the ancient Greeks well until they got too rich to allow it, just as it served America the same way until we got too rich to allow it.
What Can You Do About All This? A lot.
You can make the system an offer it can’t refuse by doing small things, individually.
You can publicly oppose—in writing, in speech, in actions—anything that will perpetuate the institution as it is. The accumulated weight of your resistance and disapproval, together with that of thousands more, will erode the energy of any bureaucracy.
You can calmly refuse to take standardized tests. Follow the lead of Melville’s moral genius in Bartleby, the Scrivener, and ask everyone, politely, to write: “I prefer not to take this test” on the face of the test packet.
You can, of course, homeschool or unschool. You can inform your kids that bad grades won’t hurt them at all in life, if they actually learn to master valuable skills and put them on offer to the world at large. And you can begin to free yourself from the conditioned fear that not being accepted at a “good” college will preclude you from a comfortable life. If the lack of a college degree didn’t stop Steve Jobs (Apple), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Michael Dell (Dell Computer), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Ingvar Kamprad (IKEA), Warren Avis (Avis Rent-a-Car), Ted Turner (CNN), and so many others, then it shouldn’t be too hard for you to see that you’ve been bamboozled, flummoxed, played for a sap by the propaganda mills of schooling. Get rid of your assumptions.
If you are interested in education, I’ve tried to show you a little about how that’s done, and I have faith you can learn the rest on your own. Schooling operates out of an assumption that ordinary people are biologically or psychologically or politically inferior; education assumes that individuals are sovereign spirits. Societies that don’t know that need to be changed or broken.
Once you take responsibility for your own education, you’ll join a growing army of men and women all across America who are waking up to the mismatch schools inflict on the young—a mismatch between what common sense tells you they’ll need to know, and what is actually taught. You’ll have the exquisite luxury of being able to adapt to conditions, to opportunities, to the particular spirits of your kids. With you as educational czar or czarina, feedback becomes your friend and guide.
I’ve traveled 3 million miles to every corner of this country and 12 others, and believe me, people everywhere are gradually waking up and striking out in new directions. Don’t wait for the government to say it’s OK, just come on in—the water’s fine.
John Taylor Gatto wrote this article for Learn as You Go, the Fall 2009 issue of YES! Magazine. Gatto was a New York State Teacher of the Year. An advocate for school reform, Gatto’s books include Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling and Weapons of Mass Instruction.
YES! Magazine encourages you to make free use of this article by taking these easy steps. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Home Educators are Racist, Child Abusing, Religious Extremists
No this picture is not of a home educating family having a jolly little BNP stylee knees up, this is a photo of that rational, intelligent, family guy who is head of the department which is now resorting to using the BNP smear card against us, because we dare to SAY NO. How to say NO is something dear old Ed could learn from us. That is of course if the truth of the matter is that he *only wore the uniform so as not to upset his friends* - sounds a bit similar to that old nazi war criminal defence of *I woz only doin' me job mate*....
We watched the *debate* in the Commons yesterday, and I can honestly say that it made me ashamed to be English. If that is the kind of behaviour those who run our country think is acceptable (and consider that all but maybe one of them are the result of the school system) then you can take your school system and shove it where the sun never shines. My children are better behaved, and have more respect for others than the lot of you. You do not have any right to tell us how to run our lives. Consider yourselves fired.
previous related articles:
Aren't you all hippies, weirdos and religious nutcases?
Home Education Diversity Survey Results
ETA: This tickled me as a concept - Cromwell your MP it's anonymous, incase that makes a difference ;)
And again ETA: Gill has, as ever, written an excellent post on yesterday's events here.
And another ETA: BillySu has done a fabulous collection of graphs - great visuals.
Ah, and Grit, dear Grit, tells it as only she can. Bravo!
Sunday, January 3, 2010
No Smoke Without Fire
So the saying goes. It's not always true though is it, as we frequently find out when trying to light our stove!
I've read in a few places recently, that the reason the government's idea of a licensing scheme won't work to save home educated children at risk, is because those who have something to hide will just move home and go underground, and it will be the innocents who suffer most from the unwarranted intrusion of the state into their lives.
I have to say that I am really rather affronted by this type of attempt to argue the case against licensing. However, if memory serves me correctly, I shouldn't really be surprised, considering the source.
We are currently in the process of preparing our house for the market, but that doesn't mean that we have *something to hide*, it just means that we don't want to stay in a country which shows such distrust in us, and which is quite happy to sanction the abuse of our children by the state. We know that we aren't alone in wanting to leave this country, we know many people who don't home educate who wish to leave the sinking ship that is England. Will they find themselves hunted down by interpol* for daring to find a better place to bring up their children? Not yet, perhaps.
What irks me is that our children have been consulted, their opinions have been listened to, and they will be acted on. This is how our family has always worked, much to the horror of quite a few people, but it seems like a perfectly reasonable way to operate a family to us. Now if the government would only take a leaf out of the books of those of us who parent in this way, perhaps articles like this one (from whence the following apposite quote comes) wouldn't be being written in today's press.
"Labour made a disastrous mistake when it abandoned its own tradition of self-help and mutual assistance for a distrustful bureaucratic state. We are not willing to be the helpless observers of our lives."
And this is exactly why we plan on moving, not because we are the foul,child abusing people who aren't giving their children a *decent* education that some sections of our own community seem to be painting, but because we believe that we are responsible people, who deserve to be trusted to do the right thing for our family, and we wish our children to be brought up to believe the same of themselves.
* this has actually happened to a Home Educating family I know, who moved from the UK to another European country.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Balls Recommends Licensing as a Result of Incestuous Amplification
Synchronicity is a funny thing. You can be happily reading a book about one of the greatest medical cons of our time, when BANG, a phrase hits you right between the eyes, and you suddenly have a diagnosis for all the troubles of the past year.
Incestuous Amplification.
This is a military term, which is in itself interesting, considering it feels as though we have been fighting in a dirty battle since January 19th.
In psychological circles it is known as *group polarisation*, but I prefer the military term myself, it fits far better with our government's propensity for the *sexing up* of documents, don't you think?
"In a nutshell: Like-minded people, talking only with one another, usually end up believing a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk."
—Cass R. Sunstein, "The Power of Dissent," Los Angeles Times, September 17, 2003
It certainly seems to have worked in the most incredibly powerful way as this tale of a Home Educator and her young child who were doorstepped only this week, shows: they were left shaken and distressed after suffering various threats, and were told (presumably as justification for such appalling treatment) that:
"Home Educators are more likely to abuse their children."
We have the stats that totally disprove this, but if a BAD MAN repeats the lie often enough, and to groups of people who really want to believe it to be true, then the lie becomes a truth - in the eyes of those who have been guilty of incestuous amplification at least.
Remember, incestuous amplification means: The observer sees what he wants to see rather than what is. When this happens, the Decisions and Actions flowing from that Orientation become progressively disconnected from reality.
Wishing you all a New Year free from Balls, Bad Men and Incestuous Amplification.
Incestuous Amplification.
This is a military term, which is in itself interesting, considering it feels as though we have been fighting in a dirty battle since January 19th.
In psychological circles it is known as *group polarisation*, but I prefer the military term myself, it fits far better with our government's propensity for the *sexing up* of documents, don't you think?
"In a nutshell: Like-minded people, talking only with one another, usually end up believing a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk."
—Cass R. Sunstein, "The Power of Dissent," Los Angeles Times, September 17, 2003
It certainly seems to have worked in the most incredibly powerful way as this tale of a Home Educator and her young child who were doorstepped only this week, shows: they were left shaken and distressed after suffering various threats, and were told (presumably as justification for such appalling treatment) that:
"Home Educators are more likely to abuse their children."
We have the stats that totally disprove this, but if a BAD MAN repeats the lie often enough, and to groups of people who really want to believe it to be true, then the lie becomes a truth - in the eyes of those who have been guilty of incestuous amplification at least.
Remember, incestuous amplification means: The observer sees what he wants to see rather than what is. When this happens, the Decisions and Actions flowing from that Orientation become progressively disconnected from reality.
Wishing you all a New Year free from Balls, Bad Men and Incestuous Amplification.
Friday, December 4, 2009
Anyone for Monopoly?
I used to love playing monopoly, and spent many happy (and not so happy when I was losing!) hours playing. I used to find the *go straight to jail, do not pass go, do not collect £200* part of it rather irritating, but the chances of landing that one were fairly small so it wasn't a big deal.
Imagine for a minute if every other space was a *straight to jail* one. I don't think many people would have bothered playing, and the game would never have become the world wide success it is today. It's quite amazing the number of different monopoly boards out there on the market now - Star Wars to Simpsons with many international cities having their very own boards. Would you believe you can even get a *make your own* board for real personalisation.
I never in my wildest flights of imagination thought that I would ever compare Home Education to monopoly, but this is what I am doing.
The latest government proposals regarding Home Education equate to the *straight to jail* space on every other square of the board.
If anything deviates from your plan -- SAO
If your circumstances change -- SAO
If your child doesn't want to meet, his/her opinion doesn't count -- SAO
If you don't make the meeting because you are away for more than 2 weeks and miss the notification -- SAO
If you are educating brilliantly, your child has 99 GCSES but you are unregistered -- SAO (they must not consider your provision)
If you have been refused registration once you can always be refused-- SAO
If your circumstances change -- SAO
If your child doesn't want to meet, his/her opinion doesn't count -- SAO
If you don't make the meeting because you are away for more than 2 weeks and miss the notification -- SAO
If you are educating brilliantly, your child has 99 GCSES but you are unregistered -- SAO (they must not consider your provision)
If you have been refused registration once you can always be refused-- SAO
What is this SAO? It is a School Attendance Order, which basically means that you must send your child to the school named by the local authority otherwise you are breaking the law. SAOs can be used already, but local authorities rarely bother, partly, I think, because they are expensive and ineffective. Why? Well as the law stands, if a parent is issued with a School Attendance Order, they can take their case to court and it is up to the judge to decide if, on the balance of probabilities, an education suitable to the child's age, aptitude and ability is being provided by the parent. If the Judge decides it is, the SAO does not stand.
What this government proposes doing beggars belief. They are suggesting that what should happen is that if a School Attendance Order is issued, the court CANNOT look at the parent's provision.
Damned every which way.
For many years government and local authorities have wittered on about the *loop hole* that is Home Education. Of course Home Education is nothing of the sort, it is the default position, all others are imposters. Clearly though government wishes to shut off every possible *loop hole*, and yet, it says that it supports a parent's right to home educate?
This is not benign legislation, anyone who thinks it is is quite frankly deluded.
Thanks to Karen for the bullet points.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Irony
Lately I can't help but chuckle at the irony of the words of our *esteemed leaders* (or do I mean *running out of steam*?)
Take for instance this quote from the Telegraph:
"If we bandy around accusations regardless of the facts, and take action regardless of the evidence, we will just end up alienating the very communities we need to help us tackle extremism."
Oh, right, so we can safely assume then that this level headed person would never over see the eradication of a community based on flawed evidence? Ah, no, silly me, of course not, because this is the same person who supported the Badman review in its entirety, and who has now commissioned the most shocking piece of anti parent and anti child legislation that this country has ever seen.
It's ok though, because Ed also says:
"We all have a duty to stand up for the values that underpin our society.
That does mean challenging those who actively seek to undermine them and influence others to do the same - on the streets, on the Internet or behind closed doors."
Which is exactly what we're doing Ed, so perhaps you might have a word in the shell like of your laccies over at DCSF central and get them to stop issuing nasty letters to people who are just *doing what you told us to*.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Inspiration
It's been a while since I've felt compelled to blog anything much, but this morning I woke up with a seed of an idea in my head. The morning and family life seem to have sent it off into the four winds though, so I shall scrabble about trying to catch that pesky seed and see if I can help it grow! I suspect it won't turn out to be quite what I thought it would be this morning, but isn't that just like life?
It's been a bit of a bumpy ride around here the past couple of weeks. We've have had the most horrendously stressful year, thanks to the government and a certain Bad Man. Whilst we have generally been hopeful of a positive outcome, the truly shocking news of just what is planned for home ed, should that wretched children, schools and families bill become law, really knocked us for six - one blogger really summed it up when she called it vindictive legislation and Kelly sums up the abusiveness to a T.
We have had long conversations about our options. We have had tears; we have had anger and raging fury; we have had shock, dismay and disgust and we have had a feeling of total impotence in the face of forces stronger than us.
Thankfully, as we have plumbed the depths of despair, other home educating friends have been feeling their strength and power; their joy and sense of wonder; their dogged determination and that has lifted us once more. It's a constant ebb and flow, up and down existence that we are living right now, but living it we are - an organic experience if ever there was one!
A friend of mine wrote this as her facebook status this morning:
"She will reach higher than the mire they spread :) Have a great day !!"
I didn't manage to catch hold of that seed from this morning, but I seem to have found a different one, one that seems more fitting for us right now. I am going to plant it, and I hope to watch it grow into something strong and beautiful, something that will inspire us to look around and find all the joy and beauty that DOES still exist in our world, if we would only see it and nurture it through the dying days of the strangling, ugly weeds that would see us shrink and shrivel with them into the mire.
RISKS
To laugh is to risk appearing the fool,
To weep is to risk being called sentimental.
To reach out to another is to riskinvolvement.
To expose feelings is to risk showing your true self.
To place your ideas and your dreams before the crowd is to
risk being called naive.
To love is to risk not being loved in return,
To live is to risk dying,
To hope is to risk despair,
To try is to risk failure
But risks must be taken, because the greatest risk in life is to risk nothing.
The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing, and becomes nothing.
He may avoid suffering and sorrow, but he simply cannot learn, feel, change, grow or love.
Chained by his certitude, he is a slave; he has forfeited his
freedom.
Only the person who risks is truly free.
Often attributed to the poet and thinker, Leo Buscaglia, the real author of this inspirational verse is Janet Rand.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Notice to Parliament
“The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storm may enter, the rain may enter -- but the King of England cannot enter; all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!” William Pitt the elder
"Following the Queen's speech this notice is rapidly making the rounds. I have cross-posted it here as it is something that everyone can use to register their protest directly with parliament. A refusal to co-operate means anything from, saying no to demands, to time wasting, to absolute refusal to obey their law."
This is a Declaration to Parliament.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Notice of refusal to co-operate
This is urgent, and requires active participation by all Home Educators. Please read and forward to all Home Educators and Home Ed lists that you belong to.
This act is not in competition with or an attack against any Home educated person or Home Education organisation. Now is not the time for an Home Education civil war. We need to deal with the real threat first, then try to resolve conflict within the Home Ed community later. OUR STRENGTH IS NOT ONLY IN OUR CONVICTIONS IT IS ALSO IN OUR NUMBERS.
The Badman recommendations have generated a great deal of fear within the Home Education community; but the threat is an illusion. If we ALL refuse to cooperate nothing will happen - they will NOT come for you and your children. Their power over us is based on our own fear.
This is a declaration to parliament, putting them on notice that they should not add the recommendations of the Graham Badman Report into new law, and that we will not co-operate with any such law should they dare to enact it.
If you agree with what it says, select all the text between the dividers, copy the text to a new document, print it, sign it or otherwise make your mark on it, and then send it to your MP. Then forward this entire message to any Home Educators and parents that you know and urge them to do the same. You may disseminate this public notice to anyone and any place you think will help it gain momentum.
Whether you are involved in the petition or any other initiative makes no odds. Use this to deluge your MPs and show them once and for all that we are united!
To find your MP's address use this site: http://www.theyworkforyou.com/
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Notice of Refusal to Co-operate
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
WHEREAS the recommendations of the GRAHAM BADMAN REVIEW OF ELECTIVE HOME EDUCATION have been accepted in full by the Secretary of State.
AND that these grossly disproportionate recommendations hold serious implications for the civil liberties of parents, children and families in this country.
AND that these recommendations place primary responsibility for assessing the suitability of education and the welfare of the child on the state, rather than the parent - with no prior evidence that either is unsatisfactory prior to this grossly intrusive intervention.
AND that the recommendations of the review assumes that the home is an inherently unsafe or unhealthy place for the child to be.
AND that these recommendations undermine the role of the parent and trample over family freedoms in its haste to set parent and child up against each other, bestowing additional and selective "rights" on home educated children that only the government can adequately minister to.
AND that these recommendations destroy the very possibility of true autonomy in learning.
AND that these recommendations operate from a position of requiring proof of parental innocence rather than reasonable suspicion of guilt.
AND that these recommendations discriminatorily use the coercive and interventionist tools of parental licensing, warrantless entry to the home, inspection according to arbitrary external standards, and an unconscionable new power to interrogate the child without the parents present.
AND that the outcome of these recommendations will be horribly discriminatory to a minority community, the measures eventually having to apply to anyone who has their child at home with them: parents with under 5s, those whose children attend private school, and also those with school-aged children who are at home in the evenings, over the weekends, and throughout the summer holidays.
AND that the outcome of these inspections will be based on the very human whim and prejudices of a local authority officer, who will have the power to destroy the life and education that that parent has conceived for his or her child.
AND that if the government is to avoid further discrimination it also stands to reason that each child who attends school must be given the same "rights" as home educated children - to "have their voices heard" regarding whether or not they are happy to be educated in school, whether they are satisfied with their teachers and whether they feel safe in such an environment.
WE ACCEPT that it is right that appropriate and proportionate action, as currently outlined in the law, may be taken to rectify a situation if there are serious concerns about a child's welfare, observing that a child being at home with its parents is not, and never has been, in and of itself a child welfare issue.
AND HEREBY RESOLVE that any such utterly disproportionate legislation if passed will fundamentally alter the relationship between citizen and state, and would constitute a fundamental violation of our rights,
AND that any such legislation is illegitimate on its face.
NOW UNDERSTAND that by this declaration, Parliament is PUT ON NOTICE that I and others will not co-operate with any such legislation, and strongly caution you not to consider, debate, or enact any such legislation.
Signed _______________________________
This is a Declaration to Parliament.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Notice of refusal to co-operate
This is urgent, and requires active participation by all Home Educators. Please read and forward to all Home Educators and Home Ed lists that you belong to.
This act is not in competition with or an attack against any Home educated person or Home Education organisation. Now is not the time for an Home Education civil war. We need to deal with the real threat first, then try to resolve conflict within the Home Ed community later. OUR STRENGTH IS NOT ONLY IN OUR CONVICTIONS IT IS ALSO IN OUR NUMBERS.
The Badman recommendations have generated a great deal of fear within the Home Education community; but the threat is an illusion. If we ALL refuse to cooperate nothing will happen - they will NOT come for you and your children. Their power over us is based on our own fear.
This is a declaration to parliament, putting them on notice that they should not add the recommendations of the Graham Badman Report into new law, and that we will not co-operate with any such law should they dare to enact it.
If you agree with what it says, select all the text between the dividers, copy the text to a new document, print it, sign it or otherwise make your mark on it, and then send it to your MP. Then forward this entire message to any Home Educators and parents that you know and urge them to do the same. You may disseminate this public notice to anyone and any place you think will help it gain momentum.
Whether you are involved in the petition or any other initiative makes no odds. Use this to deluge your MPs and show them once and for all that we are united!
To find your MP's address use this site: http://www.theyworkforyou.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Notice of Refusal to Co-operate
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
WHEREAS the recommendations of the GRAHAM BADMAN REVIEW OF ELECTIVE HOME EDUCATION have been accepted in full by the Secretary of State.
AND that these grossly disproportionate recommendations hold serious implications for the civil liberties of parents, children and families in this country.
AND that these recommendations place primary responsibility for assessing the suitability of education and the welfare of the child on the state, rather than the parent - with no prior evidence that either is unsatisfactory prior to this grossly intrusive intervention.
AND that the recommendations of the review assumes that the home is an inherently unsafe or unhealthy place for the child to be.
AND that these recommendations undermine the role of the parent and trample over family freedoms in its haste to set parent and child up against each other, bestowing additional and selective "rights" on home educated children that only the government can adequately minister to.
AND that these recommendations destroy the very possibility of true autonomy in learning.
AND that these recommendations operate from a position of requiring proof of parental innocence rather than reasonable suspicion of guilt.
AND that these recommendations discriminatorily use the coercive and interventionist tools of parental licensing, warrantless entry to the home, inspection according to arbitrary external standards, and an unconscionable new power to interrogate the child without the parents present.
AND that the outcome of these recommendations will be horribly discriminatory to a minority community, the measures eventually having to apply to anyone who has their child at home with them: parents with under 5s, those whose children attend private school, and also those with school-aged children who are at home in the evenings, over the weekends, and throughout the summer holidays.
AND that the outcome of these inspections will be based on the very human whim and prejudices of a local authority officer, who will have the power to destroy the life and education that that parent has conceived for his or her child.
AND that if the government is to avoid further discrimination it also stands to reason that each child who attends school must be given the same "rights" as home educated children - to "have their voices heard" regarding whether or not they are happy to be educated in school, whether they are satisfied with their teachers and whether they feel safe in such an environment.
WE ACCEPT that it is right that appropriate and proportionate action, as currently outlined in the law, may be taken to rectify a situation if there are serious concerns about a child's welfare, observing that a child being at home with its parents is not, and never has been, in and of itself a child welfare issue.
AND HEREBY RESOLVE that any such utterly disproportionate legislation if passed will fundamentally alter the relationship between citizen and state, and would constitute a fundamental violation of our rights,
AND that any such legislation is illegitimate on its face.
NOW UNDERSTAND that by this declaration, Parliament is PUT ON NOTICE that I and others will not co-operate with any such legislation, and strongly caution you not to consider, debate, or enact any such legislation.
Signed __________________________
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Home Made vs Mass Produced
We've been making the most of our abundant hedgerows over the last couple of days. Yesterday we took some fellow home educating friends with us, we all had a great time plucking the various berries. Whilst we were gathering sloes, a dog walker stopped to chat asking if I was planning on making some sloe gin. We had a bit of a chat about the methods and different recipes, and as she carried on her walk she said:
"Well I tried it once, but I don't think it was worth all the effort."
We've had gales here today, but when it had calmed down a little we all went out and spent a good hour and a half walking, talking, and stopping to pick berries. We saw a rainbow which prompted one of the girls to tell us about a conversation she had been having with a friend in an online forum about rainbows and how they are actually circular. I had no idea about that, but that's what life here is like - my children teach me an incredible amount. Anyway, that's by the by.
I decided to try making Pontac with some of the elderberries we'd collected yesterday, it looked so rich and delicious in the recipe photo that I just had to give it a try. It's quite a time consuming recipe, and I always knew that it would yield relatively little for the effort, but I thought it was worth trying, even if just once. I was very disappointed when I bottled the finished product and discovered that I had just over half the estimated 350ml that the recipe said it would yield. It's supposed to be best if left to mature for 7 years, but I decided that I would add a small amount to the spaghetti sauce I was making for tea. Oh my goodness! The children noticed a difference to the flavour and commented on how delicious it was. So I guess it was worth the effort and no doubt I will be making it again, but will make sure that next time I double or maybe quadruple the quantity.
As I was pulling today's haul of elderberries off their umbrellas, I got to thinking about what a labour intensive job this was, and about the comment from the dog walker.
Not many people seem to have the patience for making things from scratch any more. We find it easier to nip to the shops and buy things ready made. Yet take a drive and look at the signs outside pubs all shouting *Home Made Food Here* or one we saw on holiday which said *Good Home Made Food Here* as though someone might advertise bad! Watch a few adverts on the telly with Jamie Oliver extolling the virtues of cooking your own food with fresh ingredients. Read in the papers about the drive for more locally produced goods and the over use of that horrible buzz phrase *buy local think global*.
Home made is trendy - look at the success of sites like Etsy, and the many crafting blogs, books and magazines that are about now.
Home made shows that you've put some effort in. Your home made gift shows that you put your heart into making it, that you willingly gave of your time to create something especially for the receiver. That it was made and given with love.
And yet... the *home* in Home Education makes people suspect something not so good, something lacking in effort, something second rate. Why is that? The old saying *home is where the heart is* still rings true, doesn't it? So what has happened to make home suspect when coupled with education? I think it's about time we made more of the *home*. We like being at home, yes, we go out, we enjoy visiting other people and seeing other places, but we are not ashamed to say that we spend plenty of time at home. There is so much to be learned from the simple things in life, so much pleasure to be had, so much experience to be gained. Why do we rush out to be entertained, to buy experiences, why are we so quick to shun expanding a bit of effort?
Enoch Arnold Bennett says:
"Happiness includes chiefly the idea of satisfaction after full honest effort. No one can possibly be satisfied and no one can be happy who feels that in some paramount affairs he failed to take up the challenge of life."
To me, home education is *taking up the challenge of life*. It is living fully, taking responsibility not shrugging it off. It's worth the effort, even when that effort seems awfully hard work for little return, you can guarantee that the rainbow moments are just around the next corner.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Home Ed Protest Song
We had a ball taking part in this - thanks so much to Allan and Imogen for all their hard work putting it all together!
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Celebrate International Freedom In Education
Happy International Freedom In Education Day! Pop along here and enjoy the carnival - but finish reading this post first ;)
I hope that the posts to date have shown how important such freedom is, and why it absolutely must be protected from the grinding state machinery with it's tick box, one size fits all, measurable outcomes, mind set.
We love our life and wouldn't change it for the world. We hope that more and more people will come to see how important it is to maintain freedom in education, not just in this country, but all around the globe. The more restrictive and prescriptive education becomes, the smaller our chances of the world becoming a better place for our children and their children. It really is THAT important.
Even if you don't currently see yourself home educating, you never know what the future might hold, and if a time comes when you find yourself needing to pull your child out of school, I hope the option is still available to you, and you don't regret thinking *it's nothing to do with me*.
Finally, my family and I (ooh get her sounding like the Queen ;) ) would just like to send a heartfelt thank you to Baroness Morgan, The NSPCC, Ed Balls and The Bad Man. You will have taken almost a year from us by the time the Select Committee Report and consultation are done and dusted. You have slandered us in the national press, you have caused us stress beyond measure, you have made us cry, you have made us seriously look at leaving the home and country we love. But, in doing all of this you have made us as a family stronger, you have cemented friendships with home educators around the country, people we would never have met were it not because we wanted to reunite in condemnation of your treatment of us. You may think you can break us, but we are stronger than you will ever know, and that in part is due to your treatment of us.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Why Should I Be Worried About The Badman Recommendations?
If you haven't already, I would ask you to go to the beginning of this blog and read through all the posts.
When you have done that, and once I have explained just what the Badman Recommendations entail, I think you will understand why you, me and every other person in the country should be worried.
AHEd have produced an incredibly thorough briefing paper which I can highly recommend reading. Gill has also done a painstaking pulling apart of the report which you can read here. I shan't attempt to cover it in nearly as much depth, I shall just offer my personal opinions, and try to explain how our family will be affected.
There are 28 recommendations in the report; some of them could, potentially, be helpful for home educators were they implemented, but of course these are the ones that the government is ignoring.
The main ideas being pushed forward, hurriedly, by government are:
- compulsory registration
- the parent providing a statement of educational approach against which the child's "performance" will be assessed
- annual inspections, with right of access to the home and right of access (alone if necessary) to the child
All of which might sound reasonable, if you are just looking at them superficially. As with everything though, it is always best to read the small print.
Let's take them one by one.
1. Compulsory Registration
Suggests, on the surface, that you just have to tell someone official that you are home educating your child. Sounds reasonable enough, I suppose.
However, what the recommendation actually suggests is a licensing scheme. Parents will have to have their home education assessed and approved, and there after apply annually for approval to renew their licence.
Now just hang on a minute - as we have already seen, section 7 of the education act clearly states that educational provision is the duty of the parent. It is up to the parent to choose whether or not to delegate that responsibility. It is not up to the local authority, or government, to grant permission. To alter the balance in this way will require primary legislation, and it will open the floodgates for children failed by the education system to seek compensation. Remember those statistics we saw in an earlier post: 1 in 6 children leave school unable to read, write or add up. At a time when the country is on the verge of bankruptcy, is this a wise move on the part of government?
All that aside, as I explained in earlier posts, it takes time to find your feet when you start home educating. There is the need for a proper period of deschooling if the child is being withdrawn from school. This needs to be a time with as little external pressure as possible. Having to present yourself and your plans for home education, for official scrutiny BEFORE you are granted permission to home educate, will completely wipe out this very important time for families.
Talking of deregistration, the registration recommendation also plans to tinker with deregistration on demand, something we discussed the importance of in the previous post entitled "A Life Line".
Here is that particular part of the recommendation:
"When parents are thinking of deregistering their child/children from school to home educate, schools should retain such pupils on roll for a period of 20 school days so that should there be a change in circumstances, the child could be readmitted to the school. This period would also allow for the resolution of such difficulties that may have prompted the decision to remove the child from school."
Bye bye dereg on demand, bye bye life line. Especially when you take into account recommendation 15:
"That the DCSF take such action as necessary to prevent schools or local authorities advising parents to consider home education to prevent permanent exclusion or using such a mechanism to deal with educational or behavioural issues."
So perpetuate "The Big Lie" even though to do so may cost a child it's life. As I said in a previous post, these people must accept that they will have children's blood on their hands. This is so tragically twisted when you think that the whole review supposedly came about because of *safeguarding* concerns.
2. The parent providing a statement of educational approach against which the child's performance will be assessed.
Might sound reasonable, possibly, if you don't know anything at all about home education.
The idea with this one is basically that at your annual licensing meeting, sorry, registration, you present your educational plan for the coming year. The following year at your licensing meeting your child is tested and the results measured against the previous year's plan. If the child fails to have reached the targets set for the year, no licence renewal for you.
Why is this a problem? Well, firstly because if you are following a child led approach, you just don't plan a year ahead. You'd be lucky to plan a week or two ahead to be honest. This doesn't mean that following such an approach is slack, it just means that you can follow your child's interests which alter thick and fast - such is the nature of the child.
The other problem is testing. It has been shown that testing children induces stress. That teaching to the test kills their natural love of learning, we have seen this with SATs tests. They are going to scrap SATs tests for school children, and not before time. Many home educators, myself included, are fundamentally opposed to testing, and it is one of the many reasons why we home educate. When you are with your child on a daily basis as we are, you KNOW how they are doing, you KNOW what areas of weakness they have. You do not need a test to tell you these things. Besides which, the law states that a parent has to provide an education, the child is not legally bound to take it up. Can you imagine if they were? For goodness sake, it would be complete bedlam. How do you force anyone to learn anything? You can't, it is impossible. You cannot force feed knowledge in the way you can force feed food. If all children who went to school were to be subject to such penalties for failing their SATs what would we do with them all? Certainly a case of double standards at work here.
Moving on to the piece de resistance ...
3. Annual inspections, with right of access to the home and right of access (alone if necessary) to the child.
This recommendation is just utterly horrific. It flies in the face of human and child rights (don't you love how they separate the child from other humans as though they were a totally different species? Reminds me of the way the government department responsible for this rubbish separates the child from it's family by the use of school - Department of Children, Schools and Families).
Let's get one thing clear; where there are concerns about the safety of a child, there are already laws in place which grant access to the home and to the child. This is as it should be, and is completely fair and reasonable. I doubt anyone would argue with that.
What the Badman recommendations are saying is that just because a family home educates - and let's remember that this is actually the default position because it is the parent's duty to decide how and where their child is educated - that they automatically become suspects. Let's try out an analogy again:
Imagine there is a drug dealer living a few doors away from you. The police have reason to suspect that there are drugs on the premises, and so organise a raid. Perfectly reasonable so far. Now, imagine that just because you happen to live in the same street as the drug dealer; even though you have no previous convictions for drug related crime, there aren't even any suspicions about your good character; the police decide that you could be hiding drugs in your house so they raid you too. Still sound reasonable?
What the Badman recommendations propose will mean that home educated children have fewer rights than juvenile offenders who, under the Beijing Rules, are entitled to have a parent or guardian present when interviewed.
Article 9.1 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states:
- States Parties shall ensure that a child shall not be separated from his or her parents against their will, except when competent authorities subject to judicial review determine, in accordance with applicable law and procedures, that such separation is necessary for the best interests of the child. Such determination may be necessary in a particular case such as one involving abuse or neglect of the child by the parents, or one where the parents are living separately and a decision must be made as to the child's place of residence.
My own children are horrified at the idea of a stranger coming into their home, taking them off to another room and interrogating them. I can't say that I blame them. It makes me exceptionally angry that even though the government has said time and again that home education is not a welfare issue, here they are saying that actually it is. That our children are to be granted less human dignity and respect than young offenders. No, this is morally corrupt. Apart from anything else, it will leave those doing the interrogating wide open to allegations of abuse. We have a collapsing social care system. Social workers are over burdened as it is, is it really wise,will it really protect children, if we increase their workload by the tens of thousands when there is NO EVIDENCE to suggest that these children are anything but loved and well cared for by their parents?
These are just a few of the 28 recommendations. As I said, taken at face value you might wonder why many home educators are so concerned that they are considering leaving the country.
What these recommendations will do, IF they become law, is kill home education as we know it. We have been home educating perfectly well, perfectly legally, perfectly happily for 9 years. Over night that will end. We will become the subject of unwarranted, microscopic scrutiny because we choose to take the responsibility for our children's education seriously, and do not delegate it to someone else. How can this be right or just?
Perhaps, if you don't see a problem with it, you would like to come and explain to my children why they will have to be assessed and interrogated by strangers who will determine whether they can continue with the education that has served them well these 9 years.
Perhaps you would like to come back in a few years and explain to my younger children why they are not allowed the benefits of the type of education their older sisters had.
Perhaps you would like to explain it to me and my husband whilst you're at it.
Perhaps, if you have a child, grandchild, niece, nephew or neighbour whose life might have been saved by home education, you would like to explain to them why there is no alternative, why they have to continue going to the place where they are so miserable that they are considering suicide.
Perhaps you might like to consider how the complete removal of freedom in education will affect the country as a whole.
Perhaps, if none of these things concern you, you might like to consider what the world will be like when parents are no longer allowed to be responsible for their own children. We are already seeing the start of so many social problems that stem from over prescriptive, state interference in family life. These will only get worse if we allow our parental duties to be over ridden by a one size fits all, iron fisted, state machine.
These people do not care about our children, when they say that it is concern for children that is behind this they are lying, and their lie shines through in those report recommendations.
"These changes would effectively put the local authority and home educating parents in opposition to each other and create a great deal of unnecessary stress for home educators. All this would be done for the sake of improved child protection. In reality, the proposed new arrangements would not result in better child protection and may actually cause more harm than good."
Sunday, September 13, 2009
A Life Line
Lots of children become home educated as a last resort, often due to special needs not being met properly, school phobia, stress and bullying.
Many children's lives have been saved because their parents discovered that school is not compulsory. Many others have been lost because they didn't. What is worse, is that often there is a conspiracy of silence among schools and local authorities. Time after time we hear of parents fighting for years with their child's school, desperately asking for help. Hardly any of these parents are told that there is another option. This despicable behaviour continues, even now when home education has a much higher profile than it did a number of years ago. Only the other week there was an example of this on national TV. There is no excuse for it, and the people who refuse to tell parents that there is another way, must accept that they have children's blood on their hands. If you think I'm being overly dramatic have a look at this.
As I said earlier, in the post about the legality of home education, it is the parent who is responsible for ensuring their child receives an education, and it is EDUCATION that is compulsory, not school. Why is this not something that every parent is told when they have a child, or at least when they are being offered places at nurseries and schools? Many home educators refer to this as "The Big Lie" and whilst we are starting to make in roads into it's demolition, it's a painfully slow process, which is a crying shame because whilst parents remain unaware, children will continue to die.
Deregistration on demand is a legal right that parents MUST retain. The Badman recommendations threaten to remove this lifeline, and we must not allow it to happen. The government have tried before to remove it, and failed. We must continue to demand that this life line remains. With children set to stay in compulsory education until they are 18, it is crucially important that there is a safety net for those it does not work for. Parents should not have to jump through hoops imposed by local authorities, especially when these local authorities are failing their child, to enable them to carry out their legally binding parental duties.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Education Theories
Some people suggest that home educating your child is nothing more than a dangerous experiment.
I was in the first school year to take GCSEs and I can tell you, we felt like guinea pigs. Since then children across the country have been subjected to educational experimentation in the form of the national curriculum, SATs, literacy and numeracy hours, and goodness knows what else. SATs are going to be scrapped, maybe GCSEs will be next, who knows. Governments have always tinkered with education, and if the current one is anything to go by, they will continue to do so until they have completely ruined it for everyone.
I was lucky enough not to have to suffer the national curriculum, and I'm very glad. I had a lot of different teachers; some were good, some were absolutely awful. The ones that stick in my mind, were the ones who had a passion for their subject, who made lessons their own. I was fortunate enough to experience the same subject addressed differently by many different people - my father was in the forces, school changes and different teachers were a part of life.
Had the national curriculum been in place during my childhood I would have been guaranteed never to miss a thing in my school changes, because the tabling of subjects would not have been left to the individual teachers. The content of the lessons would have been very similar where ever I was. Would that have been a good thing? Personally, I don't think so. I'm trying to think where I read the analogy that springs to mind. It went something like this:
The national curriculum is like a fast food *restaurant* - you get the same food, delivered in the same way, for the same price, at every one of the company's establishments. Where ever you go in the world, if you go along to one of these establishments you know exactly what you are going to get.
Now compare it to a restaurant in the Michelin Guide; you never know what you're going to get, but you know it's going to be good.
IMO education should endeavour to belong to the Michelin Guide rather than the fast food chain.
The human race has been getting along OK for thousands of years. We've seen the rise and fall of civilisations. We've seen incredible creations and feats of human ingenuity all around the world. And all without a national curriculum in sight! There are so many differing theories about what constitutes a good education, it's something people have debated for millenia. If great philosophers can disagree, what on earth makes us think that suddenly, at the tail end of the 20th century, a group of politicians and civil servants had an epiphany?
Apparently teacher training used to include learning about different educational theories. These days it's all about classroom management. I brought this up with Ian McGimpsey of the RSA at a recent conference I spoke at. He agreed that it is a problem newly qualified teachers face when taking up posts. The government talks about personalised learning, and other buzz words, but when we have teachers who have themselves known nothing but the national curriculum, and who have never heard of the many and varied theories of education, how on earth can we get back to an education system that is more on a par with Michelin than MacDonalds?
The national curriculum has been the biggest, mass educational experiment since the introduction of compulsory education back in 1870, and it has failed (IMO they both have but that's another issue). Independent education, of which home education is one facet, has steadfastly stayed away from the national curriculum, thank goodness!
I'm not a teacher, yet I would wager I have more education theory books on my bookshelves than most teachers. Home educators are keeping these theories alive because they work, they have been proven to work, often over thousands of years! No, we're not the ones conducting a dangerous experiment.
If the current government gets it's way we are doomed to follow along this failing path; that would be criminal, and it must not happen. Freedom in education is so important, please help us to stop it from going the way of the dinosaurs.
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