(Guest post by missdisco)
Ministers today unveiled plans for a major toughening-up of the regulation of home education, forcing families who opt out of schooling to register annually with their local authorities, submit learning plans and undergo regular inspections. If they fail the inspections they could be made to send their children to school.
A lot of people, noticeably home-educators, seem to be up in arms about the notion that they may have to register their children as being home-educated and have lesson plans and such examined. A controlling draconian state, big brother blah blah blah.
Some of these people need to just shut the fuck up.
I was home-educated between 1993-2001. It was an appalling experience. My mother was a manipulative bitch, who actually never bothered to teach us at all. It was a whim for her for about a year, but then i think she just lost it and just couldn’t be bothered with anything, except keeping us in the house. As a child i barely left the house except maybe once a week. I didn’t do science, languages, PE, art, music, or anything interesting. My interest in English Literature arose out of being a Manic Street Preachers fan, otherwise i suspect i would have never had that.
Only once did someone come round to inspect us. Once in eight years. The night before that inspection is something I try to forget. Essentially an hours beating to make sure when they ask how me and my sisters felt our response was that we were happier.
My memories of the inspection were that he had no problem with our basic skills – from the few rushed examples of work pushed at him – but that he was concerned by our mothers Irish nationalist stance in everything and the lack of PE, language or music. Mostly though, he disliked that none of our work was dated, because that meant he had no idea when what he saw was produced.
Yes, some people are just honestly supporting children with learning difficulties or trying to embrace their own culture, but there are cases where it does just turn into abuse. The chances are, like me and my sisters, that isn’t really reported or known. We just went on into being dysfunctional adults. I’m not sure if my sisters can even read or write properly, since they struggled at primary school.
It seems like the majority of opinions on this are all about embracing positive alternative education, but that can turn into a nightmare. Surely, if you have nothing to hide or be ashamed of, then no harm will come of someone checking that the children are actually being educated.
My sisters and I are all completely estranged from our mother now. She hates us because we stole her life because she had to teach us. As soon as i got to sixth form I felt that even the weakest student, with Cs and Ds, was better educated than I was. Around this time we fell out. She denies my existence now.
Surely someone checking that your children meet a standard of numeracy and literacy, and aren’t raised to believe that the world is controlled by Jew-hating-lizards from outer space is something that should be done, not beaten down by shouty hippie parents with anger issues towards the local education authority, or Labour, or Catholicism or various other issues, is a good thing? If parents become ill, or must work more, and can’t support their children’s education shouldn’t there be someone to step in and make a stand about that.
After all, when you’re young, whoever teaches you tends to be your earliest guide in the world. Did you know how you should be educated when you were 8 or 9? You don’t really have any authority on this yourself when you’re young, parents decide it for you. If you did, you’d probably just sit in the dirt chopping hair off dolls and eating refreshers all day.
I fail to understand why there’s such opinion that the government/LEAs/the big bad whoever are anti-home education. They’ve allowed the option since the 70s or so and there really has been very little regulation on it at all. Now they just want to enforce and make compulsory what currently is very loosely done.
I would have been far better off to have been home educated in primary school. Then I would not have been systematically abused and sadistically tortured by a teacher who got sexually stimulated by hurting small children. The school administration was well aware of what was going on, and had been for the previous 30 years, but chose to do nothing. As I was required to show up, day after day, I had no choice in the matter but to endure this for 2 years.
I do however accept that the majority of schools do not (at least in this country) allow physical and sexual abuse of young children to occur unhindered within their walls.
I’ve met people who homeschool or who are thinking of homeschooling and they are not looking for an excuse to abuse their kids. Likewise, most primary teachers are not looking for opportunities to molest the children under their care.
What your mum did was horrible and she sounds like an abusive psychopath. My abuser certainly was.
What gets me about all this crap about essentially harassing homeschooling parents is that what it’s about is not ensuring that abuse and neglect is going on, it’s that dammit, those hippies want to do things differently and we are just going to show them that they have to do exactly as everyone else! A large part of what is taught in school has nothing whatsoever to do with learning and everything to do with teaching you to do exactly what you are told, when you are told, and never think for yourself, and to view any kind of non-conformity as wrong, wrong, wrong.
Funnily, I learned to read well before I went to school and the more enlightened teachers let me just sit there and read books and do handcrafts for 3/4 of the day because they needed to spend more time with the less able students. I also learned, from the other kids, that I was a bad person, that I had no friends, and that it was normal and acceptable for me to be beaten up by them on a daily basis. Once more, the school was aware of the bullying and chose not to intervene, ever, in any case of bullying. And once more, I had no way out of this.
Therefore, this harassment thinly disguised by the govt as concern meets with nothing but scepticism from me (I feel pretty damn strongly about this as you can imagine).
(Cue post from OSB ranting about how children should be seen and not heard and just sit there do what they are told all day).
“is not ensuring that abuse and neglect is going on,”
is NOT going on, I mean!
yes another comment…. just want to stress that I hope my comment above does not in any way suggest that what your mum did was in any way justified, and indeed she deserved to be arrested and convicted for it.
From my own perspective, currently home-schooling parents aren’t checked or regulated in any way. They’re free to take their children out of school, for any reason they may like (bullying or religion generally), without providing evidence that they have an education of their own, and then given free rein on it. Teachers are assessed constantly and expected to have at least a degree. So surely it is not unreasonable for the relevant education authority to check that parents are able to educate their children. I don’t think it is intended to be about stifling individuality. If a child was better outside a mainstream school who could refute that?
Statistics on home-ed families are quite vague. There are predictions between 30,000 and 150,000. That would strike me as quite a difference, and it seems that would suggest that this is a way of life that should be officially acknowledged and registered, as not some ‘alternative’ method but a choice (when i was in sixth form, this wasn’t even a category that could be listed on a UCAS application, i was listed as ‘schoooled outside UK’ to send the application off). If it were acknowledged as a real, serious alternative it may stand a chance of being more seriously acknowledged as an option, not the whim choice of upper middle-class parents who don’t have to work so have the time to educated their children full-time.
While the majority may be honest about it, educating their children in the best way, the fact is that those children in families detached from Education Otherwise* or other organisations simply slip completely out of the radar of anyone.
* When I was first taught at home, in the area i lived the home ed co-ordinator was a rather forceful woman who had a chip on her shoulder about state education. Her own daughter had never attended school. Her daughter was a hyperactive brat who was apparently ‘allergic to all sweets except Penguin bars.’ She was impossible to be friends with. She threw her toys at me because she wanted to play outside and i didn’t. Her mother got angry with my mother about this, because I hadn’t been nice to her. Perhaps we met the wrong people
Fair enough. In the meantime, a discussion elsewhere on the net revealed that the proposals are not, in fact, going to be all that draconian, and not given to councils as an excuse to harass parents who are doing a good job if an individual council seeks to do this, so me getting worked up about this is a bit silly.
The people I know who home educate are mostly in the USA, where a lot of people do this either because the local school district is awful (due to decentralisation of funding, this is common) or for religious reasons – I am not right wing religious BUT the kids in question are being educated well, at least the ones whose parents I know, and it’s all very well organised. You can even organise PE classes through your local homeschool network so your kid can endure the joys of volleyball and (field) hockey in January should you so choose
.
I can well imagine that home educating here can become a magnet for well, nutters who subscribe a little too much to the Dr Spock (not star trek) philosophy of never telling the little brats off for anything… I think in the USA these get sufficiently diluted by the multitudes of sensible parents. I can imagine it being problematic if your local network was full of such cranks without large numbers of sensible parents.
Did I read somewhere that 45,000 children are taught at home ? That`s an awful lot of children. Yet again I`m struggling to believe statistics. I`ve been around more than a few blocks and I`ve never met anyone who was home educated. Can`t see any benefit to it personally.
As for children being seen and not heard and doing as they`re told. I`m obviously all for that. Actually, the youth organisation I work for has a strong thread of discipline. At the moment they`re turning up in droves. I do sometimes wonder if the kids are naturally gravitating towards something they`re not offered either at home or in school. Youths who don`t know where the boundaries lie and who spend their lives pushing at something that isn`t at all discernible seem rather unhappy to me.
A lot of home-schoolers in the US are actually trained teachers. Mum leaves work, becomes a full-time parent, and puts those elementary or high school teaching qualifications to use. I wonder if it’s the same here?
Sounds a bit like the psychotherapy regulation debate – that the main purpose is to protect those at risk but the state body will define where risk lies.
Like anything else, there is likely a bell-distribution of high standard / mainstream / low standard – amongst the low standard there is a presumption of risk of abuse (certainly neglect – but possibly other types are increasingly likely as missdisco experienced).
The argument for state intervention was usually: ‘we do it for “the greater good” ‘ – or for the masses over the minors.
But it seems in some things, especially involving kids, that state is looking more towards increasing the controls on everyone in order to improve the chances of the few.
It’s not completely new – driving gets the same treatment – seatbelts, speed limits, MOT are all compulsory regulation – because of the few who would recklessly drive their crapped out XR3i rather than the fact that we’d all be speeding if we didn’t have a law. We could equally debate cannabis too? Or
I see no harm in regulation – especially where harm can be seen to be avoidable from it – if done sensibly and conscientiously.
But I guess the biggest fear is not the ‘what’ we regulate – but the ‘how’.
What we don’t need is another plethora of jargonese and administratium in order to do it – and I do fear for anyone subject to govt regulation.
All good things come to those who wait. Mr Ian makes a telling point !
Home education has never popped up on my radar but if it had and I`d decided to employ it myself, I wouldn`t be too welcoming of government interference.
Not that far away from here, where unemployment is rampant, 45% of those out of work are, supposedly, under 25. JBarber will have socio economic, Peoples Republic of South Yorkshire ( now turning to the BNP, I see ) blurb reasons for this but, in truth, a frightening number of these young people will be unemployable no – hopers churned out by a piss poor comprehensives. Parents have every right to treat our education system with extreme caution and every right to scrutinise alternatives.
I never thought I’d agree with OSB on anything. The heads of shit schools deserve a kicking. Probably one of the ways of ensuring that a kid will have to fight 10 times as hard for anything in life is to not educate them.
Then again, I’m biased, as I remained in the education system (working at a university) til I was 28.
As far as I can gather the OP isn’t suggesting that people shouldn’t home educate their kids – just that there should be some regulation in place to ensure that those who do so are (a) actually providing an education and (b) not using it as a cover for child abuse. This seems reasonable to me – after all, we expect regular teachers to have oversight to ensure they’re doing their job and not abusing kids. That doesn’t mean there’s necessarily anything wrong with home education, just that it’s sensible to take precautions.
That said, I once attended an event where a woman had brought her son. She proudly told all and sundry she was home-educating him to keep him away from the evils of the school system. I did notice that the kid in question was a spectularly obnoxious, uncontrollable little brat with precisely zero social skills who wound up pissing off just about everybody there over the course of the day.
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