to keep longing to home educate my DC's

[ValentinCrimble]

I find school tough...there's always something I am unhappy with or suspicious of...I KNOW the kids are fine...it's a good school...I know that they will get through it all and have an education/friends and all that...but I keep thinking that they would have all that anyway and without my having to support the 6 year old with reams of homework every night and crap reading scheme books.

Is it still thought of as odd or weird to home ed? I sense a bit of a change in people's opinions recently...DC is in a private prep...money is not an issue as we are lucky enough to have a bursary...don't know how I would deal with state as our local one is notoriously bad (I am talking rife with bullies and under special measures) and the others are rammed to the gills with locals on waiting lists.

I'm not unhappy with the school as such but feel that its an awful lot to trust strangers with my DC's education...come on...give me your best for and againsts of home ed?

"Perhaps reading Paula Rothermel (Leeds univ I think) report on Home educated children might help?"

She removed the link to her decade old PhD thesis (which is what most people are talking about when they point to her "report") from her site after it was publicized that her figures relating to the efficacy of HE versus school were based on the testing of a small group of HEed children, of which only tiny number were externally tested.

So I'm not sure that it would help our case much even if they could lay their hands on a copy.

The fact that so many people consider it a work of note in the field does nothing other than underline how little quality study has been undertaken in the area of home education.

That isn't to say that an absence of evidence is proof positive that HE can't and doesn't work, rather it shows how reticent people are to participate in the few large scale studies that are proposed. Not necessarily without good reason given that a whiff of bias from the onset can put people off from taking part.

People might not be so ignorant, or prone to jumping to conclusions if we as home educators avoided alienating them from the get go by attacking them on a personal level rather than debating the points they make.

I appreciate that the average HEing parent is defensive due to the volume of criticism we have to field, but since we are the biggest losers when we fail to convince or persuade, it smacks of shooting ourselves in the foot in an attempt to ward off gunfire.

I agree cory - there are people with a natural flair (I'm afraid I'm not one though!). But the op's assertion that by dint of being almost 40, she'd do a better job than a teacher of 24 is naive.

Having said that I do accept that much of a teacher's skills lie in the breadth of children they're able to teach. I guess that also translates into being able to adjust their style to suit a particular child at a particular time - some of what my ds responds well to now isn't the same as it was two years ago.

I really, really like what you said about school offering similar advantages to those of an extended family. That's one of the reasons why I didn't choose a tiny school for ds, which I thought could easily become quite claustrophobic. I think I'm just about the only parent I know who feels a bit about small schools, though.

sarahitaly I wonder if the HE/schools discussions we have here are similar to the SAHP/WOHP discussions.

Perhaps we all have slight chips on our shoulders and take some of the pros of each as criticism.

I mean, don't HE ds - but perhaps if I was a better parent/loved him more/less boringly establishment then I would. Likewise I work FT. Ditto.

HE-ers/SAHPs are keeping hold of their children too much and for too long - the children and the parents need to build lives of their own away from each other.

It's emotive.

Just because some parents HE because they literally cannot bear anybody else to have an influence over their children (which I think is wrong), this doesn't mean that all HE families are like that at all. Any more than you can judge all schools from the failing school down the road. Afaik HE families come in all shapes and sizes and some are brilliant at fostering independence. Just like some schools are brilliant at fostering an inquisitive attitude.

As for the teaching, my understanding is that families who HE successfully often do so in a style that is very different from school: less formal lessons and more child/project driven, social life is encouraged through other channels etc etc.

I am happy with the experience my children are getting, but I don't necessarily feel terribly emotive about some other children getting an equally good experience through some other means.

Curlyhairedassassin - I don't think children need to be taught to conform. I have seen HEd children, who have never been trained to sit in a classroom and listen to a teacher, 'behave' impeccably when on educational trips to places because they want to be there.

As an adult you can choose your work; you understand the implications of not working (not having money); you have choices. As a schooled child who hasn't chosen to be there, you have no choice. If you love school, then you'll make an effort and be 'good'. If you hate it, then you'll muck about. If you love your work, you'll put lots into it. If you hate it, you'll do the bare minimum to get paid and keep your job, and that's it. You don't need to be taught to do that. Look how many adults work like that? Or continually lose jobs? Or don't do work at all (not counting SAHPs)? Most of them went to school and it doesn't seem to have taught them the skills needed to maintain a job!

I just don't think it's good or necessary for children to be coerced into anything. I don't force my children to help me with the housework, and I don't bribe them with payment either. But they do help me. They enjoy my company, and understand that jobs get done faster when they're shared so I will have more time to play with them if they help.

Vespasian - surely you spend hours planning work for your students because you have to teach to a fairly strict curriculum? You're trained to impart that curriculum in an order that makes sense to a large group of children, and to assess which bits they've understood and learnt and which bits you need to do again. I don't need to be trained that with my children because I'm with them most of the time, and there are only four of them. It's not difficult to 'assess' how your children are getting on when you home educate, so you don't need to be trained to do it - and I don't have to teach to a curriculum, so I don't need to be trained to do that either.

Nellykats - for the zillionth time, HE parents do not teach!!! They don't have to!

CHildren should control their learning, if possible, because it's more efficient that way.

How do you think we all learned to become independent adults before school was available to all of us? It's a fairly new institution in its current form, but somehow we have survived as a species. Your argument that you need to go to school to grow up is ridiculous.

I am only posting all this because if I hadn't read a similar thread 8 years ago on another forum, I wouldn't be in the wonderful place I am now, so I guess I'm not really trying to persuade the narrow minded people who are just wanting to argue that I'm lazy, neglectful, presumptious etc. that HE is feasible and possibly, even, better for children than school. I'm mostly trying to give the opportunity to other, more open-minded parents to understand how it works.

If anyone wants to know more, PM me and I'll happily explain things further. But it's very tiresome to be called lazy, and to read people saying my children won't grow up with the skills they need to survive, and other crap, so I really am off now.

" I wonder if the HE/schools discussions we have here are similar to the SAHP/WOHP discussions."

I'd say the dynamic was much the same.

Small difference being that no government is going to try and regulate who can SAH or WOH, so there is no onus on a group in that camp to try and avoid alienating great swathes of the voting gen pub from the get go.

It's not solely a question of poor PR for me, I find the superiority complex that can soak into HE flavoured groupings desperately unattractive. We are setting one such group up now for our "thin on the ground" HE community. If a similar mentality infects that group, I'm voting with my feet.

The other difference is that there are huge, huge misunderstandings about how HE works, so the debate is difficult to have as HEors are always up against these misunderstandings

There's no superiority complex IME locally, but there is a frustration that some people are so willing to insult HEors based on misguided perceptions.

"for the zillionth time, HE parents do not teach!!! They don't have to!

CHildren should control their learning, if possible, because it's more efficient that way."

Some of us teach. I do. I've been a teacher for the last 21 years (teaching classes and one to one) and I'm buggered if I am hurling all my accumulated skill and experience out of the window on the basis that I happen to be related to my son.

Children should control their learning IN YOUR OPINION. I am not an AHEing parent and I don?t subscribe to the "Taking Children Seriously" philosophy, so that is not my position. Although I can't work myself up into a lather about parents successfully employing AHE with their own offspring. Different stokes.

Given the limitations of the studies conducted so far, there is no solid data available that proves the efficiency of AHE.

What is available is basically anecdote.

Since people are unlikely to scream from the rooftops that despite many years of application their adventures in "unschooling" have been a rampant failure the only anecdotes heard are those that point to success, which does not offer a clear picture of how effective/efficient or otherwise AHE can be on the whole.

If we cherry picked information about educational attainment in schools in a similar fashion the perception would be that the sort of educational attainment seen at Eton et al is the norm, since the results from the failing comps would be utterly invisible.

Your statement is nothing more than the mirror image of those who yell that school is the best way for all children, all of the time and the results are boound to be more sucessful than any alternative.

Which is rubbish. There is no one size fits all.

What you have is the potential to chose a good fit for a specific parent/child combo on an individual level, based on the specifics of their current circumstances.

Most of us could chose from a range of "good fit" options and get similar results as long as we ensured good practice.

There is no holy grail when it comes to "the one true way to educate" because there are too many variables. In fact if you elevate a specific educational philosophy to that status I think you are in danger of placing greater priority on a quasi religious adherence to an idea over and above the needs of the child in front of you.

That goes for using a range of different kinds of schools, or any specific flavour of home education.

The child has to be the priority, not the route chosen in order to provide them with an education.

How on earth can any parent - HE or otherwise, not teach?

You're teaching them all the time, surely? Unless you just leave your DCs to it in a room while you sit on MN

And even then you're teaching them something.

When you say HEers don't teach, do you mean they don't take an exclusively didactic approach?

" I remember reading a description of how children learn to walk and talk, pointing out that no one had to 'teach' them"

We are hard wired to start to walk and talk, which is why you don't have to actively teach babies to crawl and then take to their feet, you just have to provide opportunity and example.

Not so much learning to read\write\do fractions for all of the children, all of the time, where the ability and willingness to teach (covertly or overtly) starts to impact the degree to which a child will acquire a skill to their full potential.

I don't understand this aversion to teaching. I have spent the last two years in conversation with AHEing parents and most of them place an absolute priority in providing their children with what they request, which includes being overtly taught.

Typically I have seen AHEing parents protest at the stereotype that they neither actively teach nor seek out the skills that enable them to do so.

So now I am utterly confused as to what AHE actually means to most people.

Some of the HErs I know regard themselves as teachers, or use workbooks, or are very structured in their approach. Others are full on into autonomous learning (unschooling). It's not a narrow church, after all. :) I can't believe you lot are even debating those points .

In spite of 43 years of life and even some experience of teaching I would be a diabolically bad HE'r -- assuming I didn't beg to be sectioned after the first few weeks, that is.

It must be great if you feel up to HE. I have a DS who is very unhappy at school, so I often feel guilty that for me that HE is so wrong, and we are struck with soldiering on with our narrow options re his schooling. So perhaps that is why I have thought long and hard about what the other drawbacks to HE might be (besides threatening my own sanity, that is ).

The benefits on the other hand are obvious and a great many, perhaps it would be fairer to OP to talk more about them? Setting your own holiday dates, child most likely always genuinely enthused about learning, bullying issues knocked on the head, no hassle of dealing with petty rules and school gate gossips. I could go on and on and on, really.

Found a link as an example, from a high profile UK AHEing parent.

comment number four

homeeducationheretic.blogspot.com/2010/10/teach-and-forget-common-strategy-for.html

Paragraph beginning

"I teach my children as and when they ask to be taught.."

"It must be great if you feel up to HE. I have a DS who is very unhappy at school, so I often feel guilty that for me that HE is so wrong, and we are struck with soldiering on with our narrow options re his schooling. So perhaps that is why I have thought long and hard about what the other drawbacks to HE might be (besides threatening my own sanity, that is )."

I don't feel great. I mainly feel like you do. Guilty and musing over how my limitations have narrowed the options for my son's education.

When you pick one option over another you limit, motherhood seems to guarantee that any choice includes a good dose of guilt, despite knowing that you have done the best you can with a less than perfect scenario.

If I didn't have oratorio (sort of youth club, 300 kids, four hours per afternoon, four days a week) plus all his activities and "playdates" that his dad deals with...I think you'd be sectioning me too. I wasn't built to spend 24/7 with my son and stay sane. No disrespect to people who can and do spend 24/7 with their kids and like it that way. But I am just not made that way.

I love him to bits, I like him lots and lots too, but I need to not be with him all the time and thankfully that seems to work well from his perspective to boot.

I think I'd love to HE. But for me it's perhaps a selfish idea - it's about what I want rather than what's best for DD. I loved being a SAHM, it was amongst the best years of my life and would've loved for that to have continued.
HE is though, constantly in my mind as an idea for a back up if anything goes wrong with school education. But as it's turned out, my DD is thriving at school. We're lucky with our primary school choices where I live, they're all pretty lovely. It's more likely to be secondary where I'll feel HE could be a truly better option for DD.

I couldn't agree more, sarah. All our choices seem to include a fair dose of guilt!

Going back to the OP, I can't imagine a 6yo having homework every night. That's just daft. Is there really not another school you could send your ds to? How does his teacher respond when you raise you concerns with her?

Just to put things into persepctive, my own ds (Y5, Ofsted "outstanding" state school) has about three hours HW a week. It would be less if he wasn't such a prevaricating excuse monger applied himself

Surely not all private schools insist on quite so much HW?

Jenai....there really isn't another school, we are lucky to be where we are with financial help...plus the head is very, very supportive and caring. DC likes school....likes socilising...but the work is really taking its toll. At the mo the plan is to go abroad and be with DH for 6 months...for year three it will be back to the private school or to the local fab state if there is a place DC is top of the waiting list.

I think that it will be an adventure for us all...we will HE for 6 months....and then return to school....mainly because DC seems happy to attend. If he was not happy that would be different....but he is and he is very sociable and mixes well...so it would be sily to remove him permanently.

I see the 6 months abroad as a long working holiday. A chance to broaden DC's horizons and show DC that is is possible to escape the rat race...and still be part of society.

We plan to work with some less fortunate people whilst we are over there...on an arts project. I think this will be a massive learning opportunity...I will just have to make sure DC is where his peers will be academicaly when we return!

'for the zillionth time, HE parents do not teach!!! They don't have to!

CHildren should control their learning, if possible, because it's more efficient that way."

Some DCs want to be taught-one size doesn't fit all. I would have hated to be at home because being in control of my learning wouldn't have suited me.
You have to treat the individual and you can't make any generalisations about how DCs learn-even within the same family.
If a 6 yr old has homework every night and you don't like it then you have chosen the wrong school! I don't think that 6 yr olds should have any homework.I never understand why people pay for education that they don't like!

pisces There will be something to complain about with every school though....my not liking one aspect does not mean I chose the wrong one. Yes..the homework is too much... but during the day at school DC is happy, well behaved and popular...I cannot assume that to much homework equals wrong school.

If we go to the state school I have no doubt there will be aspects that I am not 100% happy about....I am sure most parents could have a moan.

What has annoyed me about this thread is so many people with the attitude that without a degree in teaching, a parent is not capable of teaching. It's narrow minded....I am sure that to teach a class of 30 kids with differing abilities needs a teaching degree...but to teach 1 or 2 children? No. I can manage that and so can anyone of average or above average intelligence who has love and dedication.

"...I will just have to make sure DC is where his peers will be academicaly when we return!"

Would it be worth asking the school he is at for some advice about what they would prefer you cover (with or without recommended materials) while he is away ?

I don't mean as a rigid, detailed programme of study, but more of a guide so at least you know where the goalposts are.

Sarah, I can't open the link you referred to earlier on, the violenza sulle donne one. What's "shuffling" (english not my 1st language, as anyone can see)?

I'll try posting the link again.

Shuffling in this context means moving problematic teachers/bidellas to another school rather than firing them, or retraining them (with a period of probabtion).

This is the first part of the story that hit the press

www.corriere.it/cronache/10_marzo_03/bardesono_brione_16a2b8c8-26a0-11df-b168-00144f02aabe.shtml

And this is the follow up with details of her former conviction while working in a state school.

violenza-donne.blogspot.com/2010/03/briona-la-bidella-di-briona-fu.html

Basically

She was in School A, was convicted of a serious crime with an element of threatened violence towards children, was "shuffled" to school B as a result, the inappropriate examination of bottoms took place, she got "shuffled" back to school A.

If I have done it right you should be able to click on the links ( =

My issue with "shuffling" is that there is a constant recycling of teachers (and bidelle) that need to be removed from the system.

It is the "shuffling" that screwed up my son's former school. We lost two teachers, one died, one retired and underperforming teachers were put in their place to take the heat off the director in another school.

I've been involved as a teacher in the complaints procedure only to see the teacher (or bidella) in question get moved up the road. Just moving the problem around rather than dealing with it.

If the system can't manage to eradicate cleaner who is a convicted criminal causing ongoing issues, then what hope do we have of changing the behavior of teachers who either don't know how to teach or would rather chat on their mobiles all day in class rather than do their job ?

As far as I can see the Gelmini reforms don't seem to have taken that issue on board.

Your English is amazing, leaves my Italian in the dust.

(scuttles off to practice irregular verbs)

Yes...I have already been given some lists of words and advice on wat to cover with regards to maths.

"Yes...I have already been given some lists of words and advice on wat to cover with regards to maths."

It's great that they are willing to work with you, the school being on side is a huge plus.

In your situation half that battle I think is having a solid idea of what the school expects/wants the children to achieve. We were given a programme to cover, but I couldn't get anything out of them in terms of the standard they wanted us to achieve.

Since we get tested annually it is a bit of an issue not knowing what they want in concrete terms.

The first year I often felt like I was bumbling around in the dark trying strike a target that everybody told me was there, but nobody was willing to define.

I had to resort to leaping on his friends? backpacks and rifling through their work to keep an eye on what the school felt was acceptable in terms of production. (with the permission of their parents I hasten to add, s'not like I dressed up in my spy gear and indulged in surreptitious backpack investigations).

Since they aren?t taking a ?It?s a state secret ! Guess what we want from you !? approach I don?t think you should have any problems keeping him "on track" as it were, while getting as much as you can out of the experience abroad as well.

There are more resources out there, (both subscription and free) than you can shake a stick at. The bulk of them are adaptable to any specific educational philosophy that you feel is a good fit for your son.

The school is so small that they really do value each child....it's just me...sometimes I struggle with conforming...always have done. I am sure we'll be fine...DC is only just 6 after all. I might be more worried if DC were 10 or 11...bu as it is I think we can afford 6 months out and not fall behind.