Are you going to have a generation of Home Educated kids by parents who are not up to it?

[Thegrinchshorriblesister]

I’ve been on Home Education sites for a few years as was momentarily considering it but decided against it. The crowd was great, informative, inclusive and lots of resources were shared.

I noticed at the beginning of lockdown the member counts shot up as obviously people wanted help during lockdown. Then September came and there have been a noticeable rise in those parents deregistering their kids and asking for help regarding issues with stubborn LA or meeting resistance from their families. Or posters saying they have no access to laptops or printers and what phone apps can they use for online materials.

However - a lot of these posts are written in really poor grammar. A lot of people are clearly not set up for the huge commitment that HE is.

There is a very different feel on the site now, very much ‘us against the system’, lots of memes about having children and farming them out to be drones or robots, or not loving your children because you have teachers raise them.

It’s making me wonder will there be a generation of kids that never sit any exams and go in to adulthood with no real kind of education or children who are stuck with adults that have these views making their world very small.

Sorry, by "I don't think is unusual" I more mean I don't think it's new. These people I know have been sharing that stuff for years.

Well now anyone reading this does know @lazylinguist so that’s something.

Yes, but you can't necessarily expect them to care, especially on reading the sneery and dismissive way in which you talk about the 'trend' of parents giving educational experiences to their children.

Quite simply, why should parents care if you don't think they ought to call what they do 'home education'? They regard it as such, and since there seems to be no official definition which really excludes much, nobody can make them stop calling it that.

Anyway, I have no wish to further derail the OP's point, so I'm out.

I love the way you use words to attempt to discredit me @lazylinguist talking about screeching, dismissive and sneering when I have done no such thing. Where have I sneered at people doing educational things? I am simply stating that people claiming has been a trend that I have witnessed over a period of time and it has. If people want to do educational activities with their children then I am all for that because as someone who is hugely interested in education(at home and otherwise), it still doesn’t make it home education. I could call myself wonder woman, but it doesn’t mean I am!

My children go to outstanding local state schools but I still home school on top. They have support books such as all the Cgp ones at home and I set them daily work on top of homework to do - it is not just the schools job to educate my children - but mine as well.

DD had the CGP guides, but I didn’t consider it home educating her. I called it helping her to revise for her GCSEs or ensuring that she did her homework. I didn’t “educate” her.

It’s such a huge decision and commitment to remove your child from school. Some people do a fantastic job of HE but surely it’s limiting future options to some extent? Anyone know any doctors who were homeschooled?

I know lawyers, doctors, musicians, vets, artists, writers, shop assistants, nurses, all sorts who were home educated. (Across various countries.)

@WaterWisp @GrouchyKiwi

I stand corrected!!

Lots of teachers have poor spelling and grammar as well.
And going to school definitely doesn't guarantee any social skills. There were people at my school who never said a word for 7 years, were relentlessly bullied, went around hitting people because it was their only way of dealing with "teasing". Out of school they were much more normal and far happier.
School is an artificial environment, which is not the same as any other situation in life. Where else do you have to conform to exactly the same standards as everyone else? Once you leave school you are suddenly expected to stand out from the crowd.
Schools have a lot to offer in terms of education but can be disastrous in other ways.

Lots of teachers have poor spelling and grammar as well
Sadly that's quite true.
I couldn't care less about dialect, slang, rogue autocorrect apostophes or clumsy social media errors, but I've had to have some quite serious discussions with colleagues about the literacy levels in their materials (and I'm not talking about the odd mistake or silly error that everyone makes).

Most home educated children I know have taken exams or alternative qualifications BTECs etc eventually - usually more spread out in time than schooled teens. I don’t think being critical of the frankly damaging exam factories schools have been forced to become is a sign you are somehow incapable. I think all parents should be concerned about it. Not all will home educate. I don’t. Mine go to school. But as a teacher, I’m flipping concerned about the the political ideology of schooling in the U.K. I think that’s pretty rational given the facts.

@Chickenkatsu @MimiDaisy11
I was just as horrified! Their logic is completely skewed, they think there are secret hacks to everything including maths so 15/5 or 15/1 must equally 1.5 because there's a 5 and a 1 in it! 3 replies to that same post were home educators asking "What's division?"

As much as I will always support home education and suggest it to anyone who is having major issues with mainstream education, if you don't know basic maths, literacy and science skills, you shouldn't be teaching. I've even suggested to some parents to keep their child in school for a year while they refresh their own memory of primary/secondary education- using the books they're going to be using with their children and going through the motions of practicing teaching on themselves. People are too cocky and think they are far more intelligent than they are and that leaves children in horrific situations where they get to their teen years and have the academic abilities of an 8 year old who often makes mistakes.

There is a huge variation in outcomes for home-educated children.

I am afraid that people who are broadly for HE ignore safeguarding issues and abused children (with zero qualifications too) and focus only on Oxford graduates.

People against HE try to pretend that Oxford gards don't exist.

The truth is somewhat more complex, and I get to say that as I know people from both extremes and even some in the middle.

@OlympicProcrastinator

School isn’t just about academia though. It’s the socialisation with peers without parents around that helps them develop.

That doesn't have to happen between 9 and 3 Monday-Friday during term time.

@Meatbadger

It’s such a huge decision and commitment to remove your child from school. Some people do a fantastic job of HE but surely it’s limiting future options to some extent? Anyone know any doctors who were homeschooled?

Home educated children have the same options and opportunities as schooled children. What do you actually mean?

I am afraid that people who are broadly for HE ignore safeguarding issues and abused children (with zero qualifications too) and focus only on Oxford graduates.

I have to agree with that. In my experience home schooling is so divisive and people who are pro-HE can be absolute zealots about it, and also very defensive. I don't entirely blame them because there's a lot of abuse against HE, but some of the worst vitriol I've ever experience on Mumsnet has come from HE zealots furious at me because my personal experience invalidated the myths they were trying to push.

I've had posters say that it's impossible for an HE child to be abused because others in the HE community would notice (ignoring the fact that an abused HE child wouldn't be involved with the broader HE community); that pulling a child out of school doesn't remove them from monitoring because they'd still have regular doctor and dentist appointments (because abusive parents are super into dental health); that a child not being regularly seen by a doctor would be an SS flag in itself (how often do teenagers need to see their GP?); that all vulnerable children are known to SS anyway so being pulled out of school wouldn't make any difference; that abuse goes unnoticed in schools all the time (like that somehow cancels out HE abuse?). I even had one poster tell me that the tiny minority of HE children who are abused/people who exploit HE as a cover for abuse is acceptable collateral damage and that she was willing to sacrifice those children to protect her right for the freedom to raise her children without the authorities knowing.

People against HE try to pretend that Oxford gards don't exist.
This is also very true. I used to tutor for an organisation aimed at HE students, and the amount of money, time and effort really good HE parents put into it is so impressive. The divide between really invested HE parents doing it as a conscious choice/ideology, and those doing it for the wrong reasons or with little thought, is deep.

@Boulshired

There is a large home educated group where I live, but it’s not home education done by the parents. These are wealthy parents using various tutors. I have a teacher friends who now work in home school tutoring full time. It’s a form of home education that is for the few and cannot be compared to parents educating their children full time. The parents still call it home schooling when it’s really parents chauffeuring their children to private lessons.

But that is home education. What is wrong with parents "chauffeuring" their children to private lessons?

I've had the same experience.

They've won- I don't post about my childhood experiences of HE on MN any more. If I see a thread about it, I hide the title to stop myself posting. I just don't have the energy to be told my extremely dodgy HE childhood didn't happen by a zealot. Never experienced anything else like it on MN, except for saying something negative about HE.

I'm coming from the perspective of having been a home educator for 10 years.

I do think there are going to be some problems with the kids home educated because of covid. There are a lot of parents who really are not so keen to be doing it and when push comes to shove, don't want to be responsible for it. Many of them aren't really putting in much time and effort, they want an online program to do it for them, which any home educator will tell you doesn't work, especially at the primary level.

Mind you, it isn't going to work for the kids doing online school though the official system either, so who knows who will be worse off in those situations.

All that being said, I would advise not assuming too much based on things like how much education the parent has. All the research on home education shows that how well the children learn is not related to the parents' level of education. You can also get very good outcomes from different approaches to education, from very academic to unschooling.

Nor is there any necessity for access to the internet, or a printer. Home educators managed before these things existed. In fact in some ways internet access has been a very mixed blessing in home education.

As far as parents becoming militant - one of the things I have noticed in our local homeschooling group is that quite a few parents began to teach their children and discovered they functioning at a much lower level than they had believed, or that problems that has supposedly been addressed by the school were still very much problems, or things the parents had been reassured were normal, weren't. It has really created some anger in these parents who had thought the school was on top of their children's education, or who had been told they were worrying unnecessarily and even interfering. I mean things like children who struggled to read at 10, or were working at half their grade level in math.

It's understandable that many of these parents are now feeling quite negative toward the education system.

@Hardbackwriter

Home Education is not limited to teaching by the parents; the children might be taught by any number of other skilled people.

This is a genuine question - how would this happen if the parents don't have the money to pay for outside teaching or resources?

Library, many free websites, skill swapping.

emilyinwolverhampton

@Mistlewoeandwhine

Also you can’t really point an accusatory finger at home education when state schools produce so many NEETs.

Newly educated enthusiastic teens?

Nessecerily educated essential teachers?

Nautical engineers, engineering technically?

Newly educated enthusiastic teens?

Nessecerily educated essential teachers?

Nautical engineers, engineering technically?

Not in education, employment, Training.

Basically - home education doesn't always have perfect results, but neither does state education.

Library, many free websites, skill swapping

Skill swapping is different (though relies on being part of an organised network) but I just don't think library and websites constitute an education; they are absolutely vital things that all children should be encouraged to do but as an addition to some more guided learning. There's a reason that there was a big debate about whether Facebook should add warnings for unreliable news sites. Most adults are much less good than they think they are at identifying and evaluating sources of information, it's a skill that needs to be taught. I think it's totally unrealistic to think that any but a tiny minority of children can just educate themselves from the library and websites and it's really insulting to both teachers and dedicated home educators.

Working at a university, I've heard the 'it's a waste of money because you can just teach yourself out of books' thing - I've also had a few students who essentially attempted that by never turning up to lectures or seminars but trying to do the assessments, usually based on some stuff they'd googled, and it never, ever went well for them...