Question re home educating

[Juno77]

I was listening to a segment on Radio 2 yesterday on literacy.

A caller was on the phone, talking of his inability to read and write and how he runs a farm and it's never held him back, etc etc.

He then said 'my children are homeschooled, if they get older and decide to read and write, I won't encourage them but I won't hold them back'.

I wondered - do you not have to teach literacy? I thought you had to follow the curriculum, just in your own way. Are there checks in place? Do home schooled children not sit exams?

He's a pillock ,why would anyone with an ounce of a brain not want their children to be literate . As to the question ,you don't have to follow the national curriculum and you don't have to take exams ,although some people choose to .

Well, yes obviously (sorry I kind of skirted past how much of an idiot this guy was!)

So, basically a home schooled child could be doing nothing educational at all, and no one would ever know? I always thought certain levels of education were compulsory.

I hope this isn't too ignorant - I genuinely know very little about home schooling and thought it best to ask the experts.

Hello Juno.

For us it isn't a case of following the curriculum but supporting dd to achieve what she wants to achieve. If that makes sense.
There is no law that tells you what to teach nor do they have to follow any curriculum.
Many H.ed dc take exams such as GCSE's but some skip them and go straight to college.
There are so many different ways that parents decide to H.ed and there are no right or wrong approaches.
If I can give you an example: My dd left school at the end of y3, her hand writing was terrible and whilst an average reader she wouldn't choose to read.
Now her writing is beautiful and she both reads and writes for pleasure. I was advised by a fellow H.ed parent on here not to worry and she would improve at her own speed when the time was right. Now believe me this took some faith, but I went along with the advice and it has paid off. I did no set lessons for reading or writing and gave the only condition that she kept a journal.
I can't believe the transformation and am not the only one. Her old friends from school can't believe the difference.

I don't think he is an idiot at all, he has said that he won't hold them back. He is following an autonomous approach by the sounds of things and his children will learn to read and write when they have a need to.
There are many who have followed this approach and it hasn't held their children back.
I am not an authority on the autonomous approach but know there are several on here for whom it works and has worked successfully.

I find it desperately sad that people are missing out on a massive part of life by being intentionally illiterate. Reading for pleasure or to become informed is essential.

How can anyone not want their children to be part of the literate world? I'd say it was even neglect to not care about whether they can read.

I do think he is an idiot for not teaching his children to read and write. I taught mine before Primary school, I would have thought most people do.

It's terribly restricting to not be literate.

I agree about it being neglect.

I don't think its a case of not caring whether they can read or write.
I could have given the same response myself and we don't know the context of his response.
Some people have suggested that all h.ed children are held back to some extent and their comments are given out of ignorance.
It doesn't matter if they learn to read and write at 5 or during their teens and more than likely this mans children will decide they need these skills sooner or later.
There are many people who have been schooled throughout who never read for pleasure.

I think in the context of how the OP said he came across he is an idiot , he has said he can't read and write and he's done ok so that's good enough for his children and he wouldn't encourage them to read and write . That's a bit like saying I've never worn a cycle helmet and I'm still alive so I won't get my children to wear them . I'm all for people home educating however they want but surely the point is you should be educating and the basics of education are reading and writing . Unless your children are going to live in isolation they do need basic skills and sometimes the adult has to take the lead and do what is right . IMO.

I haven't taught any of my children to read.

With one child, there was apparently no interest in it at all. So we began a habit of putting closed captions on whenever there was a DVD playing. And of course we were reading bedtime stories routinely. I realised that the child was functionally literate when, one day, the child started reading the closed captions out, and it wasn't a matter of having memorised the dialogue because what was being read was a description of the sound effect: "engine spluttering". No phonics. No literacy practice. No reading tree books. Not a single moment of sitting down learning to read together - it all happened entirely internally.

With another child, life was all about literacy games on the iPad. Lots of child-led games with rhymes and spelling out words and so on, but with adult support. A much more interactive process and, in some ways, looking more like conventional acquisition of literacy, but still without anyone ever imposing anything from top down.

I think that the only important characteristic for an adult to have in order to impart literacy (and I wouldn't say that writing is a key skill for a small child in 2014. Finding your way around a QUERTY keyboard, yes, and having sufficient hand-eye co-ordination to learn to write later on, but a key skill for a 5 year old? Waste of time IMO, unless the child is eager to develop that skill at that time) is that the adult should themselves value and use literacy. So the example of the illiterate farmer worries me slightly just because it sounds as if literacy is not something valued by him. However, as long as he doesn't keep the children locked up in a cupboard, they will discover pretty quickly that this is a literate world and, assuming they want to integrate with the world around them, they'll acquire literacy for themselves.

ommmward ,but you were encouraging them to learn so I think that's different ,I agree keyboard skills are important but most of us do write as part of daily life and jobs . I also wasn't talking about 5 year olds but a general as children grow up type of thing .

Yes of course. Writing needn't be a priority at 5, that's all - it's important that writing should be a priority once a person starts to need it. It's not a very difficult skill :-)

I'm not going to judge the farmer. There's too much potential for him not to have explained himself very well, for it to have been unsympathetically edited, and for us to be playing a slight game of chinese whispers about exactly what he said. I don't think it's very helpful to judge his situation because of that.

Actually I agree with you ,we didn't hear the interview so shouldn't really judge ,but it is interviews like that that make non home edders wonder what we get up to !

Floralnomad

Yes, I can relate to that. Sometimes people we meet ask us all sorts of questions and when they see that H. ed doesn't fit in with what they would expect they are . They don't mean to be rude and once the penny has dropped if they are open minded they openly suggest they have learned something or gained a new perspective.
Some people you know just wouldn't get it no matter how many times you explained or reasoned.