Regretting taking kids out of school.

[apocketfulofposy]

Posting here for traffic,sorry.

I have 5 children ranging from aged 6 to 10 weeks old.

We always planned to home educate after reading a book about it when ds1 and 2 were toddlers,then when ds1 was about 4 and a half,and i was pregnant with baby number 4,i decided to give our local primary a go,partly because it was just that time where he would of been going and partly because i was finding it hard with them all at home (no family on either side for 3 hours,husband who works away monday to friday,rural ish area,i cant even drive!).

Anyway reception was ok,he liked it,made plenty of friends,dc2 and 3 went to the pre school and liked it,except dc2 had lots of issues with hitting other children and just general destructive behaviour.

When ds1 started yr1 last year he hated it from the word go,he still liked seeing his friends but he really noticed the change between mostly play to mostly lessons,plus his teacher left after a term and the new one was very strict and spoke to the children like she was some kind of prison officer.

Ds2 started reception and seemed to enjoy it but after a few weeks i was called in a few times about his hitting and destroying things,they said he just physically wasnt ready to be at schoolt hat much so put him down to half days,which was a bit of a faff for me as i was in and out all day but it was fine.It didnt seem to help though and he was behaving worse and worse at school,especially at lunchtime,but strangely his behaviour at home was getting better.

Add to this the fact i was finding it hard carting them all around everywhere and i felt crap because i kept forgetting to reply to things and i kept hearing all this micheal gove stuff,i just decided to pull them out,id been thinking about it on and off for a while and just thought do it,and id id it almost on a bit of a whim.

The first few weeks were great and we all loved the novelty of not rushing around in mornings and the kids have been playing all day,and actually one good point is that they have been getting on so much better.

But apart from that i am starting to regret taking them out,i miss the routine,i miss being able to take the babies to their groups and talking to my "mummy friends"(cringe) i miss being able to go to the shop quickly with just the double buggy,i also just dont know what to do with them,and the house is just such a mess!

I know these are'nt huge things but its starting to feel chaotic and i can feel it going back to the way it used to be,before school,and it hink i underestimated how much it did for all of us.I just dont know what to do!

Help and advice please!xxxxx

I think a good education needs to encompass all manner of things that don't interest you necessarily, have no practical application to your daily doings and may well be forgotton.

It's about building intellectual skill sets as much as anything else.

I wasn't generalising- I was replying to OP and talking solely about autonomous learning. I have nothing against it, if it suits the child, but I think it is the hardest of all for the adult to do.
The easiest is to write out a plan of what you want to cover, get all your resources and equipment, books and websites and devote part of the day to it and then be free to do what you like. I don't expect HEers to all do that- after all it is why many rejected school.
However, felicitating learning is far harder- you can't know where you are going, you can't know when and how long you need. Once you get more than one child it has to become compromise.
e.g. DC 1 gets a real interest in the Stone Age and you know that the local museum has just what you need. Child 2 doesn't want to go and so you have choices, you might bribe with a visit to the park afterwards, a cafe for lunch or you might say 'we will go next Tues, when DC2 is out with a friend (DC1 might have lost interest then)or you might trade off in that DC2 puts up with it and he gets his choice next week.
You get there and DC1, who wanted to go needs your help and attention, DC2 might possibly find it interesting but the toddler just wants to run round pressing buttons and then the baby needs a nappy change!
As they get older it gets more difficult to suit them all.

At the start, I was a pretty proactive, with all sorts of ideas etc. but I soon found out that it wasn't really for us. The children are all very different and needed different handling. I have tried to treat them as individuals and encourage them in the things that interest them particularly.

DS4, for instance, loves being read to, DS3 HATED it with a passion. SO while I was reading to DS4, DS2 was doing his own thing (sumi-e, harmonica playing, cross stitch or whatever), DS3 would be playing with Scratch on the PC or looking at something like Planet Science, while DD would be drawing or reading or doing something that she enjoyed.

Nowadays, the older ones do their own thing and only come to me if they need something.

I've lost count of all the doors I've opened for ds over the years, to encourage interests outside of my own range - you just can't engage a child in something they don't want. Those doors stay open though, and the option is always there for him to take up new directions if he shows an interest. I just don't force him if he doesn't want to. There would be no point and would just waste time better spent on other things that he would gain from.

Tamer, I disagree with that. As the children get older, they begin to realise the need for compromise and that, when you live as a family, everyone has to pay attention to each other's needs and wants. In the scenario you mention, I would just tell the children that we were going, and that would be the end of it.

I've been HEing since before DS4 was born and that's how I've laways handled things.

Word, I don't disagree with you, but there comes a point where forcing children to try to learn things that they have no interest in/have no aptitude for, that it ceases to be a productive activity and just puts them off learning. Some children will never build intellectual skill sets in that kind of environment.

There are though, certain things that everyone needs to understand.

Young people may find them boring but it behoves us as good parents to ensure that they have the understanding anyway, IMVHO.

An education limited to our tastes, is not a good education.

stressedHEmum.
My honest opinion is that you would be a lot less stressed if you didnt HE! [realise that I dont think my writing that is going to make any difference to you whatsoever].

Am Sevensev btw, have name changed.

Word, so when is a good age to stop forcing a child to learn things that the really don't enjoy. When I was at school, your choices were limited until you were 16, it's still much the same.

My classes, even though all of them were top stream, were full of kids who didn't want to be there and so spent the whole time being disruptive. Now, I understand that things like Maths and English are vital and everyone has to learn those, but things like geography, German or Physics are not vital to being able to live a decent live. Yes, they are good things to know about and they also enable you to build pathways in your brain that make you better able to learn different skills, but you can't force a young person to learn.

Nothing has changed, either, because my DS, again top of the year in all his subjects, still had to contend daily with kids who just didn't want to be in French, Physics of Maths and whose main aim was to disrupt the class to the extent where teaching and learning was impossible. Luckily for him, he is the type of person that will learn and do well wherever he is and he was one of the lucky ones who passed all his exams well and went on to better things. But he was one of the lucky ones.

Surely it would be better to be able to teach to a young person's strengths and interests after they have gained the knowledge that they will need to be able to function within society.

Twintery, not nearly as stressed now as I once was. Not now that I have more experience and half a clue what I'm doing. The stresfull bit was when I was HEing an autistic teen, 2 young kids, dealing with a bay and having to fight with the school that DS1 was at to get them to support his Asperger's and do something about all the bullying he was getting.

It's like a walk in the park nowadays

"An education limited to our tastes, is not a good education."

This, this and this again!!!!!!

Word, I think what I might not be communicating very well is that it's not just that some kids find things boring, it's mostly that some kids find certain things impossible to learn. They just really struggle with academic things.

I have a friend from school who, in the olden days, took 4 attempts to pass "O"-grade arithmetic and English. She spent from the age of 14 to 18 trying and failing the same courses every year - resitting every summer, while the rest of us moved on through Highers, SYSs and on to uni. Eventually she managed to scrape a pass, but the pain that it caused her in between times was enormous. Surely after a couple of attempts, she should have been allowed to concentrate on things that she was good at, not things which she just couldn't grasp.

My friend was never going to go into an academic field, anyway. She just wasn't capable of that. Just like many, many children and young people. My honest opinion is that the best thing for young folk is to play to their strengths and help them flourish in those areas rather than trying to force them into an academic niche into which they can never fit.

What actually constitutes, definitively, a good education.

I think that I have a good education. I had a broad based schooling and I have a Masters degree from one of the country's top universities. But there are things that I never, ever learned. When I was at school, for instance, girls didn't do technical subjects and boys didn't do Home Ec. I gave up geography at 14 and stopped doing PE at 12 to take on extra things like Greek and German.

What was a good education for me would have been a nightmare and completely unmanageable for some of my peers. At some stage, education has to be tailored to the individual for it to work.

I've parented a child right through school, and then home educated others whom school failed...and became totally autonomous in education and life.
For us this type of living quickly became a lifestyle choice....and is in my experience easier than imposing a plan or timetable.
it's not the same for all home educating parents. All make choices of what is right for their families.
I find it odd that someone who hasn't any experience of educating in this way can say so categorically that it is harder.
For us it was much easier, came much more naturally.

stressed You are explaining this really well and I sort of get it. The idea seems to take much of the early age pressure of children so that when they are ready to learn, they are keen and interested.
I think many of us, though, supplement school with the things that your Dcs do full time.
I don't think I would be brave enough to HE. I think it requires a certain kind of personality on the part of the parent, but also how would you cope with a child who appears to have no self motivation? Or do you think that the apathy that many children develop is because school isn't meeting their needs?
My best friend at school left with very few qualifications but she is now a MENSA member. She felt most of what she was being taught was irrelevant to her. Those of us who did well just kind of "got" the fact that sometimes you had to endure the dull to arrive at the interesting stuff, but that doesn't suit everyone.

Well, for a start, realising that you don't have to like a subject, like the teacher or have a natural aptitude in order to learn at least the basics of that subject. And proving this to yourself by doing it. GCSE French is a very good example. I am prepared to go out on a limb and say that any NT child can get a C at GCSE French - but you are always hearing "Oh, I'm no good at languages". You might not be like my brother, who appears only to need to sit next to a Portugese person on the bus to be able to speak perfect Portugese, but you can get a C in MFL with a modicum of work. Ditto Maths.

Sometimes things are difficult. Doing things that are difficult is good for your brain. Sometimes doing things you don't want to is good for your brain too.

I think a good education has to encompass a huge range of areas/ideas/skills. Regular posters will know I take no prisoners on this count ...

But as martorana points out, one key skill is just cracking on from time to time in the face of difficulty, disruption and boredom!

If HE is such a good thing why do children and societies in general where formal education is not accessible do so badly?

"If HE is such a good thing why do children and societies in general where formal education is not accessible do so badly?"

For the sake of argument accepting your premise, presumably because the children aren't home educated either?

My friend home eds her 6 children (she also has a newish baby). They range from 4 to 14. She does it very sucessfully, they are delightful, enquiring children who are very well rounded and educated.

The main difference between her adn the OP is that she treats it like a job and approaches it in a very orderly & organised fashion to ensure that she educates each age group appropriately.

"Unschooling" sounds like rubbish IMHO. Not a recipe for success in future.

Copied from Wiki (I'm sorry, I know its not the foremost research site... ):

"Parents of unschoolers provide resources, support, guidance, information, and advice to facilitate experiences that aid their children in accessing, navigating, and making sense of the world.[4] Common parental activities include sharing interesting books, articles, and activities with their children, helping them find knowledgeable people to explore an interest with (anyone from physics professors to automotive mechanics), and helping them set goals and figure out what they need to do to meet their goals. Unschooling's interest-based nature does not mean that it is a "hands off" approach to education. Parents tend to involve themselves, especially with younger children (older children, unless new to unschooling, often need less help finding resources and making and carrying out plans).[4]"

I think this makes it clear that, with 'unschooling', particularly of young children, it does require parents to be actively involved - not just leaving it to them and taking them for occasional trips.

There's unschooling and unschooling...

Parents who un-school successfully certainly don't run a free-for-all. And yes, their DC have to do stuff they might not want to...

I am not anti-HE. I would consider it myself if we did not have excellent schools here (moved here because of them) or if I had a child who just wasn't thriving in school and I couldn't find another way to help him/her.

However, I can't help thinking that my DC who attend school also do vast amounts of the autonomous learning that people are talking about here. I have three, close in age, and they spend hours roaming about making up their own games, building things out of Lego/cardboard etc., getting interested in something and asking for help in finding out about it, building dens in the woods, going for long muddy walks, going on trips to museums/galleries and making scrapbooks about them, reading (the eldest) and being read to (all of them). Hours and hours and hours - before school, after school, weekends, the half-terms and holidays.

Then at school they (I have one in Y1 and one in YR) do loads of music, drama, PE, gardening club, choir (Y1), - all the stuff you're talking about going to clubs to do. And they also do formal learning - which seems to be often constructed in terms of activities - so numeracy and literacy are often done with treasure hunts and building things and physical stuff.

It just seems to me that a good school (and I admit, ours is excellent and many will not be anywhere near that standard) is complementary to the autonomous learning of home.

But then my DF was an autonomous learner (through neglect). He was self-motivated (perhaps because of it, admittedly), and in adult life completed his education to PhD level and had a very successful career. He always felt though that he'd lost ten years of career, through starting his formal education later. He was adamant that my siblings and I should have the best possible formal education, and he is very supportive of us doing the same for our DC.

Sorry I still don't understand the whole ' unschooling'.

Structured home education perfect, and I have researched a lot myself. But unstructured surely everything just can't be fitted in

The above of baking/ reading/ mine craft/ counting carrots isn't learning to me. It's everyday life. My eldest is 4, he will attend school 9-3pm. 8-9am and 3-8/9pm weekdays he will still be baking/ reading/ going to museums/ swimming/ counting sheep or whatever. Half the year is school holidays/ weekends anyway.
To me school is a place for simple education. To learn basic maths/ sciences/ English/ make friends/ etc, I think it's a good part of life. It Is a parents job to enhance that, but they aren't going to cover everything. Ie my ds loves space and earthquakes atm, so on top of school we go to museums/ research/ watch documentaries/ read about these subjects. He doesn't care right now about other parts of science, so that's where basic knowledge through school covers them.

However anyone relying on just school for education is wrong. They will never get beyond average

I always say I home educate my DC, but use school as one of our many resources ...

I certsainly would not rely on either school, or my own man power...

Nice way of putting it word!