'Home Schoolers should be treated robustly'

[maverick]

If you scroll down to igb's posting on this thread/page you'll see he has strong views on home education. He believes that 'the purpose of education is to protect children from their parents' prejudices', and therefore, 'Home Schoolers should be treated robustly'

Any thoughts?

www.badscience.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=10249&start=75

Personally I'm not saying discussions on home ed should generally focus on negatives - just that it should be possible to discuss them. And not 'negatives' in the sense of 'things that should make you not want to home ed' but more negatives as in pitfalls, difficulties, harder bits.

What do I have to do to be able to have a serious and frank discussion of possible downsides of school education with a teacher, or the possible pitfalls of home education with someone who home educates?? Because at the moment it seems as though I'm only allowed to discuss the pitfalls of school education with home educators, or the pitfalls of home education with teachers, but hardly ever the other way round! (There are a few honourable exceptions I've had good chats with privately.)

Bringing up possible downsides of anything can just be trying to get a complete picture - it's not always an attack.

' I mean do home edders go on the school threads and children starting school threads and demand that parents discuss the negatives of school?? '

I think that the difference is that anyone who has DCs at school recognises the negatives. I am very pro school, think it has been great for my DSs but could list a whole lot of negatives. It doesn't bother me, nothing is perfect-and would it be a good thing if it was? HEers don't like to admit to a single negative-probably because they see it as a personal attack.

Personally I don't admit to any negatives-because for our family there simply weren't any.
shrugs
from experience, from phone calls and at home ed meetings and camps and gatherings, this is true for the majority of the hundreds of home educated families we know in real life.

Only down side for us, was drop in income.
But that was more than made up by the masses of benefits.

For us there were never enough benefits in school. We know we tried it for long enough.

BUT I recognise that school works for some families and so would not go over onto the school thread and demand folks talk about the negatives.

I sincerely believe that the vast majority of parents want what is best for their children and they should be told accurate information about all of the educational paths, so they can make an informed choice about what is right for their family at that time.

This is not being done at the moment. LAs often display inaccurate information on their websites and in their policies on home education.

The only downside for us, at the moment (and we've just started, J would have been at nursery Jan '09), are my own worries and doubts about doing something so far from the mainstream. And these are all completely unfounded - just based on the negative reactions of other people and the media. As far as J is concerned, it's going really well.

A big reason HEers find it difficult to admit to any negatives they might be feeling in a place like this is that, immediately, someone will jump into the thread and say "why don't you send him/her to school?"

There's no way I'd even admit to having a less than 100% fantastic day in a public space like this because I really don't need to be told that whatever I'm feeling down about would be much better if my children were in school. No. It wouldn't be. Trust me. I know my children.

HEers do have wobbles sometimes - hardly surprising given that the way we are raising our children falls so far outside the norm. But if we are wobbling, please realise that a) we usually wobble in the knowledge that the alternatives are far worse for our families and b) we do it in a safe and respectful space, ie not usually on the Mumsnet HE thread.

It's taken me two nights to read this thread . And I can see the debate died a while back, but there are some very interesting points raised here and I felt the urge to bring it back to life.

My daughter (10) has had 5 years of schooling. My son (7) has had 2. They have been home educated since July 2008. There were a number of reasons why they left school. But about home ed;

The good bits -
*Both children can learn at their own pace.
*They have more time to follow their own interests (they always seemed too tired after school).
*They smile and laugh more.
*More flexibility and opportunities for broader education.
*We get to spend more time together.
*We talk more, something I've grown to appreciate because I barely got a grunt out of them before.
*I feel more involved in their education.
*We don't have to follow the National Curriculum which I feel is too prescriptive to facilitate meaningful learning beyond exams.

The bad bits -
*My daughter misses seeing her school friends (she has home ed friends, but obviously it's specific people she misses rather than friends in general). Having said that, her best friend moved away and changed schools anyway.
*People assuming they know better than I do what is best for my children and making ignorant and patronising comments in front of my children (thereby rendering my responses rather benign).
*Exams will cost us a fortune.

That's about it. Negative comments about HE are something that we have to put up with a lot, and it feels more personal than aiming kicks at schools or mainstream education in general. That's why we don't like it. It's why we are defensive. And why we are sometimes aggressive.

To attack the education we provide for our children is to attack our parenting. This is why so many are opposed to the recommendations in the Badman Report. The registration scheme may seem harmless, but LAs will have the power to refuse parents the right to home educate, effectively branding them crap parents. Those who are successfully registered can console themselves with the fact that they have managed to gain what is effectively a parenting licence. I won't have strangers in my home telling me how I may parent my own children. I won't be queueing up to be pronounced a satisfactory parent by a local government clipboard monitor. I don't need their approval. Their approval will not help to safeguard my children. Their approval will not make me feel validated. I don't want to live on Airstrip One.

I have a couple of comments about other posts:

Seeker, you said "But for children to leave a school with no GCSEs is a failure on the part of the school. To leave HE without GCSEs is seen as a valid choice." When children leave school with no GCSEs, the failure is the parents', in law. If it was the schools fault, parents would be suing up and down the country. Just saying.

BonsoirAnna - your definition of institution does, indeed, differ from what is generally perceived to be such in the UK. A business on its own wouldn't be considered an institution. An organisation, maybe. An institution is a wider, more societal entity, rather than a personal/local one engaging in society. I guess definitions would vary from culture to culture, which is why your talk of institutions may seem a bit disingenuous here. I'm not sure why you think not going to school would put someone at a disadvantage with regards to fitting into society, after all, were these people not always in society? What would be the harm in someone having their first taste of institutional life at 18? What would be the harm of never setting foot into an institution? I wish I could figure out what it is you're driving at.

I participate fully in society although I choose not to use certain aspects of it as I don't need to. I'm not opting out. I'm opting in to other things. I certainly am not free-riding on somebody else's back. What rot!

Can't be arsed to re read this thread to see all the contexts but SweetFanny picked out Seeker's comment:

"But for children to leave a school with no GCSEs is a failure on the part of the school. To leave HE without GCSEs is seen as a valid choice."

To that I would say, off the top of my head, parents have a duty to provide a suitable and efficient education at school or otherwise.

Efficient has been explained as that which achieves what it sets out to achieve,

So as schools set out to educate children to pass GCSEs, if a child leaves school with no GCSEs then it is a failure, in terms of efficiency of the education provided.

We most certainly did not set out for our children to achive GCSEs.
We would not choose to narrow down their education in such a way. It simply would not have worked in our home based education.
Horses for courses.

For one of our children it was a valid choice to take GCSEs and A levels. That persons free choice.
It was also a valid choice for our other two to not take any GCSEs.

Hey they have all ended up in pretty much the same place as they would have done anyway.
One heading for university after three years of working.
One heading to travel and work as a volunteer abroad, after two years of working and living away from home
One at college, after doing an OU course and deciding whether to go onto Uni or to take up the paid work already being offered and seeing where that leads her.

This next but is from our 'educational philosphy' (from the last time we sent it to the LA0. Talking about the efficiency of that education.
Note it doesn't mention GCSEs:

Our home-based education is efficient by definition, in that it achieves that which it sets out to achieve; as any learning undertaken is in direct response to the learner's intrinsic motivation. H's interests, drives and aptitudes are the driving force behind her learning, thus her learning is naturally at their precise ability level and therefore inherently suitable to her age. As our educational approach is a whole life approach with no artificial boundaries dividing the two it is by definition full-time.
H?s specific learning difficulties are of less consequence now that she is receiving a home and community based education. H?s learning style is very simply her own learning style.

As A.S Neil, creator of Summerhill, succinctly puts it:
"When my wife and I began, we had one main idea ? to make the school fit the child instead of making the child fit the school."
(A.S. Neil, 1937)