Wednesday 7 October 2009

Writing for the papers

News that I am due to give evidence next week to the select committee looking at home education has now reached the HE-UK message boards. The reactions are somewhat extreme; on the thread which announces that I am to give evidence, a debate is now taking place among people hoping to flee the country! I realise that I am unpopular with these people, but this does seem an extreme reaction. As well as the usual stories about the possibility of my working for the DCSF, an old favourite has been revived about my journalistic career. Ah, that my life is of such interest to these characters that they should wish to investigate it in fine detail! Briefly, a couple of months ago Mike Fortune-Wood took one of my posts from the list and stuck it up on the Times Educational Supplement website. I say nothing of the ethics of this; it speaks volumes about the man. Here is the relevant part;

"Third rate hack freelancers, into which category I am obliged to place myself, have a deplorable habit of misrepresenting themselves to both editors and also the public at large. It's perfectly true that I described myself as a teacher in that article. However if you were to be a reader of True Detective, then you would a few years ago have found me describing myself as a former detective from Scotland Yard! And don't even ask what I claimed to be when writing for The Lady..... Why, I even change gender for women's magazines. I know, I'm utterly shameless, but what can I do? I have to pay the bills like everybody else."

I had originally posted this in a light hearted vein as a riposte to somebody who was annoyed that I had not previously mentioned that I was a teacher. Apparently, this deeply incriminating passage is going to be waved beneath the nose of some MP. We must hope that she has more of a sense of humour than the members of the HE-UK list!

Actually, the above post is based upon a humorous piece I did for a writing magazine about the difficulties of being a freelance journalist. Not that it is wholly untrue and misleading, far from it. The fact is that many magazines wish to appear authoritative. To this end, they often encourage contributors to puff up their qualification to write upon a given topic. There is no particular secret about this, it's just how things work in that field. Women's magazines, to take another case, prefer to have it look as though all their contributors are women themselves. For some reason, many women feel uneasy about reading articles about intimate health problems that have been written by a man. Often, they alter the gender without even asking. I have had several pieces published in such magazines where I have been transgendered without any prior notice; a disconcerting experience indeed!

Not a few magazines like to make it look as though every article is written by a different person. Typically, I will be asked for an alternative name if more than one of my pieces is going to appear in an edition. Look out for James Tregarth, the name I use if I am writing about folklore or country matters. Of course the change of name from Simon to Simone is an absolute natural and possibly one of the reasons why we actually ended up naming my daughter Simone in the first place. A real case of art imitating life, as she now writes herself under this name. I dare say that just to confuse matters, she will probably end up writing as Simon Webb at some stage of her career!

I have of course not the least objection to anybody passing this email to any MP or House of Commons select committee that they wish. My only objection is to the sheer hypocrisy of these people. They rave on about protecting the privacy of individuals on the lists and then do their damnedest to spread other people's posts to the four winds. Breathtaking really.

14 comments:

  1. "My only objection is to the sheer hypocrisy of these people. They rave on about protecting the privacy of individuals on the lists and then do their damnedest to spread other people's posts to the four winds."
    Absolutely!! The most infuriating thing about this whole review is not the ideas of Badman, which I may not agree with but the whole mud slinging paranoia which has inflicted dozens of home educators.......
    Sigh.....

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  2. Maybe Simon is so deluded he doesn't even know who he is himself anymore???

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  3. Perhaps he received a handwritten invite to the SCI from Badman!!! A personal home visit during the review, a signed copy of the report.... Only natural to receive an invite to the SCI? Something not quite right here.

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  4. Simon, you and I had a number of discussions on home-education forums (or should that be fora?). What I found disturbing was your tendency to deny that you had said or meant something once your argument was shown to be flawed, when you clearly had said or meant it the way it was originally perceived. You now appear to be delighting in your notoriety and in the deception of magazine readers and to have little regard for the possible consequences of your activities for families whose children are receiving a suitable education and who are safe and well. I find your stance morally suspect.

    Sue

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  5. I am not delighting in my notoriety and have been quietly running this Blog for the last couple of months. People choose come here to discuss home education, I don't drag them in off the street! . All magazine readers are deceived in the ways which I outline. That is how the world is. As for my moral stance, well you are perfectly entitled to you opinions.

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  6. As I understand it you had been removed from the HEUK list so the only way you can know what is being said about you is by giving a false name to get back on the list. This goes against the list rules.

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  7. Well, of course according to the list rules all the posts there are private and not to be forwarded without permission of the person who posted. This did not prevent Mike Fortune-Wood, who is by the way a slippery weasel, from putting one of my posts onto the Times Educational Website. If the list owner himself does not observe the list rules, why should anybody else? Extracts from posts which I made on this list are now being including in submissions to the select committee, cross posted all over the internet and so on. Wendy Crickard announced her intention to show my old posts to an MP, Lynda Waltho. Nobody, least of all the list owner, objected to this. I have to assume therefore that these rules are no longer being followed by anybody at all.

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  8. I think you forgo the usual rules of your posts being kept 'private' when you BETRAYED all the home educators on the HEUK list by using info collected by yourself whilst on it for your own personal gain, so I really don't think you have got much to complain about do you???

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  9. I was not complaining at all. You yourself raised the subject of list rules and I responded. I seem to remember that one of the rules is that professionals like psychologists are banned, but that has not stopped Mike Fortune-Wood from inviting Paula Rothermel and other psychologists onto the list. The information used in the articles was from the EO public website, not the HE-UK list. As I have mentioned elsewhere, several people pass the messages from this list on to me now.

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  10. Simon, you appear to be losing the plot a bit! I did not raise the subject of list rules, you did. Also you WERE complaining about your posts from a "private" list being made public. Professionals etc are banned from joining lists but these people have a lot to offer HEs and were INVITED there by the list owner. They did not do what you are doing and secretly infiltrate a list! They have principles.

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  11. I feel tempted to say something irritable here! The subject of the list rules was raised by Anonymous, five posts up. What om Earth are you talking about, "secretly infitrating a list"? look at all the posts of mine on both EO and HE-UK and you will find that I use my own name and personal email address. Wake up!

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  12. Simon, you were kicked off HEUK and EO, well, EO are not too selective of who they allow on their forum. You DID infiltrate the lists for your own underhand misdeeds. You ARE infiltrating these lists either by using an alias, as you would not be allowed back on HEUK, and or as you say someone is forwarding you the messages. Either way you are in no position to complain (and you HAVE been complaining)if your previous posts are now been made public.That is my point.

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  13. HES said "You DID infiltrate the lists for your own underhand misdeeds".

    You know that is what I find odd about all these claims...yes, Simon was on those lists, but as he says, as himself...that is a legitimate long term home educator. Then he writes an article (the content of which I don't agree with) and everyone complains. Yet the thing that everyone complains about is the fact that he ignores all the evidence in favour of autonomous home ed...he doesn't quote any of the "good" statistics which are discusssed on the list, he doesn't use the "famous" case studies; in fact it is the other writer in the TES article (Jeremy Yallop?) who does name the case studies of Ford and Dowty..... so then Simon gets the boot for supposedely misusing list info when it is the simultaneous complaint that he has ignored that very info. Would some home educators have been less mad if he had (misused) those same facts?

    So now we have a situation when the "indignent righteous" who complained about Simon's supposed use of list emails are doing the exact opposite of what they preach themselves (ie forwarding his emails to all and sundry). I don't know .... some people are very inconsistent!

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  14. Just to recap. I joined HE-UK and EO under my own name and using my personal email address. I expressed my strongly held opinions on autonomous education and also mentioned that I wrote for newspapers and magazines. I even posted a link to one of the articles I had written for the Daily Telegraph about education. How was I "infiltrating" the lists? What subterfuge did I use? Finally, the information I used in the articles for the Independent and TES was all drawn from EO's public website. I cannot understand what all this nonsense about infiltration means.

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