Monday 16 November 2009

Male and female - two different types of home education

In 1808, when he was two, the father of John Stuart Mill decided that it was time to begin his son's education in earnest. A year later, the child knew Greek. Young John's achievements throughout his childhood were astonishing. At eight he learned Latin and was soon reading the classical authors of antiquity in the original languages. In adolescence, he was regarded as an absolute prodigy of erudition. What an example for today's home educators! At twenty though, he had a nervous breakdown. For many modern home educators, that sort of burnout is seen as a fairly natural consequence of stuffing a young child's head full of facts and learning in this way. It is the sort of thing that few mothers would attempt and since the great majority of home educating parents are women, this particular style of home education seems to have fallen from favour somewhat. Most people are familiar with other examples of this peculiarly male desire to produce a genius by so-called "hothousing". Often, the long term effects do not recommend the whole scheme to the neutral observer.

Ruth Lawrence was twelve when she began studying mathematics at Oxford University. She had been home educated by her father, who gave up his job in order to do so when she was five. She went on to marry a man almost thirty years older than herself; about the same age as her father in fact! Sufiah Yosuf was thirteen when she started at Oxford. Also home educated by her father, a few years after leaving university she became a prostitute. There have always been cases of this type of home education. Invariably, it is fathers who undertake it and it always involves the relentless pushing of a child to achieve more an more at a younger and younger age. Intriguingly, local education authorities have never seemed to have a problem with such home education. It was only when ordinary mothers like Iris Harrison started doing it in the nineteen seventies that the court cases began. Was this sexism? Or is it that when women educate their children, things are often a little more relaxed and laid back? Could it be that the average local authority officer can recognise easily what is going on in the home of a father who is trying to produce a genius, but has more difficulty understanding the gentler pace of informal learning which women seem more to favour?

Certainly, there are still such men home educating their children. They are unlikely to be seen on the home education circuit though. This is hardly to be wondered at. The sort of men who do hang out with home education groups often tend to be semi-emasculated males who are determined to outdo the women in sensitivity and gentleness. They are "New Men" and only an ordinary man with the strongest stomach and remarkably powerful ability to suppress the gagging reflex would be able to withstand their company! I have observed before that from time to time I would encounter lone home educating fathers. I have a strong suspicion that they too were the pushy type of home educator whose child was performing calculus at five. One seldom hears them mentioned on the home education sites and I can only guess at how things turned out for them and their kids. There is little doubt that the world of modern home education, at least in this country, contains far more women than men. This may well be due to economic reasons, but I would be very curious to know if there are any long term differences between the outcomes for those children taught by their fathers in this way and those who spend their days in their mother's company.

7 comments:

  1. There are also families where the home education is shared more or less equally between the parents. I've no idea how common this is but out of the five families we are closest to (including ours), I would only consider one as being mainly home educated by one parent (the mother). In the other four families, work and home education is shared. But maybe our 'group' is an anomaly within home education and we have become such good friends partly because our approach is similar?

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  2. My wife and I both worked part time. It was however me who ws the slavedriver and making our daughter work. With my wife it was more going out together and amore relaxed. My impression is, although I am ready to be corrected, that it is usually the father who is fretting about academic work.

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  3. Neither of us fretted about academic work (and, of course, neither of us make them do it), but it's more my cup of tea when they want help. Sounds like I'm just being contrary, but I'm not, honest, LOL.

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  4. We are sort of forced into a joint role, otherwise the Italian language skills would take an interesting nosedive.

    By joint I mean The Italian Sock Dropper is "the knower" and I am the irritating, micromanaging, control freak who nags him about how exactly I want it done, which means PROPERLY. Not just giving him the answers cos he has worked out that a certain person cannot resist more than three nano-seconds when presented with a well-practiced blank look.

    That sort of joint.

    Joint-ish. With an added extra portion of hovering from one of us and long suffering sighs from the other.

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  5. Hmm ... I've been the stay-at-home dad of a girl who was a fluent reader before she was three, who excelled at school and is now grown up with three University degrees including a Law degree with honours and about to qualify to practice law at the age of 24 (ceremony next month); and I've been the stay-at-home dad of a boy who quit school in 2002 at the age of seven and who has spent most of his time since playing videogames. I wonder what kind of "Man" I could be labelled as. :-)

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  6. Perhaps a man who has had a boy and a girl! My own experience was limited to having a girl. This is an interesting point actually, whether girls are easier to home educate than boys. I would guess yes.

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  7. Can you say more about what you 'can only guess at' - this expression usually means one has a strong suspicion about it, but it is not clear what you think. Surely this is something one can't generalise about?

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