A meeting with Ed Balls

Knowing the great affection felt for Ed Balls and the warm regard in which he is held by many home educating parents, I thought that this picture of my daughter and him might be of interest. I might perhaps have mentioned in the past that my daughter recently joined the Labour Party. (The Labour Party! My feelings on hearing of this development must have been broadly similar to those of a parent who learns that his teenage daughter is pregnant or on drugs. Only worse.) She spent a good deal of time talking to him and asking him the sort of impertinent questions which only a sixteen year old would have the cheek to raise, for instance about the precise nature of the electoral system used to select the next Labour leader, his plans for the future and so on.

I asked her out of curiosity what he had had to say for himself with regard to home education and his famous Children, Schools and Families Bill. To my surprise, she had not even thought to raise this particular topic with him. On reflection this should not have come as a surprise at all. I don't think that my daughter has ever really classified herself as being 'home educated'. When she was small and some fool in shops or other public places asked her the inevitable, fatuous question, 'No school today?', she would say simply, 'I don't go to school'. As she grew older she would describe herself as being home educated, but this was only once she had learned from others that this was a handy pigeon-hole which enabled them to classify her. I don't think I used the expression myself.

Today, she meets a huge variety of different people. Many of those people are concerned with education and so on. I often ask her afterwards, 'Did you tell so and so that you had been home educated?' She seldom has done, because it is to her an irrelevance. It has never been a defining feature of her life in the way that politics, religion and tastes in literature and theatre are. It is simply that she did not go to school. She has never displayed the least interest in the theory or ideology of home education and wanted no part of the book which I wrote. Not because she had not enjoyed being taught at home or thought it a bad experience, but rather because that was then and this is now. Who cares what her experiences of early education were? It's what she is doing now that matters to her.

Now I don't know how typical this is of other teenagers who have been educated at home. I have met a few of these and they usually let one know fairly early on that they were home educated. It seems to be a very definite part of their identity, of how they see themselves. I was wondering whether this might be because to many parents and consequently also to their children, home education is far more than simply how their children learn. It is a social grouping, hobby, political leaning and quasi-religion all rolled up into one. It provides them with electronic pen pals, who often act as a substitute for the social life which other parents have at the school gates. It allows them to feel passionately about a political issue, rather like those who used to campaign against the fluoridation of our drinking water. It gives them figures upon whom they and their group can focus their hatred and contempt. (Hmmm, my neck grew strangely warm as I typed that. Is it me or is it warm in here?) In short, it gives them an aim and purpose in life.
It is, as I say, a great deal more than just another educational method.

I suppose that we all like to belong to various groups, whether they are churches or football teams, political parties or book clubs. Home education is another of these groups, a huddling place frequently, but not of course invariably, for the lonely and disaffected. It would be interesting to study the home education movement in this country from an anthropological perspective. Its need for bogy men such as the terrifying figure of the local authority officer, always eager to snatch their children away from them; its demons and ghouls such as Graham Badman. The sense of persecution and hostility which many members feel so keenly. The delicious feeling of being a true believer, part of a beleaguered band of souls, fighting for a noble cause against the world of the orthodox and hidebound. A bit like being an early Christian, I suppose.

Unfortunately, my daughter was never really part of this world and so she did not have the chance to develop such visceral emotions on the subject of home education as those which I have observed in other families. I have a suspicion that when she goes to university she is unlikely ever to mention that she was home educated, unless the subject is specifically raised by somebody else.