Saturday 14 August 2010

A common frame of reference

I don't think that any home educating parent subscribes to the popular myth of the home educated child as a socially inept misfit, irrevocably harmed by his selfish parents' insistence on not allowing him to join a peer group and attend school like everybody else's kids. Certainly, the available research does not seem to bear out this widely held view. Both Rudner in Achievement and Demographics of Home School Students ( Education Policy Analysis Archives Volume 7, No. 8 1999) and also Shyers in Comparison of Social Adjustment between Home and Traditionally School Students (University of Florida, Ph.D Dissertation 1992), found no evidence at all to show that the social skills of home educated children were inferior to those of children at school. Quite the opposite in fact! Both found that home educated children actually scored higher than the schooled. Their social skills tended to be better than those of children confined to classrooms.

There is one way, however, that the home educated child cannot help but be something of an outsider, both during childhood and also in later life. Everybody has been to school. Black or white, Muslim or Christian, rich or poor, male and female, young and old; it is practically the only thing that everybody in this country has in common. The experience of childhood is shaped and defined by school to such an extent that it becomes an integral and assumed part of the background of all the citizens of the United Kingdom. It is a great unifying factor.

Talk to anybody at random and they will have a fund of anecdotes about their childhood, all of them coloured by the background of school. Breaking up for the summer holidays, cold winter's days on the football pitch, school dinners, playtime, the experience of belonging to a close group of friends, even encountering bullying; for almost everybody you meet, this is common ground.
Not so of course for the child educated at home. True, her life might be happier than that of the schoolchild; at least that is what her parents tell themselves. But different, certainly. The children met once a week at a home education group are not the same as the closely knit bunch of friends seen every day for six hours or so at school. Better perhaps, but definitely not the same. Swimming regularly with a parent is not at all the same as changing for PE with your friends at school. Walking to and from school with friends is a different experience from walking to the library or museum with your mother.

Children educated at home by their parents are thus deprived of a common frame of reference shared by everybody else in the country. Even those who have thoroughly enjoyed the experience of being home educated can feel a little wistful about this when all their contemporaries are chatting about school days. Because school still lingers on in the hearts of us, even forty or fifty years after we leave. A lot of adults still have a mental association with September as 'back to school'. It is impossible to see a bunch of schoolchildren without fleetingly remembering one's own school days.

Of course, for the home educating parent, these memories might be more likely to be painful than for most people. It is curious to note the number of high profile home educators whose time at school was unhappy. It may be coincidence, but it looks to me rather a leitmotif of the home educating parent; that they were often bullied or otherwise unhappy at school. Not all of them of course, but a remarkable number make throwaway remarks which reveal that whatever their ostensible motives for home education, the experience of their own school days is a factor in the decision to home educate.

Going to school is, as I observed above, the one thing which we all have in common. I have never met a man of my own age who hadn't been to school and I suspect that this is the case with all the other home educating parents who might be reading this. We all do what we feel to be best for our children, I take that as given, but we should think very carefully before setting our children apart in this way from everybody else in the country whom they are likely to meet!

13 comments:

  1. Most children are brought up by their parents, but I haven't noticed that acting as a 'unifying factor' in society. In fact, what makes discussions about school or families interesting is the different experiences that people had.

    The law requires parents to cause their children to have a suitable education. For some children, school, however popular with other children or their parents, is not a suitable educational environment. Doing something simply because everybody else appears to me a rather inadequate reason for a course of action.

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  2. "Most children are brought up by their parents, but I haven't noticed that acting as a 'unifying factor' in society. "

    I'm guessing here that you have not worked with either orphans or looked after children! Believe me, being brought up by parents does give us a common framework, very much like school.

    " Doing something simply because everybody else appears to me a rather inadequate reason for a course of action."

    Well of course I did not myself follow this course of action. I'm aware though that I had other motives beyind the purely educational and that these motives caused me to take a course of action which will have far-reaching implications for my daughter. I was just musing about what some of these implications might be.

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  3. I read 'unifying factor' as in 'promoting social cohesion' which is a common theme in educational policy discourse. That's not the same as feeling as if you have missed an experience that everyone else appears to have had.

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  4. " I take that as given, but we should think very carefully before setting our children apart in this way from everybody else in the country whom they are likely to meet!"

    Over emphasizing not wanting to create yet another way to make my son feel "set apart" is why I left Son of Thor in the RE classroom a year longer than I should have. (psychotic witch of a teacher issues, not my personal Madonna issues).


    I did (and do) worry about making him stand out like a sore thumb, leaving him without a similar cultural reference of childhood (HE wise). Even if I hadn't, the rest of the town was (and is) queuing up to remind me. Which is par for the course, since dealing with the issue of a lack of commonality has defined my experience as a parent, because in many areas of parenthood I share very little “common reference” with …just about everybody who meets me.


    All you can do, is examine the options from every angle, weight up the pros against the cons, measure those up against your kid with him as the priority, hold your nose, leap, hope to god the landing goes well and don’t close off the option for making changes if it does look like you made the wrong call.


    I've had to go through the same process with almost every aspect of my parenting, which is frequently seriously at odds with what his peers experience and my peers practice. We have both come to know the fallout from walking outside of the mainstream in that respect. Likewise there are practices here that I have adopted over those more common in the UK, which means those differences are highlighted and attract not exactly positive attention when we are in the UK. There are times when I have a bit of cloud over me thinking that no matter what I do I just can’t win, too much of X for that rabble, not enough X for the other buggers.


    Which is the price you pay sometimes for doing what you have assessed to be the right thing for your child. I wouldn't have pushed through and stick to a principle or ideal from the onset if I had believed for a minute that the payoff wasn't worth the price. Where I have screwed up I have reassessed and let go of my emotional attachment to a specific in my value system for the sake of his wellbeing


    There is a cost to everything, be it thanks to creating differences or seeking out sameness. All you can do is make your kid the priority when you do your picking and choosing and hope to god you got it right.
    I’d imagine that most other parents are coming from the same place.

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  5. I have always been aware of this. In fact, it was probably this more than anything that led to our sending our daughter to school. However, the fact of this shared 'universal' experience just wasn't enough to make up for all the negatives or silence the internal voice telling us both that the learning and social experiences were richer outside of school. This has proved to be so.

    I think we are very lucky in this town to have so many home educated children that the social opportunities are far beyond a 'once a week' home ed group. Our son, for example, goes to a home ed group for two mornings a week (21 families belong), where he plays with many of the children he also sees on the other three days at Forest School, park meet up and youth club. Add in the sleepovers and parties and so on and he really does have a little cohort that is not unlike a friendship group based around school. It isn't the same as school - that's true - but we choose to value happiness over sameness.

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  6. "In fact, it was probably this more than anything that led to our sending our daughter to school."

    yes, I never thought about school for my daughter for educational reasons! I must admit though i did agonise on occasion about the fact that she would be missingout on other stuff that I could not provide. She is very self-cofident and assured, which is good, but I notice that she does not even now spend much time with young people her own age. She prefers those a good deal older. Obviously, having spent so much time in the company of an older man and woman, her parents, has probably got something to do with this. I', not saying it's a bad thing, but it does mark her out a little. Still, like you Allie, I made what seemed the best decision based upon what I knew. Whatever choices you make like that there will be good consequences and bad.

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  7. I just can't see how this could possibly be a problem.

    Maybe I'm being a bit dim, but I think about some of my friends who didn't have tellies growing up. They had no 'common frame of reference' with the rest of us who did. In fact, they probably still don't know who Rag Tag and Bobtail were. But they manage fine without that common knowledge of those of us of a certain age. :-)

    It seems to me that you are worrying unneccesarily about this again. And why have you labelled this post 'scialisation'? What on earth has school to do with that process?

    Mrs Anon

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  8. "Rag Tag and Bobtail"

    Oh, dear Mrs Anon, I'm afraid that this is a hideous clue as to your age! You will be mentioning Torchy and Muffin the mule next. It just struck me that when everybody in the country has a common set of experiences, then those who lack them might be set apart to some extent. This was precipitated by reading about childhood development and a passage in which various people explained how they still were aware of the school calendar, even though they were in their fifties and sixties.

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  9. "This was precipitated by reading about childhood development and a passage in which various people explained how they still were aware of the school calendar, even though they were in their fifties and sixties."

    My children are aware of this too, so they know when to expect museums, play areas, town centres, etc to be full of school children!

    I suppose similar but different frames of reference apply to those who attended private schools, boarding schools or were too sick to attend school for some reason.

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  10. 'It just struck me that when everybody in the country has a common set of experiences, then those who lack them might be set apart to some extent.'

    To some extent, yes. In the same ways as kids brought up vegetarian, or without tellies or as Christians.

    For our family, being 'set apart to some extent' was one of the blessings of HE! :-) My kids (older teens) seem delighted to be so.

    Most of their friends these days are young people who went to schools. It does not seem to be a handicap in any way to their relationships. In fact, it seems to be a useful starting point for getting to know new friends, to have a point of difference, rather than being part of the bland sameness of the crowd. It makes them interesting, like having been born in another country or having travelled a lot with a parent in the Diplomatic Corps or something.

    It's just not a problem.

    Mrs Anon

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  11. "It's just not a problem."

    Very probably not, I just think it's something to bear in mind. Of course, as you say, we meet all sorts of people. Some are Christian, others are Muslim, some eat meat, others don't. I have met many different types of people, but I have never met any adult who grew up in this country and hadn't been to school. It is simply the one thing everybody has in common. This is not something about which I ever thought myself until recently.

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  12. But there will be lots of them in coming years, won't there? My son joined those ranks this summer.

    Mrs Anon

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  13. "My son joined those ranks this summer."

    And indeed my own daughter. They move among us, rather like one of those fifties sci fi films. You know the ones where the aliens take over the bodies of hapless humans, who remain outwardly unchanged? They look like everybody else but they are....the Home educated. Be afraid, be very afraid!

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