One of the problem when dealing with home educators is that they tend to argue every point with great tenacity, even about things that everybody else in society accepts as being more or less true. There is of course nothing wrong with that; I am famous myself for disagreeing with those around me. Sometimes though, home educating parents take this a bit far and even establishing the most minor fact becomes so laborious and time consuming a process that all but the most rugged and determined lose heart!
The expression 'straw man', like the word 'conflate', is impossible to avoid lately when exchanging views with home educators! I honestly can't remember the last time I read a post on one of the HE Internet lists where some government agency or one of their lackeys was not being accused of conflating one thing with something else quite different. As for 'straw men'; why, anybody would think that I was running a scarecrow factory here from the number of complaints I receive about my straw men, which home educators apparently keep stumbling across whenever they visit this blog! The latest straw man that I have been apparently setting up is the idea that for many parents, their only source of information is the Internet. Somebody commenting here a few days ago said,
' Do you know any parents that rely soley on the internet? Or is this another straw man argument?'
The suggestion that I am setting up a straw man by hinting that a lot of parents rely only upon the Internet for information is a prime example of the difficulty which I mentioned at the beginning; that home educators seem to inhabit a different world from everybody else. That many parents do indeed rely solely upon the Internet to acquire information is undoubtedly the case and the fact that somebody would question this only goes to show just how out of touch some home educators are.
Let us suppose that a child's homework entails finding out the exports of Chile. There are many ways to get hold of this information. One could go to the library and get a book out about South America, one could reach down a book of one's own and look up Chile, one could watch television in the hope of a documentary about Chile being on that evening, ring up the Chilean Embassy and ask them; the list is endless. In the real world though, children and their parents will just go onto the Internet to find this out. I would be surprised if many parents would suggest the library or television as the first port of call for homework about Chile. Many homes these days do not have encyclopaedias or other reference books in them. Almost all would use the Internet. For many people, this is more or less the only way that they would ever think of getting information which they wanted.
According to several people who commented here a day or two ago, this is not always the case with home educating parents, which I am glad to hear. For the average family though, this is where information is almost exclusively acquired now in day to day life. Schools do not recommend, as once they did, that children go to the library to research homework. Instead, they tell them to look things up on the Internet. Many secondary school pupils go through the whole five years without being given a book at all. No maths books, no history books, nothing at all; everything is done via electronic media supplemented by photo-copied sheets. Many homes too have no books in them at all, let alone reference books. Those that do have books often only have a few thrillers and the children might have some Jaqueline Wilson novels. Otherwise, that's it. The only magazines are likely to be those dealing with the lives of footballers and pop stars. All information must perforce come from the computer terminal. I wonder how the person who made the comment which I quoted above thinks that the average parent finds things out for their children? In other words, if a child needs to know what year Napoleon was born, or the date of the Battle of Trafalgar or a million and one other things, does this person really think that most parents pop down to the library to find out?
This depiction of modern family life is no straw man, simply how things are today in many homes in this country and the fact that a number of home educating parents are unaware of how things have changed in recent years is a little bit alarming. It also makes trying to discuss things heavy going, because before one can even begin to debate, it is necessary to explain how life in modern Britain actually works! These people are constantly claiming that their children get out and about and meet all sorts of people, but I don't think that the people they are meeting can be ordinary, everyday folk of the kind which I know. If they were, then the distorted and unrealistic view of the modern world which some of these characters seem to have might stand a chance of being modified or even changed completely. They would discover that for a great many families in this country, parents and children, the Internet is the first and in many cases the only port of call when they are seeking information.
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You don't provide any evidence to suggest that you haven't set up a straw man, though. Although internet use is growing, by no means every family, or even most families, have access to it.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=8
At one school my children attended, a new school governor, who happened to work for the then DfES, suggested that the PTA would work more efficiently if it communicated with members by email. He found it difficult to believe that only three of the eight PTA committee members had email accounts.
Perhaps the home educators aren't as out of touch with reality as you seem to think.
' Although internet use is growing, by no means every family, or even most families, have access to it.'
ReplyDeleteI didn't say this at all; I said that it was common for parents to rely upon it. The suggestion I was countering was that the very idea that any parent at all relied upon the Internet for acquiring information was a straw man. Some parents certainly do.
The actual part of my post upon which this comment was made was this:
ReplyDelete'Straight away, we see that those parents who decide that the Internet is the key to the acquisition of knowledge have handicapped their child's future prospects.'
That some parents decide that the Internet is the key to the acquisition of knowledge is manifestly true. I certainly did not mean to suggest that every parent in the country felt this way! Nor did I mean to suggest that this is more common among home educators, I doubt that this is so.
And the suggestion I was countering was:
ReplyDelete"For the average family though, this is where information is almost exclusively acquired now in day to day life."
"'Straight away, we see that those parents who decide that the Internet is the key to the acquisition of knowledge have handicapped their child's future prospects.'"
ReplyDeleteBut the research you site and appeared to base this claim on was carried out pre-internet, or at least, before we had such widespread use of the internet. Also, when I made the straw man argument I was under the misapprehension that you were talking about home educators. Whilst the internet is probably used for much on the spot factual research (as you suggest above), I suspect that most home educators still have plenty of books around, mainly for the purpose of stimulating new interests and a love of reading.
'Although internet use is growing, by no means every family, or even most families, have access to it.'
ReplyDeleteThree quarters of homes have Internet access; 98% of children use the Internet
'when I made the straw man argument I was under the misapprehension that you were talking about home educators.'
ReplyDeleteI've just checked the original post, and it gave me that impression as well.
But anyway, the idea that any child, home educated or schooled, has *only* the internet as a source of information seems bizarre to me. I know that schooled children use the internet to research some of their homework, but round here at least, they also have to go out and look at things, use their imaginations, and even talk to people for some of it, as well as writing with actual pens in actual
books about stuff they have learnt at school from books, discussions and experiments.
And I've never met a home educated child who only learns from the internet. They tend to learn all the time from a wider variety of sources than schooled children. Even the ones who use internet based curricula do not *only* learn from the internet, because they do not *stop* learning when they are not engaged in their internet based work.
Even if the internet is an important source of information for many families, why is this a bad thing? In my experience it makes the aquisition of information much easier. We no longer have to rely on the books that the library or the bookshop happens to have in stock. Many questions can be answered by a quick google search, whereas previously we would have had to go to the library and look for the right books, assuming they were in stock. We can find abstracts and reviews which help us to decide which books we need. Internet forums and discussion boards, and even social networking sites, are very useful for sharing information and ideas, and for discovering new areas of interest.
"But the research you site"
ReplyDeleteWhoops, make that 'cite'!
'Straight away, we see that those parents who decide that the Internet is the key to the acquisition of knowledge have handicapped their child's future prospects.'
ReplyDeleteYou said that the research you cited (which predates the present almost ubiquitous access to the internet that we have now)indicated that having a lot of books in the house was the best predictor of academic success.
Do you think many families abandoned their books when they got the internet? In my experience families with a lot of books use the internet as well as, rather than instead of the internet, as Anonymous suggested above.
As for families with no books, I would say that internet access has increased their ability to acquire knowledge, so they are at least better off than they were before.
"I wonder how the person who made the comment which I quoted above thinks that the average parent finds things out for their children? In other words, if a child needs to know what year Napoleon was born, or the date of the Battle of Trafalgar or a million and one other things, does this person really think that most parents pop down to the library to find out?"
ReplyDeleteI made that comment and that's also how I would find out the year Napoleon was born or the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. However, we also have hundreds of books in the house because we love books and they can be an excellent stimulus for new areas of interest. If you are bored you can have a browse, have a read, and then maybe a search on the internet for related facts or places of interest such as museums, craft shops, RSPCA groups, etc. We also make trips to the library if the interest is sustained.
"This depiction of modern family life is no straw man, simply how things are today in many homes in this country and the fact that a number of home educating parents are unaware of how things have changed in recent years is a little bit alarming."
I'm not unaware of this trend but I also don't think it's a problem, nor the only way people find information and this is especially the case for home educators. Even when it is the only source of information for a family it must be much better than what was available during the childhood of many of the people included in the study you cite. It would be interesting to see the results of a similar study in 10-20 years time. I wouldn't be surprised if they find that it is families that have the easiest and fullest access to the internet (as opposed to just at school or the library) that do well academically.