Public opinion

One of the difficulties which everybody has with home educating parents is that there seems to be a far higher proportion of crackpots and cranks among them than is the case with the general population. In other words, if you were to take a group of home educating parents and set them alongside a group of people who sent their kids to school, the home educating ones would contain more peculiar individuals than average. This is not necessarily a bad thing of course. Weird and atypical people sometimes produce great inventions, write fantastic poetry or have radical idea which revolutionise human thought. These are the exceptions. Most weird people are just.... well, weird!

I suppose that when 99.9% of the population do something as a matter of routine, then the odd 0.1% are bound by definition to be out of step with society. This would be the case whether it was being prepared to accept blood transfusions, living in flats and houses rather than caravans or sending your children to school. What happens though is that very often these people forget how peculiar their behaviour is, because they gravitate to other people who share their peculiarities. Jehovah's Witnesses hang out with other Witnesses, travellers cluster together and home educators frequently join groups and online communities full of other strange people who don't send their kids to school. Often, friends and relatives stop mentioning that it is really odd not to send their children to school like everybody else and so after a while, they regard it as perfectly normal.

The difficulty arises when those with these unusual notions come into contact with ordinary people. The family whose child desperately needs a blood transfusion to save her life, for instance. It is crystal clear to the hospital staff that this is a vital procedure. They hand the form to the parents as a matter of routine, only to find that they refuse to sign it on the grounds that the Bible forbids this common practice. For anybody but Witnesses, this is barking mad and demonstrates a callous disregard for the child's life. In the same way, teachers and local authority officers take it for granted that children should be taught. They come up against a parent who assures them that this is quite unnecessary and that they are opposed to the practice on principle. Small wonder that they think the parent is showing an irresponsible attitude to her daughter's welfare and future life prospects.

This is not to say that either the Jehovah's Witness or the home educating parent are actually wrongheaded and negligent of their children's welfare; only that ordinary people who are not members of the group, cult, call it what you will, believe this strongly to be the case. If it were only doctors or teachers who felt this way, then one could perhaps dismiss this as professionals prejudice. Unfortunately, it is not. For the man or woman in the street too, the idea of refusing either blood transfusions or teaching for a child is almost criminally negligent.

It is this problem that many home educators must confront, although many seem unable or unwilling to do so. The fact that their way of life is seen by many as bizarre and running counter to their children's best interests. Any debating position which fails to take this into account is pretty pointless, because ultimately it is the mores of society which tend to become codified into law. Until the man on the Clapham omnibus is persuaded that schools and teaching are not necessary for children's development, then home education will always be at hazard of regulation or suppression.