Thursday 16 June 2011

Home educators set out, very much against their own best interests, to alienate the Open University.

I have for several years entertained the suspicion that home educators are the most quarrelsome and disagreeable special interest group in this country. I am increasingly inclined to believe that some of them must be quite literally stark, raving mad.



The Open University has been a very good thing for home educated children in this country. It has enabled them to gain access to places at universities such as Oxford and Exeter, which might otherwise have been denied them. The OU is one of the most progressive and enlightened universities and given how helpful they have been to home educators and their children, you might think that the news that they are thinking of running a course to teach people about home education would be greeted with pleasure. You would? Why, you gullible fool! Don’t you realise that the OU are all part of the military/industrial complex, in the pocket of Big Pharma, part of the New World Order and probably controlled by the Illuminati? Who funds them? Central government of course and they are heavily involved with orthodox educationalists. What sort of course would they run on home education?


The first angry and suspicious emails have already begun arriving at the Open University and unless I am very much mistaken in my understanding of British home educators, this small trickle will soon become a mighty flood; thus persuading the OU that many home educating parents in this country are completely off their heads.
What are the objections to the Open University teaching about home education, say as part of a course about education and childhood development? Where shall we start? For one thing, they might not let home educators check what sort of things they will be saying before they start the course. This is of course perfectly true. When the OU run a course on Comparative Religion, they will certainly ask leaders of various faiths for their views, but will not allow them to vet the materials used. This is because the OU is independent. Imagine if the only things they were allowed to teach about Islam were those things approved by various Imams. Their impartiality would be shot to pieces at a stroke.


Another problem seems to be that local government officers might take such a course and then think that they know as much about home education as parents. It does not bear thinking about! Suppose that home educating parents wanted to go on the course and did not have the money to afford it? This would mean that the OU was discriminating in favour of professionals and against parents. Perhaps the maddest objection of all is one being promoted by a former head teacher, who fears that such a course might become compulsory for any parent who wished to educate her child. This would mean that a de facto register of home educators would be started and those who were too poor to afford the course would not be allowed to be home educators! You see what might happen? Home education in this country would be restricted to the wealthy. And all because the Open University went blindly ahead and began to teach a unit about it. As one person puts it:


'this would be a very dangerous step towards needing some sort of licence to home educate, and an agreed/prescribed method of doing it.'


All this is so completely loopy that I feel like putting my head in my hands and groaning. At the moment many home educating parents enjoy excellent relations with the Open University. I have a suspicion that this why they are considering running a unit about home education; because they have seen what a good thing it is. They wish to show people that it is a rising trend and that it is something worth learning about. Whether they will still be feeling so amiably disposed towards home educators after they have been on the receiving end of one of the home educating community’s famous campaigns, remains to be seen.

17 comments:

  1. I agree with you Simon. Over the 11 years that I have been involved with the HE community on line, I have become increasingly disappointed with their behaviour.

    I really like some individual home educators, but as a group, I find myself wishing I had nothing to do with them, and don't want to be associated with them.

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  2. Ditto! Quite relieved it's not just me.

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  3. Webb cannot abide anyone that does not conform to his distorted and divisive way of thinking.

    So once more he combines his fantasy thoughts with deliberate exaggeration in the misguided hope of elevating himself to guru status.

    Keep dreaming!

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  4. I am almost totally ignorant of the OU, I freely admit. Also, I've not seen the discussions you write about.

    What I do know is that I know someone who works for the OU, writing teaching units for the education dept. She is very, very anti-HE, despite knowing my kids, how well they did being HE'd and how they've turned out.

    She is just very invested in the idea of public education. I don't blame her. I was a teacher and felt the same way until I taught my own kids.

    Now, I am NOT trying to say that everyone in the OU is ant-HE. Not at all. It's quite possible, even probable that the unit that gets written will be fine. However, because of my personal experience of this one person, I'd be cautious about the whole idea.

    Remember, that's 'cautious', not 'literally stark raving mad'.

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  5. You are exaggerating, Simon. Plenty of people think this is encouraging/interesting. How do you know anti emails are arriving at the OU? Have yo phoned to ask?

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  6. When this course was discussed on our local HE list, the responses from parents were split fairly evenly between people who would be interested in finding out more about such a course and people who were a bit suspicious that it would lead to LA people waving around a piece of paper and claiming to be experts in home ed. Everything was very measured and cautious - no hysteria at all! I don't think you can conclude home educators as a group are raving mad based on the comments of a handful of very vociferous people on one (theoretically private) mailing list.

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  7. 'Have yo phoned to ask?'
    I do hope Allie, that this is not some misplaced attempt on your part at the cultural appropriation of African-American speech patterns? I am faintly insulted in any case by the question and would have been even had it been phrased in Standard English. I mean really, do I strike anybody as the sort of person who as soon as he heard about this would go beetling off to the OU and ask them all about it? And does anybody honestly believe that while I was on the line, I would then ask casually if they had received any feedback yet on the idea? As the poet said, 'Who shall escape calumny?'

    Simon.

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  8. 'I don't think you can conclude home educators as a group are raving mad '

    I didn't: I said that I thought that some were raving mad.

    'based on the comments of a handful of very vociferous people on one (theoretically private) mailing list.'

    Not a bit of it. This has now gone viral, as they say. The Badman Review Action Group messages may be seen by anybody; one does not need to join the group to read them. You might want to see what is being said there about this idea. Also the HE-UK and EO lists.

    Simon.

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  9. 'the misguided hope of elevating himself to guru status.'

    Now this I do like! The idea of becoming a guru is an enticing one and I am certainly going to look into it. I am not at all sure though that Johnsson Matthey in Scotland would really feel that posting messages of this sort if really the most productive use of one of their project manager's time!
    Simon.

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  10. "I do hope Allie, that this is not some misplaced attempt on your part at the cultural appropriation of African-American speech patterns?"

    I don't think I can claim the relevant expertise there! It was a rather unexciting typo.

    I think it will certainly be a shame if the OU gets lots of negative feedback. As I have said elsewhere, I think it's an interesting and potentially positive development. Maybe I should say that to the OU...

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  11. So where does your information come from that allows you to say, 'The first angry and suspicious emails have already begun arriving at the Open University'?

    Looking at the various forums, I'd say the majority of messages are positive or neutral.

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  12. "I really like some individual home educators, but as a group......"
    "Ditto......"

    Ditto.

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  13. Welcome to my new game. Post something outrageous to a mailing list that Simon, in theory, does not read, and see how long before he puts up a blog post about it.

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  14. "I mean really, do I strike anybody as the sort of person who as soon as he heard about this would go beetling off to the OU and ask them all about it? And does anybody honestly believe that while I was on the line, I would then ask casually if they had received any feedback yet on the idea? As the poet said, 'Who shall escape calumny?'

    Simon."


    You're joking right? That is EXACTLY what you do.

    Oh and by the way, the poet said "thou shalt not escape calumny". Rather appropriate in your case.

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  15. 'You're joking right? That is EXACTLY what you do.'

    You got that right, Anonymous!
    Simon.

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  16. 'Oh and by the way, the poet said "thou shalt not escape calumny". Rather appropriate in your case.'

    I was referencing Jerome K Jerome rather than Shakespeare; another indication that the words were not to be taken seriously.
    Simon.

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    ReplyDelete