Monday 8 August 2011

An enduring myth among home educators

We all kid ourselves that we behave rationally and make our choices based upon common sense and logic. Sometimes this is true; often it is not. Our decisions are frequently a product of an accumulation of our prejudices and preconceived ideas which generate reflex actions rather than considered and well ordered thoughts. Somebody mentions the death penalty and we say automatically. ‘Oh, I don’t approve of that’. It may be twenty or thirty years since we actually thought the matter through logically and calmly, but it is so much easier to have a set of opinions and beliefs that we can simply repeat like mantras for any debate which arises.

I am like this just as much as anybody else. Take the question of the teaching of reading, for example. I taught my own child by using the Look and Say method, sometimes known as whole word teaching. I used flashcards, built up a sight vocabulary and so on. Now of course, this worked brilliantly; my child could read numbers and individual words at fifteen months and was reading fluently by two years and three months. The fact that I chose this method has less to do with making a careful study of the evidence and then following where it led and more to do with the fact that I have been familiar with Fred Schonell’s books for forty years and his was the first method of learning to read which I ever encountered. Using this method was a reflex action which entailed little conscious thought. There are better and more effective ways to teach reading. Take synthetic phonics, for instance.

One of the most popular and comforting myths to be found on the British home educating scene is that no method of learning to read is any better than another. According to this idea, 20% of children will struggle with the process, no matter what system is adopted. There is accordingly little point in worrying about the business and if your child is one of that 20%, then pushing him to hard will only create stress and be counter-productive. This old wives’ tale is passed around and used as justification for the autonomous learning of reading; whereby the child himself sets the pace for the learning of reading and is essentially in control of the whole business. Not surprisingly, this results in some children being unable to read until their teenage years. It need not be this way. An Ofsted report published last year showed that in some schools, all children are reading by six. This includes children with special needs and those for whom English is not their first language. These schools use synthetic phonics and they have found that when used systematically and effectively it works every time and that all children learn to read. The report may be found here:

http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/reading-six-how-best-schools-do-it


What is interesting about the work with this method of teaching reading is that schools using synthetic phonics intelligently find that there is no such thing as dyslexia; all the children learn to read at the expected age. This suggests strongly that failure to learn to read is due to poor teaching rather than any specific disorder in the child herself. In other words, if children fail to read, then their teachers are at fault. This has profound implications for home education, because we are our children’s teachers. It is hard to escape the conclusion that if our children do not learn to read at six or seven, then this is because the education being offered is somehow defective. This report makes sobering reading, not least for somebody like me; who has always championed Look and Say. If a child of twelve is not reading, it is almost certainly because he has not been taught to read properly.

All this puts advocates of autonomous education in rather a tricky situation. The justification for not undertaking formal instruction in the teaching of reading is that no method is perfect and that 20% or so of children will always have difficulties. The evidence from across the country seems to indicate that this is not true and that any child can be taught to read by six or seven. One must now ask what reason any home educating parents could have for failing to teach their children this useful skill, given that we know that it can be done quickly and effectively at a very early age without any trauma to the child? Ideology alone is not sufficiently good reason for holding back on the teaching of reading.

58 comments:

  1. We've been through all this before.

    1. Whether every child is reading by six or not depends what you mean by 'reading'. Clearly if all children can decode text at six, that gives them an advantage in an education system that depends on children being able to read. But, what was their reading like at eleven? At fourteen?

    The Clackmannanshire study, despite its apparent success, showed that at 11, around 15% of children were two or more years behind their peers on comprehension.

    2. Whether children had dyslexia or not depends on what you mean by dyslexia. Again, because children can successfully decode text doesn't mean they don't have an organic difficulty with reading. My son's reading age has been consistently two years ahead of his age group since he was 7, but he would quite probably meet the criteria for dyslexia on a screening test because of his reading errors and his difficulties with spelling.

    I remember watching a tv documentary showing Ruth Miskin running an SP programme in a primary school. Despite intensive tuition, a residual group of children still really struggled. Eventually, they could all decode text, but one boy was far from fluent and would not have been able to keep up with reading tasks normally expected of his age group.

    I don't doubt the efficacy of SP, but 'reading' 'dyslexia' and 'special educational needs' are complex constructs, so you have to be pretty clear about your definitions before making sweeping statements about poor reading being the fault of teachers, or about autonomous education failing children.

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  2. I always found buying a good comic or two was a fun way to introduce reading.

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  3. It makes me wonder just how much tuition of reading has been given over to a computer package such as reading eggs.

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  4. 'We've been through all this before.'

    We have indeed and since I last discussed this, many people here have posted with the famous figure of 20%! The phrases you use in your comment suzyg, suggest that you are also wedded to a particular ideology when it comes to reading. The giveaway here is expressions like 'decoding text'. You wouldn't by any chance be a fan of Frank Smith? I am expecting you next to come out with that old saying about children 'barking at text' rather than 'extracting meaning!

    Simon.

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  5. As far as I recall, I first mentioned the coincidence between the number of children that struggle with literacy in schools and the proportion of late readers found by Thomas during his research on your blog. This was purely an observation of the data long after our children had learnt to read rather than a reason for our choices. At no point have I ever believed that one method is as good as another for an individual child or for large groups, I just disagree that the best method for a group will invariably be the best method for an individual.

    Circumstances dictated that we look for alternatives to the usual model of education. If our child had responded to the approach you took with your daughter, I've no doubt that this is the approach we would have continued with. However, this was not to be. Our first child forced us to examine our approach to education and parenting in far greater detail than we'd expected or wanted! Ultimately we came to the conclusion (through trial and error and much reading) that AE was the only approach that worked for us (and has nothing at all to do with the method of teaching reading - we used several). The AE approach would not suit every family, just as your approach does not. Or are you suggesting that all parents should be coerced into coercing their children; that section 9 of the Education Act should be ignored or removed from statue?

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  6. Here we go again with the 'coercion' head trip.

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  7. If you don't believe coercion of children is wrong you are in agreement with the majority of parents in the country. If you believe it is OK, why would discussion of it be guilt inducing (assuming guilt is the issue here for you)? Most people just think, 'what an idiot, of course children must be made to do things they don't want to do'. Feeling guilty suggests you think there's at least a small possibility that the theory is correct. Why else would you feel guilt or think that discussion of coercion is a, 'head trip' (whatever that is)?

    We chose to education in the way we do because we came to the conclusion that it's wrong to coerce children (from the point of view of an efficient education). How do you suggest we discuss our child's education and the choices we made about it without mentioning the C word?

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  8. 'The justification for not undertaking formal instruction in the teaching of reading is that no method is perfect and that 20% or so of children will always have difficulties.'

    That wasn't my justification for not undertaking formal instruction. I didn't undertake it because it wasn't necessary as my children learned to read without it.

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  9. None of my children were able to 'get' synthetic phonics even with consistent teaching of the method over a period of time. I really dont see how 'every' child can be reading by 6-7 with that method when none of my children could hear the phonic sounds until they were at least 6.
    Either its just my childern (which I accept is possible), or there are other children like this who manage to read far better with the whole word method being taught first.

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  10. A lot of parents I come across aren't really sure what Synthetic Phonics actually is. They think it means 'sounding out' words.

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  11. Phonics requires a certain level of auditory processing though. All my kids had glue ear when they were young which may have affected their ability to grasp SP, and they went on to be diagnosed with AP issues so this could have hampered them further.
    They just couldnt/cant seem to hear or understand blends/graphemes etc even with the daft JP action rhymes to 'help' them remember. We tried for ages and in the end we went back to 'Look and Say' and taught phonics afterwards when they were older, probably around 6/7 years.
    We found the best thing for helping them remember words was visualising words using US methods with boxes at different height depending on the letter shape.
    It also alleviated a lot of the frustration of wanting to read because they knew the words and could see they were actually reading a book which gave them confidence to tackle tricky things like phonic blends.

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  12. Some of us don't and never have coerced our children we nurture them into gaining an understanding of the world around them.
    Coercion is something you have been conned into feeling guilty about by those who were privileged to receive higher educations in places like Oxford or Cambridge. It is nothing but a further example of affluenza in a country that is class ridden and socially unjust.
    Now, if you really needed to be told how to raise your progeny and improve your parenting skills by some atomic physisist, a mediocre writer and their online friends, then I feel very saddened indeed.

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  13. Simon said "The phrases you use in your comment suzyg, suggest that you are also wedded to a particular ideology when it comes to reading. The giveaway here is expressions like 'decoding text'. You wouldn't by any chance be a fan of Frank Smith? I am expecting you next to come out with that old saying about children 'barking at text' rather than 'extracting meaning!"

    I'm not wedded to any ideology in relation to reading, unless you consider the decomposition of a complex task into its component parts to be an ideology.

    Decoding requires the visual identification of and discrimination between specific arrangements of marks (letters), the auditory identification of and discrimination between specific speech sounds and making associations between the two. As C points out above, children with auditory processing impairments can find SP very challenging.

    Decoding is a complex cognitive process, but it’s arguably the simplest part of a process involving chunking up the letters and speech sounds into words, and then into more complex linguistic patterns in order to convey meaning at various levels of complexity.

    The problem with cross-sectional studies like the Ofsted one is that they give the impression that SP is a magic bullet. Clearly, if rigorous SP training means that all six-year olds will be able to read, then that’s a good thing. But what’s important is what six-year-old reading levels contribute to school leavers’ understanding of how the world works. It was difficult to tell, from the Ofsted report, what effect SP had had on KS2 English results, never mind GCSE results or the effect those children will have on the world when they grow up. Some of the KS2 English results weren’t much different from current national levels, for example; exactly what was shown in the Clackmannanshire study.

    I have no problem with SP. My daughter started school just as the SP debate was getting under way. I’d been out of primary education for a long time and was astounded when I discovered that many schools didn’t use phonics of any kind in the teaching of reading. What I do have a problem with is educational research that over-simplifies the issues.

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  14. "Some of us don't and never have coerced our children we nurture them into gaining an understanding of the world around them."

    Congratulations on being so perfect, I'm happy for you.

    "Coercion is something you have been conned into feeling guilty about by those who were privileged to receive higher educations in places like Oxford or Cambridge."

    I don't feel guilty about it and never have.

    "Now, if you really needed to be told how to raise your progeny and improve your parenting skills by some atomic physisist, a mediocre writer and their online friends, then I feel very saddened indeed."

    I wasn't told how to raise my children, I decided to discuss various parenting ideas with various groups of people. I also took a parenting course in my local area (before it changed and started being used as compulsory parent training by SS). I took what felt right for our family and discarded the rest.

    I feel no shame for attempting to improve the most important skill/activity I've carried out in my life so far. Many people were raised less than perfectly themselves and benefit from learning about alternative approaches. If you were perfect as a parent from the get go, then great. Personally I see nothing wrong with attempting to improve my parenting skills.

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  15. "This includes children with special needs and those for whom English is not their first language."

    I believe the phrase was "MOST special educational needs or disabilities".
    Synthetic phonics would be of no use to a child who is unable to discern the similarities and differences between sounds and words.

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  16. Anonymous said

    "Synthetic phonics would be of no use to a child who is unable to discern the similarities and differences between sounds and words. "

    Synthetic phonics can actually help some children who find it difficult to do this because it involves repeated rehearsals of specific speech sounds. SP advocates often spend a lot of time on teaching children how spoken words are constructed, listening to component sounds etc before introducing written symbols at all.

    Having said that, I agree that there are some children who will struggle with SP.

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  17. Simon said,
    "all the children learn to read at the expected age."

    Do they? How have they shown this in the report? The statistics show that 7.5% of year 2 pupils in these schools did not reach level 2C. Nowhere does the report give any indication of the level these children have attained. For all we are told they could all be totally illiterate.

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  18. 'we came to the conclusion that it's wrong to coerce children'

    I've read through the TCS website and it's plain to see that you have been led to believe that coercion is a form of child abuse, and that parents who 'coerce' their children are abusers.

    I found these comments on TCS

    'it would be OK for parents to demand sexual services from their children in exchange for food(amazingly some hard core libertarians agree with this).'

    'I think threatening kids with loss of privileges and grounding is wrong. It's like are you their parent or their Furher? You have to respect that your child has the right to do what they want as human beings. There are ways to teach them consequences, like the ever popular guilt trip.'

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  19. Parents as abusers, we've heard that one before.

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  20. Then there are the other nuggets of pure TCS silliness.

    Senario 1:
    Billy wants to go to the park but his mother wants to stay at home and look at her new magazine.
    Explicitly coercive: 'No and that's final.'
    Implicitly coercive: 'Oh Billy, I'm exhausted. You don't want me to be unhappy do you? Why don't you let mommy rest now and we'll go later on?'
    Self Sacrificial: 'Okay Billy whatever you say.'
    TCS approach: 'I want to read my magazine, you want to go to the park. Lets think of a good solution here.'

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  21. There are other TCS scenarios...

    Like the one where Nancy needs holding down to take her antibiotics for a mild throat infection, held down because if she doesn't take it she'll die.

    And the classic...

    Five year old Abby refuses to take a bath and develops a set of neuroses about personal hygeine, contracts scabies or gets a TCS lecture about 'bodily integrity'.

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  22. You do realise that the site is made up from conversations between people who may or may not believe that TCS is a valid approach? Also that there is/were no set rules about how to take children seriously, it was a discussion forum, not a lesson our class. Some of the comments you quote could have been made by someone who had heard about TCS just that morning for all we know.

    I do like the 'senario 1' example though. This approach, the one at the end about finding solutions to problems that all involved are happy with, has done wonders for my children's problem solving skills. They are far better at this than I have ever been.Great for empathy too.

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  23. In other words, it's all bullshit.....

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  24. Why? What do you do if you and your child want different to do different things? Do you or your child dictate what happens, do you negotiate and both end up doing something slightly worse than either originally wanted? What's wrong with trying to find a solution that is at least as good for everyone as their original desires? Do you think it's bullshit because you don't think it's possible, or you don't want to bother trying, or you see this as giving in to your children? Can be a little more specific with your criticism.

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  25. Of do you mean the web site is all bullshit because it's just parents discussing parenting and not written by some all knowing parenting expert?

    What do you MEAN?

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  26. Oh dear..
    do you shout a lot at home?

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  27. At best it's apoorly written incoherent philosophy based upon middle class pretentions. It's out of touch with reality and is clearly more coercive than you actually understand.

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  28. "Oh dear..
    do you shout a lot at home?"

    LOL! No. Should really have used * for emphasis because that's how I read it in my head. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

    "At best it's apoorly written incoherent philosophy based upon middle class pretentions."

    It was/is (not sure if it's still active) primarily a discussion forum, not a defined set of rules as you seem to think.

    "It's out of touch with reality and is clearly more coercive than you actually understand."

    Give me an example of how discussing parenting issues with a group of parents could have been coercive of me or of my children and I might stand a chance of understanding what you mean. You are still just saying negative things about TCS but without substance. No reasoning seems to be involved at all. 'I don't like it', seems to sum up what you've said so far.

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  29. TCS was also the plagiarised philosophies of A.S Neill, I've got the 1st editions.

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  30. "All this puts advocates of autonomous education in rather a tricky situation. The justification for not undertaking formal instruction in the teaching of reading is that no method is perfect and that 20% or so of children will always have difficulties."

    What rubbish. Autonomous education and formal instruction in the teaching of reading are not mutually exclusive. It's not a case of using the 20% as an excuse for not teaching. It's a reason for finding a method that works for an individual child. 7.5% of children were failed according to the Ofsted report, and this was in the states best schools. Maybe these are the children the schools approach(es) did not suit. This is the problem with a mass approach to education and research. There are always the outliers who are failed and ignored (as you ignore them in your article when you claim that *all* children learnt to read).

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  31. "TCS was also the plagiarised philosophies of A.S Neill, I've got the 1st editions."

    I'm sure members of TCS were influenced by some of Neill's writings along with various other educationalists and philosophers. Is this wrong? Should we only be able to have discussions about completely new ideas that we thought up ourselves? Seems pretty limiting.

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  32. It is wrong when you consider that Sarah Fitz Claridge also proposed abolishing age of consent laws.

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  33. Yes, along with many others, but this would only be in an ideal world with no adult/child power imbalance. She also states that an adult/child sexual relationship would be incompatible with taking children seriously. It's clear from this article that she doesn't think it would be practical today.

    "A second class of reasons for objecting to legal equality for children is that so long as families have the power structure they do now, such a change would be dangerous for children. It would provide further incentive for and means of coercion to parents and adults of ill-will.

    This article, then, is not so much a proposal for political action as an attempt to clarify some of the issues and to open the ideas to debate. One of the reasons I think this is worth discussing, despite the criticisms one might justifiably make of its immediate practicality, is that these ideas do have far-reaching implications for family life. Changes in personal lives may seem less dramatic, but are ultimately more important. Real changes in society are rarely caused by political change or legislation; they are caused by shifts in attitudes at the individual level. In other words, political enlightenment follows personal enlightenment, not usually vice versa."


    http://www.fitz-claridge.com/Articles/Legal1.html

    At one point she suggests that relationships between adolescents should not be illegal (a Similar attitude prevails at Summerhill and many under 16's are issued with condoms by medical professionals so it seems a pretty normal attitude). Quite a few countries have ages of consent that allow this (Spain = 13, Italy, Germany, Estonia, Hungary = 14 etc.).

    Here's someone else arguing for a lower age of consent in this country:

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2003/nov/02/schools.uk

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  34. "It is wrong when you consider that Sarah Fitz Claridge also proposed abolishing age of consent laws."

    And even if Sarah FC did propose the abolition of the age of consent laws tomorrow, why would this mean that everything else she says is automatically worthless, let alone anything that an individual might have taken from TCS.

    TCS did not involve a set of rules laid down by leaders. It was a discussion forum for equals to discuss and develop their own theories about the pros and cons of raising children non-coercively.

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  35. PIE was also a type of discussion forum that discussed the abolition of the age of consent.

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  36. No idea who PIE are but presumably they are' bad' people and your theory runs along the lines of, 'if two groups discuss the same idea they must be as bad as each other and do the same bad things'. How simplistic.

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  37. 'No idea who PIE are but presumably they are bad people.'
    There's no excuse for your deeply entrenched ignorance and denialist attitude.

    Who was PIE?
    Paedophile information Exchange

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  38. It goes much much deeper than PIE?

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  39. You've heard of Harriet Harman MP and her husband Jack Dromey?
    The Rt Hon Patricia Hewitt MP?
    Paedophile Action for Liberation?
    National Council for Civil Liberties?

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  40. How about the politics of Rote Freiheit and The Psychology Institute in Berlin during the 1960s?
    They had a strange and disturbing obssession with Libertarianism and child sexuality.
    Never heard of 'Die Revoloution Der Erziehung' or the article from Kursbuch about Commune 2?
    Those examples have far too many striking and disturbing paralells with TCS articles written by Sarah Fitz Claridge.
    There's a very dark history of self deception of supposedly 'enlightened' parents. History shows us examples of this 'enlightenment' being led by upper middle class academics, journalists and University employees.
    So, I suppose you've never heard of the Indian Commune in Nuremburg, they were a 'green' collective that were involved in the Alternative Living Project...They too held nefarious beliefs that included that the Age of Consent be reformed.

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  41. The other websites that Sarah Fitz Claridge frequents are little more than a manifesto for the Libertarian Party/Alliance.
    I find their statement in Latin particularly interesting...
    'Si vis pacem, para bellum'
    (If you want peace prepare for war)
    Then if you look hard enough on the internet there's a very good picture of Sarah Fitz Claridge on a shooting range, Smith and Wesson in hand in a very convincing firing stance.

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  42. Taking Children Seriously......

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  43. You have been discussing TCS with me. Does this mean that you therefore hold the same views as me?

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  44. I have fired a shotgun (at clay pigeons) and spent hours firing air rifles at targets in the garden. I also rescue spiders and insects at every opportunity and avoid hurting any person or animal. What is you point about Sarah FC spending time on a shooting range? Do you think she threatens her children with a gun?

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  45. Even more deeply entrenched ignorance and barely disguised denialism.
    You defend a hypocrite with a political agenda that doesn't take children seriously but would seek to reform politics so as children are put at risk.

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  46. My main reply keeps disappearing but I'll try again, but I don't deny that I will dislike and disagree with the views held by people that I might agree with on other points. Do you have to agree with all the views a person holds before you will agree with anything they say? You must hold very few views if that is the case. I'll try again to post my original comment below.

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  47. No. It's gone again. Blogger obviously disagrees with me too...

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  48. Discussions on TCS forums led to great improvements within our family. We began working together as a team to solve problems to the benefit of all involved instead of the previous us v. them approach. It was clear from discussions (and the link I gave above) that adult/child sexual relationships could never be non-coercive because of the various power imbalances involved and would be anathema to TCS parenting.

    If you want to associate TCS with the views above because some people who took part in TCS discussions may possibly have held similar or related views (without mentioned during the discussions) then that's up to you. But can you really claim that you have never discussed issues and agreed on particular points with people who hold other views you disagree with?

    Some people who took part in TCS discussions were left wing libertarians, others were right wing libertarians, others were non-political and some disagreed with TCS and non-coercion. Discussing issues and agreeing on some points does not mean you agree with everything else the other person believes. If you only discuss issues with those you agree 100% on all issues with, they must be very boring discussions!

    Do you really think that all libertarians are paedophiles? I can assure you that I am not, so I've already disproved that theory to my own satisfaction.

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  49. You obviously have a fixation with guns. It's such a shame that so many teenagers in deprived areas of inner cities within the UK have similar fixations.

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  50. Still, a gun fixation amongst homeschoolers in the US is fairly common too. That's something that usually goes hand in hand with racial intolerance and delusional obssessions with the more extreme conspiracy theories.

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  51. "You defend a hypocrite with a political agenda that doesn't take children seriously but would seek to reform politics so as children are put at risk."

    Agreeing with someone about non-coercion of children does not mean that I agree with their political views. Do you coerce your children *because* you disagree with Sarah's political views? Or, if you are non-coercive, does this mean that *you* agree with the political views of everyone else who is non-coercive? Your arguments so far seem to suggest that one of these possibilities must be true.

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  52. "You obviously have a fixation with guns."

    LOL, you are so strange. Firing a shotgun a couple of times aged 20 and playing with an air rifle for a summer as a 13 year old does not equate to a fixation with guns.

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  53. I really couldn't care less about your adolescent interests, it is obvious that you haven't yet grown out of some of them.

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  54. Do you even know what you are talking about now, because I haven't got a clue. If you don't care about my adolescent interests, why comment on them and suggest I have a gun fixation? What interest do you think I haven't grown out of?

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  55. Omphaloskepsis.

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  56. No, never tried meditation, though I think you might benefit from omphaloskepsis.

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  57. "Ideology alone is not sufficiently good reason for holding back on the teaching of reading."

    So if someone believes it's morally wrong to force someone to learn to read against their will, they should ignore their moral code, 'for the good of the child'? You *know* that they are wrong about this? Do you have evidence? What about the research into intrinsic v. extrinsic motivation?

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  58. 'So if someone believes it's morally wrong to force someone to learn to read against their will....'
    Here we go again with that perennial and pernicious HE battle to take the moral high ground.
    Classic TCS/MF-W bull5hit.

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