Monday 8 August 2011

The extra responsibilities of home educating parents


One of the great things about home education is that you can pretty well claim responsibility for the good things which your child achieves. I don’t just mean academically, but also when their character turns out well. After all, they have been with you for most of the time and so have picked up your ideas on justice and compassion, kindness and respect for the natural world. We can all feel proud about such traits when we observe them in our children. There is a downside to this though. If we accept that we are largely answerable for the good points in our kids, then it follows naturally that we are often to blame for the bad parts as well. Well it should follow, but many home educating parents seem anxious to evade this responsibility.

Let us look at a few practical, real-life examples from my own daughter. She has many sterling qualities, but there are also less attractive aspects of her personality. For instance, she is arrogant and self-opinionated. She swears like a trooper and her knowledge of geography is lamentable. I always assumed that this sort of thing was connected with spending so much time in my company as a child. I focused on science when teaching her and therefore neglected geography. I am a famously hard swearer and am know to be arrogant. Judging by some people’s comments yesterday though, perhaps I am off the hook! Take my daughter’s lack of geographical knowledge. Maybe it is not down to poor teaching on my part. Perhaps there is a psychological block to her learning about the capital cities and principle exports of foreign countries? Could this be geographobia? Or might it be a neurological deficit? I am thinking geographexia. And what about all that swearing? I have always thought it is because as a small girl she spent so much time with a foul-mouthed man, but there could be another explanation. Coprolalia can be a symptom of some psychological disturbances or what about Tourette’s?

I wonder if readers can see yet where I am going with this? Yesterday, I discussed reading and advanced the radical idea that when children do not learn to read, it is generally because they have not been taught or have been taught poorly. Just as with my daughter’s lack of geography, I thought that there would be a link between the level and quality of teaching and the child’s skills and abilities in this particular area. It seems though that some parents do not accept this link. They hunt instead for obscure syndromes which might provide another reason for their children’s difficulties. Here is the way that I look at such claims. Mt daughter’s propensity for swearing may have a neurological basis. If I wanted to claim this, I would need to have hard evidence from psychiatrists, brain scans and so on. It would not really be enough if I were to suggest that her use of bad language or lack of geographical knowledge were caused by a physical disorder of her brain. In the same way, for those who comment here about their children’s supposed neurological disorders I must ask how many have evidence of an organic problem? Several people commented, hinting that their child’s reading difficulties were caused by something other than poor or absent teaching. Have these children had PET scans? Who has come up with the diagnosis? Nine times out of ten, the simplest explanation is the correct one. If a child lacks geographical knowledge or easy facility in literacy; the most likely reason is related to teaching. Only when this has definitely been excluded should we reach for other and rarer causes.

16 comments:

  1. Simon said

    "Nine times out of ten, the simplest explanation is the correct one. If a child lacks geographical knowledge or easy facility in literacy; the most likely reason is related to teaching. Only when this has definitely been excluded should we reach for other and rarer causes. "

    Misuse of Occam's razor. *Simplest* isn't the same as *most obvious*, but is simplest in terms of the number of factors involved in producing a phenomenon. So, in the case of reading, multiple factors are involved, and the simplest explanation for a child having difficulty reading is the one that explains the most anomalies using the least number of factors. *Teaching* or *not teaching* reading is not a simple explanation in Occam’s terms, since there are many factors involved in teaching or not teaching.

    Clearly if a child has never been taught to do something that they need to be taught in order to do, then they are unlikely to be able to do it. But in the case of reading, children respond in different ways to exactly the same tuition, so there is clearly something else going on in addition to ‘teaching’. And in the case of autonomous home education, some children appear to pick up reading as if by osmosis, whereas others in the same family really struggle, or are even averse to it.

    Your daughter’s lack of facility with geography might not be just because you haven’t taught her geography, but because she’s not interested in it. Given her apparently forceful personality, I’m sure she would have made her wishes clear if she had wanted to learn about it.

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  2. Agree with most of that, but glue ear at age 5 is really quite common and so not an obscure cause of not picking up phonics. Not that it can't be dealt with later on after the ear problems are sorted.

    However, it's not an autitory processing disorder. That's different. It's a hearing issue.

    Intermittent (and therefore undiagnosed) hearing problems are an amazingly common cause of poor reading.

    As is bad teaching.

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  3. Ah I see Simon! So because I bought up both Glue Ear and Auditory Processing issues, I am making excuses?

    Time to clarify something for you then - firstly, I didnt say my children couldnt read. What I said was that they didn't get there using SP. My children read very well and use the 'look and say' method.
    I said that maybe it was their glue ear that prevented that method being successful - I will never know.
    I also said that two of my children went on to be diagnosed (yes properly, by an actual professional) as having auditory processing issues and that maybe this was the cause of the SP method failing. However I need to add that youngest does not have this diagnosis and still cant understand sp.
    I never use my childrens difficulties as an excuse not to achieve something and think its appalling that some people do.

    Secondly the report said that 'vitually all' children should be able to read, not ALL children and if they werent then special help needed to be put into place. This means that there are the rare few who dont achieve using this method for whatever reason.

    Lastly, whilst I agree that parents must take responsibility for their childs' good and bad behaviour I do think that sometimes children struggle with things in spite of, NOT because of their parents.

    An example of this is with dd and Math. I love math, I adore everything about it and teach it very thoroughly to my kids. All my children are very good at math except my oldest dd who just doesnt get it. She has been assessed as having real math difficulties (again, by an actual professional.) and that is inherent to her, not caused by me.

    Your generalisation that children fail to read because of their parents is far too large a generalisation, just like the generalisation that ALL kids need SP to read

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  4. "Secondly the report said that 'vitually all' children should be able to read, not ALL children and if they werent then special help needed to be put into place. This means that there are the rare few who dont achieve using this method for whatever reason."

    If you've read the report, did they attempt to tease out other ways the child could have learnt to read? I would guess that it would be possible for a child to learn much as one of mind did, just through regular exposure to text as books were read to them along with simple phonics whilst not gaining much from the SP being used at school. How did they assess how the individual children learnt to read?

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  5. "Yesterday, I discussed reading and advanced the radical idea that when children do not learn to read, it is generally because they have not been taught or have been taught poorly."

    I am perfectly happy to accept that one of my children did not learn to read because I did not teach them (at least, not in a way that resulted in them reading). This child grew up in the same environment as my other child who was an early reader. We did most things together. This resulted in one child learning to read at 3 and the other child not. I asked the non-reader if they wanted to spend more time specifically on learning to read but they said they would do it later. They decided at 11 that they wanted to learn to read (we asked every now and then), we tried a few methods until we settled on one we both liked, and a few months later they were off. They now have an adult reading age and are due to start University at the end of September.

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  6. 'Your generalisation that children fail to read because of their parents is far too large a generalisation, just like the generalisation that ALL kids need SP to read '

    Not at all what I said.

    'just like the generalisation that ALL kids need SP to read'

    I made it clear that I did not use SP and that my child learned to read at an early age without it.

    Simon.

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  7. The glue ear thing is interesting, but not entirely relevant. 80% of young children suffer from glue ear at some time before their fifth birthday. This does not mean that 80% of children will have reading difficulties. My own daughter suffered from it, as did most of the children of our friends. It is true that glue ear can make hearing some frequencies harder, for instance the letter 'S'. This means that when somebody says the word 'star', the kid hears instead 'tar'. However, glue ear is, even in severe cases, usually sporadic. We must beware the post hoc, propter hoc trap and not be too ready to accept a cause and effect between this condition and problems with reading.

    Simon.

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  8. 'However, glue ear is, even in severe cases, usually sporadic.'

    It's the sporadic (intermittent hearing loss) nature of it which makes it difficult to deal with. Lots of kids are tested for hearing loss, when an issue is suspected, but their hearing happens to be ok that day and so the problem is missed. Once the teacher is aware that's what's going on, measures can be taken to remediate.

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  9. Exactly, Anonymous. Intermittent undetected glue ear in babies could easily disrupt the development of the fine-tuning of the neural networks that process speech.

    The reason glue ear is a prime suspect when it comes to reading problems is that the most significant sensory issue found to be associated with reading difficulty is auditory function.

    That doesn't mean, as Simon points out, that one can assume that glue ear is responsible, but it doesn't mean one can assume it isn't responsible either.

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  10. Developing eyesight is another factor in a growing child...

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  11. 'Developing eyesight is another factor in a growing child...'

    What evidence do you have for this?
    This was an old myth trotted out by the 'better late than early' crowd 20 years ago, but never borne out by serious research.

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  12. "This was an old myth trotted out by the 'better late than early' crowd 20 years ago, but never borne out by serious research."

    Not the same anon, but are you sure?

    http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=1783884&show=html

    http://www.dyslexic.org.uk/va_news.htm

    http://www.dpag.ox.ac.uk/academic_staff/john_stein/stein_research
    "Prof Stein’s research into the visual guidance of attention and movements in monkeys has also helped to elucidate why children with developmental dyslexia often suffer visual letter confusions. This has led to techniques to help children stabilise their visual perceptions when reading and hence make much better reading progress."

    http://www.foodforthebrain.org/content.asp?id_Content=1636
    "Children with dyslexia, dyspraxia and learning difficulties are very often deficient in these essential fats and/or the nutrients needed to properly utilise them, and the benefits of increasing the intake of these fats have been clearly documented in many studies. A high concentration of essential fats is needed in the eyes before they can manage the very rapid movements associated with vision."

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  13. I said 'serious research'.

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  14. So research carried out at or by staff from Oxford University, Brown University, UCL, Barrow Neurological Centre, Phoenix, Arizona, Nuffield Dept of Surgery, Reading University and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, Oxford doesn't count as serious research? High standards indeed!

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  15. Where are the references, then?

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