Sunday 2 September 2012

Bad publicity for home education…




Home educators who spend a lot of time prowling the internet and looking for references to their lifestyle tend on the whole to be a pretty angry and intemperate bunch; always on the lookout for fancied slights and supposed discrimination. They google “home education” with  various other words such as “abuse”, “local authority” or “regulation”, until they come across some newspaper article or forum which is discussing home education. They then comment themselves and contact various other like-minded individuals, until the comments pages are flooded with virulently pro-home education sentiments. Anybody who is the least bit dubious about the benefits of home education or who feels that greater checks are needed, is shouted down, mocked and abused. There are only a couple of dozen people at this game, but you see them all over the internet. Let some well-meaning mother express concern about a home educating family on some parenting site, for instance, and before you know it the usual home educators are on the thread, denouncing her as a fool and bigot.

The sort of behaviour which I outline above  is very well known to many in the field of education. The home educators engaging in this practice give a terrible impression of home educators in general. It is perfectly clear that they have massive chips on their shoulders for various reasons and regard anybody who is the slightest bit sceptical about home education as a bitter enemy. People in local authorities, the staff on the Time Educational Supplement and others actively involved with education, take all this in their stride. They know what some of these characters can be like and don’t take offence. Problems can arise though when these tactics spill over into the real world and people unfamiliar with the more aggressive type of home educator come up against campaigns of this sort.

When the National School Film Week introduced a minimum booking of ten seats for their event in October, it was seen by some as ‘pure discrimination’, ‘bias’ and ‘prejudice’. It was of course nothing of the sort; just a small charity trying to reduce staff costs and avoid wasting the time of cinemas by getting them to come in  and show films to just two or three children. Following the kind of strategy which I have talked about, some home educators organised angry messages on the Facebook page of this charity and also saw to it that masses of emails were sent. Many of these were very aggressive in tone, so much so that that the head of the charity had this to say in public:




'In closing, I must also refute the accusations made by a small minority of home educators against Film Education and members of its staff, that we are deliberately discriminating against home educated children and young people. We are prepared, if necessary, to take appropriate action to protect our staff and our organisation from such unfounded accusations'


This is now on the public website. What sort of impression does this give to ordinary people of home educators? Action might need to be taken to protect the staff of a charity from home educators? I do wish that people would stop to think before they get up to these capers. An awful lot of people already think that home educating parents must be a bit weird. This sort of thing hardly helps. The average person reading what has been put up on the site will be shaking his head in disapproval at the thought of the abuse to which this charity’s workers have been subjected. This is just the kind of publicity which home education in this country can do without.

34 comments:

  1. So who was it that started this particularly nasty campaign against the charity..was it a home educating individual, website collective or one of the organisations?

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    1. I don't think anyone organised a nasty campaign. Many home educators wrote to them, concerned about the effect of the changes on HE visits. A "small minority" responded in a negative, non-constructive way. Luckily the charity saw beyond this minority and responded to the majority by making changes that would help home educators. Hopefully the small minority who attacked the charity will have learnt something from this - but to be honest, I'm not holding my breath.

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  2. Many times we read discriminitive remarks made by home educators against school children on here and other websites...
    It's probably the same HEing ****kwits that are responsible.

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    1. 'And you don't know her rather unpleasant brood at all.'

      And here we have someone doing the same thing regarding home educated children.

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  3. 'Many times we read discriminitive remarks made by home educators against school children on here and other websites...'

    No, you don't.

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    1. Yeah...we do. It's all in the archives.

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    2. No.

      What we have is lots of facts about home education at which one commenter shouts, 'HE spin! School Hater!!! Schoolchild discriminator! Ugly as racism!' on a regular basis.

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    3. No, you have lots of comments that are anti school and schoolchildren.

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    4. Oh, there are plenty of comments about schools which show them in a less than positive light. Clearly, people wouldn't opt for home education in the numbers they do, if, compared with HE, schools always did a brilliant job. But you shouldn't take that so hard.

      However, you said, 'disciminative remarks...against school CHILDREN'. I don't think I've seen any of those.

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    5. A couple of articles ago...

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    6. Home educators often do a less than brilliant job. Quite often they're not even good role models and pretty useless as parents.

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    7. Home educators are pretty useless as parents? Right. Okay. You met one once, did you?

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    8. Met quite a few..

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  4. 'So who was it that started this particularly nasty campaign against the charity..was it a home educating individual, website collective or one of the organisations?'

    Step forward Julie Bunker and take a bow...

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  5. Ah..as I recall she knows a lot about discrimination.
    Dishing it out, homophobia mainly.

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  6. Dishing out discrimination? I think you have the wrong Julie.

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  7. Dishing out discrimination? I think you have the wrong Julie.

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  8. Dishing out discrimination? I think you have the wrong Julie.

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  9. Oh no I don't...
    I think you only know the one face.

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  10. And you don't know her rather unpleasant brood at all.

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    1. What a horrible, spiteful and abusive thing to say about someone's children.

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    2. Yeah...that's what I thought when Julie and her brood were involved in all that homophobia.

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    3. Came straight out of school, directly into AE and dived right on into the bullying, all within the space of a few months.

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    4. Smearing CHILDREN is a new low, even for you.

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  11. Not sure of the relevance of this, but want to point out that although I post here, and I am Julie B, I am not Julie Bunker.......although my appearance before the Select Common Wednesday is likely to turn me into one of the " most hated" going by some comments I have read elsewhere!

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  12. what are you doing sucking up to the select commons on Wednesday Julie? what are you up 2?

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  13. Ah must be Peter!

    Not actually sure why I have been asked - except as a rep of a Hampshire home ed group!

    Watch and see!.

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  14. yes its me Julie!

    well i do hope your going to tell those old M.Ps that we do not need monitoring or home visits or interviewing of child on there own! hope your going to do a sell out of home educators? try to keep your teachers hat off and be strong and tell those fools no regulations no sell out Julie!!
    College Friday for Peter and he been selected to represent England in German for chess.

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    1. So, he plays chess well... that happened because you plugged him into loads of chess software, it had nothing to do with you being in any way, shape or form an educator.
      You're so woefully uneducated that you were incapable of educating anyone.

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  15. No wonder there's talk of monitoring if this f'ckwit thinks he's a home educator.
    Plugging your sprog into Thomas the Tank Engine, a Playstation or a chess software package isn't an education.
    It's an abuse.

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    1. But then, if we made decisions based on individual cases, we would probably ban schools on the basis that you attended one.

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  16. You have to be careful with things like this because just because Film Education has made that statement it doesn't mean that it is true. I for one said that they seemed to be only discriminating against small groups which obviously only included home educators and small schools. Unfortunately the changes they brought in did in fact only affect those groups. Whether they did that deliberately or not is besides the point because the effect was the same and the argument at that point is moot. To have that statement on their website just makes them look slightly petty as far as I am concerned and hopefully will look the same to anyone who can think outside the box. People were upset by the changes and when upset, people say things they might regret. It is a shame, but it happens and normal human beings move on.

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  17. Strange thing is, I always found Film Education staff to be quite helpful and not in the least bit discriminative.
    Never found that many home educators keen to take advantage of their scheme.

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