Tuesday 15 January 2013

Putting it all together

In the first post that I made this year, I remarked upon the extraordinary levels of anger displayed by quite a few home educators in the public sphere. Now if this were anger directed only  at me, it would be nothing remarkable. I am an unusually irritating person, given to asking questions and expressing strong opinions. A natural consequence of this is that I do tend to piss off a fair few people! However, the anger of which I wrote is also aimed by these home educators at others. Their targets include teachers, schools, local authorities, doctors, psychologists, newspaper reporters and other home educators; to name but a few. Many of them appear to be in a permanent state of tension, ready to erupt in fury at the least provocation.


We have over the last couple of weeks examined one or two causes of this perpetual anger. Some of those at whom we looked have neurological difficulties, wiring problems in the brain if you like, which make it hard for them to understand what others are getting at. This naturally results in their growing frustrated and angry at things which make no sense to them. Others, who have no obvious disorder, cannot follow logical trains of thought. They are incapable of separating ideas into the correct category. This means that they are unable to distinguish between sensible and foolish arguments. This has the effect of making them angry, because they simply don’t get what people are trying to say.

Yesterday, I touched upon another source of anger in quite a few of the home educators who are familiar to us from lists and blogs. These are people whose experiences at school were bad and have therefore picked up from an early age a dislike of and opposition to authority in general. This colours all that they do, say and believe. Combined with an inability to weigh evidence and follow a coherent line of thought, it all makes for a pretty lethal combination! This dislike and distrust of authority makes such people prone to following all sorts of fringe beliefs, some of which may be harmful to their children. How does this work in practice? Well, two obvious examples are teaching and vaccination. The authorities and practically everybody else for the last four thousand years or so have always believed that children need to be taught. We will reject the authorities, while at the same time giving one in the eye to those teachers we so dislike, say such individuals. We will not teach our children as a matter of routine, but only if they specifically ask us to do so. There, that’s put one over on authority and no mistake! We are doing the opposite to what the authorities say we should do.

This attitude can lead to worse courses of action than this though. Authority says that vaccinations are a good idea and will protect your child from German Measles or Mumps. Ha, you fool! Don’t you realise that you will give your kids mercury poisoning or autism if you obey authority? Readers might care to correlate the most angry home educators with those who express the most opposition to the MMR vaccine. The initial dislike of authority, combined with the fact that these people cannot understand how to evaluate evidence, means that they end up hazarding the health of their children.

We are almost ready to pull all the threads together and put together an overview of the home education movement in this country. This will enable us to understand a number of things which do not make any sense to those with children at school. Things such as a dislike of regular teaching, the refusal to allow any monitoring of children, widespread adherence to unconventional ideas and the toxic levels of anger which are on show wherever one looks; not only on the internet, but in the day to day dealings of many of these parents with others.

20 comments:

  1. Worn out Webb says-Their targets include teachers, schools, local authorities, doctors, psychologists, newspaper reporters

    angry is directed against those that lie or tell half truth about a family such as an LEA officer who tell lies to attempt to force a home visit or a head teacher who tell lies to an LEA officer in a phone call about that family
    Until complaints about schools and LEA are really looked into nothing will change

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  2. 'We are almost ready to pull all the threads together and put together an overview of the home education movement in this country. This will enable us to understand a number of things...'

    I doubt it.

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    1. Given the kind of disinformation and broken logic we've seen from Simon over the last couple of weeks, he'll start with 2+2, reinterpret this as 6x7, and he'll end-up with 420 - then woe betide anyone who disagrees; they'll be branded as muddle-headed disordered thinkers, incapable of following elementary logic.

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    2. Then he'll just say that he was only joking and can't we all take a joke?

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  3. I'm not sure you can judge any movement by such a tiny number of people. After all, Simon, you were once a home educator, and I'm sure you wouldn't consider yourself a typical one. Anyone who goes against the 'norm' has to have strong views to do it, just like you do yourself. I'm pretty sure politicians realise this because they've had to work round Dennis Skinner, Ken Livingstone, Boris Johnstone and Lembit Opik!

    Reading this, I'm reminded of what I think is a Yorkshire saying. 'Everyone's mad except me and thee... and sometimes I'm not so sure about thee!'

    Atb
    Anne B

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  4. "Many of them appear to be in a permanent state of tension, ready to erupt in fury at the least provocation."

    Since new year, we've seen something of an eruption from Simon; months of pent-up fury, unleashed in an incoherent outpouring of venomous drivel.

    Was he on Santa's naughty list?

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  5. Simon is desperately in need of a long retreat. Whatever one might think of his views, seeing him go into mental meltdown in this very public way is a most pathetic and unedifying spectacle. Best to leave him be.

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  6. Is there a reason for these recent posts? I've enjoyed reading a lot of your blog, especially since you obviously did an such a good job of educating your daughter, but I have no idea what you're talking about lately! Is there some particular context for your anger?

    I haven't been involved with home education for as long as you, but these posts don't remotely represent the home educators I know. I do find it rather disconcerting that you're so determined to prove we're all insane!

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    1. I wouldn't worry about it. He frequently goes-off on some rant or other, but since returning from his absence he seems to be particularly manic.

      Unfortunately, in order to "prove" a point in his own mind, he sets lower standards for himself than for others when it comes to truth and the relevance of information. He leaps on the flimsiest piece of evidence and draws wild conclusions while silently ignoring counter-arguments, or pretending that his opponents don't understand his point.

      As the previous anon. said, it may be best to ignore him and maybe he'll go away and calm down, although maybe that's being optimistic.

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  7. ' I do find it rather disconcerting that you're so determined to prove we're all insane! '

    Nothing of the kind. At each stage, I have been meticulously careful to specify whether I am talking about high profile home educators who one sees in the news or about the large majority of what we might call 'ordinary' home educating parents.

    The comments about mental illnesses and learning disorders such as dyslexia and ADHD were restricted to what many of the former catagory have said about themselves. The post on which you have commented, on the othere hand, is more general. Nobody disputes that there are several broad catagories into which many home educators fall; those whose children have special needs, those who took their children out of school due to bullying and so on. I am looking at one or two other broad classes, such as those with a constitutional need to challenge authority. Of course, this does not apply to all home educators, any more than all home educators remove their children from school because of bullying. I am looking at trends.

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  8. 'it may be best to ignore him and maybe he'll go away '

    It is hardly necessary for you to wait for me to go away! Surely there is a simpler solution? The internet is a vast place and yet you choose to come to the one site where you know that will be irritated and annoyed. This is hardly rational. Rather than waiting for me to 'go away', why not just avoid this blog?

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  9. 'Whatever one might think of his views, seeing him go into mental meltdown in this very public way is a most pathetic and unedifying spectacle. Best to leave him be. '

    See my advice above. Why would you come to view a 'pathetic and unedifying spectacle'? There is something more than little tacky about such voyerism. The most dignified approach from your point of view would be to steer clear of such a thing. I am honestly unable to see why you would want to watch somebody having a 'mental meltdown'!

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  10. I suspect "go away" meant "go away from the internet" - possibly even the entire planet.

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  11. "The internet is a vast place..."

    ...full of poisonous watering holes like this one. The unwary often end-up here via Google (or other) search engines, so it's important for them to see some health warnings.

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  12. I understand the two comments above to mean that these people are unhappy for views other than their own to be disseminated. This does not altogether surprise me.

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  13. I think people have a problem with your deceit and wild exaggerated claims, Simon, not to mention you ignoring or dismissing counter-arguments.

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  14. 'I think people have a problem with your deceit and wild exaggerated claims, Simon, not to mention you ignoring or dismissing counter-arguments.'

    Obviously, I do not myself think that I have either wildly exaggerated or been deceitful. As for ignoring counter-arguements, this is not really true. I respond initially and in detail. When it becomes clear that I and the other parties are talking about different things, there seems little point in continuing the debate. I then withdraw and leave the field to those who disagree with me. This blog is, after all, only a small part of my life and there is a limit on the amount of time that I am able to spend on it.


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    1. I think it's quite clear from the Lizard thread that this is false, Simon.

      You steadfastly ignored the points that mainstream religions have made falsifiable (and falsified) predictions while the lizard claims - nonsense though they may be - are not necessarily falsifiable.

      Not to mention that the person alleged to believe in royal lizards had made no such claim.

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  15. 'I think it's quite clear from the Lizard thread that this is false, Simon.'

    I replied with ten long comments. I also dealt with matters such as the supposedly scientific claims of some religions; young earth geology for example. I do not propose to go into this again. I was drawing a distinction between different types of hypothesis and when it became obvious that none of those commenting knew what I was talking about, I dropped the subject.

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  16. "I replied with ten long comments."

    None of which dealt with the points.

    "I was drawing a distinction between different types of hypothesis and when it became obvious that none of those commenting knew what I was talking about, I dropped the subject."

    The different types of hypothesis were clear to all; you dropped the subject when it became clear that mainstream religions have made falsifiable (and falsified) predictions while the lizard claims - nonsense though they may be - are not necessarily falsifiable, therefore invalidating your argument.

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