The war against home education

Dealing with some of the more militant types of home educator is a bit like coping with a remedial class for slow learners. Everything needs to be repeated endlessly, explained in a dozen different ways and then the whole, soul-destroying process begins anew the next day. Not only that, but one gets the same silly comments and interruptions, the constant cries of, “Sir, I don’t get it!” I felt this most forcibly when people were asking on here recently, as to  why I went into detail about the actual reason that our old friend went to Ireland.  I assumed that my motives would be plain, but I see now that I must settle down and explain, step by step, exactly why I wanted to set the case out in such detail.

To begin with, it is necessary for readers to understand that there is a certain strand among British home educators who believe, or purport to believe, I am not sure which, that some sort of war is being waged against their chosen method of education. They claim that attempts are constantly being made to suppress home education and that there is an agenda by some in the mainstream educational establishment to do away with the practice entirely. It is of course preposterous, but there it is. In order to maintain this worldview,  these people  need always to be uncovering new plots against home educators; they require  a continuous stream of threats and menaces to their favoured  lifestyle. (Of course, fighting all these attacks on their liberties makes for a far more congenial life than actually educating their children! It is  essentially a displacement activity, which means that rather than teaching their kids their times tables, they can instead spend their time  lobbying MPs and writing political manifestos).

Sometimes, there are slack periods, when no obvious danger is looming on the horizon for home education in this country.  When this happens, they  have  to fabricate threats and pretend that some individual is being persecuted because she is a home educator.  This stops other home educating parents becoming complacent and thinking that they are safe! This is what was done last year, when this appeal was widely circulated among home educators;

A well-known member of the HE community and trusted friend needs our help. The 
person's family is facing a possible court order and they felt the need to leave the country very quickly in order to protect the children from unfounded interference based on home education as a risk factor. 

Now anybody reading this, would assume that home education was integral to the threat facing this person. She is a member of the HE community and  she is facing a court order and the possibility of ‘unfounded interference based on home education as a risk factor’.  This was very neatly done and many people fell for it. Of course, the attention of social services and their unfounded interference was precipitated not by home education at all, but by the sequence of events which I outlined a few days ago. The key factors were things such as the condition of the home, the call to the police and previous trouble with various authorities which also had nothing to do with home education. The mother in this case was also in the habit of posting about her use of illegal drugs and that probably didn’t help matters either! So while it was not wholly untruthful to say that home education was a risk factor, the ‘unfounded interference’ about which people were worrying, was not based upon this. If it was a factor, it amounted to about 0.00001% of the total of concerns being expressed by the agencies involved.

This is not an exceptional case, of course. We regularly see home educators trying to work up fears that they are under attack and that if we don’t all support them, then our own lifestyles will be the next to be targeted by the government. I have mentioned any number of incidents of this sort  on here over the years; this was not the worst example of such scaremongering, not by a long chalk. In this case though, hardly anybody with whom I have been in contact knew the true story. Those who signed the original letter have been very keen to keep the actual events from being known, because it shows that all those people like Neil Taylor-Moore, Alison Preuss and Barbara Stark, who signed that letter,  were playing people for mugs and using a case which had very little to do with home education in order to put the wind up them.  It was this practice, which is not limited to that particular instance, to which I wished to draw attention. 

Another strand in British home education

We have looked in the course of the last week or two at a couple of major strands in British home education. There are of course others, including the one I wish to examine today.


A sizeable proportion of home educating parents in this country have worked as school teachers. This is also the case in the USA. In contrast to this group is another, perhaps as large, whose members hate schools, teachers and anything which smacks in the least of formal education. Of course, there is a good deal of overlap between these groups and the others of which I have lately been writing. For example, I mentioned the mother/daughter pairs with neurological disorders a little while ago. A well known member in this group comes from a family of teachers and was herself married to a teacher. Another parent in this category, on the other hand, belongs to the group who hate schools and had unhappy experiences there.

Let us look at one of the parents whose decision to home educate was motivated less by the needs of her child than by residual anger felt by her towards authority figures in her childhood. Some readers may recollect that there was a campaign last year to raise money so that a home educating parent could skip the country before social services moved in on her and her children. This appeal was signed by many of the usual suspects; Barbara Stark, Neil Taylor, Alison Preuss, Maire Stafford and so on. Their efforts were successful and the woman was able to flee to Ireland. Her name will be familiar to many, but I cannot mention it for legal reasons.  She kept for a while a blog and one of the posts there shows precisely the sort of thing that I am talking about:



http://the-exiled-educator.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/dear-miss-downing.html




‘She hated school and had few friends, she was always much happier at home’ Nothing could more clearly illustrate the type of parent whose own past makes her likely to whip her child out of school at the first sign of any difficulty. We see Maire Stafford in the comments, saying, ‘That could have been me, although they did not know I was bright they criticised all the time and I got two years of the bitchiest teacher going, she picked on and exposed the shy ones.’ She is also a member of this group of home educators who hated school and still feel angry about their time there; even half a century later.

Now a thing that I have noticed is that those parents who home educate because of their own childhood misery tend to be a lot angrier than ordinary home educators. Their anger is directed not only against teachers and schools, but also against authority in general. They are also very often the ones at the centre of schisms and rows within the home educating community. Maire Stafford is of course famous for falling out with anybody who disagrees with her views on home education. She is a bitter enemy of Cheryl Moy, whose blog I drew attention to a little while ago.

This type of parent spearheads the opposition to visits from local authorities and is keen to spread news of any problems in schools; shortcomings in academic standards or cases of abuse by teachers for instance. Readers may have noticed the awful pleasure with which incidents of sexual abuse in nurseries, say, are advertised on blogs and lists run by such people. I have an idea, although I am of course quite ready to be proved wrong, that much of the anger which one sees simmering beneath the surface of some home educators is driven not by contemporary events in British education, but rather stems from childhood memories of perceived ill treatment from teachers. I need hardly add that parents in this group are, almost without exception, opponents of teaching and firm advocates of child-centred education. The extent to which this is a rational choice is open to question and it is perfectly possible that their chosen pedagogy is instead a Pavlovian response to reflexes which have their roots in childhood.

Conformity and orthodoxy among well-known home educators

I have remarked before that an awful lot of the more well known home educators seem to conform to a fairly rigid stereotype. They tend to be left wing politically, often opposed to vaccination, prone to conspiracy theories, in favour of organic food; that sort of thing. I could draw up a profile of the typical high-profile home educator without too much difficulty. I have come across two recent examples of this tendency to conformity. The first is  that mother who was, allegedly, forced to flee the country in order to protect her children from social services involvement. I am sure that most of us remember the appeal which was circulating on the forums and lists three months ago, beginning;

 
A well-known member of the HE community and trusted friend needs our help. The person's family is facing a possible court order and they felt the need to leave the country very quickly in order to protect the children from unfounded interference based on home education as a risk factor.

It was signed by many of the usual suspects, including Maire Stafford, Barbara Stark, Alison Preuss and Neil Taylor. Readers will be relieved to hear that this unfortunate and persecuted woman made it safely to Ireland. What precipitated her flight? Let her tell us in her own words:

A few months ago I shamefully attended a meeting about how to obtain Organic Food, leaving my young children in the care of their 17yr old brother, when I should have been at home washing the clothes... This led to scrutiny from 'authority' figures & caused me to commit a further sin of defying that 'authority' when it sought to persecute myself & my family for my wayward ways, particularly my disgraceful choice to educate my children outside of the state system or allow my parenting, educational provision, or moral scruples to be inspected & dictated by dubiously qualified 'experts'


It just had to be a meeting about organic food! Mind, one feels instinctively that there is more to the case than meets the eye. Leaving a seventeen year-old babysitting is a fairly common thing to do; how did the ‘authorities’ even hear of this?  The whole of this explanantion appears to be written in code. I have heard of local authorities wishing to check on educational provision, but when was the last time you had a man from the council knocking on the door because he wanted to inspect your 'moral scruples'? It would be interesting to know if anything happened to any of the younger children being looked after by the seventeen year-old and how this family first came to the attention of social services in the first place.

The other well-known home educator whose views are exceedingly orthodox for this type of individual is Alison Sauer. While idly looking at her Facebook page, I noticed that her interests include attachment parenting and support of Dr Wakefield; the maniac who started off the whole autism and vaccination scare. Alison Sauer, needless to say, thinks he was right and is opposed to the triple vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella…

As others have pointed out here before, we cannot judge all home educators by those whom we see on the Internet; for which I thank the Lord! However, these people are influential and thousands of people belong to lists and forums where their views are propagated. Their bizarre thoughts and weird belief-systems therefore have a way of filtering down to other home educating parents, via groups composed in the main of normal people. It only takes one of two evangelical mothers who spend a lot of time on Home Ed Biz or HE-UK to spread alarm about things from a particular slant in an ordinary home educating support group. It is certainly worth keeping an eye on the ideas to which many of them subscribe, for this reason alone.