Better late than early

Many home educating parents in this country seem to be very familiar with John Holt and his books; Teach Your Own seems to be a particular favourite. In the same year that this was first published, 1981, another book on home education came out in the USA. It was called Home Grown Kids and it was written by Raymond and Dorothy Moore. The Moores had written a book a few years earlier than that, called Better Late then Early. During the nineteen sixties, they had been conducting research into the early childhood education movement. While doing so, they discovered a huge amount of evidence from all around the world which suggested that taking very young children from their parents and having them looked after all day by strangers was a bad thing for them, both emotionally and educationally. It's important to note that their conclusions in this were led by the evidence; they did not begin from the position that nurseries and kindergarten were a bad thing, quite the opposite. Older readers will perhaps recollect that during the late sixties and early seventies, the idea of nurseries where children could start very young was seen as a great liberation for women. They could have children and not be bound to the home as housewives.

The Moores found a direct and clear correlation between the age at which formal schooling began and a raft of later difficulties. These ranged from emotional difficulties and juvenile delinquency to various health problems. Interestingly, they also found that early schooling harmed socialisation. A lot of this of course ties in with what people in this country like John Bowlby were finding about maternal deprivation and the ill effects upon a child of being raised in the absence of a one to one loving caregiver.

I find all this interesting with reference to home education in this country. As far as we know, most home educated children in this country seem to spend at least some time in a maintained school. True, some pretty large research projects carried out here have shown a fairly even split between those who have never been to school and those who have been deregistered, but these must be treated with caution. Both Rothermel's studies in 1997/1998 and a large survey conducted by Education Otherwise among its member a few years later only had a 20% response rate. It is upon these that the notion that half of home educated children have never attended school is based.

When you talk to home educators, it certainly seems more common to encounter those whose children have attended school for a while. What is interesting is that it is almost always that they have attended primary school. One seldom hears of children who have been home educated at primary level and then gone to secondary school. It does happen of course, but it is very much the exception.

An awful lot of research now suggests that it is far better for a child to spend those early years with her parents, rather than in an institutional setting. The home is also a much better place to learn how to read and write and for the acquisition of other vital early skills. Any parent can teach a child to read and write in a relaxed and informal way; it is one of the great pleasures of infancy for both parents and child. Teaching Chemistry on the other hand to GCSE level when a child is fourteen or fifteen is, by contrast, a far harder and less enjoyable enterprise!

It strikes me that if parents are going to send their children to school for a few years and also educate them at home for a spell, then the most sensible way of going about the business would be as Dorothy and Raymond Moore suggested in Better Late than Early; teaching them at home until the age of eleven or twelve and only then sending them off to formal schooling. It is curious that parents in this country seem to opt for the opposite approach, sending them to school when young and then educating them at home when they are teenagers. I suppose that this could be due to the fact that few parents in this country seem to make a definite decision to home educate from the beginning and that many of them take this course of action as a response to problems. In other words, the whole thing is not planned in advance.

I would certainly recommend every parent to teach their own children from birth until around eleven. Secondary education is another matter entirely. It can be done effectively, but it is very definitely a full time job which does not suit everybody. Whereas teaching small children is less a full time task than a continuous delight. I know which I enjoyed most!