Silencing other views

I was fascinated to watch the reaction among some well-known home educators to my daughter's heterodox views on home education, as expressed in the Guardian recently. Now you must remember that these are people who contrive to give the impression that they are fighting to protect home educated children from the oppressive power of the state. One might have thought that they would be pleased to hear the views of a genuine home educated young person; one who had never spent a single day in school. Not a bit of it! To appreciate this fully, you have to realise that I am not talking about a few random strangers, but people who are very well known in the world of British home education; they run groups, write blogs, send letters to the papers, make Freedom of Information requests to the Department of Education, submit evidence to select committees, that sort of thing. I shall not name them because this seems to irritate people; I am accused of 'naming and shaming'. However, the guilty may look into their own hearts!

As many realise, the opposition to any increased regulation of home education in this country is often coordinated via Internet lists and also by communicating on twitter. It was on twitter that some really awful opinions were being expressed, opinions which provided a window into the true nature of some of these staunchest advocates of the right of children to have their opinions respected. One woman made a sleazy and misogynistic joke about my daughter, a play on words about 'Balls' and called her a 'little tart'. My daughter responded vigorously, pointing out the sexism inherent in this remark. This prompted another home educating mother to describe my daughter and me as 'a pair of c**ts'. What an extraordinary thing for a home educating mother to say of a sixteen year old home educated girl who had expressed an opinion about home education! The tweeter who had called her a tart agreed with this description. Then began a series of exchanges between six prominent home educators in which she was variously called 'a sad little troll' and an 'attention seeker'. (This last was a bit rich, coming from a woman whom it is impossible to avoid tripping over in the comments section of any online article on home education!) There followed doubts being expressed as to whether she really is sixteen or was even home educated.

Two things strike one about all this. The first is that almost all the stuff posted on the Internet about home education is by parents. Parents who claim to be speaking on behalf of their children, it is true, but parents never the less. All the comments posted on Ed Balls' article in the Guardian last week were adults; nearly all seemed to be parents. My daughter was the only home educated young person to say anything there. One gets the distinct impression that most of the parents there would rather keep the whole home education debate in their own hands, without home educated children and young people muddying the waters by expressing their own views on the matter! As soon as a real home educated youth pops up to say something, she is dismissed as a 'cunt', 'little tart', 'sad little troll' and 'attention seeker'. This, I think, says a great deal about how these people really view children and young people, even home educated ones.

The second thing which occurs to me is this. I have regularly been mocked by some home educators for being a lone voice; the 'only' home educator who agreed with Badman. Where are all the other home educating parents who feel as you do, I have been asked rhetorically. Well I think that quite a few of them keep well clear of the established home education scene in this country because they know that there are some pretty unpleasant types to be found there. A year or two ago there were a few people on some of the Internet lists who had varying opinions to most of those who post there. All have gone now. Some were made to feel unwelcome, others were bullied and driven off by some of the same parents who were being so abusive on twitter recently. Parents who join these lists soon learn that if they do not go along with the majority view, then they are liable to be ostracised and incur disapproval. A similar thing happens at some home education groups. I had an email recently from somebody who posts here from time to time. She has been frozen out of her local group because she told everybody that she hoped that her seven year old son would be taking examinations in a few years. Since these parents are often facing negativity from those who send their children to school, the prospect of also being frowned upon by fellow home educators is sometimes too much. I also know this to be true, because when I posted on HE-UK, I would not infrequently receive private emails from folk who agreed with me but did not like to say so publicly for fear of the reaction. Perhaps we need to remember what John Stuart Mill said about the 'Tyranny of the Majority'.

I hasten to add that my daughter is well able to stand up for herself and in fact her response was as forcefully expressed as anything I could have said myself. It has given me food for thought though. Ian Dowty recently suggested that home educators might consider compromising to the extent of agreeing at least with registration. Up went the predictable cry of 'No surrender'. One would get the impression that home educators were completely united in not giving an inch on this question. And yet, as I have mentioned before, when opinions were collected anonymously as responses to the Badman review, a third of home educating parents were in favour of registration. The reason that these parents are not speaking out publicly is almost certainly because they do not want to be abused and insulted by some of the more gung ho members of the home educating community. We have seen what happens when even a young girl from a home educating family says publicly that she agrees with this idea; one shudders to think what these characters would say to a mother or father who dared to speak out like that!

Oh no, it's another S. Webb!

My daughter drew my attention to Ed Balls' piece in the Guardian yesterday about home education. There is a bit of a story behind this. For some incomprehensible reason, she joined the Labour party earlier this year and is now active in the campaign to secure the leadership of the party for Ed Balls. This has entailed going to the campaign headquarters and ringing up members to urge them to support Ed Balls for leader. The other day she told me that she had been telephoning dead people, which made me wonder for a moment if she had been contacting Keir hardy and Ramsay McDonald in order to solicit their support. It turned out simply that the membership list was a little out of date and some of those on it had died.

Now my daughter is very touchy about home education and very quick to jump in if she feels that somebody is attacking the idea or saying silly things about it. Yet after reading Ed Balls' article, she posted a comment in support of his views at once. I also read the piece and could not for the life of me see anything objectionable about it. He says that most home educators are doing a good job and that it would be sensible to check that this is the case with all children being educated at home. Neither I nor my daughter can see anything at all wrong in this idea. My only criticism of what he says is that he falls into the popular error of talking about parents' 'rights' to home educate. This is of course nonsense. It is, as I have pointed out before on more than one occasion, children who have a right to education. Parents have not a right but a duty to see that their children gain access to this right.

Among other things, ed Balls said;

'The review I commissioned and the legislation I brought forward for a formal registration scheme – with rights to see children alone for local authority officers in rare situations when they can obtain no co-operation from parents – provoked vigorous criticism from some, who claimed I was infringing parental rights, criticism which I believe was wholly disproportionate to what we actually proposed.'

I think one would be hard pressed to find anybody apart from home educating parents who would be inclined to disagree with this. One hears a good deal of the views of home educating parents, many of whom are vociferous, but it is curious that one does not see the children and young people themselves on the main lists such as EO and HE-UK. My daughter tried to join both last year, but was refused permission. I found this curious and so did she, that an articulate home educated young person should be denied a voice in this way. Why do no young people and children ever post on the lists? Have they no opinions? At any rate, my daughter is very eager to talk about this and so she will be answering any comments here herself today. This will be a glorious bonus for readers, as I shall also be answering comments in my usual amiable fashion. I can imagine the hearts of some home educators sinking at this prospect; imagine another S. Webb giving views about home education! It does not bear thinking about. They are already all too familiar with S. Webb the father. Now they are to have S. Webb the daughter inflicted upon them. Whoever will it be next? S. Webb the mother? S. Webb the aunty? Perhaps even S. Webb the grandfather's cousin twice removed? Fortunately, I can assure readers that this is strictly a one-off event and that my daughter will only be on here for one day, although she has already weighed in to the debate on the Guardian about ed Balls' article. Nervous readers may rest easy; there are no more S. Webbs lurking around the place ready to rave on about home education. Her contributions are likely to be later on, because during the day she will be at Ed Balls' campaign headquarters, beavering away to secure this frightful man the leadership of the Labour party. Why she can't just vote Tory like all other sensible and well balanced people is a complete mystery to me.

The complete text of Ed Balls article may be found here. Santaevita is my daughter;


http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/aug/03/michael-gove-ed-balls-home-education

A meeting with Ed Balls

Knowing the great affection felt for Ed Balls and the warm regard in which he is held by many home educating parents, I thought that this picture of my daughter and him might be of interest. I might perhaps have mentioned in the past that my daughter recently joined the Labour Party. (The Labour Party! My feelings on hearing of this development must have been broadly similar to those of a parent who learns that his teenage daughter is pregnant or on drugs. Only worse.) She spent a good deal of time talking to him and asking him the sort of impertinent questions which only a sixteen year old would have the cheek to raise, for instance about the precise nature of the electoral system used to select the next Labour leader, his plans for the future and so on.

I asked her out of curiosity what he had had to say for himself with regard to home education and his famous Children, Schools and Families Bill. To my surprise, she had not even thought to raise this particular topic with him. On reflection this should not have come as a surprise at all. I don't think that my daughter has ever really classified herself as being 'home educated'. When she was small and some fool in shops or other public places asked her the inevitable, fatuous question, 'No school today?', she would say simply, 'I don't go to school'. As she grew older she would describe herself as being home educated, but this was only once she had learned from others that this was a handy pigeon-hole which enabled them to classify her. I don't think I used the expression myself.

Today, she meets a huge variety of different people. Many of those people are concerned with education and so on. I often ask her afterwards, 'Did you tell so and so that you had been home educated?' She seldom has done, because it is to her an irrelevance. It has never been a defining feature of her life in the way that politics, religion and tastes in literature and theatre are. It is simply that she did not go to school. She has never displayed the least interest in the theory or ideology of home education and wanted no part of the book which I wrote. Not because she had not enjoyed being taught at home or thought it a bad experience, but rather because that was then and this is now. Who cares what her experiences of early education were? It's what she is doing now that matters to her.

Now I don't know how typical this is of other teenagers who have been educated at home. I have met a few of these and they usually let one know fairly early on that they were home educated. It seems to be a very definite part of their identity, of how they see themselves. I was wondering whether this might be because to many parents and consequently also to their children, home education is far more than simply how their children learn. It is a social grouping, hobby, political leaning and quasi-religion all rolled up into one. It provides them with electronic pen pals, who often act as a substitute for the social life which other parents have at the school gates. It allows them to feel passionately about a political issue, rather like those who used to campaign against the fluoridation of our drinking water. It gives them figures upon whom they and their group can focus their hatred and contempt. (Hmmm, my neck grew strangely warm as I typed that. Is it me or is it warm in here?) In short, it gives them an aim and purpose in life.
It is, as I say, a great deal more than just another educational method.

I suppose that we all like to belong to various groups, whether they are churches or football teams, political parties or book clubs. Home education is another of these groups, a huddling place frequently, but not of course invariably, for the lonely and disaffected. It would be interesting to study the home education movement in this country from an anthropological perspective. Its need for bogy men such as the terrifying figure of the local authority officer, always eager to snatch their children away from them; its demons and ghouls such as Graham Badman. The sense of persecution and hostility which many members feel so keenly. The delicious feeling of being a true believer, part of a beleaguered band of souls, fighting for a noble cause against the world of the orthodox and hidebound. A bit like being an early Christian, I suppose.

Unfortunately, my daughter was never really part of this world and so she did not have the chance to develop such visceral emotions on the subject of home education as those which I have observed in other families. I have a suspicion that when she goes to university she is unlikely ever to mention that she was home educated, unless the subject is specifically raised by somebody else.

The middle of the road, Part 2

A week ago I was injudicious enough to post a light hearted piece in which I suggested that at either end of the home education spectrum are groups of fanatics whose opinions are diametrically opposed to each other. I gave it as my view that Ed Balls and his cronies are at one end and autonomously educating parents at the other. I also mused that those like the present writer who remain resolutely in the middle of the road are apt to be run over. Ironically, but quite predictably, I was promptly knocked down by a bunch of autonomous educators who took exception to the thesis advanced, which was that they were by way of being extremists!

The fault is of course entirely mine, because I worded a couple of sentences somewhat elliptically and several readers jumped to the wrong conclusions about what I was saying. Referring to autonomous educators, I said that this group thought that children shouldn't be taught. I cannot really complain about readers being literal minded and failing to read between the lines; I am after all a world class pedant in my own right! What I actually meant to imply was, "This group believe that children shouldn't be taught (as a matter of routine and certainly not unless they actually want to be taught)." I did not for a moment suppose that autonomous educators would actually refuse to teach their children if the kids actually asked to be taught.

Mind you, I have to say that in my experience this is a rather rare occurrence. My own daughter has often asked me to take her to the theatre or buy her various magazines. I do not ever recollect her asking me to explain the failure of the Schlieffen Plan in August 1914 or to teach her about the Gallipoli Campaign in 1915. Perhaps she is a very weird and atypical teenager, but I was obliged to arrange this myself and set times when I would teach her that sort of thing. I have a suspicion that had it been left to her, she would not have come to me and asked to be taught about the six specific themes of World War I which she needed for the IGCSE History; I always had to take the initiative. Perhaps other readers have teenagers who are a little more enthusiastic about stuff like that and do actually ask to be taught about it.

To put the case for there being two groups of extremists involved in home educations, I will say this. The vast majority of people, both parents and teachers, believe that children should be taught regularly and that this teaching should take place according to some sort of plan. I myself believe this. I think most of us would agree that this is the commonly held view. Ed Balls and some of his friends go much further than this and believe that teaching can only take place in schools and that a child not at school is a child not being taught, or at least not being taught properly. I imagine that he has reached this conclusion by some exceedingly faulty induction. I guess that he has said to himself, "Teaching takes place in schools, home educated children are not at school; therefore, home educated children are not being taught." That muffled whirring noise which is faintly audible, is Wittgenstein spinning round like a Catherine wheel in his grave.......

In short, the folk at the DCSF are saying that children need teaching and that parents are not really capable of providing it and that the education of their children will suffer as a consequence.
Autonomous educators seem to be saying precisely the opposite. They seem to be saying, from all that I am able to apprehend, that children do not need to be taught, unless they particularly want to be and that they are in any case quite capable of learning without formal teaching or even any sort of plan. Their views thus differ both from that of the Ed Balls faction and also from most ordinary people. My own views lie between both these extremes and firmly with the majority of normal people. I believe that children need to be taught and that this teaching has to be done in a planned and systematic fashion. I don't think it matters much whether the teaching takes place at home or in a school, although it is easier and more effective to do it at home. And that is why I regard myself as a middle of the road type of home educator who has little patience for the extremists whom one finds on the fringes.

Walking in the middle of the road

Those who spend too much time in the middle of the road are apt to get run over from time to time, a familiar enough hazard for the present writer. The problem is that when any ideology or belief system has mad extremists at its fringes, many reasonable folk wish to steer a course somewhere between the opposite ends of the spectrum. In the case of home education, there are two groups connected with it which I tend to avoid as far as possible and with whose opinions I disagree strongly.

The first group are headed by Ed Balls, who suggested recently that children should be removed from their parents to be educated by the state no later than the September after their fourth birthday. He presented this proposal in the form of a classic false dichotomy, telling us that the parents could choose between nursery at that age or a school place. The thought that there is a third way which involves neither of these possibilities honestly did not seem to occur to him. This is mildly alarming coming from an Education Secretary. He typifies a certain sort of person in the field of education who feels that a child out of school is a child at risk of failing academically. One of his acolytes was on Radio 4 on Sunday. A Headmaster called Steve Wright was talking about the idea that parents should teach their own children. He gave it as his opinion that he would himself be unable to provide a full and varied curriculum for a child single-handed, singling out religion and science as subjects that parents would not be able to cover effectively at home. His message was, "Leave it to us professionals!" Regular readers of this Blog will be aware that I always try to discuss matters in a dispassionate and scholarly fashion, but here I feel bound to say that this prize fathead should be set up in a pillory so that right thinking citizens can pelt him with mouldy vegetables.

In short, the opinion of the faction led by Ed Balls is that parents cannot teach their children and would be foolish even to try. There is of course another group which holds that parents shouldn't teach their children and that it is harmful to the children to attempt to do so. This party is spearheaded by the so-called autonomous educators. A fairly typical example of the breed is Deborah Durbin, author of Teach Yourself Home Education, without doubt the worst book I have ever read on the subject. Ms. Durbin believes that her children are able to acquire correct grammar and syntax by writing thank you letters by themselves while their mother works on the other side of the room. Rather than teach them history, she feels that researching her family tree should meet the bill. In the face of such idiocy, words fail me. ( I am tempted to suggest that Deborah Durbin should join Steve Wright in the pillory, but since I have recently been accused of misogyny on the Home Education Forums, I shall refrain from doing so).

So there you have it in a nutshell; one group thinking that children cannot be taught at home and the other thinking that they shouldn't be. I cannot decide which of these two groups of extremists irritate me more. Ed Balls and his cronies are pretty annoying, with their absolute mania for prescribing every last, tiny detail of a child's education, but then again so are those parents who are resolutely opposed to anything even remotely approaching structure and planning in their children's education. Those of us who hold more moderate views are constantly at risk of being caught in the crossfire between these two sides. In my own case, for instance, I am regarded by the local authorities with whom I deal, as a dangerous fanatic who encourages the parents of children with special educational needs to withdraw their children from school and keep them at home. To the autonomous educators, on the other hand, I am a stooge of the DCSF and probably an employee of some LA education department to boot!

The problem is of course, that as both sides become more and more entrenched, so they become more and more extreme in their positions. The idea that home education was being used as cover for forced marriage was a ludicrous slur which originated with the DCSF. It was they who got Graham Badman to conduct his review. This rather makes it look as though the DCSF are, at the very least, a little uneasy about the whole business of home education. The autonomous educators are not much better, with their refusal to acknowledge the need for any sort of monitoring, registration or planning for a child's education. In the middle are the average home educators who just want to get on with their children's education and are quite happy to allow the officers from their local authority into their homes and see no reason at all not to share with them the plans that they have for their children's education. It is to this average, middle of the road crowd to which I belong. I suspect that they form the majority of home educators.