Prevailing ideology; the closely interwoven connections of home educators and their organisations

Commenting here last night, somebody accused me of quoting a person on, ‘the extreme edge’ of the home educating community and then representing her ideas to be a significant strand in the world of British home education. This is a fair point, although it leads me to suppose that the person making it knows little about the situation today among home educators in this country.

When something like the Badman Report happens or attempts are made to abolish flexi-schooling, there is at once  the appearance of protests by large numbers of individuals and also various unrelated organisations and groups. We hear, for example,  that Home Education UK says something about the new proposals, as does the Centre for Personalised Education, Action on Rights for Children,  and  Education Otherwise, along with individuals like Roland Meighan,   psychologist Paula Rothermel,  barrister Ian Dowty and businesswoman  Alison Sauer. What most people do not apparently realise is that  all these groups and people are almost incestuously interconnected and share a common ideology. If I might be permitted the use of a vernacular, if somewhat vulgar expression; they all piss in the same pot. It would take too long to detail all the ways that these people, and of course Leslie Barson, are associated with each other. I’ll point out some of the major links though.

The Educational Heretics Press, a small publishing company run by Roland Meighan is one nexus in the world of British home education. They also run a charity called the Centre for Personalised Education.  The Educational Heretics Press published Jan Fortune-Wood's early books, one of which was co-authored with Terri Dowty; wife of barrister Ian Dowty. The Dowtys were both directors of a rather mysterious limited company whose registered office is their home in Leytonstone; Action on Rights for Children or ARCH.   Jan Fortune-Wood’s former husband, Mike Fortune-Wood, runs the Home Education UK website and Yahoo list HE-UK; an internet support group for home educating parents. The Centre for Personalised Education is a registered charity and for some time, they were paying Mike Fortune-Wood to undertake research and write a report on home education in this country. One of the trustees of this charity is Alison Sauer.

There is nothing sinister about any of this, except it will have been noticed that these various people often try to  pretend that they do not have anything to do with each other. For instance, when Alison Sauer was trying to persuade MP Graham Stuart to help her introduce her own guidelines on home education, many people denied that they knew anything about it. Mike Fortune-Wood was one of these who categorically stated that he had no dealings with Alison Sauer over the guidelines, even though this was a complete lie and he was reading the drafts and offering her advice all through the process.

Leslie Barson is one of these people who is known to an awful lot of the others. She is a chum of Paula Rothermel and was until two years ago a trustee of Education Otherwise.  Paula Rothermel is a mate of Mike Fortune-Woods, they are on first name terms and he allows her to  be a member of the HE-UK list. More than one member of that list has been surprised to receive an unexpected email from Dr Rothermel, who reads all that is posted on the list. I think that this is what passes for her research in the field these days! Needless to say, Mike Fortune-Wood does not tell parents that their posts are being scrutinised by a non-home educating psychologist in this way.  Ian Dowty is another friend of Mike Fortune-Wood's and they are both chums of Roland Meighan. 

I think it would be fair to say that those parents who join internet groups about home education or read almost any book on the subject, will have come into contact with the prevailing ideology of this network. Briefly, this may be stated as being opposed to compulsory education, in favour of child-centred or autonomous education and very strongly against oversight of home education by the state. To suggest that Leslie Barson somehow holds extreme views about this is absurd; this is the mainstream ideology of  all the influential groups and individuals in British home education today.

Through the looking-glass; a look at the mad world of the Fortune-Woods

I have had one or two things to say over the last few weeks about those in the British home educating scene who manufacture scare stories and spread alarming rumours. Of course, no mention of this subject would be complete without a look at the stuff that Mike Fortune-Wood and his former wife have turned out. I have been browsing on the Home Education UK website and thought that I might just  publish some of the things to be found there. It provides a fascinating glimpse into an alternative universe; a world such as few of us have seen.

Lots of home educating families feel nervous about being out in the daytime and lots of  children never go out 'just in case'. Imagine if you could be routinely be stopped in the  street by policemen checking up on whether you should be in work and suspecting that  you might be committing a crime just because you were going to a bookshop on a  weekday morning. 

Is it really true that a lot of home educating families feel nervous about being out in the daytime? Apart, obviously, from the crossover group of families who are both home educators and also vampires.  And who are these, ‘lots of children’ who never go out, ‘just in case’? Have any readers yet met a home educated child who never goes out, 'just in case'?  One hardly likes to ask, 'In case of what?'  Are we to understand that these unfortunate children never leave their homes at all? That doesn't sound like a healthy model of home education!  Presumably, if they never go out,  those children won’t be worried about the curfews which are about to be imposed on them, which will make it illegal for children  to be on the streets at all, apart from, ‘the twilight world between 3 and 9PM’ What, you haven’t heard about this? You really ought to check the Home Education UK website more often! The Fortune-Woods have the facts about the new law;


A new education act is being planned which would make it illegal for children of compulsory  school age to be in a public place during school hours without good reason. This legislation is  primarily aimed at excluded children who are perceived as being a public menace but will affect other children such as those being home educated. Home educators can expect  problems similar to those experienced with anti truancy legislation which has been a nuisance for HE families almost since the day it was introduced. It largely depends of course upon the wording of the bill and how local police, who still have  difficulty understanding the nature of home education and how it works, interpret it. At worst  it could effectively make HE children prisoners in their homes from 9 till 3. Given that children in some areas are already under curfew after around 9pm that means that children  are only allowed out in the twilight world between 3 and 9 pm. 

And then there are those idiots who have contact with their local authority…

Many parents, having made the decision to home educate, are aware that other home educators  have  had their  decision  in  some  way  “second  guessed”.  This  leads  many  home  educators to actively  avoid  any  contact with  education  authorities, fearful that LAs will  assess the parents’ decision to deregister their child against the national policy of ensuring that all children are in school. Experience suggests that parents known to authorities do come under undue pressure to return  children to  school  and this pressure  sometimes  extends to maliciously contacting social services to put further pressure on the parents to ‘cooperate’.  


And what about those parents whose children need to be taken to the Casualty Department at the local hospital? Don't they know what is likely to happen? The fools!

I have heard examples of parents discussing the wisdom of taking a child to an emergency ward when they know that a visit will be noted and passed on to the social services

Is this true? Do Casualty Departments generally pass on details of children seen there to social services? Or does this only happen with children educated at home? We need to know a little more about this, I think.

Remember the old Connexions service? You might, like me have found them to be pretty useless, but I bet you didn’t know this about them:

Not since Germany's Third Reich has the state systematically gathered information about  parents by using their children - it is truly reminiscent of "1984" …the introduction of the electronic Connexions card for young people, with its overtones of Hitler Youth reporting on their parents

It easy to laugh at lunacy such as this, but that would, I think, be a mistake. Home Education UK and its associated support group, the HE-UK Yahoo list, is one of the biggest  British home educating sites on the internet. For thousands of home educating parents, this is, heaven help them, their first contact with the wider world of home education.  Once there, many of them  get sucked into this delusional world-view and believe that these paranoiac ravings are what home education is all about.  No wonder there is so much friction between home educators and local authorities with poison like this being poured in the ears of parents.

An amusing anecdote about home education

As regular readers might know, I am the author of many books and have a good deal to do with various publishers. From time to time, I am invited, for a fee, to give my expert opinion about some manuscript or proposal that is being offered to a publisher. Expert, you ask? Expert in what, precisely? Well, archeo-mythology for one subject, social history in general and of course home education. And thereby hangs a tail…

A few days ago, I was approached by one of the largest international publishers of academic work and asked to prepare a report on a proposal which they had received. This was to be a book about home education. This is not the first time that I have been asked to do this; I am regarded by many as one of the leading experts in this country on home education. This time, the manuscript that was being offered was by somebody whose name would be instantly recognised by most home educators, an academic who has conducted some research into home edcuation. The funny thing was of course that I would have been the very last person in the entire universe that this particular person would have wanted to be offering an expert view about the proposed work.  The person in question had only his or herself to blame for this.

When you are touting round a non-fiction book to publishers, it is done by means of a proposal which you must prepare. You describe the book, say who might buy it and also compare your proposed book with other similar works on the market. This is where both the person who is trying to sell the book on which I reported this week and also the author of a previous book on home education, upon which I was also asked to comment some months ago fell down.  You see, both hopeful authors could not help being very unpleasant and uncomplimentary about my book on the subject. Both were flattering about Mike Fortune-Wood and Alan Thomas, and both were scathing about what I had written. Big mistake! This virtually guaranteed me the job of reviewing their proposals. The reason is simple.

If you  are a publisher and want somebody to point out potential shortcomings and errors in a manuscript, then there is no point at all asking chums of the author about it. In the present case, this author had mentioned various people by their Christian names; Jan, Mike, Alan and so on. When it came to my book, it was a case of Mr Webb, followed by a swift hatchet job. Obviously, the publisher came to me and asked me what I thought about the work of this academic. I am ideally placed to tell them the things that his or her friends would not.

I have to say that there was something so exquisitely funny about the idea of my writing a report on this person’s proposal, that I felt that I simply had to share it.

The converts to autonomous education

I was interested to see yesterday  one of my most vociferous critics here,  a keen autonomous educator,  mention in passing that he or she had tried to teach a child to read at the age of two. We saw the same thing with David Hough up in Cambridge; the education begins in a way that many people would call hot-housing  and then later, the parents are converted to autonomous education. This even happened with Mike Fortune-Wood, that arch apostle of the autonomous home education movement. He writes that at first he did ‘home at school’, and only  later become a convert to autonomy.  I have seen this sort of thing many times before, not only among home educators, but also with friends of ours who sent their children to school. One notable case was that of a man who began with ante-natal education, involving  a loudspeaker pressed against his wife’s belly during pregnancy. (No, honestly, this was not me!) When the kid was born, he stuck labels on everything, so that the kid was seeing words like table and door at baby eye level. What is curious is that he gave all this up after six months and became strongly opposed to this sort of game.

     I have remarked many times before that there is something a little fanatical and cult-like about some of the more enthusiastic autonomous types. It seems to be less a pedagogy and more a philosophy of life; almost a religion. Now as I am sure that readers know, converts are the very devil for being keen as mustard about their new faith. We see this with Catholics and I have also encountered it with those who convert to Islam and Judaism. Often, these characters are ten times more strict about their faith than those who were born into it. I am wondering if something of the sort might happen with those who are, as it were, converts to autonomous education? Anybody reading what Jan Fortune-Wood has to say about the education of children would surely think that her faith in autonomous education was bred in the bone, but it is nothing of the sort. A few years ago, she too was dead keen on ‘school at home’. She had an epiphany and was converted to the cause of autonomy; of which she is now a champion.

     All this would make sense really. One  notices that those who send their children to school and then change to home education are frequently more fanatical about the business than people like me who have been involved for decades. There definitely seems to be a different mindset among those who deregister their children, which sets them apart from those who did not send their children in the first place. This too has the feeling of a conversion.

     I am not being dogmatic about this, it is just something which I have noticed over the years. Do readers know of any other well known autonomous educators who began by doing ‘school at home’?

Pro-home education or anti-school?

I have lately been reading an interesting book which denounces school. It is called School is Dead and was written by an associate of Ivan Illich's called Everett Reimer. It is not a new book; it was published in 1971. The thesis is that schools are little more than tools of capitalist society and that they are useless for education.

Most of the ideologues of home education, those who provide the theoretical underpinning for the practice, are American. I am thinking of Gatto and Holt, the Moores and so on. Their influence though has heavily permeated the British home educating scene and this is a shame. I say this because the core idea expounded by these people is essentially that schools are bad. This negative idea, that 'Schools are bad' seems to have a lot more strength for many home educating parents in this country than does the positive one of 'Home education is good'. In other words, one often gets more of a sense of home educators in this country being anti-school than one does of their being pro-home education.

Now I dare say that a lot of this is caused by the fact that many home educating parents have taken their children out of school following a series of bad experiences; bullying, failure to meet some special educational need and so on. This sort of thing is bound to give one a jaded view of schools. I don't think though that this can be the whole explanation to the trend which one sees of a lot of parents who are not just anti-school, but anti-traditional education in general. Not only do they reject school, they also reject formal qualifications and anything which smacks at all of teaching. This attitude manifests itself in the delight which some home educating parents openly express when a paedophile ring is unmasked at a nursery, or a child dies of an asthma attack because the teacher didn't give him his inhaler at once. In other words, they are pleased about these events because it all goes to show what dreadful places schools are and how wise they have been to take their children from them.

Now I may be wrong, and I am happy to be corrected here, but I fancy that those who do not send their children to school in the first place for ideological reasons are less apt to this wholesale condemnation of school. This would be logical really. if your child has never come home in tears after being bullied by another child or humiliated by a teacher, I suppose you might be able to view school through rose tinted lenses and kid yourself that it's not that bad really. I am certainly not in the least opposed to the institution of school as such. I am aware that it does not suit everybody, which is why I am glad that parents have the option in this country to educate their own children if they wish to do so. I take it as given that children in general need to be educated in reading and writing and taught various things. Schools are a convenient and cost effective way of achieving that end. And it has to be said, most children seem to like school well enough. It does not seem to do them any harm and in most cases actually teaches them a good deal.

I think it a pity that we are compelled to rely upon Americans for our theories of home education. I have of course read the books of people like Jan Fortune-Wood, but they lack the clarity and intellectual strength of John Holt or Raymond and Dorothy Moore's writing. Alan Thomas is better, but still does not quite hit the spot. It would be good to see a British John Holt emerge. I have an idea that the anti-school, anti-examination, anti-teaching and anti-many other aspects of formal education view which is so common among home educators in this country is not doing anybody any favours with the establishment. Most civil servants and MPs, as well as local authority officers, learn about the rationale behind British home education from the internet. If they constantly see things which suggest that parents are motivated by dislike of schools and determination not to teach or enter children for GCSEs, it is liable to alarm them. Actually, it alarms me and you could hardly hope to find a more dedicated home educator than me! When MPs and civil servants become alarmed, their instinctive reaction is to restrict or end some activity, so this could have practical consequences.

An autonomous educational philosophy

A couple of people commenting here have suggested that if I really wished to understand autonomous education, I should study the document below:

http://www.home-education.org.uk/ac/article-ae.htm

Actually of course, this is already horribly familiar to me in various forms. Most local authority officers involved with home education have several versions of this document in their files. Parents who wish to avoid visits frequently download and then cannibalise it in order to provide 'evidence' of the education which they are supposedly providing. It was written by Jan Fortune-Wood who by some accounts actually invented the very expression 'autonomous education'. This being so, it is probably a safe bet that this represents the mainstream thinking on this topic. Let's have a look and see what we can say about it.

The first thing to strike one about this text is that it is more than a little incoherent. It is hard to say whether the author intends to prescribe a course of action or describe how children actually learn. In other words, is she using the word 'theory' to set out the framework for a practice or is she meaning 'theory' in the scientific meaning of the word as being the confirmation of an hypothesis which has been made by many detailed observations or experiments? It would take too long to go through the whole thing, practically every sentence cries out for refutation, and so I shall today limit myself to one or two of the more obvious absurdities which strike the eye immediately. Tomorrow I shall talk about the wider theory of education upon which this is based, namely constructivism.

Almost at once, we run into difficulties. A quotation by Karl Popper is given, which says:

We do not discover new facts or new effects by copying them

There follows a list of other ways that we do not discover new facts or new effects, but let us look at this first part of the sentence. It is demonstrably untrue to state so definitely that we do not discover new facts by copying them. To be sure, this is not the only way that we discover new facts, but it is without doubt one of them. From our birth we also discover new effects by copying them. A baby will copy what it sees others doing. For instance we might hide our eyes with our hands, thus shutting the light out. A baby copies this and so discovers a new effect. Again, this is not the only method of discovering a new effect, but it is certainly one of them. After throwing in a quotation by Gombrich, although I'm not sure why his ideas are relevant here, the author says blithely:

On such a theory, extrinsic motivation is ruled out as a totally ineffective strategy for learning

This is staggering. It does not in the least follow on from the previous sentences and is really little more than a bald statement of what the writer apparently believes to be true. Nothing has been adduced to support the assertion; it is simply presented as a given! What she is actually saying is, 'I think that extrinsic motivation is an ineffective strategy and so did Popper'. We are not told how or why such a strategy has been ruled out. There follow five points which are it seems the theoretical basis for Ms Fortune-Wood's educational philosophy. Number four begins:

The growth of knowledge is a creative and non-mechanical process within the mind of the learner

Is it? Well it is sometimes, but certainly not always. Sometimes the growth of knowledge is a mechanical process which is anything but creative. Or does the author mean that this is how she thinks the growth of knowledge should be? We face the same problem we saw earlier; it is far from clear whether the writer is describing how she thinks things are or how she would like them to be. It is when we look at the section headed Mode of Learning, that we reach the crux of the matter. The mode of learning described is based upon the constructivist theory of learning. This is pretty much the standard theory of education in this country these days, having edged out behaviourism. I shall go into more detail tomorrow, but this theory is one of the reasons why I did not send my daughter to school. For now it is enough to examine this statement:

In this theory emphasis is placed on the learner and it is the learner who interacts with problems to construct his/her own solutions and ideas.

At once, most readers will spot the problem. If the learner constructs his own solutions and ideas, these may be quite wrong. For example the learner might construct his own solution to the puzzling movement of the sun across the sky and decide that the sun is moving round the earth. This is wrong and if he says nothing to anybody about it, he will go to the grave with this wrong idea. Or again, the learner might meet very few black people. If he only meets two in his childhood and they are both stupid and lazy, then the learner might well form an hypothesis that black people are stupid and lazy. He may not mention this false hypothesis to anybody; just hold it within him. This leads to racial prejudice and it is a very bad thing. One of the ways to deal with this problem is by actually teaching children about other cultures and setting out deliberately to show them that black people are very similar to white people. If we simply allow them to form their own hypotheses about this subject, they may do so without telling us and thus not giving us the opportunity to point out that their ideas are mistaken. This is the problem with the idea of the learner constructing his own solutions and ideas; many of them will be wrong. We shall look in more detail at this problem tomorrow.

Under the heading of Basic Skills, we find this gem:

It is a core assumption of autonomous education that children will acquire the skills they need to take advantage of their environment and pursue their own aspirations.

Yes, it is an assumption and as such completely worthless. If I were to write an educational philosophy and state categorically:

It is a core assumption that children are much better off being at school than they are at home

I would be jeered at and quite rightly. A core assumption indeed! I wonder if the author thought that by describing this assumption as a 'core' assumption that this would somehow make it more respectable than any old assumption? It does not; it is still shocking intellectual laziness.

The fact that so many parents read this nonsense and apparently approve of it so heartily, is worrying in the extreme. They read it, swallow it whole and then regurgitate it to their own local authorities. Do none of them realise what drivel this is? No wonder that some local authority officers get irritated by receiving various bastardised versions of this thing. Horrifying to think that for thousands of children across the country, this mush represents the ideology behind their education!