How autonomous home education was outlawed in this country over thirty years ago

One of the things which never ceases to amaze me is the enthusiasm shown by autonomous home educators in this country for the case of precedent set by Harrison and Harrison V Stevenson in the early 1980s. These idiots talk about this case as though it established their  right to educate their children autonomously, whereas in fact it had the effect of making the practice unlawful. To see why this should have been, we need to look at what was said during the judgement. It will be recalled that a woman called Iris Harrison was trying to assert her right not to teach her own children and the case hinged around the question of what might constitute a 'suitable education'. Children in this country over the age of five, must of course be provided with a suitable, efficient and full-time education, either at school or otherwise.

The judge at Worcester said, apropos of what might be meant by a 'suitable' education:

In our judgement 'education' demands at least an element of supervision; merely to allow a child to follow its own devices in the hope that it will acquire knowledge by imitation, experiment or experience in its own way and in its own good time is neither systematic nor instructive.

The judge went on to say that such a course, 'would not be education'. He then ruled specifically that a child not receiving systematic instruction in mathematics and English, if it were capable of learning them, could not be said to be receiving a 'suitable education'.

And there you have the matter in a nutshell. According to this key piece of precedent, any home educating parent who is not actually teaching or instructing his or her child in mathematics, is not providing a suitable education in the legal sense. Any parent leaving her child to acquire knowledge in her own way and in her own time is not causing that child to receive  a suitable education either.

The next time any home educators feel like quoting Harrison and Harrison V Stevenson, I do hope that they will realise that autonomous education was actually condemned by the judge in the case and that  home educating  parents who don't teach their children mathematics and English systematically, were told in no uncertain terms that they are breaking the law by failing to provide their children with a 'suitable' education.

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’?

The autonomous acquisition of literacy in home educated children

One of the most commonly held beliefs among  certain  British home educators  is that it is unnecessary to teach children to read; that they will somehow just ‘pick it up’ naturally, just like walking and talking. I don’t claim that this is impossible, but I can certainly say that in every such case that I have been able to investigate, there is more to the business than at first meets the eye. I want today to look at a classic example of this sort of thing. 

     Here is an item from a local newspaper in Cambridgeshire;

http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/Cambridge/Are-home-educated-children-better-off.htm

Now let us examine what is said here about the way that this child  supposedly learned to read. This is, according to the parents, an autonomous education.  We are told  that:

‘Kit was not forced to read, but instead started to pick it up when he realised it would be useful for him to learn about other things.’

We also read that;

‘he didn't want to start learning to read until he was six, and has rejected the system of phonics which is used in many schools.’


This is  fairly typical of the  kind of claims made by autonomous home educators about the learning of reading. According to this account, at the age of six this boy started to pick up reading because he realised that it would be useful. He was not forced to learn and had no dealings with phonics; that is to say learning the sounds of individual letters.

Really, if it is this easy, you wonder that anybody bothers teaching children to read at all! Why not just let them pick it up naturally like this, in their own time?  All that work in schools on teaching phonics to five and six year-olds and here is a kid who begins to read at the same age as most schoolchildren,  without any fuss; he just learns  by himself when he is ready. A  classic case of the autonomous acquisition of literacy. Except of course, it is all complete nonsense. I happen to know this for a fact. Here is what the child’s mother wrote six years before that newspaper report:

22 December 2003
…has been having a wonderful time of late learning things like numbers and letters. He was transfixed by the Sesame Street DVDs on the subjects, but was restless when I tried to do some alphabet with him today. I wrote letters in his sketchbook and he furiously scribbled them out. We came into the computer room and fired up nickjr.co.uk, which has some lovely games for 2 year olds, in case you never knew. When he knew the very same set of letters in the very same order as Mummy, suddenly it started clicking. Mummy was NOT making this up to be cruel. This is some secret code he needs to learn. As in he thinks he needs to learn it now, not just Mummy thinks he needs to learn it. He's not expert at mouse moving yet, and clicks tend to happen not at all or 30 in a row, but he likes to point to the screen and make choices and have me click on them for him. Today's winners seem to be the letter K and the letter Z. He's always been a big fan of S. 

That entry was made when the child was two years and three months of age and as we can see, one of the parents has already begun teaching her son to read. The method that she is using is of course phonics; teaching her son the letters of the alphabet and the sounds that they make. A month later, in January 2004, when the boy was two years and four months, his mother was using flashcards of letters and numbers to teach him. A month after that, her efforts began to pay off, because by February 3rd 2004, the child could recognise every single letter of the alphabet and the associated sounds. Not bad for a boy who is still only two years and five months old.

Now there is nothing at all wrong with any of this; I did exactly the same with my own daughter. It is called teaching a child to read and, just like me, this parent thought that the earlier that you undertake the process, the better. Let us now look at that newspaper report again;

‘he didn't want to start learning to read until he was six…started to pick it up when he realised it would be useful for him to learn about other things’

At best, this is exceedingly misleading; at worst, a complete falsehood. He was being  taught to read  systematically four years before he was six, by phonics; the same method used in schools. Anybody think that this might have some bearing on his acquisition of literacy?

Tomorrow, we shall be thinking a little   about this sort of deception. What motivates home educating parents to teach children to read and then pretend that their children have learned to read without any structured teaching? It is common enough and I know of many  such cases. We shall look at why people do this and also consider the ill effects that accounts of such supposedly autonomous learning can have  upon gullible parents who are persuaded that if their children are left to their own devices, then they too will somehow just ‘pick up’ the ability to read.

The problem with the internet for home educated children

I said yesterday that research on the internet posed special problems for some home educated children. Of course, it is not only home educated children who get a lot of their information from the internet and to illustrate the problem clearly, we shall look first at something which happened recently at a secondary school. The pupils had been told to research on the internet about America’s first inhabitants. One girl turned up at the next lesson with a lot of impressive looking stuff from a university website. She had discovered that the ancestors of the native Americans were in fact Jews who arrived in the country about 500 BC. She had also found a link to an academic article about supposed DNA evidence which backed up this mad idea. Here is one of the sources of her knowledge:

http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/review/?vol=18&num=1&id=601&cat_id=488

     Actually, it all sounds very plausible and if it were not for the fact that I know Mormonism to be raving mad, I might almost be persuaded myself by all this fancy, scientific language!

     Now fortunately, the teacher was able to put her right about this and explain that Brigham Young University was not the best place to go to for information on this topic. For him to do this though, he needed to have a good deal of prior knowledge about the subject. He needed to know about the Clovis People, the land bridge over the Bering Strait and also a bit about the beliefs of Mormonism. In other words, the teacher was able to guide the child to a correct understanding of the implausibility of what she had found during her research; not withstanding the fact that she had been getting the information from a university. Left to herself, the girl had gone hopelessly astray. Of course, she should ideally have cross-checked what she had found at Brigham Young with various other sources and perhaps visited the library as well to look at a few books. Teenagers aren’t always like that though and many take the first thing they read as being true; as long as it is from a university and contains many long words.

     Consider the case of a home educated child whose parents might not know  about the origin of humans in the Americas or anything about Mormonism. If their child announced that she had learned that the aboriginal inhabitants of America were from the Middle East, they might not have the knowledge to set her straight. It is entirely possible that the child could stumble across this nonsense and then go off believing it to be true. Of course, if the child were to be told that this was not the true history of America and urged to look more deeply into the subject, she might be able to get the matter a little clearer. But why would she do so if she believed the first site that she came across?  In other words, just roaming around the internet and picking up information in this way without the guidance of a knowledgeable adult is not really the best way to learn things. This is of course because the internet contains an awful lot of misleading and downright untruthful information. 

     There is a strand in modern British home education which holds that the internet is the ideal place for  children to acquire information. Indeed, some believe that a child can more or less educate herself without any guidance, provided that she is given unlimited access to the internet. This is a mistaken view.  Without a teacher and guide to correct errors and set the child along the right path to knowledge, there are too many pitfalls to make this a suitable mode of education. Certainly, the child might bring some of the idiotic things she learns on the internet to her parents, thus giving them a chance to put her right. But there are still likely to be many things which remain uncorrected; urban myths, old wives’ tales and downright fabrications.  This is why most educators feel the need for a skeleton framework of knowledge to ensure that the child acquires the basics in a sound way. Once this is in place and suitable research techniques have been taught, the child will be less at  hazard from falling into beliefs such as that native Americans are really the descendants of the Children of Israel!

A question about autonomous education

I was talking the other day to a local authority officer who works with children who are not attending school. She asked me a question which left me a little foxed, so I thought that I would ask readers here to offer their views. As most home educators probably know, the Department for Education, in addition to closing down the practice of flexi-schooling, are targeting the children of Gypsies, Travellers and Roma; with a view to ensuring that they spend more time in school. There is a bit about this here:

http://media.education.gov.uk/assets/files/pdf/c/traveller%20cons%20doc%20dec12.pdf


Now as we know, some home educating parents feel strongly that a child can receive a perfectly good education just from being part of a family and participating in  ordinary, everyday activities. We looked recently at Iris Harrison and her children. This was the lifestyle that they pursued; really just doing what they felt like doing and so educating themselves. Some days playing the violin; on others tinkering with an old car and so on. Some autonomous educators believe that this is the best type of education, where a child is free to choose his or her own curriculum and learn only about those things in which there is an intrinsic interest.

     The question I was asked was this. Would this sort of education be regarded by many home educating parents in this country as being a suitable one for members of minority cultures such as the GTR community? Would it be acceptable just to leave it to these children and their parents to worry, or not, themselves about what might constitute a suitable, full-time education?

     There was a supplementary question, depending upon the answer to this first point, but we might return to this later. 

Ideology v real children

Earlier in the week, readers will have noticed that we were reaching broad agreement on a number of points concerning home education. Of course, this pleasant state of affairs  could hardly be expected to continue indefinitely and in the last day or two, we seem  once again to have descended into acrimony and name-calling. Most of this has come from one or two individuals, people whom we might perhaps not inaptly describe as hardline autonomous educators.

Now I believe that most home educators, whether structured or autonomous, use or used a mixture of educational styles; some direct teaching, some self-directed learning. This was certainly how I worked.  The proportions might vary, but there tends I think to be in general a pragmatic approach, with different techniques being used as and when they prove effective. For some parents though, their educational methods  are  dictated more by ideological than empirical considerations. These are people, often disciples of various writers or philosophers, who pursue one pedagogy remorselessly because that is what they believe must work uniquely, according to Karl Popper or Ayn Rand. I have an idea that if such individuals spent a little more time with real children and a little less reading about education and childhood, then they might change their views. I have never been very keen on reading what Piaget, for example, said about children and their development; preferring to work directly with children. The problem is that if you read too much about the subject, you start to expect the children to fit in with your ideology and when they don’t behave as they are supposed to, it becomes irritating. We have seen this over the last few days.

Let us examine a couple of statements made here in recent days about children and their learning. These statements shed light upon the thought processes of some of those whom I mentioned above; the ones who take their knowledge of children from books, rather than real life. Here is one such statement;



'Nobody can teach anything to anyone who is not intrinsically motivated to learn it'


Here is another statement, confidently made. I had talked of teaching children the value of Pi by getting them to chant the figures out loud. Somebody then said of this method of teaching;



‘Research indicates that children retain only about 5%-10% of what they learn when "taught" this way’


Observe the quotation marks around the word ‘taught’. This person believes, on purely ideological grounds, that children cannot be taught. They can only learn what they wish to learn. This point was emphasised by somebody when I talked light-heartedly about being compelled to learn under penalty of sanctions, the order of the royal houses of England. The assertion was made that it would have been impossible to teach me this sequence; I secretly wanted to know about the Plantagenet, Tudor and Hanoverian dynasties and the teaching at school was irrelevant. There's an unexpected insight into my early life and no mistake! I just hope that no other readers are entertaining the delusion that they were compelled at school to learn a lot of foolishness which would never be of any practical use to them. You fools! You only learned about the principle exports of Australia because you wanted to! The teachers and school had nothing to do with the case.

I wish to consider one of the first things that children in this country learn in the academic line; that is to say the sequence of letters in the English Alphabet. According to the people whom I quote above, it is all but impossible to teach children to recite the Alphabet. One person asserts that it is impossible to teach anything which a person is not intrinsically motivated to learn and the other thinks that typically only 5% to 10% of material taught by chanting in a rhythmic and sing-song fashion is retained. Looking  at the first of these objections to the idea of children being taught to say the Alphabet, we observe at once that there can be no possible intrinsic motivation for wanting to  know the sequence of letters in the Alphabet at the age of four or five. The only  reason anybody would wish to know the letter order would be so that an index might be consulted. It will be a little while before most four and five year olds will be using indices and so they have no conceivable intrinsic motivation for learning the Alphabet.

The other person to comment states that only 5% to 10% of material taught by means of rote learning and chanting will be retained. This is a less extreme position than the first writer, but still means that it will not be possible to teach the Alphabet to the average child. They will only be able to learn perhaps the first two or three letters of the Alphabet by systematic teaching; say as far as ‘B’ or ‘C’. Teaching children  the whole thing would mean expecting them to retain  not just 5% to 10% of the material, but 100%. This is clearly unrealistic. The conclusion is plain; at least according to the two people who made the claims which we examined above. Teaching the Alphabet to children is impossible.

Here we see the perfect example of where too much ideology may lead us when looking at children and their learning. The people who made the statements above must surely never have had any dealings with real children. Their ideas about how children’s minds work have been taken from books or research papers, rather than by looking at and interacting with the genuine article!

I might mention,  for the benefit of  those who really doubt that teaching the Alphabet is possible, that 80% of five year-olds  this country are able to recite the Alphabet. The rest learn it in the following year. The exceptions are usually those with sequencing problems, dyslexia and other learning difficulties. The child who is unable to learn the Alphabet beyond the letter ‘C’, is actually very rare.

Incidentally, I am not advocating the teaching of children to recite the Alphabet at three. I regard it as a pretty pointless exercise. But believing, as I do, that we should not do it is a quite different thing from asserting on purely ideological grounds that the thing cannot be done.

The uses of jargon

Yesterday, we saw a regrettable outbreak of jargon being used in the comments on this blog. I have not the time to go deeply into the reasons why people use jargon. One common reason is to obscure the meaning of essentially simple ideas and so muddle up those who wish to debate them. Often, as a by-product, those listening to a discussion feel a little confused and overawed; thinking perhaps that because they cannot fully follow what is being said, it must all be very clever and above their heads.

Two assertions were made in the comments to yesterday’s post. One was an obvious, but misleading statement of fact; the other a wholly unwarranted conclusion which was presented as leading logically from the first premise. Needless to say, this initial premise was not stated plainly, but supported by  expressions such as;



‘intrinsically motivated process of identifying one’s impressions in conceptual terms, of integrating every event and every observation into a conceptual context,’



‘expanding one’s knowledge into an ever-growing sum’



‘no way of either knowing or controlling what knowledge is integrated nor how it is integrated’



‘driven by someone else's desire to create my inner map of a particular shape.’


What was being said, may be put in far clearer terms than this. What it boiled down to was that when teaching children, we cannot be absolutely sure which parts of the material being taught will be learned and subsequently remembered.

Now this is of course true. The conclusion which was reached though was an astonishing non sequitur. We cannot be sure which parts of what we teach children will be learned and remembered, therefore we should not teach children anything. I have seldom seen such an weak argument in all my life! Of course an equally valid conclusion would have been; we cannot be sure which parts of what we teach children will be learned and remembered, therefore we will take greater care with our teaching methods and try to modify them so that they are more effective. No wonder it had to be disguised with a lot of fancy language, so that that it looked impressive! In any case of course, even the first statement is irrelevant. We cannot, it is true, be 100% certain that the material we set before children will be absorbed, but we can vastly increase the chances of this happening. Let us conduct a little thought experiment. My aim is to cause thirty children to absorb thoroughly the approximate value of Pi. I also wish to ensure that they understand the concept and do not forget it.

If I announce in a quavering and reedy voice, half way through a maths lesson, that Pi is roughly 3.14; then I doubt many children will learn the fact. Suppose though that I set up a large picture, showing how Pi is derived from the ratio of the radius of a circle to its circumference? If I show this visual aid, while talking clearly about Pi and its significance, more of the children might pay attention and remember the lesson. What if I got the whole class to chant ‘Pi equals three point one four’ for half an hour? Does anybody doubt that the information would have a better chance of being retained? Or here’s an even better idea! Suppose that the pupils knew that those who recalled the figure for Pi and could explain to the teacher about how it was calculated, would be rewarded at the end of term with £1000 each? Does anybody doubt that we could make it more likely that this piece of knowledge would be absorbed by the children? What if they knew that their mothers and fathers would be shot if their children failed to learn about Pi? Would this help it stick in their minds better?

I am not of course advocating seriously any of the above ideas. Rather, I am pointing out that while it is impossible to be completely sure of getting a child to learn some information, the process of fixing it in the mind is not, as was suggested here yesterday, random. There are ways of making it more likely that what is taught to children will stay with them; sometimes forever. We only need to examine our own memories to see that this is so. I have information which was presented to me as a child, fifty years or so ago, which I have been unable to forget. It has truly become, to use the jargon, 'part of my inner map'! I never wanted or needed to know that the Plantagenets came before the Tudors, but under the threat of the cane; I managed to do so. I am sure we all have similar knowledge.

The real question is not an educational one, but an ethical consideration. It is not, ‘Can we teach children effectively, so that they retain much of what they are taught?’ It is really, ‘Should we do this?’ Is this better for their development and future lives than not teaching them?

On bodies of knowledge

A few days ago, somebody commenting here was getting ticked off with me because I would not readily respond to her hectoring tone. Specifically, she wished me to agree that I believed that there existed a body of knowledge which I had to transmit to my daughter and that this was part of what I meant by ‘education’. I did not answer her then for two reasons. First, because it is never wise to give in to bullying tactics of that sort; it only encourages such behaviour in the future. Secondly of course, the very question was meaningless, because all parents believe that they are in possession of a body of knowledge which they should pass on to their children. Whether they formalise their belief in words, makes no difference at all. They still act as though this was so.

Let us see what I mean by this. I used conversation with my young daughter to pass on knowledge and information that I felt she would find interesting or useful. For example, a walk in the country would give me the opportunity to teach her about photosynthesis, the food web and many other concepts with which I felt she should be familiar. I was talking last year to an extreme autonomous educator who found this quite at variance with her own views. She believed that it was unwise to direct conversation in this way, but that it should be allowed to develop according to the child’s interests and her own observations of what interested her. She told me that what I was doing was really teaching, which was quite true; I make no secret of it. The sequel, which came a few weeks later, was revealing.

The mother to whom I had been talking was, unsurprisingly, a keen organic gardener. She believed passionately in recycling and was also a fanatical composter. It turned out that she felt it a moral imperative to explain to her children why as much as possible should be recycled and to emphasise to them the finite nature of the Earth’s resources. So far, so good; many readers will no doubt agree. She never missed an opportunity to show her children why it made sense to recycle things and had recently explained to the nine year-old why it made more sense to put potato peelings on the compost heap, rather than throw them in the rubbish bin as many children might be tempted to do. Brownie point to mum for raising responsible and eco-aware children!

In the course of her explanations, the mother ended up telling the child, without being asked to do so, how the different nutrients such as nitrogen would then pass from the potato peeling to the soil and then later be used by other living things. It was at this point that I realised that here was a mother who had, albeit very gently, denounced me for using a walk in the wood as a chance for a biology lesson, who had herself been teaching her children, unasked, about the nitrogen cycle. There was not the least difference between my explaining photosynthesis on a family walk and her explaining the nitrogen cycle as an after dinner activity. In each case, we both felt that it would be interesting and useful for our children to learn about some aspect of the IGCSE biology curriculum and, without waiting for our children to ask or show any interest in the subject, we launched into lectures.

All parents do this sort of thing all the time. This is because all parents have a body of knowledge that they think should be shared with their children. If a child notices a bird hovering overhead, most parents, if they know what the bird is, will tell the child, ‘It’s a kestrel.’ They will do this, even if the child has not asked what sort of bird it is. They will similarly tell their children unasked a million other things during a walk in a forest. They might explain the difference between an oak tree and a hornbeam; they might point to a stag beetle and tell the child that it is the biggest English insect; they could tell the child how strange it is to think that the clouds in the sky are nothing but water vapour. In every case, the parent is passing on a body of knowledge to which she has access and her child does not. It is precisely the same as my explaining the formula for photosynthesis to my own ten year-old daughter; it is direct teaching.

All parents teach their children, often completely unasked, those things which the parents think would be nice for their children to know. They teach them. More often than not, this is done by means of purposive conversation, which is a very effective way of imparting knowledge to children. To pretend that just because they are not using blackboards and making the children sit down for a lesson, this makes the activity any less of a teaching session is mad. This teaching takes place whether the parent is a dedicated autonomous educator or a highly structured educator.

To return to and answer the person who was badgering me about this, the day before yesterday, the reason that I did not answer the question, was that the question itself was based upon a false premise. This premise was that some parents attempt to transmit to their children an objective body of knowledge and that others allow their children to discover the wonders of the world for themselves. There are no separate categories of this sort; all parents teach their children from a body of knowledge which they, the parents, wish to impart to their offspring.

Doublethink

I find debating with some home educators quite chilling, due to their ability to hold two diametrically opposed views simultaneously; without apparently being aware of what they are doing. It reminds me of the term ’doublethink’ from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. There is something a little alarming about the business.


Yesterday, we enjoyed one of those rare moments here when everybody was in agreement. Both I and those commenting accepted that Einstein’s achievements and academic success owed more to his own character and the support which he was given at home, than it did to the teaching which he received at school. As I have said before, this is usually the case. The level of support and amount of resources found in the home are of far greater importance in the academic outcome for children at the age of sixteen than the school which has been attended. Also significant is the character of the child; in Einstein’s case, he had enormous intellectual curiosity which was nurtured and encouraged by his family and their friends. The schooling to which he was subjected played a lesser role in his subsequent achievements.

So far, we still all agree, I suppose. Let us look back a few days though, when I was talking of another schoolboy; one who had achieved very much less than Albert Einstein. In fact this child was barely literate and lacked any intellectual curiosity that could be discerned. Little chance of this boy growing up to revolutionise our understanding of the universe!

In the case of the boy who was not showing academic promise and intellectual achievement, a completely different set of rules were applied. In his case, it was not thought for a moment that his situation had anything at all to do with his own character, his family background or anything else. No, this was all the responsibility of the school and those running it;  the local authority. Those commenting were quick to lay complete responsibility for his development and the academic level at which he found himself, at the door of the school; who had ’failed’ him. We must not ’blame’ the parents, but the school.

All this is very odd! If a schoolchild does really well in his studies, then it is due to his family and home background; the school is of minor importance. If a schoolchild does really badly at his studies, then it is not due to his family and home background; the school is of paramount importance.

I am honestly puzzled by this and invite readers to help us square this particular circle. In short, are the parents and home background of crucial significance in a schoolchild’s academic and intellectual achievements or are they not?

Using Einstein's name

Almost sixty years after his death, Einstein’s name is still a very potent one. Advocates of this or that belief still feel that it is in some way a trump card to claim that Einstein supported their views. The implication is clear; if the world’s greatest brainbox agreed with me, who are you to argue? We see both theists and atheists using the great man’s name to support their positions on religion and Einstein is even quoted as a secret believer in such strange ideas as telepathy and ESP. Forty years ago, when Velikosky’s mad book Worlds in Collision enjoyed a vogue among the less well intellectually endowed, much was made by the publisher of the fact that when he died, Einstein had a copy of this book on his death; as though that in some way endorsed Velikovsky’s theories. Einstein’s name is even used to sell things. I am sure that some readers have come across the Baby Einstein products, designed for those who wish to accelerate their baby’s development.


It was inevitable that home educators would latch on to this trend and try and pretend that Einstein was one of their own! You will regularly see him in lists of famous people who were home educated and a company in America even sells a tee-shirt printed with the slogan, ‘Einstein was home schooled’. He wasn’t of course, but a few days ago we saw people here trying to show that Einstein was in fact an autonomous learner. This is true as far as it goes. Many bright children at school have always  pursued  interests outside the academic curriculum and this is still the case today. Those commenting though went a little further than this and suggested that Einstein learned most of his mathematics and physics at home by himself and that he was somehow a supporter of home education and an opponent of schools. This is less certain.

What we must bear in mind when considering Einstein’s views on schools is that he attended school in Germany during the 1880s and 1890s. This was not a good time for a restless and brilliant intellect to be in one of that country’s schools. The educational system was hugely restrictive and independent thought was discouraged. Einstein’s dislike of formal schooling was rooted deeper than that though. At the age of five he, a Jew, was sent to a Catholic primary school. There was a great deal of anti-Semitism about at that time in Germany and the child experienced the full brunt of it. During a lesson about Jesus’ life, for instance, the teacher handed round six inch long nails and asked the children to consider what it would be like to have these hammered through their ankles and wrists. He then told them that the Jews had caused this to be done to Jesus; whereupon all eyes in the class turned to the little Jewish boy. It is hardly to be wondered at that Einstein grew up with a bad feeling about school!

Like all children, Einstein’s home background played a great part in his later academic success. He was given a book on calculus at the age of twelve and his family used to talk a lot about various topics. There can be little doubt that this conversation served to stimulate the child and awaken his interest in mathematics and physics. Whether this would have been sufficient education in itself, without the teaching he received at school, is doubtful.

I was accused on the thread where this was being discussed of ignoring the points which were made, but this was only because I am not sure really what the points were. Einstein went to school and learned about mathematics and physics. He hated school and felt that his family stimulated his interest in these subjects more than the school did. This was without doubt true. It is still true today. The family attitude to education and learning is of far greater importance than the school attended. It is so and always has been.

I saw nothing controversial in what was said about Einstein and so did not feel the need to dispute any of it. If anybody feels that Einstein’s life, education or later opinions about the schooling which he received has anything useful to tell us about home education, then I would be pleased to hear it.

Are autonomous home educators more prone to anger than other people?

I am constantly amazed at the ferocious anger which seems to bubble away under the surface of some autonomous home educators. It is of a type and degree that one seldom sees in the more structured educators and one has the impression that these are people who are probably simmering away all the time; ready to erupt in a second at some fancied slight or criticism. Of course, one also encounters such people among those who send their children to school, but there they are definitely a tiny minority. Among autonomous home educators, this kind of parent appears to be alarmingly common!


Now I am aware that I can be an irritating person, but the responses to what I say here go beyond all reason. Any normal person stumbling across a blog whose author seems to be an annoying fool, will simply move on and find another, more congenial place, to hang out in cyberspace. Not so the autonomous educators! They pop up here regularly and are always furious. I have remarked before on how curious this is. I am not after all attacking them personally. Indeed, because they are too cowardly in general to sign their names to the rude messages which they leave here, I could hardly do so, even if I wanted. No, they are angry because I express scepticism and ask questions about an educational theory which they favour. This is truly extraordinary.

As a home educator, I took it for granted that many people, especially those who had sent their children to school, would disapprove of my choice. So it proved, with a lot of parents making ill-informed comments about the matter. This never made me angry; why on earth would it? This was my choice and there are bound to be people who have made different choices about education to that which I made. With quite a few autonomous types though, even asking questions is enough to drive them to fury!

On the thread ‘No wonder local authorities are alarmed about home education!’, I was having a little light-hearted discussion yesterday about Albert Einstein and the extent to which his schooling contributed towards his success as a physicist. You would have thought that this was a completely neutral topic about nobody would be likely to grow cross.  You would have thought this, until I tell you that a number of autonomous educators were involved in the debate! I asked a few questions, always a mistake with those people, and even made one or two humorous observations. I recommend readers to have a look at the increasingly heated comments which this provoked. It ended with two people commenting, using the expressions;



'shows himself up to be the arrogant ignoramus that he is.'

' truly repressed, narrow minded & pompously ignorant twonk '


Now all this is very unfortunate. There are serious points to be made here; about the extent to which somebody who attends school from the age of five can be said to be an autonomous learner, how much  formal schooling contributed to Einstein’s education and various other points. It is also worth talking about the way in which Einstein is sometimes invoked as an authority on topics other than physics and his name used to support fringe beliefs. Readers with long memories might recall this being done both with Immanuel Velikovsky’s theories and also the idea of biorhythms. Any attempt to talk reasonably about the topic though, ends in vitriolic rudeness.

I wonder if this says anything useful about the sort of person who chooses autonomous education? Are they more commonly angry individuals than ordinary people? Is it because they are more likely to be opposed to schools and teachers? Or do they perhaps feel sensitive and unsure about their chosen educational technique and believe that when somebody asks questions, then the best defence is attack? If the incident yesterday were a one-off, it would be one thing, but it is not. Nor is the level of anger which we regularly see here, restricted to me. It is directed against all who question this ideology. I have an idea that this is more a psychological or sociological problem than one relating to education per se and I will be turning the matter over in my mind when I have a chance and letting readers know what I conclude.

No wonder local authorities are alarmed about home education!

I have several times been accused in recent days of asking questions to which I already knew the answers. I have to say that this is quite absurd. Not  only did I not have a ready-made answer up my sleeve, I could not in a million years have guessed how other people would respond to the case which I cited forty eight hours ago. I described a child who was not being educated and yet whose mother claimed that he was.  I fully expected readers to agree that this was something of a problem and to discuss ways that genuine home educators could be distinguished from situations where no education is being provided. This is a problem and I can see why some home educating parents get a little tetchy when their local authority acts as though all home educated children are missing from education. However, this was not at all the way most people saw the example that I gave. Instead of agreeing that here was a child who was not receiving an education, the general view seemed to be that he was doing fine and should be left alone. It was suggested that playing computer games all day and then hanging round the streets with a bunch of kids who were gradually moving further into petty crime was a perfectly adequate education.

Even weirder, most of those commenting seemed to place responsibility for truanting upon the local authority, rather than the child’s parents. This is very curious! Home educators are always talking about the sanctity of parental responsibility and then as soon as a kid truants, it is no longer the parents’ responsibility, but  that of the local authority.

Having found that not one reader feels that anything needs to be done to help a child who does not attend school and is not receiving an education from either his parents or anybody else; there is little more to say. This was a genuinely unexpected turn of events and I am sure that any local authority officers reading this blog will draw their own conclusions about the matter. The conclusion is, as far as I am able to make it out, that a number of home educators believe that if a child truants and is then withdrawn from school by his mother in order to avoid prosecution; then that is fine and the child should simply be ignored. Any child who is claimed to be home educated should face no further attention from the local authority, regardless of whether or not this is really the case. Parents should not be responsible for ensuring that their children attend a school at which they are registered and if the child fails to attend then this is the fault of the local authority. Playing computer games all day, after not getting up until after lunchtime is a pefectly adequate eduction for a fourteen year-old.  I can assure readers that my open ended questions a couple of days ago were not intended to elicit such views as this! I am frankly taken aback at what has been said.

I cannot help remembering the newspaper articles which I wrote on the subject of home education a few years ago; the ones that first made me an object of hatred for the loopier type of home educating parent. In one passage, which caused particular anger, I said:



Autonomous education is based on a simple principle: that children alone are the best judges of what they should learn and when they should learn it. If a child wishes to spend the day slumped in front of a television or games console, this is not a problem, the choice is his. Many autonomous educators go even further, asserting that it is for the child to decide on bedtimes, diet and other aspects of lifestyle.

I can still recall the fury which this caused. I was told that I knew nothing of autonomous education and that the idea of supposedly home educated children sitting around all day playing Grand Theft Auto was ridiculous. I knew then that it was not, of course, and it is interesting to find it being confirmed here that quite a few home edcautors see nothing wrong with this lifestyle.  Indeed, although I never used the expression, somebody reading about the child whom I described who was missing from education, did in fact call this autonomous education. I think that there is nothing more that I can add to this debate. Obviously, if a child hates school and truants, then I think that a parent should be able to provide an education for the child at home. I am a fanatical supporter of home education. When this is not done though and a child is left to his or her own devices, then I believe that the local authority should intervene and help the parents to provide an education for their child.

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.

Trahison des clercs

Some children will succeed academically despite their environment. No matter how dreadful the school or impoverished the home, there will always be those who overcome these disadvantages and become brilliant scholars or famous scientists. This is the case whether they attend a strict school or are raised in the most progressive of households. The mistake would be then, to attribute their subsequent success to the factors which they overcame by their intellectual ability or the force of their personality; in other words, to say that the child succeeded because of the terrible school or as a result of the poor home background. I am reminded of the truth of this whenever my attention is drawn to children who have supposedly flourished as a consequence of autonomous education.


A couple of weeks ago, this piece appeared in the Huffington Post:



http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/zion-lights/home-education_b_1937272.html






Inevitably, one of the comments is about a success story of autonomous education. This is of course one of the two cases who are invariably cited when discussion turns to this topic; the boy who studied biochemistry at Manchester. Before we go further, it is worth noting one or two things. The first is that for ten years, this case has been endlessly recycled as firm evidence of the efficacy of autonomous education. You might have expected by now to see one or two new names appearing.  The second is that the mother always manages to leave out key aspects of the story, in such a way as to mislead others into thinking that the bizarre experimental techniques to which her children were subjected, actually caused the desirable outcomes which followed. To give a couple of examples, in the comment on the above article, we find the following:



I have autonomously home educated my children who both chose not to do any kind of formal work until they were about 14



This of course is not true; one of the children chose to attend secondary school at eleven, although it did not work out. No mention is made of taking GCSEs at twelve either.

This case, which always seems to crop up, is fascinating, because we are able to trace the ill effects of this type of education and see their origin in the methods used. The children’s mother has given the game away in various interviews. In 2003, for example, she told of her daughter attending a ‘tester’ day at the local infants’ school. Apparently the child was asked by a teacher to write out the numbers from one to nine and when she did so, the teacher told her that she had reversed two of them. This sort of thing was against the principle of the mother and, supposedly, put the kid off mathematics for years. In other words, number and letter reversals were not to be remarked upon, let alone corrected.

Elsewhere, and apparently oblivious to the implications of what she was saying, the mother tells us that her eldest son’s handwriting was practically indecipherable when he began college at fourteen. She find this amusing and does not apparently tie it in with an ideology which dictates that wrongly formed letters should not be corrected!

My problem is that people like this then go on to encourage others to follow suit and behave in the same way. Now in their case, things worked out OK; the father was a teacher and so were the mother’s parents and this no doubt mitigated some of the ill effects of their crank methods. Other children are not so lucky. They read of this sort of case, with of course key parts edited out, and think that they too can achieve the same ends by allowing their children to choose to do no formal work until the age of fourteen. This sort of thing, when educated people who really should know better, go out of their way to mislead others who might not have had their advantages is truly trahison de clercs of the most culpable kind.

Getting into university, or not

One of the saddest things one ever encounters in the world of home education is watching that moment when a parent realises that the dogged pursuit of ideology has irrevocably screwed up a child’s life. Sometimes this moment is almost invisible. For example, seeing a mother on a blog who says, ‘We have decided not to do GCSEs’. Because it is of course parents who arrange and pay for the taking of such examinations, this may be translated as, ‘I   have decided that my child will not be taking GCSEs’. Sometimes, this particular decision is not altogether catastrophic for a home educated child. It is still possible to find some Further Education colleges which will allow a child in without GCSEs, although this is becoming rarer every year. Even then, it will seldom be for A levels and so the parent’s decision has effectively restricted the kid’s life chances at the age of twelve or thirteen. Even if she takes A levels, many universities will raise their eyebrows if she applies without having any GCSEs as well.

What is even worse that the above scenario is the parents who steadfastly refuses, and teaches her child to refuse, to consider gaining any formal qualifications up to the age of seventeen and then still hopes to be able to swing a place at university. Often, these people have been lured on in their folly by the story of Ian Dowty’s son getting into Oxford without any GCSEs or A levels and are unaware of the background to this story. They breeze up to some university in the Russell Group when their daughter or son is seventeen and try to get the child in on the strength of a portfolio or life experiences. This is truly tragic, because they have not the slightest chance of succeeding in this endeavour. Here is a very well-known home educator having this ‘Eureka’ moment of discovery last week. She writes:
Has anyone had any success with Edinburgh University?


We've just had a disappointing response to my home educating daughter's enquiry about what they 'need' for entrance. The bod suggests that my daughter put her home educating experience in her 'personal statement' and I feel like suggesting where the bod should put a copy of her mechanical response to student enquiries.

It's the usual demand for A levels or an Access Course.

Yet when we went up for the Open Day the head of the department was quite positive about her chances.

XXXXX

P.S. She wants to study Japanese at University level and Edinburgh's MA is 'supposed' to be the 'best'.

I find this almost literally unbelievable. Approaching one of the best universities in the United Kingdom without any A levels and hoping for her child to be given a place on the say-so of the mother! I am particularly enchanted by the anger she expresses towards Edinburgh University, as though it is somehow their fault that she has not arranged for her daughter to take A levels! Here is a woman who took her daughter on a misguided and foolish educational journey, only to find that the result is likely to be complete failure for the child. Can anybody imagine anything sadder?

The real reasons for the opposition to the Welsh proposals for the registration and monitoring of home education

The Welsh Assembly hope to introduce a scheme to register and monitor home educators and their children, to ensure that an education is actually being delivered. Most ordinary people see nothing wrong with this, but a small number of militant home educators are fighting the proposals ferociously. Many of these are the same people who fought against the attempt to change the law in England in 2009 and 2010. There are not many of them, perhaps a couple of hundred at most, but they are very vociferous.

One of the things that I would like to know about these people is whether or not they really believe what they say. Let me explain. Although there are some home educating parents who are grateful for the help of their local authority, I am guessing that the vast majority just want to be left alone. This is the case with the whole spectrum of home educators; ranging from radical unschoolers at one end to the fanatically structured at the other. It is obvious why this should be the case. If you practice autonomous education, then the very act of examining and asking probing questions about the education could have the effect of altering its style or direction. If on the other hand, like me, you are an extremely structured educator, then you are just as likely to be unwelcoming to inspection. This is because those investigating the education that you are providing will not understand what you are up to and the hour or so spent in a visit will just disrupt the smooth running of the day’s work. This is why I did not register with either of the local authorities where we lived while I was educating my child; there would have been no point.

So far, so good. Up to this point I am in complete accord with all the other parents who do not wish to be registered or monitored. Where I perhaps differ is that I have not the least doubt that a regimen of national monitoring of this sort would have an effect, a generally beneficial effect, upon home education. To understand why I think this, it is necessary to look at the supposed beliefs of those home educators who are opposed to the proposals currently under consideration in Wales.

Militant home educators are a tricksy bunch. They will say anything at all in support of their cause if they think that it will play well with those who know nothing about home education. For example, during the Badman business, the focus was upon ‘rights’. There was much talk of the ‘rights’ of parents and, to a lesser extent, those of the children themselves. You will not hear much about this during the present campaign, because it has rightly been gauged that popular opinion is in favour of monitoring and talk of ‘rights’ will not sway most parents whose children are at school. Instead, the emphasis is on the cost of registration and monitoring and the pointlessness of it.

The thing that I am unable to figure out is whether or not the home educators opposed to the idea of monitoring really believe that it would have no effect or only a bad effect upon home education? I somehow doubt that do. At the moment, one withdraws a child from school or fails to send her and there is an end to the matter. Parents can avoid meeting with or speaking to local authority officers and fob them off for years at a time with copied ‘philosophies’ or threats of legal action. Some of the children of such parents are probably being educated; others are probably not. Does anybody really doubt that if they knew that they would be expected to give some account of the education that their children were receiving, then many of those parents would put their shoulders to the wheel and provide some structured teaching and get their children to read, write, study history and do sums? I would say that this is a racing certainty. Of course, most autonomous educators do believe this; but unlike me, they think that it would be a bad thing if this were to happen.

Diverting the debate to various states in America or other countries, such as New Zealand is very neatly done, but does not alter the fact that compulsory registration and monitoring would have a great effect on home education either in England or in Wales. One of those effects would be that more parents would be undertaking structured work with their children; that is to say actually teaching them. I think that this would be a good thing and so, I suspect, would almost all non-home educators. The militant home educators who are opposing any such move tend to be autonomous educators who think that for parents to feel obliged to teach their children regularly would be a bad thing. Because this sounds pretty mad to most people whose children attend school, they find it necessary to dissemble and claim instead that they are worried about the waste of money that such a scheme would entail. This is not an honest way to carry on. I think that it would be interesting to hear what those who do not approve of the idea of registration and monitoring think the actual results would be. Do they, like me, think that the natural consequence would be more parents teaching their children in a  structured way? If so, is this at the heart of their opposition?

More about the teaching of higher mathematics

I managed to irritate one or two people here yesterday; not for the first and almost certainly not for the last time. I wonder if those commenting really thought that I was advocating the securing to stakes and pelting with filth of those who failed effectively to motivate their children in the study of mathematics?  If so, it is time now to reveal that this was meant humorously!

In the coming week I want to look at home education in the secondary years, with particular reference to subjects which parents themselves found hard or disliked at school. All too often, we as parents transmit these prejudices and neuroses to our children, so that you will have families with a tradition of art and music, while others tend towards science. This certainly happens in schooling families and I strongly suspect that it is even more common in home educating families.

Today though, I want briefly to mention one or two personal things about my own daughter’s education and the peculiar man who supervised it. By the age of sixteen she had passed eight International GCSEs, all at A*. These were English language, English literature, mathematics, history, physics, biology, chemistry and religious studies. She had also gained Grade 6 (bronze medal) at acting with LAMDA, as well as  Grade 5 classical guitar and Grade 2 piano with the ABRSM. She had no lessons or tutoring in any of those subjects, except by me.

Now I wonder if readers think that all this was because I am some sort of Renaissance Man or Victorian polymath? Do they perhaps think that I am a musician in the morning, who acts at weekends and has a passionate interest in science and mathematics? Not a bit of it. I literally cannot play a single note on the guitar, nor have I ever acted, even at school. As for mathematics, I know hardly anything about the subject and was a complete failure at school. It was my worst subject. Readers are now perhaps scratching their heads, saying to themselves, ’Hang on a minute, wasn’t he talking about the joys of higher mathematics yesterday and rabbiting on about calculus? Somethings’s not right here!’

I shall be expanding upon this idea in the next week or so, but for now I will say that all I know about calculus is that it is concerned with changing motion and figuring out the area under curves. That is it; the sum total of my knowledge. My daughter needed calculus for her maths IGCSE and did it so well that she went on to get an A* in the subject at A level. How can this be, if I was such a duffer at maths and disliked the subject? What about physics? Surely I must be a specialist at that? Nothing of the sort.

This is only a short post, but I want to leave you with this thought. If I did not think that I could have provided my daughter with an education at least as rich and varied, as well as academically sound, as that which she would have received at the best of schools; I should never have embarked upon the enterprise in the first place. True, I had other motives, but this would have been an irreducible minimum, whatever other reasons I might have had for wanting to home educate.

Educating children at home has nothing to do with knowing about subjects. Nor does it, or perhaps I should say that it should not, have any connection with which things one enjoyed at school or found difficult there. Anybody can teach their child literally anything at all; from calculus to piano, from acting to chemistry. It requires no  prior knowledge and will not produce misery in any child. Before I finish, I must leave readers with a simple question. I have a reputation as being a highly structured, school-at-home type of home educator; one who taught, rather than allowed his child to learn naturally. Here is the question. Does anybody believe for a moment that it would be possible to get a child to work hard enough at the guitar to pass grade 5, unless the child was a willing partner in the process? Can anybody imagine forcing, against her wishes, a child of twelve to study calculus? Or biology, acting or anything else? If they can visualise such a neurotic and driven child, forced on by an unforgiving and fanatically pushy parent to over-achieve in all areas, simply to obey his wishes; well then, all I can say is that such people must have a vastly more vivid imagination that my own! It is quite literally impossible to get a two year-old to eat a carrot. How less likely is it that one would be able to persuade, against her will, an adolescent to study mathematics. As I say, I shall be looking at secondary education in the next few weeks and exploring this whole idea in more detail.

Back to the subject of home education...

Somebody asked yesterday if I could give some account of the methods which I used in my daughter’s education. Since this brings us neatly back to the topic of home education, I think that this is no bad idea; although I have in the past tended to steer clear of discussing in details my educational techniques.


I have mentioned that I taught my daughter to read at a very early age, but there was more important stuff going on than that. The most crucial aspect of her early years was the programme of enrichment which I devised for her and put into operation. Essentially, this entailed making sure that she had as many interesting experiences as could possibly be fitted into her waking hours. I will focus today upon what, had she been educated by others, would have been the pre-school years, possibly looking in detail in later posts at her primary and secondary years.

The best way of explaining what was being done to increase my daughter’s intellectual ability is too give a few random examples. A full account would weary even the most dedicated home educator to read! I wanted the child by the age of five to be familiar with different types of transport; boats for instance. Of course, I arranged for her to travel in rowing boats, punts and canoes, but this was not really sufficiently stimulating. I made sure that she also boarded a submarine, visited a fishing trawler, explored a warship, clambered about in a lifeboat and travelled down the Thames in a paddle steamer; seeing in the process  Tower bridge open to allow the boat through. She needed to know something about mines and so I took her down a coal mine, gold mine, lead mine, iron mine and chalk mine. Of course, for a child of that age, this was not education at all from her point of view; merely a series of glorious adventures.

The animal kingdom was a particularly rich field of endeavour, chiefly concerned with finding ways to baffle the safety precautions which prevent small children from getting close to large and dangerous animals. At London Zoo, they used to have elephants and rhinoceroses. When my daughter was very small, it was possible to dangle her over the side of the enclosure so that she could actually touch the rhinoceros and fondle its horn. The same method enabled her to reach out and touch the elephant’s trunk. At Paradise Park wildlife park in Hertfordshire, a fully grown tiger was laying by the bars of its enclosure. There was a safety barrier, but I never took much notice of such things. I climbed over with my four year-old daughter and allowed her to put her hand through the bars and stroke the tiger. Mercifully, it did not whirl round and tear her arm off. By the age of five, she had stroked, held or fed from her hand the following animals; elephant, giraffe, rhinoceros, camel, zebra, tiger, wolf, lynx, jungle cat, yak, fox, armadillo, crocodile, penguin and many others.

The human brain is extraordinarily plastic in the early years and instead of learning about the world only through the medium of her eyes, as is often the case with children who depend upon television, books and computers; she was able to immerse her senses in those things about which I wished her to learn. Not only seeing a picture or film of a tiger, but actually smelling it and burying her hands in its fur as though she were stroking the neighbour’s cat. There was of course the odd mishap; most notably when a tapir swallowed her arm, but nothing which caused lasting harm.

Now of course most parents take their children to the zoo from time to time, but when my daughter was small, this was her entire life. Not only zoos, but castles, museums, aquaria, farms, army bases; anywhere at all in fact which I felt she might benefit from seeing, hearing, smelling touching and generally experiencing. Of course, the academic work continued alongside this enrichment. In a typical day at the age of three she would be reading half a dozen simple books, being taught to write, learning Chinese, doing simple algebra, visiting a museum and finishing the day at a farm where she would have a riding lesson.

I might mention here that I found all this enormously enjoyable myself and although it was not made explicit, she probably realised even at the age of two or three that the exciting activities were contingent upon her working academically as well.

This is only the briefest account and I have given this only because I was specifically asked to do so by somebody who commented here. I might in the future give accounts of other stages in her development. The results seemed to be satisfactory for both of us, to the extent that we enjoyed each other’s company and she eventually went on to get a place at Oxford. I think that the conversational learning which took place alongside all these various activities deserves a post of its own at some point. Really though, that is enough about my own child, at least for now.

How the autonomous acquisition of literacy in this country relies upon universal schooling

I drew attention a few days ago to the fact that in countries where there is not universal schooling, literacy rates tend to be low. Somebody commenting here then said that the autonomous acquisition of literacy as practiced by some parents in this country is predicated upon children growing up in a literate environment; surrounded by the printed word. Others have made this point; among them Paul Goodman, John Holt and Alan Thomas. Reference has been made to the ‘sea of literacy’ which envelops children in Britain and America, allegedly making it easy for them simply to pick up literacy informally. Not one of those advocating this way of learning to read seems to have considered the implications of such a state of affairs.


At one time in this country, few people could read. Shops had signs consisting of recognisable objects rather than words. The three golden balls for the pawnbroker and the red and white barber’s pole are relics of this; as are the painted images on pub signs. As more children attended school, so the literacy rate rose. Once schooling was all but universal, the literacy rate grew to around 100%. This means that there is printed matter wherever we look. Free newspaper and advertisements are quite literally thrust upon us, being pushed through our letterboxes. It would be hard to avoid seeing printed words each day. In a country like Bangladesh, where fewer than 50% of children go to school for five years or more, the literacy rate is below 50%. It is growing though. As the rates of schooling increase, so too does the literacy rate. There is a direct and strong correlation between the move to universal schooling and the achievement of 100% literacy in a country.

What this means is that parents in this country who choose not to send their children to school and allow them to acquire literacy informally by immersing themselves in the ‘sea of literacy’ are benefiting from universal schooling just as much as those who do send their kids to school. They are riding on the back of compulsory schooling. The universal schooling produces the literate society which is needed for the autonomous acquisition of literacy. It is rather like vaccination. When vaccination levels for measles are almost universal, the disease becomes very rare. When the levels of vaccination fall, the result is a measles epidemic. This does not of course mean that one child who is not vaccinated will get measles; merely that he still benefits from the protection afforded by all those who have been vaccinated.

It is common for autonomously educating parents to moan about the efforts made by local authorities to ensure that all children attend school. This is a little ungracious, because without universal schooling of the kind we have in this country, there would be no literate society, no ‘sea of literacy’. Their own method, that of letting their children acquire literacy informally from observing the world around them, would then be impossible. Autonomous educators actually need schools at which almost 100% of children are taught, in order  to create the correct environment for their own children to learn effectively.

Smoke and mirrors in school-based education

Somebody commenting here suggested yesterday that I am prone to ‘bashing autonomous education’; a preposterous notion! To even things up a bit, we shall today look at the phenomenon of parents working away hard at their children’s school education and then forgetting that they have done so. As Old Mum correctly divined, the aim of this stratagem, both for schooling and home educating parents, is to make their children look more clever than is actually the case.


We looked yesterday at a couple of home educators who made great efforts in getting their children to read or take the necessary qualifications to get a place at college and then forgot what they had done. This kind of thing is by no means exclusive to home education; although there are certainly some stunning examples in that field. As a matter of fact, most of the parents I have known who have engaged in these games have had children at school. Before we look at how this works for those who are not home educating, I want to look at the motive for these deceptions. I say deceptions, but in many of the cases which I have known, the parents had actually managed to take themselves in as well; in fact they had come to believe their own myths! I rather suspect that the parents at whom we looked yesterday fall into this category and were not setting out deliberately to deceive others.

So what is the motive behind all this? It is pretty simple. Look at my own activities. When my daughter was two and a half and reading English fluently, I decided to teach her to read Chinese. This was very successful and she was making great progress until my wife put her foot down. Now as this stands, it is not much of a story. It simply shows the child’s father in a poor light as an insanely pushy parent. Let us imagine though that I made the same claim that the parent in yesterday’s post made to a newspaper about the kid reading English. Suppose that I told people that my daughter had learned Chinese herself; just picked it up, without any help from me at the age of two. You see the difference? This is much better; I have been transformed from a pushy parent into the father of a genius. A great improvement indeed! Telling people that we as parents have done little to encourage and help our children makes their achievements look much more impressive. They become very bright kids and we can portray ourselves as laid back parents without a pushy or ambitious bone in our bodies.

In the last few years, my wife and I have seen the children of friends get places at good universities after passing tough, academic A levels with As and A*s. Every one of their parents has claimed that the children didn’t study hard or revise, as well as making out that they themselves never bothered much about their children’s education; just leaving them to it. This is simply another version of the autonomous educating gag. What is astounding is that these people seem genuinely to have forgotten all that they did to get their kids to this point. The best local school is the Davenant Foundation. To get in, you need a ten year record of church attendance. Some of these parents spent a whole decade feigning belief in the Deity in order to get their kids to this school! How’s that for dedication, ten years pretending to be religious and all for the sake of your kid’s schooling? Once there, they paid for tutors to push the children academically, shouted and argued with the children to make sure that they took the right options at GCSE and A level and arranged a hundred different leisure activities and hobbies; to all of which they drove their children. In most cases, it would have been surprising had the kid not done well at A level.

Despite all this, the parents pretend to have done little or nothing to help their children’s studies. They tell everybody that their son or daughter never did any homework, didn’t pick up a book until a week before the exam and so on. This makes their children’s A level results look all the better, which is the aim of the gambit. Returning to home educators, we saw a marvellous example of this last year when a parent whose two children are famous for being autonomously educated claimed that her daughter had passed a science GCSE with flying colours, despite never having studied the subject and just flicking through the textbook a fortnight before the examination took place!

Speaking for myself, I have not the least objection to people claiming that their children gained GCSEs or A levels without any input from them, any more than I disapprove of parents making out that their children taught themselves to read. It is human nature to wish to present both your children and yourself in the best possible light. These tactics have the dual effect of both making you look like a relaxed and confident parent, while at the same time casting your kids in the role of infant prodigies. It’s a great game to play, as long as you don’t lose your sense of humour and start getting tetchy when others take your claims with a pinch of salt.