Stupendous hypocrisy, possibly combined with racism, on the part of Education Otherwise, Home Education UK, Action for Home Education and various other major home education organisations in the United Kingdom.

I was accused yesterday of not expressing my views openly and it is to be hoped that the title of this post clears that up. As I said a couple of days ago, I was talking to a local authority officer who was irritated about the suggestion being made by some home educators that there was something racist about the attempts to get more Gypsy and Roma children into school. She asked me if I could see the difference between this and the line that the big home education groups took about Victoria Climbie a few years ago. I could not and when I asked about the subject here, nobody could give a plain answer. Let me explain why this is at best dreadful hypocrisy and at worst out and out racism.

     Let us begin with what is practically an article of faith at the large home education support organisations and that is that just because a child is not at school, that does not mean that she is not receiving an education. I am sure that we have all read of the outraged cries from home educating parents when their children get mixed in with those who are ‘missing from education’. Surely, parents should be innocent until proven guilty? We ought to assume that parents and carers are providing children with a suitable education, unless there is definite evidence to the contrary. So far, so good; nothing controversial here, I fancy.

      With some groups in society; these assumptions are reversed.  As readers know, there was a huge fuss when organisations such as the NSPCC said that Victoria Climbie was home educated. Education Otherwise, Home Education UK and so on all went mad and asserted that this was not the case. Why were they so sure that this child was not being home educated? We will allow Mike Fortune-Wood of Home Education UK to explain. His is the standard explanation for believing that Victoria Climbie was not a home educated child. Be prepared though for a shock:

http://www.home-education.org.uk/articles/article-victoria-climbie.pdf


Have we all read it?  We know that the child was not receiving an education because;

‘the reason that Victoria was not attending school was that there was a failure to provide sufficient school places in her locality. Both the LEA and Social Services knew of her existence and her lack of education’

How do we know that she was lacking an education? Because of course, she was not at school! Incidentally, it is not true that she could not get a school place; her carer did not apply for one. Now we know that Mike Fortune-Wood, Education Otherwise and other groups are all in favour of children not attending school. We know that they believe passionately that the fact that a child is not in school does not mean that the child is lacking an education. Except perhaps, as in this case, when we are talking about working class, black foreigners.

     Perhaps I am wrong? Let us imagine  that we are talking now of a white, Welsh family. Does anybody think for a moment that Mike Fortune-Wood or Education Otherwise would say something along the lines of, ‘The local authority knew that this child was lacking an education because she was not at school’? Hard to believe, no? The only conclusion which I can reach is that either these organisations are guilty of massive hypocrisy about this or that they have one set of assumptions for white, British families and a completely different set for black foreigners. These two cases are not, of course, mutually exclusive!

     The suggestion was advanced here yesterday that Victoria Climbie was not being home educated because her main carer did not say that she was. What this means is that a woman whose first language is Senoufo and second language is French, should be judged because she might not be familiar with an English expression such as ‘home education’. Sounds as though those special rules for foreigners are coming into play again!

     There is a widely held assumption among many British home educators that a child, particularly a young child, should be able to receive an informal education at home. In some countries, schooling and formal education do not start until the age of seven or eight. Victoria Climbie was eight. The idea that a child of this age should be regarded as ‘lacking an education’,  as Mike Fortune-Wood puts it, simply because she is not at school is not one that I feel is commonly held among British home educators. Out of interest, how many readers feel that an eight year-old who is not at school should be treated as ‘lacking an education’? What, nobody?  Here’s an easier question then. How many of you think that the children of black foreigners should be assumed to be lacking an education if they are not at school? Ah, that’s better! Nice to see that so many of you are in agreement with Mike Fortune-Wood and Education Otherwise about this. 

The illusion of choice

Before I return to some personal accounts of home education, I feel that I must expand upon the idea that I set out yesterday; that unless heroic efforts are made, children are indoctrinated  by their family life from birth in various ideas which will force them in certain directions, thus robbing them of a free choice in how they develop and which interests they pursue. Here is an extract from the blog of a very well known home educator who is vehement in advocating the right of children to choose their own topics for home education:

‘Pottery again today, it is my weekly therapy and we both love it’


The mother goes on in detail about the wonders of creative artwork. The word ‘we’ constantly recurs. One seeks in vain for similar enthusiasm for physics or mathematics! Already, at the age of twelve, this child has been guided into ‘creative’ rather than scientific channels. The mother is determined that the child will not take GCSEs, which means that if she goes to college it will probably be a course which can be accessed by a portfolio; almost certainly  not an A level course. I would put money on its being something in the art line. How much choice has this young person really had?

Or consider the case of a child raised in a very devout Muslim home or one belonging to some protestant, fundamentalist Christian sects. If you have been taught that the world was created only six thousand years ago, you are unlikely to end up studying biology or astronomy at university. After all, you will probably not accept evolution or standard cosmology. Here again, the family belief system is imposing a curriculum which precludes various lines of study.

Of course one does not need to look at devoutly religious families to find ideology being imposed upon children which will push them in a particular direction! Here is a presumably modern, enlightened and progressive parent speaking here yesterday of the way in which she raised a home educated child:

‘'I'm not sure why I'd want my child to develop vastly different life values to the rest of their family. I wouldn't want them to be racist, being rather an obvious example.'



‘We started out with anti-racist beliefs’

This is a pretty general type of dogma which is so common that we may not even recognise it as being a prejudice in which we are indoctrinating our children. Assuming that this parent was using the expression ‘racism’ in the usual meaning, that of believing that different races have different innate qualities and characteristics, some of which make them superior or inferior to those of other races; then why on earth was she conveying opposition  to this belief system to her child as being axiomatic? Why was it her default setting? True, she says that she discussed the question, but clearly from a particular and slanted perspective.

I am myself open minded about the idea of racism and have always promoted this to my daughter. The evidence is far from conclusive and is actually pretty finely balanced on either side. Let us look at just  one example which militates against the holding of ‘anti-racist beliefs’. ( How this can be a matter of ‘belief’, rather than evidence is, I confess, quite beyond me. The very expression, 'anti-racist beliefs'   tells us at once that to the writer,  this is  a matter of ideology or faith and not objective science.)

It is a matter of common observation, in this country, America, Africa, China and everywhere else that data are collected, that black babies reach their motor milestones earlier than white babies. Babies of Chinese origin, by comparison, lag behind both black and white children. Any Health Visitor in this country will know about this and it has been the subject of many studies. Black babies crawl earlier, stand earlier and walk earlier. This is regardless of where they are born and no convincing cultural explanation has been offered for this advantage. They just seem to be stronger and quicker to develop. The physical superiority of black neonates has also shown up in premature babies. Black babies born prematurely have higher survival rates than white babies. It has been suggested that this early advantage in physical development goes some way to towards explaining why there are so many black athletes and footballers.

Now here is evidence which strongly supports a central tenet of racism; a racial group with apparently innate characteristics and traits which give it a superiority over others from different races. To make opposition to such evidence a matter of ideological belief and not science means that many parents who view themselves as being liberal and progressive are in fact in the grip of dogma just as much as the family who believe in the existence of Adam and Eve! The child of such a family who notices that while there are an awful lot of Asian doctors and dentists, it is vanishingly rare to encounter one of Caribbean origin, will be fobbed off with an explanation founded upon ‘anti-racist beliefs’; perhaps that the disparity is due to white racism or is the legacy of colonialism.

We all have irrational family belief systems. Our children are raised in this context and often we are not even aware that we are handing down our own prejudices to them. The only way to counter this is to devise a broad and balanced curriculum which is designed to replace our own prejudices with the best modern thinking about anything that we believe or have faith in. Without an objective education, there is little chance for children to become individuals. In the average family, to pretend that we are allowing children a free choice is a complete nonsense. We are in fact playing a version of the three card trick with them; forcing their choice in line with our own unconscious bigotry and preconceptions.

Anti-sexist childrearing

During the 1980s, I ran toy libraries and playgroups in the London Borough of Hackney. Although we made every effort to create anti-sexist and gay-friendly spaces, it was all pretty much of a flop. We leant out various books in addition to toys, including the notorious Jenny lives with Eric and Martin. Which meant of course that we were, indirectly, the sort of people who precipitated Section 28! Every effort was made to encourage the boys to play with the buggies and dolls and to get the girls to play with the toy cars. It's true that the boys liked the brooms and buggies, but this was only because the brooms could be held like miniature rifles and they could chuck the babies out of the buggies and then race round the room with them pretending that they were motor cycles. We had realistic little people of various ethnic mixes which could sit in the toy cars. The moment that I realised that we were wasting our time was when a group of little girls were, under our urging, reluctantly playing with the toy cars instead of the dolls. We had removed most of the male figures so that the cars and people they were playing with were an almost exclusively female society. How cool was that for the girls? One girl got upset though. She had a car and a group of female figures but thought it was unfair because she didn't have a driver for her car. When I looked, I found that all the male figures had been co-opted as drivers and that all the cars had men driving them. It was so clearly the natural order of things for these girl-children from a multi-cultural, inner London borough.

The problem was of course society and the families in which the children were being raised. We could not hope to have any sort of impact in an hour or so each week. When my own children were born, I decided that the only solution was not simply to avoid sexism, but aggressively to challenge it in our home. Many of our friends tried to adopt a neutral attitude to sexism and homophobia, hoping that the fact that they were not displaying any overt signs of either sexism, racism or homophobia would be enough to counter the prejudices to which their children might be exposed at school. This invariably failed; the pressures of society need more than this passive resistance to be overcome.

My wife and I structured our lives so that the children would not have traditional roles reinforced. I do not drive, so that was OK; they grew up thinking that driving was something which a woman usually did. We decided that washing up and doing the laundry should be my part of the housework and anything which looked physical or dirty should be my wife's. Of course, once the kids were in bed, we eased up a bit on this. Books like Heather has two Mommies became favourites for the children as bedtime reading. Dolls were ethnically balanced and anatomically realistic. Some were disabled. I acquired from an American supplier a wheelchair for teddies, as well as little leg callipers and white sticks. Action man and Barbie rubbed shoulders in the toy box and it was not uncommon to see action man tricked out like a Drag Queen and Barbie carrying an assault rifle. A lot of what we did during the children's early years sounds like a caricature of left wing practice. We did not have soldiers with our boiled eggs; we had suffragettes! No mention of firemen, it was always fire-fighters.

Home educating my younger daughter meant that this sort of lifestyle was not countered by any sort of foolish influence at school from other children. I have to say, the whole thing has been pretty much of a success. More so with the girl who did not go to school than with her sister, of course, but that is only to be expected. I never indoctrinated either of the girls with this ridiculous middle class ethos about not hitting back. I think that the most dangerous nonsense to teach girls. Both grew up to be pretty handy with their fists and even today it would be a brave lad who tried to take liberties with either of them. Simone is a keen fencer, not only with epee but also the sabre. I can assure readers that I would not like to face her when she has a sabre in her hand. All the stuff that we did has given them both the firm idea that there is nothing at all that men can do better than women. And of course, vice versa. The idea that women should be better at nursing a baby or cleaning a floor is utterly alien to them.

Perhaps the best thing that this sort of childhood has given the girls is the air that they carry with them, an air of 'Don't mess with me or you will live to regret it'. They walk in what some have described as a masculine way, striding along confidently, obviously ready for whatever comes at them. Groups of local youths who tease passing girls with sexist remarks or throw snowballs at them in winter always gave my daughters a wide birth. This is also good because it means that they do not present as suitable targets for rapists or muggers. One look at them tells anybody that you are apt to bite off more than you can chew if you tangle with them.

It is not enough when raising children to take a neutral stance upon prejudice of any kind. Prejudices must be tackled head on, not just as they arise from time to time but in a pro-active way as part of a lifestyle. It is simply not enough to talk like a liberal when the subject of sexism comes up or to avoid using derogatory terms about minorities. Home education gives one an ideal opportunity to do this, freeing a child from the negative influences of schools and children who might already be infected with the very prejudices which we are attempting to eradicate in our children.