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’?

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.