An even more structured home educator than me...

This family live near me and make me feel like a real slacker. They even do A levels at home, which is something I frankly could not face. Compared with them, I am a radical unschooler!


http://www.yellowad.co.uk/news.cfm?id=21260&headline=Home%20schooling%20success

Good things and bad things about home educating

Good Things
Your kid won’t have nits all the time
You won’t have to make yourself hoarse every morning shouting, ‘It’s gone eight o’clock’ at a sleeping teenager.
Your child will retain the ability to pronounce medial and terminal ‘t’s and not replace them as a matter of course with glottal stops.
You can enter your child for whatever combination of GCSEs you both want.
You don’t have to make yourself presentable for the school run every day.
Your daughter or son can continue playing with dolls or toy cars, without feeling that they must stop at a certain age lest their friends think them babyish.
Your child will not have to rub shoulders with children called Brandon, Jadon, Taylor, Tyler, Kylie and Paige.

Bad Things
Despite what you tell the LA, your kid will not have a very extensive social life. He will become out of touch with what other kids find important.
Unless you get your arse into gear, he will end up with no qualifications at all.
Your family and friends will think that you are weird.
The only people who will approve and be your friends are other home educating parents, many of whom genuinely are weird. (Unlike you).
Your kid may not have to hang out with children called Chantelle, but you will find now that she is likely to be knocking around with people called Andromeda and Sky.

You will spend hours on the computer, like some kid obsessed with facebook. You run the risk of sitting up until two every morning commenting angrily on forums and blogs.

Short BBC piece about home education

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-13681216

Unreasonable behaviour by local authorities

One of the difficulties we face when trying to get some idea of a local authority's behaviour towards home educating families is that we often only hear second hand about the situation. The case may indeed be exactly as presented by the irate parent to a local group or on an Internet list, or there may be a good deal more to it than meets the eye. So I want to try an experiment.

Quite a few home educating parents come on this Blog each day and so I am hoping that we can hear some first hand examples of unreasonable behaviour by local authorities. In other words, cases where the person commenting feels that she has been badly treated by the LA and is prepared to answer intrusive questions about the circumstances in order that we might build up a rounded picture of what has happened. It would help if we could be given the name of the local authority as well. This will enable us all to get some idea of how things are working in a local authority which has supposedly behaved badly towards a home educator.

I want to try this, because in many of the cases which I see on Internet lists, I have an idea that things might not be precisely as advertised. So here is the opportunity for everybody to talk about the worst local authorities and what they have done which is unacceptable. No holds barred, guys; you can name names and give dates and see if others on here can shed any light on these LAs.

Why children might reject an adult-led educational approach; part 2

Somebody commented yesterday on the thread about the above topic, putting forward an interesting hypothesis. She suggested that some parents are natural teachers, while others are born facilitators. Children too come in different types; some are naturally autonomous learners and others are predisposed to being taught. I am not at all sure what to make of this idea.

To begin with of course, this is just a form of biological determinism. I cannot teach little Mary because her predetermined character is such that she will not respond well to being taught. Or perhaps; I can't teach GCSE physics, because I am biologically a facilitator and not a natural teacher. I am bound to say that on the face of it, this strikes me as being a pretty strange way of looking at the case. If I make a poor job of accomplishing some task, whether it is teaching physics or fixing a car, I tend to assume that the fault lies in me and not in the car or the child. If there are natural born teachers, then I suppose that there must also be natural born mechanics, natural born electricians and natural born architects as well. This is a weird concept and one with which I have difficulties. Do these biological predispositions have a gender bias? Are women more likely to be facilitators and men teachers?

How would we know if this idea held true for children, that their rejection of teaching ws an inbuilt feature of their character rather than just a result of bad teaching which has put them off being taught? I suppose we would need to do some research involving identical twins separated at birth. Does anybody have any actual evidence for this idea? I am not rejecting the notion out of hand, but it seems to be to be inherently implausible and something of a cop-out for poor quality teaching. I say this, because I have frequently heard teachers advance the same argument when their pupils are failing. They say things like 'What can you expect from that family?' or 'Oh the kids from that estate are all the same!' In other words, they too attribute the fact that their pupils are not thriving academically not to their own shortcomings as teachers but to this same biological determinism. Some kids are born to fail at school. Can this be true?

Home educated or missing from education?

There is currently considerable disquiet on one of the home education Internet lists about the case of an apparently home educating mother in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham. She has been referred, under circumstances which remain obscure, to social services. The assumption is that the referral was prompted by her home educating, rather than any other concern. Of course, without knowing a good deal more about the family than the mother chooses to reveal to an Internet forum, it is impossible to know what is really going on here. Let us assume for a moment though that the case is as presented and that somebody in Barking and Dagenham's education department has tipped off social services about the home education and raised it as a concern. What are we to make of this? I know a little about the situation in this borough because, as I have mentioned in the past, my wife works there in a role which brings her into contact with many exceedingly dysfunctional families with young children. I would not say from what I have heard that home education is very common in this East London borough, but what is not at all rare is parents not sending their children to school, which is an entirely different matter. A number of parents drift into the habit of not sending their kids to school regularly because they have chaotic and disorganised lifestyles. They stay up late, take their children out visiting with them until one or two in the morning and then neither the kids or the parents wake up in time for school the next day. If this happens a few times and nobody takes any firm action, some parents simply stop sending their children entirely after a while. The school sometimes colludes with this and it has been known for schools to hint that if parents were to tell them that they were moving, that it would then be possible for the school to remove the child's name from the register. This suits the school, who don't want a load of fuss and extra paperwork and also the parent who does not want to have to get up early to take the kid to school. Truancy reflects badly on the school as well as the parents and most schools like to avoid having too much truancy. It suggestes that there is something wrong with their school and if a way can be found to remove a persistent truant from the register, many will jump at the chance.

Of course this is not home education at all; it is a child missing from education. However, without looking into such families a little and visiting the home, talking to the child and so on, it is impossible to gauge the true state of affairs. Children from this sort of home background often are at risk in one way and another. The mother might be in the habit of leaving the kid at home while she goes out in the evenings; I also know of several cases like this where the mother was on the game or using drugs.

In a number of local authority areas now, a child not at school is being regarded as being, prima facie, at risk. This is not a desirable state of affairs and yet a very understandable reaction among those who wish to protect the interests of vulnerable children. Often, a single home visit is enough to filter this sort of family our from genuine home educators.

Parents like this are not the only ones who fail to send their children to school. There are a lot of foreigners living in Barking and Dagenham these days, particularly Albanians, and some of these families do not want their children to attend school. There are various reasons for this, none of which involve home education and this is another group who cause concern. I am not really at all surprised that the mother who has posted about being referred to social services has had a visit of this sort. The aim is always child protection and there is no sinister agenda which entails the persecution of real home educators. The goal is simply to check that this is a home educating parent and not one of the other categories of parents who simply do not send their kids to school.

Suppose my child rejects adult-led education, what do I do then as a home educating parent?

Somebody commenting here asked the above question a couple of times. I did not respond, because the question itself seems to me to be manifestly absurd. If the child rejects adult-led education, then you are doing something wrong. The child's best interests are not served by abandoning all attempts to direct the course of the education if this happens, but by asking yourself how you can improve the education which you are providing. Let's look at a practical example to see what I mean by this.

I am not a great fan of the idea of the global warming scare. The temperature of the planet has always fluctuated and the ice caps have grown and melted over time. However, if children are going to learn about this hypothesis, they should at least understand what it is they are being invited to believe. What most of them seem to believe, as a result of poor teaching in schools, is that the ice at the north pole will melt and that this will have the effect of raising sea levels and flooding coastal areas elsewhere in the world. They believe this because they are taught ineffectively by ignorant people who don't really understand the subject themselves. This is poor quality adult-led education as delivered in schools.

So, let's have a science lesson. Your child has not asked for a science lesson, but you feel she should have one anyway. Gosh, I hope she doesn't reject my adult-led learning! The reason that children cannot be expected to understand the mechanics of global warming and climate change is that they have had no direct experience of ice caps and tropical oceans. The thing is so far removed from their everyday life that it is pure abstraction. Tell your child that you are going to make some polar ice melt and ask them to guess what will happen. They don't need to do anything. You are not asking them to open a book or pick up a pen; just watch you make a fool of yourself. Take a large glass jug and fill it with water. Then put in a handful of ice cubes. This is our ocean and ice cap. Mark the level of the water on the side of the jug and ask your kid what will happen to the water level when the ice melts. Will it go up, down or remain the same. Der! it will go up of course. Why is my mother wasting my time asking silly questions? Of course, the water level remains the same. If your child shows any interest in why this should be, you can explain the mechanism involved and they will then see that if all the ice at the north pole melted, it would make no difference at all to sea levels.

Now you can demonstrate the real mechanism which could be implicated in rising sea levels. Fill the jug with boiling water and again mark the level. Ask your child what will happen as the water cools. The level falls. Explain that hot water takes up more space than cold water and that if the sea level did rise as a result of global warming it would be as a result of this thermal expansion and nothing to do with melting ice. If you are lucky, he will ask why hot things take up more space than cold things. This gives you a chance to explain that all matter is made up of little particles that are jiggling about. The more they jiggle about, the more room they need. Heat is just the molecules jiggling about more and more, thus needing more room.

You can go on to do things like put a glass of earth and a glass of water on a sunny windowsill and see which heats up more quickly and which retains the heat more effectively. This has implications for the whole global warming business. You can put a large glass bowl upside down on a sunny lawn and then see how dramatically the temperature inside will rise. You have demonstrated the greenhouse effect.

None of this science requires your child to ask any initial questions; you have chosen to teach science today, not her. If it is done in a lively way as a series of games, I cannot imagine any child free of pathological abnormalities of mind who would not be interested in watching what you are doing. They have all heard about global warming and are worried about the ice melting and the implications for polar bears; of course they will be interested. You can also grab their attention by explaining that everything they are hearing about the melting of the ice caps is quite wrong and this can start a wider discussion about the extent to which they should trust newspapers and textbooks. For the child who has been put off learning by a school, this will really catch his attention.

The above science lesson is suitable for any child over the age of eight or nine. I simply cannot imagine a child who would not gain something from it, always provided that you do not present it in terms of; 'Now we are going to learn science'. As part of a series of games in the kitchen, the kid will not even think of the word 'science'; it is just something really interesting that his mother is showing him. And it allows him to steal a march on his schooled friends by telling them that they have been taught a pack of nonsense in their lessons!