For me, one of the greatest things about home education has been the opportunity to give my daughter the widest possible range of choices in her life. When a child is two or three, it is quite impossible to know what direction her interests will lie in. Will she want to be a carpenter? A doctor? A writer? Nobody can tell. When children are taught at home, it is of course far easier to arrange for a variety of experiences and activities so that they can find out what they enjoy doing, perhaps get some idea what they might want to do in later life. As an example, to this end I took my daughter to the Royal College of Surgeons Pathology department when she was five and showed her the body parts there and let her examine the preserved corpses. She did not care over much for this. I got her to dissect hearts and livers of animals when she was a bit older, which was helpful for the IGCSE Biology examination. As a result of all this, she decided against medicine as a possible career, which was a pity!
At other times, I made it possible for her to help a garage mechanic at work, fire a shotgun, go down a couple of mines, stroke a tiger and crocodile, as well as a huge number of other things. Always, the aim was for her to discover what she liked, what she herself wished to do. At the same time that all these activities were taking place, I was providing her with the tools which would enable her to make the most of her abilities. She was very early in speaking and adored books from an early age. Obviously it would give her pleasure to be able read books independently, rather than be reliant upon me or her mother. Accordingly, I taught her to read. This was not a tricky job and by her second birthday she was reading fluently. This enormously increased her chances of finding out what she liked, what she was interested in. She could look at reference books and find out stuff for herself. This again freed her and gave her the power to choose for herself what she wished to read about. Teaching her to write allowed her to put down her thoughts and ideas in permanent form. This has been important to her since she was three or four.
By the age of eleven, she was talking about going to university when she was older. Of course, she could easily have changed her mind, but it seemed a wise move to keep her options open. A child of that age cannot really be expected to know what will be needed to get a place at college or university. As an adult, that was my job. I therefore chose a fairly broad range of IGCSEs such as would be likely to impress a university if that was still what she wished to do when she was eighteen. At the same time, I made sure that they were the sort of qualifications which would also impress an employer. Covering all bases again, you see. Physics, Chemistry and Biology were obvious choices, as were English Language and Mathematics. As for the rest, I thought History and English Literature would be interesting for her. She also wanted to study Religion, so at the last moment I also included that. The purpose of taking these examinations was always to make sure that she had as many choices open to her as possible. Imagine if she had reached her sixteenth birthday, wanted to take four A levels in order to get into a decent university and then found that no college would accept her without GCSEs! This would restrict her options greatly.
Underpinning all my work with my child's education has been the awareness that she alone must decide the course her own future. To do this though, she needs enough knowledge to make an informed choice. The amount of knowledge needed has changed as she has grown older. Being literate increased enormously the information available to her and therefore made it possible for her to make more and better choices. Without the ability to read, children are often dependent upon their parents and other adults for information. This is not a good thing, because the adults around them may have motives of their own for wanting their children's access to information to be restricted. Being a fluent reader from a young age also opened up vistas for my daughter. It was reading "Brideshead Revisited" when she was twelve which caused her to decide that she would like to go to Oxford!
I have sometimes been accused of believing that the way that I educated my daughter is the only true path and that I see other parents as foolish and negligent. This is of course absolute nonsense. I am very strongly committed to young people being able to make their own choices. Ignorant, ill-informed and illiterate people though, are not generally well placed to make good choices. This is why I find so much of the cant about childrens' "choice" to be a little hollow and unconvincing. Without a proper base of knowledge and skills there can be no real choice.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
What about young people who choose not to take GCSEs? Who really don't want to take them? Does one override their choices with force at that point? And if so, how, exactly?
ReplyDeleteI would guess that with most children, how they view formal examinations is heavily influenced by how their parents feel about the matter. This was certainly the case with my daughter.
ReplyDeleteI see, thanks.
ReplyDeleteThis was an interesting read, Simon.
ReplyDeleteChoice is a complicated thing. For each path we choose to follow in life there are, of course, countless others that we do not. One of the things I have observed and experienced is that if a school child is academically inclined it is expected that they will go to university. I suspect that this means that many thousands of such children never really consider a future where they do not make this 'choice'.
I'm not saying that this is the case with your daughter, by the way.
But I'm wary of giving my children the message (at a young age) that they are making choices that commit them to any particular path through their teens and young adult life. One of the advantages of home education is that my children have not been categorised, slotted into their place in the academic hierarchy, and started to limit their own ideas about what they want to do. They do make plans, of course, and we share information all the time about what is possible.
Of course people need knowledge and skills to make choices - but this is a constant process through our lives. I certainly don't want my children's choices limited because of something I neglect to do but, equally, I don't want them limited because I end up giving them the impression that the only choice in involved in the path ahead is between degree courses at 'good' universities.
She was reading fluently before the age of TWO?
ReplyDeleteMrs Anon
Yes, I agree with you Allie. My older duaghter never wanted anything to do with academic stuff and left school at sixteen to work in a stable! I don't regard that as any less of a success than going to university. All you can do really is give your kids the options and leave it to them.
ReplyDeleteActually Mrs. Anon, she began reading numbers at fifteen months. Individual words a month later. I was also teaching her Chinese at the same time, using the ideograms, but with the English words. This went quite well and by two she could point out words and read them in the window of the local Chinese restaraunt. The real delay came in reading English when she had to scan rapidly from left to right. This, she could not manage properly until just before her second birthday. I need hardly add that when she was reading out numbers at fifteen months, this does not mean that she had a theory of number! It was what an unsympathetic person might call "Barking at print". I dare say you are, as a teacher, familiar with this expression?
ReplyDeleteSimon there appears to be an implicit assumption running through your posts that all children are capable of reading at the same age as your daughter if only parents can be bothered to teach them. As I have pointed out before, good reading ability is dependent on good visual and auditory discrimination, which, for various reasons, does not develop in all children at the same age.
ReplyDeleteThat of course is completely true, but I don't make any assumption about the age at which children should be capable of reading. Two is certainly earlier than usual, but I have raised my eyebrows a little when I hear of children who are starting to write at fourteen or read at thirteen. I am not using my own daughter as a yardstick though.
ReplyDeleteI can't understand why you're concerned about when other people's children start reading, Simon. What business is it of yours? If the same children were causing damage to people or the neighbourhood, I might be concerned but if they're happily ensconced in family life, what's the problem? And why does there have to be a yardstick when every child and every family is different?
ReplyDeleteIt's just that there are so many things to worry about in the world, that whether someone else's child learns to read at two, twelve, or fourteen is surely neither here nor there unless other urgent problems are presenting themselves.
Well I'm interested in the subject of education, Anonymous. And this Blog is about education, particularly home education. Of cours I will discuss different ways of learning to read; This is a matter of concern to everybody. There is a strong correlation between illiteracy and imprisonmnet. By which I mean that a huge number of people in prison cannot read and write. When somewhere between fifty and eighty thousand children in this country are being taught at home, then of course it is of interest whether they are actually learning to read. The numbers of home educated children are growing every year and if it were the case that a significant proportion are illiterate as adults, that would be of great interest to me. If you do not wish to discuss home education though, I am sure that there are many other Blogs where this topic does not feature!
ReplyDeleteThanks, but I love discussing home education - just not in terms of yardsticks. Learning to read is a huge part of the educational process and something to celebrate whatever age it happens at. One of the things I love about home education is its flexibility - that you can allow a child to wait until later for certain skills if it seems to need to.
ReplyDeleteI don't think this kind of judgmental "They must all read by the age of eight" attitude is helpful to home educators or their children. It will make them feel unduly pressured, which might be reflected in their parenting. We should be able to respond to our children's needs without the feeling that someone is looking over our shoulder, checking that we're doing it 'right'. As parents, we know what their needs are better than anyone.
And I think, again, you're conflating two separate and unrelated issues: unregulated home education and the bad parenting which leads to social problems. Unregulated home ed does not = potentially bad parenting. Unregulated home educators aren't naughty children who need checking up on in case they're doing something wrong. It should be assumed, in the absence of apparent problems with their children, that they're doing OK and they should be left alone.
The presumption of innocence is a useful thing, vital to people's wellbeing.
I did not say at all that all children should read by the age of eight. I said that I would raise my euebrows if a child of fourteen were starting to read by copying out the alphabet. I think many people would find that a little odd. This was actually mentioned on the HE-UK list. I do not think that unregulated home education has anything to do with bad parenting. I simply observed that there is a connection between illiteracy and criminality. I have no idea at all whether the percentage of autonomously educated children who are illiterate is any higher than the average population. I was talking about a general principle. Guilt and innocence have nothing to do with the case; I cannot for the life of me see what the presumption of innocence has to do with home education. There is no suggestion of criminal activity here, surely?
ReplyDeleteIf the Badman recommendations are enacted, failing to register as a home educator will be a criminal offence, yes. Presumably an unregistered home educated child will be treated as a truant in the eyes of the law with the imprisonment of its parents as the ultimate (and not unusual) punishment.
ReplyDeleteTo obtain their licence to home educate, parents will have to persuade the local authority that the provision is acceptable and very late readers will probably not fall into this category, though it's all up for debate and blogs like this will have an influence in that debate to some degree, which is why I think so many of us take the time out of our busy lives to come here and counter your opinions.
The presumption of innocence for home educators will therefore be lost, if the Badman recommendations are enacted.
The point I was making about learning to read is that it is not solely dependent on the example set, or encouragement or quality of tuition given by an adult. There might be anatomical/physiological reasons why the child can't learn before that. A friend who home educated her four children said her elder son (third child) simply couldn't write until he was 12; then suddenly he started writing. She was an experienced primary teacher and used a structured approach. The child in question is now a software engineer, but I can imagine yours would not have been the only eyebrows raised at the time.
ReplyDelete>>>>>>>>>>>There is a strong correlation between illiteracy and imprisonmnet.<<<<<<<<<<<<
ReplyDeleteYes, that may well be. However, before we need to start worrying about illiterate HE'd kids ending up in prison, we'd have to know if any of them were still illiterate by age 18. Very few, I'd have thought, and all of them would probably be dyslexic.
I've been Heing for longer than you, Simon, in several different areas, within many different groups and among those 100's of kids I've known, there is not one single HE'd youngster who moved on from HE illiterate.
(Having said that, I don't think that some HE parents deal with dyslexia very well, but that's a completely different subject.)
Mrs Anon
"I did not say at all that all children should read by the age of eight. I said that I would raise my euebrows if a child of fourteen were starting to read by copying out the alphabet."
ReplyDeleteShe wasn't learning to read, she was improving her handwriting.
Just to clarify.
"I've been Heing for longer than you, Simon, in several different areas, within many different groups and among those 100's of kids I've known, there is not one single HE'd youngster who moved on from HE illiterate."
ReplyDeleteSame here. Not one. Not even among the kids whose educational provision I had doubts about.
Me neither, but it's anecdotal evidence so Simon won't count it.
ReplyDeleteTBH, Anonymous, I don't hold out much hope of changing Simon's mind about anything. I've seen him repeat himself too many times now.
ReplyDeleteThe reason I post here (along with some others, I suspect, including you?) is to make sure that a balanced argument is visible, and so that no-one, from DCSF staff to LA staff to people considering HE for the first time, will balieve that Simon is some kind of expert on the subject, or even that he speaks for the majority.
Well Erica, I hope that I have not given the impression that I am an expert here? I am a parent, with all that this entails. An expert upon my own children perhaps, nothing more. Are there DCSF staff visiting this Blog? If so, then you evidently know more of the matter than I do myself! As for speaking for the majority, I doubt that either of us could make such a claim. We don't know how many people are home educating or what 99% of them think. It would certainly be hard to claim that most of them agree with either you or me.
ReplyDelete