A televisual treat!

My many admirers will, I am sure, be thrilled to have the opportunity to see the Family Webb at home. The link below will take you to Inside Out East.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0071mjk

Don't bother with the first ten and a half minutes, it's about windmills or something. Start at 10.30.Of course, when I say the Family Webb, that's not strictly true. Sharp eyed viewers will be asking themselves, "Where is the child's mother?"

Long before I started home educating, I was already familiar with various famous home educated children such as Ruth Lawrence the maths genius and Judith Polgar the chess prodigy. One thing that all those well known home educated families seem to have in common is that one never sees the mother! There is always some slightly demented looking father with an eerily precocious child, usually a daughter. One never sees Mrs. Lawrence or Mrs. Polgar in the pictures though. I always used to assume that this was because the father either kept the mother locked up in the attic out of the way, like Mr. Rochester's mad wife in Jane Eyre, or that he had beaten her to death and buried her under the patio. Both would be quite understandable; nothing gets in the way of a properly regulated home education more, than some soft hearted woman fussing around and asking whether the kid really needs to be able to read Chinese at the age of two!

However, now that the years have transformed me into one of those same, demented home educating fathers, I am able to answer the perplexing question of where is the wife when the cameras are rolling. In my own wife's case, she refused point blank to be involved with the business and retired to the bedroom to re-read "Follyfoot". She said that if I insisted on dragging her in front of a television camera, she would denounce me for being a cruel and tyrannical parent. I thought it best to let her have her way......