Trahison des clercs

Some children will succeed academically despite their environment. No matter how dreadful the school or impoverished the home, there will always be those who overcome these disadvantages and become brilliant scholars or famous scientists. This is the case whether they attend a strict school or are raised in the most progressive of households. The mistake would be then, to attribute their subsequent success to the factors which they overcame by their intellectual ability or the force of their personality; in other words, to say that the child succeeded because of the terrible school or as a result of the poor home background. I am reminded of the truth of this whenever my attention is drawn to children who have supposedly flourished as a consequence of autonomous education.


A couple of weeks ago, this piece appeared in the Huffington Post:



http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/zion-lights/home-education_b_1937272.html






Inevitably, one of the comments is about a success story of autonomous education. This is of course one of the two cases who are invariably cited when discussion turns to this topic; the boy who studied biochemistry at Manchester. Before we go further, it is worth noting one or two things. The first is that for ten years, this case has been endlessly recycled as firm evidence of the efficacy of autonomous education. You might have expected by now to see one or two new names appearing.  The second is that the mother always manages to leave out key aspects of the story, in such a way as to mislead others into thinking that the bizarre experimental techniques to which her children were subjected, actually caused the desirable outcomes which followed. To give a couple of examples, in the comment on the above article, we find the following:



I have autonomously home educated my children who both chose not to do any kind of formal work until they were about 14



This of course is not true; one of the children chose to attend secondary school at eleven, although it did not work out. No mention is made of taking GCSEs at twelve either.

This case, which always seems to crop up, is fascinating, because we are able to trace the ill effects of this type of education and see their origin in the methods used. The children’s mother has given the game away in various interviews. In 2003, for example, she told of her daughter attending a ‘tester’ day at the local infants’ school. Apparently the child was asked by a teacher to write out the numbers from one to nine and when she did so, the teacher told her that she had reversed two of them. This sort of thing was against the principle of the mother and, supposedly, put the kid off mathematics for years. In other words, number and letter reversals were not to be remarked upon, let alone corrected.

Elsewhere, and apparently oblivious to the implications of what she was saying, the mother tells us that her eldest son’s handwriting was practically indecipherable when he began college at fourteen. She find this amusing and does not apparently tie it in with an ideology which dictates that wrongly formed letters should not be corrected!

My problem is that people like this then go on to encourage others to follow suit and behave in the same way. Now in their case, things worked out OK; the father was a teacher and so were the mother’s parents and this no doubt mitigated some of the ill effects of their crank methods. Other children are not so lucky. They read of this sort of case, with of course key parts edited out, and think that they too can achieve the same ends by allowing their children to choose to do no formal work until the age of fourteen. This sort of thing, when educated people who really should know better, go out of their way to mislead others who might not have had their advantages is truly trahison de clercs of the most culpable kind.

Truancy

There is currently a campaign going on in Manchester to try and reduce parent condoned truancy. The aim is discourage parents from going on holiday during term time and the the posters say things such as;

'Taking off during term time could land you with a fine. It counts as truancy. And as a parent, you are legally responsible for making sure your child is at school, or you could face a fine.'

Predictably enough, some home educating parents are angry about this and want the posters amended to remind people that only pupils registered at school are obliged to attend. I rather think that most people know this any way and that the posters are aimed at the 99.5% of parents whose children are registered pupils at a school. I had to laugh about this, because of course Graham Stuart, the home educators friend, said precisely the same thing himself last year. See;


http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/153756/Get-your-child-to-school-and-win-flying-lessons


You see? I bet you guys didn't know that it is,'tantamount to child abuse not to make sure your children go to school'? And don't forget that parents should do ' their legal duty and send their children to be educated at school.' I'm sure that if these views are acceptable from Graham Stuart, they should be equally acceptable from Manchester Council!

My daughter's views on politics

For those of you who cannot get enough of my daughter and me, a fairly general sentiment I believe, here is a chance to hear what she has to say about the political situation in this country. She is at the Labour Party Conference in Manchester today and was asked to help field calls on a phone-in on Radio 5 this morning. The more cynical among you, and indeed almost everybody in the United Kingdom who is not one of her parents, may well be scratching their heads
at this point and asking, 'What on earth does a seventeen year old girl know about anything?' This is a fair point and one which I am forced to concede! Any way, for those who do want to hear what she has to say, the phone-in starts at 21 minutes into the programme.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00twwdm/5_live_Breakfast_Your_Call_29_09_2010


There are also a number of strange people with provincial accents, but I wouldn't listen to them too closely. The good Lord alone knows where they find these peculiar individuals! I didn't realise before that anybody actually lives in the North of England; beats me why these types don't move to the Home Counties like everybody else.