Is home education an educational concern?

My daughter has now gone back to Oxford and I have been musing about the extent to which the concerns of professionals around home education actually involve education itself.  When speaking to teachers, social workers and so on about this subject, it is very noticeable that education itself very seldom comes up during the conversation. This is probably because although teachers, like all other specialists, try to make what they're doing sound very complicated and hard, they know really that any fool can teach a child any subject at all. No, it is not education that tends to be the focus of discussions about home education, but rather the wisdom of keeping a child within the family and not letting her mingle with others for six or eight hours, five days a week.

The question of possible abuse or neglect sometimes comes up in the course of such conversations, but this is more as a theoretically increased risk; it isn't seen as being a huge problem. By far the greatest cause for concern is the extent to which home educated children present as different; which is to say a bit weird and not like other kids of similar age. Many, perhaps most, teachers have come across the occasional home educated child who is now at school or college and they often remark that these children and young people  come across as outsiders, not able to connect with their peers in the same way that those who have attended school from the age of four or five seem to do. It is also observed that the longer children have been out of school, the stranger and less normal they appear to be. This is felt to be a bad thing for the children themselves, making it hard for them to get along with others.

Now I obviously cannot be expected fully to share such feelings and yet there is no doubt at all that there is something in this. Many home educated children have been withdrawn from school because they have been bullied. Often, this bullying has been because they are different in the first place. If the child is then taken from school and kept with the mother for a a few years, it is hardly to be expected that this would have the effect of making him or her more like other children; quite the opposite in fact. 

This then is in my experience the point which most worries professionals, that children who do not attend school tend often to become different from other children of their age. They think differently and behave and talk differently. Parents might find this a pleasing thing, because in many cases their child talks, thinks and behaves more like the parents than he does other children of his age. This cannot help but be flattering to a mother or father! It would be interesting to know what, if any, the implications of this might be when children become adults.  Do they settle down and become like everybody else or do they remain slightly off-beam and perhaps a little eccentric? Is there any correlation between this and the length of time that a child is out of school?  Is it more likely to be the case with children who were deregistered due to bullying? Is some of this perceived strangeness attributable to the relatively high proportion of home educated children on the autistic spectrum? I feel that there is scope here for somebody's thesis or research project.

Another myth in British home education; there is no evidence to show that socialisation is a problem for home educated children

The question of socialisation always rears its head in any discussion between home educators and  those who send their children to school. It is often asserted by home educators that there is no reason to think that their children are any less socialised than those at school, but this is not really true.

There is a bit of a difficulty when discussing socialisation of children. Parents naturally tend to think that their own kids are well adjusted and sociable. They typically think this, even if their offspring are lonely psychopaths about to carry out a massacre at the local high school. Needless to say, if anybody asks me about my own child, I will claim that she is clever, popular and well balanced. There is no reason to suppose that this is true; it is just what parents think about their own  kids. We must take home educating parents statements about sociability with a grain of salt. There is anecdotal evidence on the other side, of course. Many teachers and lecturers say that the home educated children they come into contact with are strange and do not fit in. We must treat these suggestions too with some scepticism , because teachers are not unbiased; many of them disapprove of home education and may not like the confident air that some home educated children have. Is there any objective evidence to which we can turn? Fortunately, there is; although it is not conclusive.

I am not a great fan of Paula Rothermel’s work, but she did carry out some tests on the social skills of home educated children. The results were surprising and not generally known among home educating parents. Bearing in mind that the samples were small and must be treated with caution, what was discovered? Rothermel used two different Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaires and these gave differing results. One showed that the home educated children had social skills as good as those of children at school; the other diagnosed many problems with the home educated children. What sort of problems? Perhaps we should let Rothermel’s words speak for themselves. She found that, ‘ Theft amongst the home-educated boys was substantially higher than for the schoolchildren’ She also discovered that, ‘the home-educated children here emerged as mostly 'Abnormal' in terms of their 'Prosocial Behaviour'.’ and also, ‘Socially, the SDQ found 61% of the home-educated children to exhibit 'abnormal' social behaviour,’.

These are quite disturbing findings, but they are not the only conclusion that Rothermel reached. Home educated girls in particular seemed prone to difficulties in socialisation. For example:

‘the home-educated sample demonstrated more signs of aggressive behaviours than the schoolchildren from the Rutter et al study, particularly for home-educated girls where aggressiveness was at 22.7% as opposed to 5.3% for Rutter's girls’



‘A comparison with the home-educated sample's data and that provided by Ekblad (1990) relating to previous studies, revealed that the home-educated children were more aggressive than the norm and that the girls' levels of anxiety was higher than those found in other studies.’


None of this is of course conclusive and I have mentioned elsewhere my reservations about both the size of the samples used and the methods for selecting them. Never the less, it remains the fact that in the only professional evaluation of the socialisation of home educated children in this country, serious problems were found. As I said earlier, one test found these problems and the other did not, which means that the question remains open. It is however not reasonable to claim, as many home educators do, that there is no reason to think that the socialisation of home educated children is any worse than that of those at school. There is reason to think this so, but the evidence is not conclusive.

Socialisation

When I was interviewed on Radio Sheffield the other day, it was perhaps inevitable that one of the questions asked should relate to socialisation. I often get a little tetchy when this subject is raised in connection with home education and it was all I could do to stop myself swearing at the idiot asking the question!

     What nobody with children at school ever seems to realise is that the socialisation which is the norm at schools is actually of a very limited and specific type, which is often not transferable to real life. To explain what I mean by this, it will be necessary to relate a personal anecdote.

     When my daughter was thirteen and also in the summer when she was fourteen, the local authority here in Essex managed to get hold of some money to run a series of events over the long summer holiday. These were courses and activities aimed at children and young people of all ages. They ranged from archery and canoeing to poetry and self assertiveness workshops. All were completely free to the young people taking part. My daughter signed up for masses of things for each of those summers and had a great time.

     What I found profoundly depressing was that many of the activities had to be cancelled, because not enough children wanted to take part and it was not worth laying them on only for one or two. This was puzzling, because a constant complaint round here is that there is nothing for young people to do.  I was so curious about this that I looked into it a bit; asking the parents of schoolchildren that I know, why they thought that their own children had not been interested. The answers were interesting. Typical responses from the young people themselves were statements such as, “I wouldn’t know anybody.”  or “None of my mates are going.” The idea of turning up to met a bunch of people that they did not know was frankly unnerving for these schoolchildren. My own daughter and also incidentally a few other home educated children locally, just turned up alone and joined in. This was an uncomfortable idea for many children of school age, which is why so many events were not run in the end.

     In effect, the children at school had been conditioned to socialise with a group of thirty or so other young people, none of whom varied in age by more than twelve months. They were keen to mix with these children, but not with anybody who was slightly young or older. They certainly did not want to spend the day with strangers. This is in sharp contrast to many home educated children, who are used to mixing with unknown people of all ages; from toddlers and babies, all the way through to very old men and women. 

A common frame of reference

I don't think that any home educating parent subscribes to the popular myth of the home educated child as a socially inept misfit, irrevocably harmed by his selfish parents' insistence on not allowing him to join a peer group and attend school like everybody else's kids. Certainly, the available research does not seem to bear out this widely held view. Both Rudner in Achievement and Demographics of Home School Students ( Education Policy Analysis Archives Volume 7, No. 8 1999) and also Shyers in Comparison of Social Adjustment between Home and Traditionally School Students (University of Florida, Ph.D Dissertation 1992), found no evidence at all to show that the social skills of home educated children were inferior to those of children at school. Quite the opposite in fact! Both found that home educated children actually scored higher than the schooled. Their social skills tended to be better than those of children confined to classrooms.

There is one way, however, that the home educated child cannot help but be something of an outsider, both during childhood and also in later life. Everybody has been to school. Black or white, Muslim or Christian, rich or poor, male and female, young and old; it is practically the only thing that everybody in this country has in common. The experience of childhood is shaped and defined by school to such an extent that it becomes an integral and assumed part of the background of all the citizens of the United Kingdom. It is a great unifying factor.

Talk to anybody at random and they will have a fund of anecdotes about their childhood, all of them coloured by the background of school. Breaking up for the summer holidays, cold winter's days on the football pitch, school dinners, playtime, the experience of belonging to a close group of friends, even encountering bullying; for almost everybody you meet, this is common ground.
Not so of course for the child educated at home. True, her life might be happier than that of the schoolchild; at least that is what her parents tell themselves. But different, certainly. The children met once a week at a home education group are not the same as the closely knit bunch of friends seen every day for six hours or so at school. Better perhaps, but definitely not the same. Swimming regularly with a parent is not at all the same as changing for PE with your friends at school. Walking to and from school with friends is a different experience from walking to the library or museum with your mother.

Children educated at home by their parents are thus deprived of a common frame of reference shared by everybody else in the country. Even those who have thoroughly enjoyed the experience of being home educated can feel a little wistful about this when all their contemporaries are chatting about school days. Because school still lingers on in the hearts of us, even forty or fifty years after we leave. A lot of adults still have a mental association with September as 'back to school'. It is impossible to see a bunch of schoolchildren without fleetingly remembering one's own school days.

Of course, for the home educating parent, these memories might be more likely to be painful than for most people. It is curious to note the number of high profile home educators whose time at school was unhappy. It may be coincidence, but it looks to me rather a leitmotif of the home educating parent; that they were often bullied or otherwise unhappy at school. Not all of them of course, but a remarkable number make throwaway remarks which reveal that whatever their ostensible motives for home education, the experience of their own school days is a factor in the decision to home educate.

Going to school is, as I observed above, the one thing which we all have in common. I have never met a man of my own age who hadn't been to school and I suspect that this is the case with all the other home educating parents who might be reading this. We all do what we feel to be best for our children, I take that as given, but we should think very carefully before setting our children apart in this way from everybody else in the country whom they are likely to meet!

Home educated children and socialisation

A mother who teaches her child at home asked me recently about the question of socialisation. It is practically an article of faith among many home educators that the entire socialisation problem is a complete myth. Indeed, even asking about it can make one look like a newcomer to the whole business and probably one who has been got at by their local authority into the bargain! I mean, socialisation! Everybody knows that home educated children aren't stuck at home, but get out to meet loads of people. Well, yes......and no.

The person who asked me about this was well aware that her child would be able to socialise to the extent of meeting other children. What she was specifically concerned about was how her child would be able to build relationships with those children. This is a very good question indeed, and one which is not always addressed by home educators.

There is of course all the difference in the world between seeing the same people at work every day, perhaps going to lunch with them, walking to the tube, going for a drink after work and so on and the situation with those we see briefly for an hour a week; say at an evening class. In the one case, which is very similar to school, we get to know them pretty well. In the other, which is like the ballet class which a home educated child might attend, we barely have the chance to exchange a few words. A lot of the "socialisation" undertaken by home educated children falls into this latter category; an hour or so once a week for specific activities. There is seldom the sustained, day in day out, week after week type of contact with the same bunch of kids which gives rise naturally to friendships at school.

There are ways round this. When my own daughter was little, I would assiduously "court" the parents of children whom I though might make suitable friends for her. This is a damned tricky business for a man, since most of the other parents are mothers. On the one hand you run the risk of looking like a predatory paedophile cruising around looking for new victims, on the other you might present as a lone father yourself, hitting on single mothers! Since my own social skills are nor particularly well developed, this led to some awkward situations over the years. I had a fair number of successes though, children that my daughter could have for sleepovers and so on. I have to say that I had to put quite a bit of work into this, even just to acquire three or four regular friends for my daughter. I must also say that the associations which I was obliged to form with various mothers in order to facilitate this gave rise to a certain amount of pursing of lips, narrowing of eyes and sharp intakes of breath from my wife.

Interestingly, now that she is sixteen and more or less her own boss, Simone does not choose to see any of these friends whom I so carefully engineered for her. Some of them, she saw for over eight years, but the friendships, if that is what they were, died without my input. I was of course always careful to ask her, "Would you like to see Joanne?" or Mary or whoever, so this was all done with her approval. Never the less, I do not really know just how good an idea it is for a parent to be arranging a child's social life in this way. In retrospect, perhaps not a very good idea.

The good news is that now she is at college, she does not seem to have any difficulty socialising and making friends. Presumably the experience of being home educated did her no particular harm in that regard. (This does not of course mean that when she is thirty, she will not be weeping to her therapist about the lonely childhood which she was forced to endure in the company of her mad father.) I am curious to know what others have found about this, especially those whose children have now grown up. The person who asked me this question visits this Blog and I am sure that she would like to hear other people's views about this.

The problem with home educators......

The problem with home educators is the same problem that hippies and skinheads used to have some years ago. It is a problem that Goths, Jehovah's Witnesses, home educators and a lot of other tiny minority groups who refuse to conform to the mores of the society in which they live, still have. These types all seem really weird to outsiders and often a mythology grows up about them in those who don't usually know any personally. For instance hippies were all regarded as promiscuous drug addicts, skinheads beat up gays and Pakistanis, that sort of thing. With home educators, the idea is that their children are at greatly increased risk of physical and sexual abuse, forced marriage and possibly even murder. This is one part of the problem.

The second part of the problem is that like all those who are used to living a peculiar and atypical lifestyle, home educators have forgotten just how they appear to others; that is to say as a bunch of freaks and oddballs. That they should be unaware of this is perfectly understandable from the perspective of the home educating parent. After all, what are they doing that is strange? Just looking after their children and trying to help them to learn. I mean that's what most people do until their children are five, but carry on with it after that age and people give you some pretty odd looks! Also of course, many home educators spend a lot of time chatting on the internet to other home educators, their friends are often home educators and their family and neighbours are often too polite to mention how weird it all looks to normal citizens.

The problem really becomes apparent only when something like the Badman report crops up. Most people, both parents of schoolchildren and others, find it quite reasonable that home educators should be checked regularly by the local authority. This is partly because they seem to be a pretty strange bunch and it sounds like a good idea that we should be seeing how their children are, but also because the safety and welfare of children is very dear to the heart of the man in the street. Anything which makes children safer must, almost by definition, be a good thing.

The perspective on such proposals from some home educators could hardly be more different. Teaching one's children at home is, for them, the most natural thing in the world. How dare anybody suggest that their children are not safe at home! They feel picked on and victimised. This is of course exactly how Goth teenagers feel and, for that matter, other fringe groups like naturists .

Here is the heart of the problem. If we deliberately set ourselves apart from the rest of society by our behaviour or personal appearance, then we can hardly be surprised if society and its more conventional members view us askance and mistrust our motives. In a sense, we can be said to have brought the problem upon ourselves. Readers might remember a year or two ago, the fellow who decided that he had a perfectly legal right to walk from one end of the country to the other stark naked. I have no idea at all of the legal situation, but I do know that he was regularly arrested and treated by the general public as a wandering madman. He had a choice. Either he could put his trousers on and walk from Lands End to John O' Groats peaceably and without a fuss, or he could do it naked and be stopped and bothered by the police at every touch and turn. One or the other, but not both. Home educators are in a sense in a similar condition.

Those who have chosen not to send their children to school may or may not have good reasons for what they are doing. Most people, in fact society as a whole, find the whole thing a bit fishy and probably somewhat suspicious. These attitudes are something which we must expect as a result of our choice. Some of the recommendations of the Badman Report perhaps stem from this point of view. On the other hand, we could just send our kids to school like everybody else and then there would be no problem and everyone will think that we are normal. What we cannot do is adopt a course of action which over 99% of the population regard as utterly bizarre and then affect shock and disbelief if we are treated as crackpots and weirdos!

Everybody goes to school

There is one thing that practically every grown person in this country has in common. Young or old, rich or poor, black or white, male or female; everybody has attended school. Well, almost everybody. Everybody except the tiny handful of misfits and cranks who have been home educated. It is sometimes difficult for those intimately involved with some hobby, pastime or lifestyle, to appreciate just how strange it looks to outsiders. You have only to listen to a Scientologist or Moonie explaining his belief system and watch the expressions on the faces of the uninitiated as they listen. That's exactly the same look that you will see on people's faces when you talk to them about home education. I mean why wouldn't anybody send their kid to school? That is seriously weird!

Because so many of us spend a lot of our time talking, writing, reading and thinking about home education, we tend sometimes to forget how it looks to others. We take it for granted that everyone knows about the Badman Report or that people are aware that while education is compulsory, school is not. In fact, of course, the vast majority of people are still completely in the dark about all this. The Internet may have made information more freely available, but you still have to look for it.

The truth is, school is a given, probably the only given about which you can be certain when you meet a stranger. You may not know where she was born, who she votes for or how much she earns, but you definitely know that she went to school! In this respect, the adult who has never attended school is bound to be something of an oddity. It cannot help but mark one out in a thousand different ways, not all of them immediately apparent.

When my daughter started college last week, she came home a little bemused on the first day. Some of the children who had started were enchanted by a fantastically novel experience, something that they found really peculiar about college; they could visit the lavatory whenever they wished without first seeking permission! My daughter was utterly baffled by this. She also could not understand why a lot of the students persisted in calling the lecturers "Sir" and "Miss" , rather than using their Christian names. She has never called anybody "Sir" in the whole course of her life. These are two small examples of the shared cultural background that all adults in this country share, but from which home educated children are excluded. This lack of a common background cannot help but mark the home educated person out as being different from others, even a bit of an oddball. This might not necessarily be a good thing.

I still have a lot of doubts about home education, even as to whether it is the best way of raising children. Educationally, it is of course an amazingly efficient way of working. Unlimited one to one tuition, unrivalled opportunity for field trips and lectures in any subject you like, no distractions by a lot of idiots who don't want to learn. From that point of view, it is unbeatable. I am not at all sure though whether it is the best way for a child to grow and develop socially. I am also a little concerned at how home educated children may, as they get older, diverge more and more from the common social values which link all members of society together.

On a wider level, I cannot quite make up my mind whether home education is a marvellous, fast growing movement which represents in some sense the future of individualised learning, or if it is just another of those crackpot ideas like water births and macrobiotic diets over which the middle classes periodically go mad. Only time will tell.

The "S" word

I am always amused when the parents of children at school ask me sadly, "Don't you think that your daughter might have missed out on the social side of school?" Here is an example of why I find this funny.

A few years ago our local council staged a raft of activities during the Summer holidays for children and young people. After all, everybody agrees that there's not much for the kids to do round here over the Summer. That year there was archery, kyaking, assertiveness training; masses of exciting stuff to do and all of it completely free. Needless to say my daughter, who was eleven at the time, booked up for practically everything . Unfortunately, about half the sessions were cancelled because not enough children could be found to make it worthwhile to run them. Odd.

When I asked the children of friends why they had not wanted to do all these interesting things, the response was predictable and depressing. "I won't know anyone there!", "None of my mates are going!" In other words, the idea of going somewhere and doing stuff with young people that they didn't know was anathema to these children.

I have observed this phenomenon over and over again. By the time they reach secondary school at the latest, children start sticking only to their school friends or those in other known groups. They will not generally talk to those older or younger, or socialise with adults. They avoid strangers like the plague. Is this the much vaunted socialisation? There is a pretty lousy college in our area; if you want a decent sixth form you have to go to a school about five miles away. Almost without exception, local school leavers choose the college, purely and simply because that's where everybody else is going.

The phrases, "I won't know anybody!" and "None of my mates are going!" are almost leitmotifs of modern youth. Those two commonly heard expressions of anxiety tell us all we really need to know about socialisation among schooled young people.