For there are strange raptors

I have been a bit of a failure in keeping up to date with the Children, Schools, and Families Act 2010 - which had included all the Badman recommendations for the compulsory registration of home educated children and so on and so forth. 

Turns out it passed into law on April 8th. With all the home educated stuff removed. Completely. 

So, rejoice, rejoice, and remember: Education is compulsory, school is not.

I'll end with a quote from Lord Lucas on the matter*:

"We are considering a section of the Bill which will cost £20 million per annum, which is about £1,000 per home-educated child. These children receive no money to help pay the costs of examinations; no money to buy textbooks; no money to buy materials; no money and no tuition to help them over difficulties in education. Now the Government can find £1,000 for each of these children-and will spend it on auditing them. Not one penny will go to help the children; it will all go on auditing them. What have these people done to deserve that?"


* I really do not approve of the current state of affairs regarding the unelected house of Lords. However, they have swatted down and opposed so many absolutely stupid Labour policies in the past year or two that I have to feel a little bit grateful towards them. 

For more information see: http://www.freedomforchildrentogrow.org/csfbill.htm and http://www.education-otherwise.org/legal.htm

All unawares, I was reading yesterday's Guardian education supplement. Along with the usual oddities (a story on marmite's place in scientific research), there was an article entitled "Slumdog reveals learning treasures". Aha, I thought to myself, a feel good article about something innovative in education - that sounds wonderful!

Except that it sort of wasn't, because it had quotes like this:

"Having watched hundreds of Indian children learning without teachers at the Hole In The Wall computers, it became obvious that all children can work by themselves, if they want to." ~ Professor Sugata Mitra

"It [Hole in The Wall] proved that if you encourage individual learning, and give children interesting questions to look into independently, the learning process is sparked by curiosity."  ~ Professor Sugata Mitra

But wait! I hear you cry. Surely this is what autonomous education is all about? Surely anyone with the slightest grounding in education who has read anything by John Holt (1923-1985), for example, knows this.

"... the human animal is a learning animal; we like to learn; we are good at it; we don't need to be shown how or made to do it. What kills the processes are the people interfering with it or trying to regulate it or control it." ~ John Holt

"The most important thing any teacher has to learn, not to be learned in any school of education I ever heard of, can be expressed in seven words: Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners." ~ John Holt

Sound familiar? So, why has it taken this long, this long, for these ideas to still (still!) be greeted as new and innovative? Why are children still treated as mindless rebels who must be sat down, forcibly, and made to learn what the government wants? Why is it the case that the government doesn't recognise autonomous education as a valid form of education?

I know Prof. Mitra is one of the good guys, and what he's done has been really fantastic and great. But why is society so messed up in its way of dealing with children and their education? Why are we under this collective brainwashing that says that schools work and that this is how we raise our children - by making them spend 6-7 hours a day with strangers learning things by rote that they have no particular interest in so that they can progress to learning more things by rote that they have no particular interest in with a different set of strangers? Do we somehow not feel responsible for our children's education? Has the government thoroughly convinced us that we have no place educating them ourselves?

More and more I find myself drifting towards the thought that if you do not have the time or the inclination to educate your children then you have no place having children; that such a thing is quite simply irresponsible.

Every day I consider teaching as a job. In my spare time my thoughts drift towards lesson plans and ways of challenging the kids, of inspiring them, of encouraging them to reach the very peak of their potential and then some. I am a rebel teacher, seeking to bring down the system from the inside. I would question the protocol, form a subversive reading group (alá Dead Poet's Society), tell them about opera and music and the world, listen to their debates and ideas. And I know this isn't what school is like. I know I wouldn't last two minutes in an inner city comprehensive. But there are times when I'm so full of myself, so confident in my abilities, that I think I could make a difference.

Thought I should link to the actual report. 

Some of the recommendations are good. Things like the DCSF paying for exam entry, should the child want to be examined (recommendation 10). 

And then we get to recommendation 15:

Going by this BBC article, it sounds like the government will be recommended to increase monitoring of home educated kids. Will it be good for home education? I'm not sure. Increasing the LEA's (Local Education Authorities') power to allow home checks (something a number of LEAs already think they have the power to do) is, I think, somewhat an invasion of privacy - although I freely admit that I don't have a good answer as to how to check on the welfare of kids. I do not think, however hard the government claim, that schools provide a good way of checking up on this kind of thing. From that point of view, I'd rather have a national child registration scheme that checked up on everyone who has kids annually. Except that that would cause an immense fuss about nanny-states and so on. Picking on a small minority of educators won't really damage their votes all that much.

The other side to this review, that home educators should receive more support from LEAs is encouraging. Most of the advances for home education have been made by the charity Education Otherwise - things like free admission to museums, or educational discounts. I'd like to see the government give home educated kids the money that they put by for their education if they go to state school, a token that says we accept that you're choosing to educate your child at home, and that this means you will be working reduced hours, and that you will need to buy things like books, or educational software. But if they did that, they'd similarly have to give handouts to kids who go to private schools, and there might be a monetary incentive for home education. 

Ultimately, I disapprove of increased regulation of home education, partly because of my own experiences dealing with an LEA and listening to other people's stories, and partly because what it boils down to is a check on parenting, and I don't see why home educators should be singled out this way.