Having become increasingly alarmed by people trying to replicate school at home and all that nonsense it is reassuring to see someone doing it right.
Think of all the lessons learnt while doing this.
Home education
Elect
The Guardian’s [W:Ben Goldacre] piece today threw up some interesting links. The VoteMatch site is like an online dating service for you to be matched to your ideal local candidate. One particularly taxing question was the old tax breaks for educating children outside the school system….
I remain open minded about such things. While the BNP were in favour the Lib Dems (my ideal match apparently) were not…
It looks like a close call between Lib Dems and Greens but the local Green chappie, a teacher, has ruled himself out with a leaflet that promises to protect the education system; which is about as un-green a system as one could possibly devise.
A glass of water in the desert
Amongst all the home education dross we get these days [W:Astra Taylor] talking about her unschooling is a (long but worth sticking with) treat…
And an interview too.
The bare truth (will out)
It seems to me that the home education community (whoever they are!) lack a certain degree of imagination in their protestations against the [W:Badman Review]. “They sign those petitions ’til they’re sad in the face. And still they seem to be getting no place.” So “If public policy gets on your nerves. And no one pays attention to you” all you need to do is get naked!
What you have to do is what the [W:Doukhobor] did….
Written by [W:Malvina Reynolds] and performed by [W:Pete Seeger].
Select a quote, win friends, influence people
The Freedom In Education Under Threat blog is one of the reality distorting points of view that seem to predominate the home education blogging world. The Home Education and Religion post is a typical non-story that is inflated to bizarre proportions.
Selectively quoting is a dangerous game. Peter Traves was responding to a comment about failing schools. The full quote is:
May I respond to that? I don’t see how the issue of failing schools negates the issue about our responsibility to children who are not educated in schools. We have a responsibility to improve all schools, and that is absolutely right and proper. On the issue of withdrawal, parents withdraw their children from school for a whole range of reasons. I did six years of home visits, and there were parents who withdrew their children because we had failed them-that is absolutely true. There were parents who had withdrawn their children for ideological reasons because they had a profound belief in a different form of education, which I respected. There were also parents who withdrew their children for particular religious views because they wanted those views inculcated in that child. It is not just about the rights of parents, but about the rights of children. It is not necessarily about the state’s responsibility to children, but about the community’s responsibility to them.
So what is the complaint? Are we being asked to support the Indoctrination of children? Who knows? The original complaint is conflated with some perceived descent into a fascist state.
Really? The evidence seems to be a little slim.
Shall we just ignore “The council said the children would not have been moved solely on the basis of weight.” Perhaps they were the only fat family in town and so singled out. Perhaps not.
Nowhere in the linked article or in the report is there mention of “Your 5 year old being taught how to masturbate”
But why let mere facts get in the way of good rant story.
Famous people who were smart enough not to be home educated
Home educators love to cut and paste. A popular choice for practising their cut and paste skills are lists of famous people who were home educated. Look – here comes one now….
The reality was… if you were born before schools were widely available (I note those born in the 1700s or earlier), female, black, poor, wealthy, a child performer, from an age when young children worked, lived in the middle of nowhere, or had poor health….. the chances are you would have had little or no school based education. This is not a positive / choice / elective thing. This is just the way it was. So let’s look at this list….
Abraham Lincoln – Impoverished family. Some schooling. At 9 his mother died. Mostly self taught.
Noel Coward – Chapel Royal Choir School
, Clapham
Michael Faraday – 
“my education was of the most ordinary description, consisting of little more than the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic at a common day-school. My hours out of school were passed at home and in the streets”
LeAnn Rimes – Child performer
Phillis Wheatley – Slave born c. 1753 Tutored by her ‘owners’
Benjamin Frankilin (B. 1706)
 – attended Boston Latin School for a couple of years but unable to continue due to a lack of money
Claude Monet – Le Havre secondary school of the arts
John Paul Jones (B. 1747)
 – Apprenticed at 13
George Washington (B. 1732)
John Philip Sousa – 
educated in harmony and musical composition from age six. Apprenticed at 13
Margaret Atwood – 
attended Leaside High School, Toronto and graduated in 1957
Henry Clay (B. 1777)
 – Assorted education/working childhood
Ansel Adams – Withdrawn from school in 1915 briefly tutored at home, returning to private school.
John Burrows (? Who he?)
Whoopi Goldberg
 – St Columba Catholic School
, 331 W 25th St, New York.
Wright Brothers – Went to school. Wilbur briefly educated at home due to injury sustained at school.
William Samuel Johnson (B. 1727)
 – graduated from Yale College aged 17
Beatrix Potter
 – Wealthy family. Educated by governesses at home.
Irving Berlin – Left school at 8 to work to support family after death of father.
Sandra Day O’Connor – 
For most of her early schooling, O’Connor lived in El Paso with her maternal grandmother, and attended public schools and the Radford School for Girls, a private school.
Andrew Carnegie – 
educated at a Lancastrian school, emigrated to US and started work at 13.
Charlie Chaplin – Archbishop Temples Boys School.
Blaise Pascal (B. 1623)
 – Educated by father himself university educated mathematics/scientist.
Hanson (Blush)
Walt Whitman – 
Left school at 11 to work to support impoverished family.
Mark Twain (B. Samuel Langhorne Clemens)
 – Father died when he was 11 – started work as apprentice printer.
Andrew Wyeth
home-tutored because of his frail health
Martha Washington (B. 1731) – 
Raised on parents 500 acre plantation
Soichiro Honda – Futamata Senior Elementary School.
Alexander Graham Bell – 
Royal High School, Edinburgh – left at 15
John Witherspoon (B. 1723) – 
attended the Haddington Grammar School, and obtained a Master of Arts from the University of Edinburgh in 1739.
Robert Frost – graduated from Lawrence High School
Pierre Du Pont – 
(Which one is not specified) Wealthy family – typical education followed….
Phillips Exeter Academy, Princeton University, and Harvard Law School
William Blake (B. 1757)
 – Apprenticed at 14
John Burrows (? Again. Who he?)
Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (B. 1689) – 
College of Juilly
Andrew Jackson (B. 1767)
 – Educated at local school during American War of Independence. Joined army at 13. Prisoner of war and orphaned at 14.
Pierre Curie – 
educated at the Sorbonne where he became an assistant in 1878. In 1882 he was made laboratory chief at the School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry where he remained until he was appointed professor of physics at the Sorbonne in 1904.
Louis Armstrong – Impoverished childhood attended Fisk School for Boys
Charles Dickens – William Giles’s School, in Chatham. Started working age 12 – rest of family in debtors prison.
Felix Mendelssohn – 
Private school / university but travelled a lot.
John Wesley (B. 1703)
 – Early education with parents then Charterhouse School in London
Thomas Paine (B.1737) – 
Thetford Grammar School. Apprenticed at 13.
Peter Kindersley – King Edward VI School, Norwich and the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts
Catharine Beecher – 
Initially taught at home went to school for limited education available to girls.
Hudson Taylor – educated at home and at a private day school, and as apprentice to his father. At fifteen he worked in a bank to learn accountancy
Charles Peale (B. 1741)
Florence Nightingale – Wealthy family. Father – educationist financed schools on his estate, oversaw the education of his daughters.
Joseph Pulitzer – 
private tutors/school
Theodore Roosevelt – “Owing to my asthma I was not able to go to schoolâ€
Franklin D. Roosevelt – (different family although concatenated on list)
Groton School
Charlotte Mason – Mostly educated at home
William Carey (B. 1761) – 
Father local schoolmaster. Apprenticed at 14.
Leonardo da Vinci (B. 1452) – 
Little known of early childhood. Apprenticed at 14.
John Stuart Mill – (This is not a good example!)
 Grew up “in the absence of love and the presence of fear… the boy worked alone with his father from 5 to 9 a.m., then assisted James (father) until noon with the lessons of two younger sisters. There is not a moment’s relaxation¦ no fault however trivial escapes [James’s] notice; none goes without reprehension or punishment. On one occasion all three children were kept at their books until 6 p.m. without a midday meal: the fault today is a mistake in one wordâ€
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (B. 1756)
 -Travelled widely from age of 6
Albert Schweitzer – At Mülhausen high school awarded his “Abitur†(the certificate at the end of secondary education).
Hans Christian Andersen – 
father died when he was 11 worked to support himself. Sponsor paid for him to go to a grammar school in Slagelse,
Ernest Shackleton – schooled by a governess until the age of 11, when he began at Fir Lodge Preparatory School in West Hill, Dulwich. At 13 he entered Dulwich College, a leading public school for boys
Joan of Arc (B. 1412)
There is a long history of actual educators who have developed the ideas of education otherwise than by schooling but that thread is broken and lost by the dumbing down of the home educators.
Curiouser and curiouser!
My recent post is a chart topper with Google.com but seems to have been banished from Google.co.uk listings. A chap could start to develop a persecution complex 
The curious case of the missing "Badman" page
Question:
What do you get when you subtract….
from…
an identical Google.com search?
Answer:
The Dark Lord Badman’s Guide to Home Education – Arranging An Inspection
Remainder:
Update 28th July 2009:
This piece had a lot of visitors yesterday (but not a single comment ;-)) most of whom were from the UK. A couple of visitors from [W:Google] itself passed through – probably in response to this link.
Of course Google searches are dynamic things and this page itself is now appearing in the .com listing. So for the record here is a picture of the original listings.
Update 2nd August: Curiouser and curiouser.
Back to basics: education otherwise than by mass schooling after Badman
Now that the dust has started to settle on the initial indignant ranting of the home educators it may be safe to pop above the parapet and float a few random thoughts….
The response to the Badman report should be on two discrete fronts, the civil liberties issues and the education issues, with each branch being argued separately.
One needs to acknowledge the limited world view of the professional educators. They went to school. They went to university. They went back to school. Any ideas that are outside this scenario can be difficult for them to grasp. Showing workings and adding labels to an illustrative diagram often helps.
The Badman report is a huge leap backwards to where we were decades ago so perhaps we should retrace our steps a few decades and find some other educational path to follow; one that does not lead to the odious home education model that is so common today.
Perhaps a starting point might be the description of various forms of education defined by Combs with Prosser and Ahmed in 1973 which included:
Informal education: the truly lifelong process whereby every individual acquires attitudes, values, skills and knowledge from daily experience and the educative influences and resources in his or her environment – from family and neighbours, from work and play, from the market place, the library and the mass media.
Which itself followed on from a 1972 [W:UNESCO] report called “Learning To Be” which raised the notion that…
education should enable each person to be able to solve his own problems, make his own decisions and shoulder his own responsibilities.
Learning To Be was adopted as one of The Four Pillars in Education for the 21st century (1996 – hence the ugly web site ;-). Etc. Etc. It would be far easier to defend from such extant heights than from the piddling [W:molehill] that is home education.
Someone should thank [W:Gordon Brown] for his vociferous support in a speech about education on the 5th May 2009 (my emphasis):
An alternative approach would be a significantly increased top-down role for government in the education system, local authorities running every school to meet centrally-set targets and regulations. I reject this approach. It would stifle innovation, deny teachers and school leaders the freedom they need to drive change. It would cut parents out of any role in improving education standards.
Bear in mind that the government’s response to the petition regarding the review said:
One of the key principles underpinning The Children’s Plan published by the Department for Children, Schools and Families is that the government does not bring up children – parents do.
Laughing out loud at those who suggest that a child’s safety and or well being are best monitored by professionals in a formal environment is really bad form.
On the other hand laughing at the home educators, and their posturing that has so successfully landed them in this pickle, is quite acceptable.
Why home education sucks (Part 735/B)
Apparently it is Open season on home education (whatever that is) which tells us something of the bizarre parallel universe in which home educators (whoever they are) seem to live – ever the hapless victims of oppression and discrimination. In their topsy turvy universe everything is painted in the darkest colours possible. Children do not just go to school they are “sacrificed… to daily incarceration” Home educators constantly decry the use of propaganda by the state whilst creating their own version of the [W:Black Legend] and the Big Lie; of course their version is not propaganda, their version is the truth for they have a secret gift that will lead them to a promised land.
Not satisfied with turning education into a quasi-religous cult the home educators are now conspiring with the state to turn the current freedom of parents to choose how they wish to educate their children (as enshrined in Section 7 of the Education Act) into a dichotomy between School or Home Education. This is their most sinister and pernicious act.
While presenting themselves as victims of the heavy handed state they seem to have missed the irony that they can cite the Human Rights Act to defend themselves and use the Freedom Of Information Act to gather information from officialdom. I wouldn’t be surprised if the evil/nazi/pinko/leftist/commie/fascist (delete as appropriate) government starts forcing them and their children to roam the countryside – freely.
How many people are put off educating their children otherwise than at school by all this home education nonsense? Someone should set up a database to monitor the situation.