Home Education Blog Carnival – for IFED ’09

Hi everyone, and welcome to the Home Education Blog Carnival in celebration of International Freedom in Education Day! I have had a lot of fun (and quite a bit of stress!) putting this carnival together, and want to thank everyone who has so generously sent links in for inclusion, and who hasn’t minded when I’ve gone rummaging around in their blogs for nice juicy posts to include! I have tried to include posts from home educators of many different viewpoints, to go just a little way to show the wonderful diversity of home education, especially as that diversity is so much under threat at the moment in England. The first section of the carnival deals with the day to day lives of home educators, and why and how we go about home educating. The second section highlights some of the challenges home educators face, both from the “system”, and from members of the public who often have very little understanding of home education. Here many of the myths around home education are debunked. The third section is given over to the Badman Review in England, and how that threatens home education as we currently know it.

Right, I’ll get out of the way now and let you get on with reading the carnival! I hope you enjoy it, I hope it inspires you, and I hope both those who already know about home education, and those who are less familiar with it, can take something from it.

how and why we home educate, and our day to day lives

The whole world is our classroom

Lisa at Renegade Parent has written Why we home educate

Unfortunately, in the march towards standardisation, the classes, curricula, lessons, testing, assessments and standardisation that are key features of most schools fail to cater to the individual. They emphasise the importance of “an education” as a time-restricted, consumable product, over learning – an internal, lifelong process.

Helen at Petit Haricots demonstrates how a structured approach works in her family, in Work in Progress – next mission statement

We need to encourage her to see the need to strengthen the areas of weakness, so that learning is not prone to unravel unexpectedly in the future. Since this is is something she doesn’t enjoy so much, we need to find and agree levels that will incrementally lead to improvement, but don’t make it an unbearable chore, scaffolding and encouraging. this is most noticeable in the area of english language, grammar and spelling. At present we don’t write or record many of the things we do, because of the dislike and difficulty writing. I think that we gradually should start to encourage a record, be it lap book, mostly drawings or photos and a few words of some of the experiments/trips out and about, and ‘topics’ should we do them.

In the post First Day Back, C AT of Little Pieces of Happiness… also shows how structured home education is working for her family

This year we are trying to be active every day mainly because some of their best work last year was after a bit of activity. So after discussing PE with the children, we put together a ‘set’ of stretching and toning exercising, that could be done in around 20 minutes a day. This is alternated with a kids yoga dvd which also takes 20 minutes and on Fridays they will be starting up ballet again so will not have to do their ‘set’ on that day. Music is simply piano practice which is about 20ish minutes a day.

Helen also tells us about her reasons for home educating in Why we HE, a post which also lists some pros and cons of HE.

When SB, our eldest, was 3.5 we started contemplating the schooling options for her. She was blissfully happy in a wonderful nursery with a 1:8 ratio and fab staff for 2 days a week. i guess, initially, we wanted to consider something that would be as good as that environment, and both of us went off into our different search modes to consider. we both had fairly instantly not considered the state primaries as being far too big [in our area enormous] and with dreadful ratios. We felt SB, as a gentler child would possibly drown in that environment. i don’t know that we were right, just, well, protective.

For many home educators, thinking about home education starts even before their children are of “compulsory school age”, with the decision of whether or not to make use of preschool facilities. SunnyMama brings together some invaluable information to help with making this choice in Preschool or not? She quotes the Preschooler’s Bill of Rights:

WE, the preschoolers of the world, have determined that parents who abdicate their responsibility to raise, educate, and care for their own children from birth to age five, jeopardize children’s lives and endanger all of humankind – and we have had enough! We are tired of being handed over to transient strangers, so-called child “experts,” daycare providers, teachers, preschools, corporations, government agencies, and special interest groups in the name of social reform and the global economy.

In Preschool Jitters, Alexis of Taking the Lid off the Sun considers her options and thinks about how her son might cope in preschool

When (if) I send him to preschool in September, who will know him, love him and respect him enough to walk that just-right balance with him? Surely, I can’t be alone in this fear. I worry that in someone else’s eyes, Lucas’ gifts will be seen as shortcomings; that his strength of character will be seen as willfulness; that his nonlinear, creative thinking will be seen as an inability to follow simple directions; that his delightful energy and talkativeness will be interpreted as hyperactivity.

In When Does Learning Happen? Jacqui at Corridor Living explains she will not be sending her toddler to preschool

I imagine how stressed I would be by such an early start. I might have lost my temper and shouted; harassed and nagged everyone into getting ready for work and school, cutting short any play or fun. “No time, no time!”, in the rush to be out the door, far too soon. James would not have had the opportunity to do all the things he did today, unless he was at home. No-one would have played with him for hours on the living room floor, in just the way he wanted to, or let him help cut mushrooms for the risotto that he asked me to make for dinner. He might have come home, tired, clutching a piece of paper with blue paint slapped on it as evidence of his creativity, but would he have been told to be quiet when he began to play the piano and sing joyously as he did after tea today? Would he have been laughed at or ridiculed for playing with his Barbie campervan – organising a trip to the beach for some of his toys?Would he have been able to do these things anyway, or might he have been told to do some other box ticking activity instead? I do not want to endanger his gentle unfolding in any way by subjecting him to the shoulds and should nots of this society and certainly not by it’s clock.

Claire has written Our Home Education Journey especially for this carnival.

School made a valiant, but failed, effort at trying to dampen my son’s spontaneous enjoyment of learning. The child who started school was inquisitive, confident and at ease around adults. But after 3 years of schooling he had become withdrawn, unsure of himself and lacked the skills needed to communicate with adults; much to our dismay. He had lost his inquisitiveness and had become resistant to learning; so for the first year of home edding we took is slowly, we learnt by living in the world around us; we went on many field trips (museums, nature parks, historical places of interest); I read books aloud; we conquered mental maths together in coffee shops; times tables we sung on car journeys; he doubled and then tripled pancake mixtures; we worked with clay, he had weekly electric guitar lesson with a great guy who plays in a band, we’d tell each other imaginary stories and so on.

In this post, Alastair, aged 10, also writes:

I felt helpless at school; I have freedom in my learning at home; I choose what I want to learn at home, at school I was forced to learn what they wanted me to learn and I had no say. At home I get more time to spend doing things I want to do for as long as I want to do it. For me Home Education is about fun not sitting down and getting fed random information that I don’t want to learn about. I didn’t learn as much in school as I now do learning at home; that’s why I found school so boring.

Beth, a home educated girl who writes at Home Education is Freedom explains what the Benefits of Home Education are to her.

Because home educated children are not stressed they can achieve whatever they want. They learn what they want at the speed they want and they are not forced to listen to things that go in one ear and out the other. The subjects children want to study just get pushed to one side at school so they can’t follow the career that they want to. When children are home educated they can give their full attention to what they want and not what the teachers want.

Su, of the blog Soaring, has made a beautiful video showing Just another home educating Monday

Sharon, writing at the blog Living and Learning Together, answers the question Why do we EHE?

I thought I would share why as a family my three daughters came out of the Government run education system to learn in a free, positive, inclusive and welcoming environment. An environment where children are not belittled or are made to feel inferior by fellow peers or by teaching staff…

Ruth of The Jumps shares the story of Daisy’s First Day Not at School, meaning the day she would have started school if she were going, and muses

I sometimes wonder how she would get on at school. Sometimes, she can seem intelligent, articulate, socially competent, and primed to succeed in such an environment. At others, she seems like a very fragile little girl, who is worried by the idea of spending all day, every day, away from Mummy; who is very difficult to persuade to do things she’s not interested in; who can be silly and rude; who seems to get this red mist of insanity when she’s in trouble, that just makes her do more and more infuriating things until I can hardly bear to look at her. Maybe she’s just four. Maybe she would learn the rules and settle down quite quickly. Maybe she would become the trouble-maker. Maybe she would be put off learning by the effort of understanding the environment. I have absolutely no idea. But I am very, very sure that the best place for her to be, at this point in her life, is here.

In the post Can a leopard change its spots? From The Mother Magazine blog, home educated Bethany (aged 12) writes

I’m currently reading the Twilight books and using the theme of vampires in other areas of life. For art, I’m doing cartoons and sketches of vampires, and in drama writing a play about them. For English, I’m writing poetry and stories. I’m hoping to bake some vampire biscuits for food tech. My sister tells me vampires come from Transylvania, so that will be something to look up for geography. Eliza says it is not a country, but mountains in Romania. Now maths. Is there such a thing as vampire algebra? And will the history books tell me the history of the blood suckers? I’m really enjoying composing music for my violin and piano, and have to do a piece for my best exams, so I’m learning to write ‘spooky’ music.

And Eliza, 10, writes

I’m teaching William (my fat lump of a short haired persian) Italian. He sleeps through most of it. Lazy git. It’s a shame he doesn’t answer when I ask what his name is, in Italian. Last week Bethany’s friend came round for a sleepover & he licked her nose & hair, yuck.

Dani at Reflections in the Greenhouse wrote a post about Autonomy as they get older and how that is working in her family.

Some things are constant – conversation, books, outings. Some things change – interests (of course), and resources needed and used. Probably the greatest joy for me is the sense of freedom that endures. I love it that my twelve year old can get up at ten and read the paper while chatting with me, before pottering off to a day of things she has chosen and often organised for herself.

Michelle at Natural Attachment tells us what A Typical Day for an Unschooler is

When did Life become so scary that we needed to hide from it by going to school — that’s what I really want to ask these people. When did Life become so devoid of learning, knowledge and success that we decided to ‘learn’ about Life by removing ourselves from it and placing ourselves into institutions that claim to have the secrets to living a Life of success, knowledge and learning? I’m still trying to figure out how Life has evaded so many seemingly intelligent people. Maybe I am confusing intelligence with an amassing of facts, figures, dates, names and grades…I might be, but I’ve had substantial and satiating conversations with several people. I went through the same system of ‘education’ that most American’s have gone through and I know that I am much more than a repository for useless factoids and ’skills’ that have no real connection or purpose in my Life.

Tracy Liebmann (Certified Life Coach – www.transformingfamily.com – www.asktracy.wordpress.com – 843-343-8956) shares her thoughts on curriculum in Parenting Curriculum at Transforming Family

I started to look at it like a musician entering a jam session. I am one person who has learned how to play my instrument who is in collaboration with the other people in my family all bringing their gifts and talents to our jam session. Together we share ideas on how we want our song to sound and then we just start playing. What flows in that moment is what matters, not the preconceived notions about what we thought the song should sound like.

Ruth, who blogs at Just Life by the Sea, has a post entitled More Structure, where she struggles with the reality of sending one of her children to school

The final nail in the HE coffin was buying name tapes for her uniform that I do not agree with in the first place. Who decides if shoes, hairstyle or a coat are “sensible” ? Why do they have to be “sensible”? Whatever that actually translates to. Grrhh. Why do they all have to look the same? I am feeling a bit resentful that the all pervasive school control on our lives has already started in subtle ways and she isn’t even there yet. The first thing I got a wake up call over was our holidays. We cannot afford to go away in the school holidays so she will have to be left behind as the school won’t let her have time out until she has been there a year AND had 90% attendance.

Maire, blogging at Natural Learning and Life, explains Why we home educate

We were fortunate in realising that we didn’t need to reproduce school at home as Beth was too traumatised [from her experience in school] to accept any sort of instruction and any attempt to control her learning would have led to battles and upset and certainly not to education.

We have been welcomed generously into the local home education communities and had the opportunity to take part in some marvellous days out, and made good friends.

K at Educational Escapades explores the idea of keeping a record of her daughter’s education in Record Keeping.

I think one of the biggest problems I have with this record-keeping is the way it can kill spontaneity and interfere with creativity. A lot of what we do is very spur of the moment, and that’s what I love about being a home educating parent – I can respond immediately to something that takes A’s interest. And A is an extremely creative person, she learns much more by following some flash of inspiration to ‘make’ something, than by working through stages/levels of workbooks. That’s just A. But I can see already how the knowledge of future contact with the EA (and not knowing how sympathetic to HE they might be) is affecting my approach to HE.

Julia, who writes at the Classroom Free blog, has a post entitled Our Day, which shows the natural simplicity of home educating, in this case spurred by a trip to the library

All I know is that about a week ago I overheard the two of them deep in conversation about nuclear weapons and their views on war. Today they came home, arms full of books and settled straight down to read them. They each read, swapped books, asked each other questions, told each other various parts of the book that they had found interesting/absurd/funny/amazing, it really was home-edding at its best. By lunch time they had written notes and labelled the pages that they thought were of interest.

The Organic Sister writes graphically of How to Shape a Child, demonstrating the damage often done by attempting to treat all children the same, or expecting them to fit into adult’s pre-conceived ideas

Instructional Warning: The finished product will very likely fit the box you’ve intended for them. But please don’t be surprised when you can no longer recognize them through the disfigured, hurting, angry, incapable, fearful, diffident and broken people they’ve become.

Danae at Three Degrees of Freedom explains how the autonomous learning that happens in her family works in Thinking About Autonomous Mongooses

So, that’s it. The core of it for me. Purposive conversation. The ground we’ve travelled in the last four years has been amazing. And it’s astounding how much each of us has squirreled away in our brains, and incredible how we are able to have ranging and fascinating conversations about weird and wonderful, neutral and ordinary, fashionable and unfashionable, historical and modern… Well, I’m sure you get the picture. About anything.

Merry at Patch of Puddles has decided some structured learning towards qualifications is what’s needed at the moment, in a post entitled And how it happened these last couple of days

There is method in the madness there; not a big fan of gcse’s or exams but Fran is quite set on doing gym coaching and dancing teaching and really wants to focus on those. With that in mind i feel that some formal academic qualifications might be a good idea. It’s all very well turning up an eloquent HEd kid at a uni interview but if she chooses to spend several years coaching she might some time in the future want to go back to something else. I’d hate her to come up against people assuming she had done those things as she “couldn’t” do the academic side, rather than understanding that she simply chose not to.

Merry also shares A Typical HE Day through a series of photos.

Lisa at Renegade Parent shows just how far removed from their children’s education many parents have become in “We need kitchens in schools to teach children how to cook,” whine parents.

Where else one might find businesses, swimming pools, theatres and recording studios? In the real world perhaps? And if this is the wholly reasonable explanation for state schools lacking such facilities, then why do we continue to perpetuate the belief that school attendance is the only way of adequately preparing children for adult life?

In a blog called In the Heart of my Home, Elizabeth gives us a Note on “Teaching” Faith to Teens, showing how this works in her home educated family.

There is a decided emphasis on Peter Kreeft, to be sure. Peter Kreeft resonates with the people in our home. What isn’t listed on the young lady’s curriculum are the Peter Kreeft books we read and discussed last year, books that were particularly suited to young teens seeking some answers for themselves. You could say they are apologetics books, but the emphasis is not on winning an argument with someone else. The emphasis is on truly understanding the philosophical underpinnings of the faith for oneself.

Elizabeth also details how she goes about planning her children’s education in Been There, Done That: the Seasonal Post on Choosing Curriculum

I cracked open my brand new planners and began to plot it all out, pulling from all the various pages and texts in those various syllabi. Then, the tweaking crept in. I substituted a little here, a little there. I recognized that I didn’t have certain books, but I did have worthy substitutes. Scratching, switching, tailoring, tinkering…and so it went, until I recognized that it would indeed be simpler to plot out my own plans and then to pull from those as the year progressed instead of forcing a fit.

K at Educational Escapades explains how she goes about tackling a subject that her daughter is not so keen on in Back to Work

I’m using a mix and match approach to maths, picking a theme then gathering lots of info from lots of different resouces, and using what I think will appeal to A most. A still has a very negative attitude to maths, so I’m being very gentle and encouraging with it. I’m doing my best to make it enjoyable and relevant. I’ve told A there are only 2 rules for our maths sessions – 1. she can take as long as she needs to think about/work out things (she reacts very badly when pressured or rushed on maths questions, and completely loses confidence in her ability), and 2. its ok to get things wrong, as thats a crucial part of the learning process.

Sally of Happy@Home posts Something not to do with the review…nearly, detailing the “inventing/doing/exploring” her children had been doing.

Lani was needle felting today and Freya began working on some wet felting, but wouldn’t use hot water coz she only likes cold. I was impressed as she seemed to have all the other necessary factors in place. I came in upon this, having been very preoccupied by thrashing out some statistical stuff regarding footnote 2 of annex 5 from the EHE review (ha, see … it had to creep in there somewhere) and nursing DH with what we are diagnosing as ’swiney-man flu’ (well, you never know. It might be!) Anyway, the felting digressed, logically without heat, into soap bubble experiments.

Also check Sally’s sidebar where she lists all the places the family’s “home” education takes place!

Hannah of Home Baked Education demonstrates how home educating her son, who has Asperger’s, can accommodate him far better than a school setting would, in How it’s Going

Cameron’s curriculum arrived yesterday and he had a bit of a tizz about it as it wasn’t exactly as he had expected and the pages on some of the text books are made from a kind of paper he hates because it squeaks. We chatted about what he wants to get from it and what I can do to help and decided to try out the first days work and see how it went.

Grit of Grit’s Day, in Home Ed History demonstrates how learning often happens in home educating families.

Our history isn’t given to us from the black and white pages of a worn through text book. We feel it, do it, live it, and are spellbound by its story.

And she also show brilliantly in Come to your own conclusions about oddball how HE learning and classroom learning compare

Of course to the home educator this makes perfect sense. On our two-hour exploration we discover that quarried holes filled with water draining quickly from asphalt dumps make fish-free ponds and perfect breeding grounds for wildlife otherwise gobbled up by finny fiends…

We contemplate learning a different way to this. Perhaps dressed in grey and white and staring at a black and white photo of a brownfield site while a cover teacher whose expertise is Maths, and probably not Ecology, intones that the work set is Read the passage about the land and answer the multiple choice below.

And finally from Grit, we have There is a path that leads the other way, in which she explains how the “fantastic” educational opportunities some people think schools offer are no match for the opportunities offered by home education (make sure to read the comments, too)

Seriously, there is such a range of activities home educators can choose or create for their kids outside school – and I would stick out my neck and say there is nothing we home educators cannot find – that far from me being overawed by schools as fantastic places of educational opportunity, I have to question why they exist at all. Unless it is to provide child care while parents go to work.

Mieke of Dutchess Discloses blog give a thorough and interesting answer to the question Why Do You Home Educate?

Another myth is that children wouldn’t learn unless they’re being told to. Rubbish. There is no end to the natural curiosity and will to learn of a child, or of any human being, for that matter. And I’m sure everybody can easily think of examples, from baby’s learning to crawl, walk, talk and sing to adults learning everything there is to know about their hobby’s.

Anna, an “unschooled teen recovering from public school”, writes about how her life has changed since she left school to be home educated in Turning Seasons

The biggest change my mind has gone through, since school ended back in May, is realizing I don’t have to learn everything right now, right away. I can sit there and think about it, I can doodle it out however I would like to. I can read books out loud and laugh over mispronouncing new words without worrying! I *can* let myself be wrong. Coming back to that feeling of, I can do this!, has made me go back to many things I’ve missed for a good while.

Tech, who has set up a brand new blog here at Freedom in Education Under Threat, has written many informative posts, beginning with the Why? When? Where? and How Much? of home education in her family. This extract is from How?

The how is different for every family, and often it is different for each child within one family. The thing that you need more than anything is time. Time to learn about different ways of doing things; time to try them out to see what works best; time to readjust if something doesn’t work so well; time to develop a faith in the inate learning capabilities that are a part of every human being, if they are only allowed to be cultivated.

Obeerg at Wise Little Acorn explain the why’s in Why we Home Educate…

I didn’t know about Home Education then, and even if I had I don’t think I would have considered it as a viable option. I believed that school was the place for learning…oh my goodness how I resented the time it took away from my family, and the rules they imposed, and the useless teaching during the daytime which ended with piles of homework in the evening…which my children never did, because I never made them…because I didn’t approve…but still, I continued to send them, unthinkingly, to school.

Sunnymama, who writes at Sunnydaytodaymama, has recently written a series of posts about parenting at work, and how her toddler goes to work with her, and how that is so successful for them. These posts are very inspiring and show really well how home educated children can learn simply by accompanying their parents in their daily lives. It feeds their natural sense of curiosity and desire to learn whilst reinforcing the bond with the parent. The posts are Work, La-la-la-lah!

Sunnyboy and I sing together everyday. We sing at work together too. I believe Sunnyboy’s best start in life is with me, not with strangers in an institution, and I love being with him as he and I learn FREELY everyday.

Shopping, Children’s Work, The Way to Work, Wordless Wednesday, Self Fulfillment and Full Time Parenting, Parenting at Work,

Sunnyboy was mostly worn in a sling while I worked and from 2 years old he played on the floor beside me. Since then he’s gradually joined in with more and more tasks and has learnt so much from being with adults in a work environment. It’s been wonderful to work and learn together in a child-friendly workplace with co-workers who have become a community for us, and also to be able to make a positive contribution to our wider local community. When the choice is preschool or work, the decision for us is obvious.

Babies at Work, Children’s Work and the Continuum Concept and Work, Play and Learning the in the Lives of Young Children

Jamie6 also explains her reasons for rejecting school in Why we home educate

Far from pacing the floors in anticipation of the day we would ‘get our lives back’, we looked forward to each new experience we would share with our children. For us the prospect of handing over responsibility for the remainder of their education to strangers, always felt somewhat alien if not a little cruel. This was highlighted to me when, at just four years old, my eldest son embarked upon his first school day. The experience was not unlike a documentary I once viewed regarding the plight of evacuees during the war. We were surrounded by parents and children alike, sobbing uncontrollably at the prospect of being separated. When it came to the point when the class room had to be entered, my precious child clung tightly to my leg, begging me not to make him go. Then to my horror, unable to allow such delay, his teacher physically prised us apart and dragged him screaming into the building, turning only briefly to remind me that this was in his best interests!

And there are yet more Reasons for Home Schooling at Bearthmama’s place

My kids are socialized around humans of various ages, genders, races, abilities, etc. The whole world is open for them to explore. This is the most important reason we homeschool. I don’t want my children raised largely by other children their age. They are wholly part of our family and an integral part of our world.

Joxy of Free Range Family shares her reasons for home educating her young son in Home Education – Why?

Being single means I am now in a position financially where HEing is possible and Rye’s dad has very little involvement with his son and (so far) has not questioned the choices I’ve made for Rye. Being pagan simply means it is an added dimension to Rye’s learning experience – being pagan means he will learn about nature, herbal lore, folklore, magic, festivals and the traditions that we will develop as a family that is pagan. Lifespan I suppose first introduced me to the idea of Home Education – although in a slightly different format to most people’s experience. Lifespan showed me there is alternatives to the mainstream and my paganism encourages me to live a life that is based around nature, respect and the joy of family.

Mamacrow, in Reasons to be Cheerful expresses the fun that home education can be

Why do you homeschool?

Because it’s NICE. FUN. ENJOYABLE.

You know, I think that’s some of the objection in random ‘tutter’s’ minds… Life shouldn’t be fun should it? CERTAINLY education shouldn’t be… Of course children can experience bullying at school, unfair teachers, topics or approaches they just don’t gel with – that’s life. Get used to it.

Excuse me?!

If we have this attitude NOTHING is ever going to change, not for an individual, not for a community large or small.

Mamacrow also talks about the progress her children have made in Odds and ends, odds and ends, lost time is not found again

Our ‘literacy plan’? The usual five point one you see on home schooling blogs occasionally – ’1, Read to them. 2, Read to them. 3, Read to them. 4 Read to them. 5 Read to them.’ Also have bought him word magnet sets he’s wanted, allowed him access to the library and our books (including his special love, graphic novels, which we do vet a little as some are more adult than others, as it were), written out words for him to trace at his request, and let him keep playing with the letter fridge magnets (which we’ve had since Saurus was a baby). Really haven’t had time to do a ‘literacy hour’ daily or anything like that (never mind that I’m allergic to such things.)

Joyfulparent asks Who gets to decide what is right for you to learn? On the Ode Magazine blog

My son and I went for a walk tonight and we talked about how one of his schooled friends asked him if he had ever done a math worksheet. My son told him no, why would I need to do that? I do math in my life all the time, but I don’t need to prove that, by doing a worksheet. We talked about all of the ways that he learns math concepts even though they are not called “math”. We talked about how if he needs to learn something, he can find the answer when he needs it. We questioned who gets to decide exactly what a human being “needs” to learn by the time they are 18? We wondered how people can get together in a meeting to decide what is best for every student that comes to their school. How is it possible to do this if we are all individuals having different interests and different learning styles?

Julia at Classroom Free thinks about how her family began their home educating journey in Home Education, Our Experience

When the children first came out of school, we tried the structured, timetabled, “school at home” approach. I wanted to make sure that we fully covered everything they would be taught in school. I got upset and frustrated when our days didn’t go to plan, and it wasn’t long before I realised (or maybe admitted to myself) that playing at schools wasn’t going to work for us. I started to relax. I did a lot of research into how children learn, different learning styles, and different ways of home-educating. I realised that we didn’t have to sit at a table from 9am-3pm, reading and writing, for my children to learn things. Instead, they learn in many ways – discussions, from books, the internet, television, places we visit, people we talk to, the clubs and associations we belong to – to coin a home-ed phrase – the world is our classroom.

And we have a wonderful view of every day home educating life from The Chicken Shed in a photo post entitled What Do You Have on Your Table Top?

Jax at Making it Up has a great blog round-up with lots more posts detailing how and why different families choose to home educate – go there for more inspiration!

challenges we face, misconceptions of non-home educators, and exploding some home education myths

Tech, blogging at Freedom in Education Under Threat, has written a series of posts debunking some of the most common myths about home education and the people who practice it.

First, she deals with a sadly very common attitude – But it would drive me mad to spend that much time with my children!

I have a zero tolerance policy in my house for the words *I’m bored*. Always have had, even when they were going to be going to school. I am not their entertainer. Yes, I am here to facilitate their learning, yes I will provide things for them to try out, learning materials, outings, art supplies, games, help and support as needed, but boredom I will not cure. I am of the opinion that boredom is very important, particularly for children, and it seems I’m not alone in this.

Before answering Are you a Teacher? Is it Legal? But What About Friends? and But You Could be Hiding Your Chilren and Teaching them the Wrong Things!, to which she says:

Your neighbours will question you, they will gossip about you, the local children will whisper to their friends about these children they know who don’t go to school. Relatives will ask questions, shopkeepers, bus drivers, doctors, dentists, nurses, the milkman, posty, parcel delivery driver, librarian, will all suddenly take a great interest in your life. Yes, being hidden would be a nice option on the days when you really don’t want to have to explain your life to A N Other, on the number 52 bus, for the umpteenth time!

Tech then answers another ignorant assertion often made by non-home educators: But they need to learn to cope in the real world

It’s well documented that those who have been bullied often go on to bully. If we all want to live in a world where bullying is seen as an acceptable thing to do, then this kind of attitude must be allowed to persist, but most people find bullying abhorrent, so how does it make any kind of sense to say that children need to experience it to cope with it *in the real world*?

And then she tackles other things that people commonly say to home educators: But Aren’t You all Hippies, Weirdos and Religious Nutcases? and But How Will They Get a Job?

Lisa at Renegade Parent explodes the myth that Home Education is School at Home. This is untrue, even if a structured approach is used.

Home-educating parents, whatever educational philosophy they follow, are streets ahead of the state when it comes to the probability of the delivery of a suitable education for their child. With only their own children to consider, and the intimate knowledge they have of each child’s ability, aptitude and special educational needs, they can interpret the law quite correctly – and more than adequately discharge their legal duties in the process. What’s more, they have a profound emotional interest in doing so because they are the child’s parents, not a proxy guardian.

An all-too common myth is that school is compulsory and it is the law that children have to go there. This is simply untrue: education is compulsory, school is not, and many people believe that school is NOT the best way to get an education. One recent case of this lie being trotted out happened on GMTV, and is dealt with here by Alison of Home Education Forums in a post entitled Lorraine Kelly misleads the Nation

Lorraine seems to have taken it upon herself to mislead the nation by failing to accurately represent the legal responsibility of parents, namely to ensure their children are provided with a suitable and efficient education. This misrepresentation was compounded by her failure to mention that schools only exist to serve parents who choose to delegate their responsibility to educate and that is why they should be subject to rigorous inspection and quality assurance. If schools fail to meet minimum standards, it is only to be expected that parents will object, as in Essex, where some have been given a grant of £10,450 to educate their children outside the state system rather than send them to the local failing comprehensive.

Heart Rockin Mama writes about her experience at an unschooling (autonomous education) conference in the US, explaining how unschooling is not the same thing as “hands off” parenting, in a post entitled Unschooling Vs Unparenting. She says

We don’t live in a bubble.
We live in the world with other people.
Our needs are not the only ones that matter.
And none of us want our kids to believe that that is the way it works.

Over on the blog Roots and Wings, Dandeliongirl dispels the myth that unschoolers (or autonomous educators) “dont DO anything all day long” in her post Unschooler’s Monday

well, let’s talk about what we did here today.

there was cooking and cleaning, taking care of 2 new baby kittens, feeding, playing, petting, changing the litter box, some swimming and snorkeling in the pool, some playing and talking with a much missed family member that’s in town visiting and staying with us, preparing and planning for pottery night/tie dying/potluck, learning to cook a vegetable curry, tie dying, and pottery making, eating, laughing, and talking with friends, playing outside together, cleaning up together…

In Update on Officialdom, Amanda at Goldston Academy for the Insane details the harassment and persecution experienced by her family

We got a letter from Social Services apologising for the distress caused to our family over their intended “Initial Assessment” after this business with the Pen Pal letter.

Such a massive over-reaction with unproven allegations and police and social services involvement was totally unnecessary and has caused huge stress.

I suppose if we belonged to any other minority group, we would probably have cause for a huge compensation claim for harassment…

So, in the meantime, we await a reply to our response to the threats of School Attendance Orders and being placed on the Children Missing Education Register.

These attacks are also detailed in What a Month for the Goldston Family and Home Education!

we then get a letter from the Elective Home Education department itself, claiming that they have tried to make informal enquires as to whether the girls are receiving a suitable education.

We started home education in 2007 and apart from the initial information pack, we have had no contact from therm since. I told them at the beginning that I did not wish to have any visits and there has been nothing since.

Anyway, their alleged enquiries and purported attempts to arrange a visit, have resulted in them deciding that our children are NOT receiving a suitable education.

They have now contacted the Education Welfare Service to consider School Attendance Orders and we have been placed on the CME (Children Missing Education) Register.

Tech at Freedom in Education Under Threat explains a little about Education Theories

I’m not a teacher, yet I would wager I have more education theory books on my bookshelves than most teachers. Home educators are keeping these theories alive because they work, they have been proven to work, often over thousands of years! No, we’re not the ones conducting a dangerous experiment.

the Badman Review in England: home education under serious threat

For anybody who doesn’t know, the Badman Report on Elective Home Education in England proposes major changes to the law concerning home education in this country. Some of the main recommendations are that home educators are to be required to register with their Local Authority annually, and the Local Authority has the right to refuse permission to home educate for any reason they like. This effectively means that we would require a license to home educate, granted or revoked on the whim of Local Authority staff who may or may not know anything about the different methods of home education, or be sympathetic to them. We would also be required to provide an educational plan 12 months in advance, and our childrens’ progress is to be checked against the plan at the end of the year. This would spell the end of autonomous home education in England, as providing a plan in advance goes against the very ethos of that method. Also, Local Authority staff are to have a right of entry into our homes (giving 2 weeks’ notice), to question us about our educational provision, and they are also to be given the right to question our children alone and without our consent.

Gill at Sometimes it’s Peaceful has dedicated her entire blog to fighting the review, and, in some wonderful and insightful posts, critiquing Badman’s report in great detail, and Maire at Staffordshire has similarly dedicated her blog to fighting the review. Go there especially for some top-notch letters asking very pertinent questions about the review, how it was conducted, and the statistics used.  Both Gill’s and Maire’s blogs are consistently superb, and required reading for anyone interested in educational freedom.

This video features Mike Fortune-Wood, being interviewed by his son Rowan, speaking about the latest attack on Home Education in England shortly after that attack was launched in January of this year. It is included here because I think it accurately captures the mood among home educators at the beginning of the review process

Alison of Home Education Forums gave us a summary of the activities of home educators who were angry and taking action on the review, in Leave our kids alone!

It has often been remarked that getting home educators to agree on anything, let alone come together as any recognised movement, is a bit like herding cats. However, following the UK Government’s announcement in January of its latest review of elective home education in England, a monumental shift appears to have taken place which has seen home educators come together as never before in common cause.

It is also worth checking out some of the other posts here, that give very good background to why so many home educators are so angry about the proposals.

Lisa at Renegade Parent brings us the story of the Baroness and the Badman in a fairy tale that only loses its charm by being all too true. This post also gives a good overview of the situation as it stood during the review process, before the report had been released and all our worst fears were realised.

The righteous Sir Badman was keen to make the ignorant, wayward people (who had elected to educate their children themselves for reasons incomprehensible to him) understand that they had responsibilities as well as rights. He, like the Baroness, wasn’t at all sure that mere parents were capable of raising their own children.

He proclaimed: “Legislation affords every parent the right to choose to educate their child at home but with those rights go responsibilities, not least being to secure a suitable education.”

And so Sir Badman was tasked with making recommendations in order that this lost and disenfranchised community could be governed accordingly, For Their Own Good. Because Of The Children. With Non-Negotiable Support. In The Fight Against The Unknowable Dangers.

Tech at Freedom in Education Under Threat answers a common question among non home educators, and even some that do home educate: Why Should I Be Worried About the Badman Recommendations?

What the Badman recommendations propose will mean that home educated children have fewer rights than juvenile offenders who, under the Beijing Rules, are entitled to have a parent or guardian present when interviewed…

Remember, we are talking here about children being interviewed, without their parent/s present where there is NO suspicion of any wrong doing.

My own children are horrified at the idea of a stranger coming into their home, taking them off to another room and interrogating them. I can’t say that I blame them. It makes me exceptionally angry that even though the government has said time and again that home education is not a welfare issue, here they are saying that actually it is. That our children are to be granted less human dignity and respect than young offenders. No, this is morally corrupt…

What these recommendations will do, IF they become law, is kill home education as we know it. We have been home educating perfectly well, perfectly legally, perfectly happily for 9 years. Over night that will end. We will become the subject of unwarranted, microscopic scrutiny because we choose to take the responsibility for our children’s education seriously, and do not delegate it to someone else. How can this be right or just?

How to become a Political Activist, written by C AT on the blog Little Pieces of Happiness… we see how the Badman review has even stirred those with little or no interest in politics to get involved in trying to save educational freedom in England

I did sign the petitions, I did add my name to any pledge that needed it, I made comments on all those dumb newspaper articles and I joined the likes of Ahed, ThenUK and EO yahoo lists so I know what is going on. And that was it. Whilst I was concerned, I was too busy to

Well my friend S, is as concerned about it all as me but, bless her, she is far more proactive than me. Maybe because she has far more to lose being as she an autonomous educator. So she headed off to see David Laws who is our MP and asked me to come along too.

Allie, blogging at Reflections in the Greenhouse responds to the Badman reviews’ insistence that home educating families produce plans for their children’s education in “Where’s Your Plan?” Says Mr Badman.

I can give you a statement of our family’s educational approach, if you want. We’ve done this for our local authority back in 2004 when we started home educating. It was an explanation of the philosophy on which we base our children’s education. At its heart were two terms – child-led and autonomous.

I don’t believe that Graham Badman has never heard these two terms. So I can only assume that he wants to outlaw an educational approach based on them. How so? Well, the crucial point is that we don’t have “planned outcomes for the child.”

Mieke of Dutchess Discloses wrote Home Education – a cover for abuse – if Recommendation 7 goes through, wondering exactly why anyone would go out of their way to recommend that possibly hostile strangers (Local Authority staff) should have access to our children alone, with nobody else present

“There are concerns that some civil servants are not performing the tasks the tax payers pay them to do. And that in some extreme cases being a civil servant could be used as a cover for paedophilia or other forms of child abuse.

Quite a few people in government and civil services are undoubtedly doing a fantastic job and I want to ensure that they get the continued support of the people who voted for them and are paying them. But we can’t afford to let any paedophile slip through the net – for the sake of our children’s safety and our families’ wellbeing.

The behaviour of the Government towards home educators prompted this 14 year old home educated young lady to write a letter to them, and her mother posted it under the title An Autonomous Young Person’s Letter to the Government. She says:

School was never the right choice for me, and it definitely wasn’t the right choice for my older brother, who has Aspergers Syndrome. Because of this mild form of autism he was left out and bullied at his school by the other students and was singled out by the teachers, who never even bothered to try to get to know and understand him.

My mother pulled us out of school for mainly that reason.

We held it out in Holland for a while, but it was a very big fuss and we were frowned upon by a lot of people who didn’t agree with Home Education…

So before you make assumptions about autonomous learning and invade people’s privacy and their homes and sit kids down to talk about if they really want to be Home Educated, why not think about why you are really doing this? Or maybe you could even consider going to a school and asking the kids there how they enjoy school? I have a lot of friends who go to school and I don’t often hear nice things about it. What I hear about school is how teachers no longer enjoy what they do, kids are only bored and take nothing in anymore, they rebel, they bully and they stereotype. They divide themselves up into groups and don’t let anyone else in who doesn’t go by a certain way.

Tom Paine’s Daughter makes some very interesting connections in Society Vs Government

Sweden is now tightening its legislation and England is following suit by adopting Sweden’s annual license and is providing a further opportunity to ban a family from exercising EHE with the words “anything else” embedded in the sentence “anything else which may affect their ability to provide a suitable and efficient education”. If you look at the use of language that is being used in both of England and Sweden’s proposals it would appear as though England and Sweden are both in process of bringing their legislation on home education in line with that of Germany’s current legislation which bans home education – this is further suggested by the 2006 European Court of Human Rights ruling that upheld Germany’s ban (a ban brought into being during the Third Reich by Bernhard Rust in 1938 apparently).

Mieke at Dutchess Discloses writes Here’s the Evidence: There is no Evidence!

But in spite of all the misleading phrases, in the end it says:

There is no evidence to support the allegations on which this review was started, that elective home education can be used as a cover for abuse, forced marriage, servitude or trafficking.

NO EVIDENCE.

Hello everybody!! MP’s!! PM!! Media! Watchdog? Ombudsman? Anybody! (Other than Ed Balls and Baroness Morgan, because they knew this all along):

This Review was based on false allegations and the Report with its repulsive Recommendations should be declared invalid. Immediately!

Raquel Toney’s poem Fleeing for Education encapsulates the feeling of many home educators who are planning to leave England, should the Badman proposals become law

when we leave you, all up in arms, waving flags, you’ll
wave back and tell us
good riddance,
when we leave, feeling low, you will say *serves them
right* for we are some
kind of foe,
when we leave you will wonder why our children meant so
much to us, and why we
would leave just because of a weird quirk,
when we leave, you may suddenly get a pang.. and wonder
“what the fuck they are
talking about?”
when we leave, we will be gone and you will be left to fight
on,
when we leave we will be free.

Danae at Three Degrees of Freedom wrote a very moving post entitled You Weren’t There, detailing just how let down many families are by the state school system, and the injustice of having the state interfering in home education

You weren’t there when the light died out of the gleaming blue eyes because the girls in her class wouldn’t play with her or talk to her or team up with her in any games or classroom endeavours.

You weren’t there when she bowed her head under the insults and the insolent stares of hostile kids.

You weren’t there when they forced her up against a toilet wall, two against one, and pulled her arms back until she managed, thank God, to squirm free of their malice and their hatred.

Maire of the blog Staffordshire shares the insights of Imran, who posts on some HE email lists, in a post entitled These are Some of the Concerns that I have about Badman’s Proposals

My children are no longer mine to educate as I see fit. I will need state sanction under Badman’s proposals.

For Muslims, it may be that Quranic instruction is not recognised, or certainly not given the importance that Muslim HEdders would give to it. We may be required to teach children as young as 6 about sex education. Badman’s proposals will let people into our homes who may not be sensitive to diversity.

If a black family refuses to send their children to school because of the way that schooling has generally failed black children, parents power to educate at home could be at the discretion of the same agencies that have made such a mess of education in Britain, are going to have power over how we bring up our children.

Amanda at Goldston Adacemy for the Insane sets out her Educational Plan, saying

One of the recommendations of the BadMan review is that all Home Educating families have to provide an Educational Plan for the following 12 months, drawn up – of course- with the supportive guidance of the Local Authority! (LOL)…

So we are going to be very busy and under the scrutiny of a lot of CCTV cameras in public places and coming into contact with a lot of “trained professionals”, which rather excludes any need for intrusive visits into our home!

Mamacrow responds to Government and media slurs on home educators in Just One More Thing

I’m not naive to truly believe that there has never or will never be a case where home schooling is used as a cover for wrong doing, but these hypothetical people would be a tiny minority in a group that is itself a tiny minority.

Homeschoolers are as much a visible part of the community as families who send their children to school, more so in fact.

Tech of Freedon in Education Under Threat speaks of how home education can literally be a lifesaver for children escaping school because of bullying, and how this Life Line is threatened by the proposals in the Badman report.

Deregistration on demand is a legal right that parents MUST retain. The Badman recommendations threaten to remove this lifeline, and we must not allow it to happen. The government have tried before to remove it, and failed. We must continue to demand that this life line remains. With children set to stay in compulsory education until they are 18, it is crucially important that there is a safety net for those it does not work for. Parents should not have to jump through hoops imposed by local authorities, especially when these local authorities are failing their child, to enable them to carry out their legally binding parental duties.

There is a petition to the Prime Minister that UK residents can sign here, and if you are not in the UK but would like to show your support of home educators in England, there is an international petition here.

The consultation on the registering and monitoring of home educators in England is running until 19th October. You can send in your response here.

There is a Select Committee Short Inquiry into the conduct of Badman’s review and the recommendations contained in his report running until 22nd September. Members of the public are invited to submit material for this inquiry. Instructions for how to do so are here.

picnics and bubbles

There are many Not Back to School (to show that not all children go back to school in September!) bubble picnics happening up and down the country, mainly on Wednesday the 16th Sept, but some are on other days. They are inspired by these home educators in Brighton, who took to the streets with bubbles and leaflets to raise awareness of home education in England and the very serious threat it is under at the moment from the Government. If you’d like to find out if there is a picnic near you, you can join the mailing list here, or check the blog here.

resources: websites, organisations and books

THEN UK – The Home Education Network

AHEd – Action for Home Education

HE Special – for families home educating children with special educational needs

HEdNI – for home educating families in Northern Ireland

Cruel at School – bullying support and advice

Christian Unschooling

Home Education Choices

Schoolhouse – Home education in Scotland

Muddle Puddle – for home educating young children

The Home Service – Christian home education

Bullying UK – Anti-bullying charity

Islamic Homeschooling Advisory Network

The Home Education UK website – Mike Fortune-Wood’s comprehensive HE resource

Finally, it is possible to read many home education and education books online (including John Holt, John Taylor Gatto, Ivan Illich etc) by following the links given here. Enjoy! That’s the end of the carnival – thanks again to all the home educators who sent links in, and who been so supportive of the carnival.

Click the logo for more information about International Freedom in Education Day