There is a debate on my birth board about HE where parents who HE have been condemned as arrogant amongst other things. I am posting my reply here just because I want someone who isn’t going to think I’m bonkers to read it. You can follow the debate at:
http://boards.babycentre.co.uk/n/pfx/forum.aspx?tsn=1&nav=messages&webtag=bcUKbclub200808&tid=13734
My reply:
Most people on here know that I homeschool my two older kids. So obviously I’m positive about HE. However, as a former teacher in a secondary school, I am not terribly positive about state education. I think the problem with school from my perspective is that it provides a one size fits all approach to education. OK, so you are supposed to differentiate lessons to provide for a variety of learning abilities and styles, but with discipline issues, paperwork and meetings, the time to actually plan this is minimal. Furthermore, the National Curriculum is aimed at a narrow body of academic students. I have had to teach Shakespeare to children who can barely read and write. Now enjoying Shakespeare with such children I am all for, but whittling away all the fun with scene analysis and language study is boring and totally inappropriate for these kids.
My son is one such kid. We’ve never had him diagnosed because we didn’t want to attach labels but we guess he is borderline dyslexic. He floundered in school due to both bullying and academic problems. He could barely read when we deregistered him at the end of year one. He’s now a fluent reader. So what did I do differently? I left him to it. I provided him with as many reading materials and opportunities as I could and let him work it out himself. He mainly taught himself through The Beano and various internet sites and computer games. If you really want to understand how to play a computer game, you will learn to read the instructions and the cheat codes. The government go on about how phonics is essential in teaching a child to read but my son doesn’t get phonics at all. If he’d stayed at school I guess he may have ended up as one of those illiterate school leavers. School totally turned him off reading. At the moment he won’t write, and what he does write is pretty poor. So what am I doing; scores of worksheets? Some, I admit, but mostly I just provide him with the materials he needs and various purposes to write and I trust that he’ll figure these things out as he grows.
Kids are instinctive learners. We don’t really do structured education. We read a lot, and go on lots of educational visits. We spend masses of time with other home schoolers and the kids get plenty of time away from me when they go off exploring in the woods of the outdoor education centre where we have our HE meeting. They play endlessly, which is what I think children ought to do. On the whole they are very happy. It’s what’s called autonomous learning. My kids might never do 10 GCSEs. I don’t care if they don’t do any. What I want is for them to find out what they really love in life and to dedicate themselves to it, whether or not that is music, engineering (Lego is a big passion of ours), carpentry, cooking. Education for educations sake is absolutely useless. Plutarch said that the mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be lighted and I truly believe in this, particularly with regard to children. Einstein, Monet, Lincoln and Dickens were all home educated. Einstein once said, when asked by a mother how to make her child brilliant, that she should tell him stories. Stories, he reasoned, unlocked the bounds of what was possible into the impossible. I think that for us, home education represents such stories, that we unlock the doors to what might be possible rather than what is.
It’s not for everyone, I admit, and there are some days when I think I might go bonkers because the boys are bickering so much. But I know it works; I see my children learn on a daily basis, and I see children who have been autonomously educated launch into adult life with tremendous success. I believe and trust in the kindled fire.
For anyone wanting to find out more about autonomous education I would highly recommend any book by John Holt; you can find his website here:
http://www.holtgws.com/johnholtpage.html
Jo
