Bishop Hill News from the front
Sep 11, 2008 Civil liberties Education Johann Hari has dared to cross the monstrous regiment of home educators in his article in the Independent today. In a carefully ambiguous article, he manages to imply that there are lots of home educated children who are simply not learning anything at all, and insinuates that HE parents are little better than child abusers.
Having bad-mouthed the HE community, Hari manages to compound his error by a bit of blatant misrepresentation. He quotes research by someone called Rob Blackhurst, who apparently found that children in HE families, as old as twelve, couldn't read and write. Now if you look up Rob Blackhurst and home education on Google, you will find that Mr Blackhurst is a journalist rather than an academic, and that he wrote a very sympathetic piece about HomeEd in the FT some months back. In it, he does indeed talk of children who didn't learn to read until very late...
One of our children didn't read until he was nine or 10...
says the quoted home educator. Full marks to Mr Hari then? Not exactly. The rest of the quote is
and he's just completed an MA in creative writing.
Not exactly what Mr Hari would have you believe that Blackhurst found, I would say.
There has been a great swathe of media comment about HE in the last week or so, presumably timed to coincide with the return of the English schools. The unions and the left wing commentators have been attacking really quite hard, with vague insinuations of child abuse, and heart-rending tales of children shut up inside for months at a time, deprived of the alleged benefits of a state education and the national curriculum.Reading between the lines though, there are two factors driving them. Firstly they are frightened that the trickle of children out of the state system and into HE will become a flood. If this happens then the state education system will be put under enormous strain and enormous pressure to change. And of course, change is the last thing that the teaching unions want. But most of all, they want access to people's homes. If you read Hari's article, he wants all children to go to school, but most of all he wants education and welfare officers to be able to turn up to check that home educating parents are not abusing their children. He is really that much of a fascist. And rest assured that once education and welfare officers have access to HE homes to check up on children there, the same outraged voices that question why nobody can check up on HE children now, will be raised again to demand why HE homes can be inspected, but not the homes of other children.
HE families are the front line in the fight against the big brother society. They may not realise it, but their fight is the fight of all of us. They deserve our support.
Reader Comments (13)
There is little or no benefit to society from state supported pre-schools and kindergartens. The Scandinavians have the best-run school systems, and they don't start until age seven. England's new law requiring children to stay until age 17 will just exacerbate the schools' discipline and crime problems, pushing more middle-class parents out of the system. Once the middle classes start abandoning the state school system, it is VERY hard to lure them back. You end up with a vicious cycle of middle class exit, followed by increased dysfunction and failure at the school, followed by yet more middle class exit. It takes years to build a school's reputation, but one violent incident that makes it to the papers destroys it all.
The left/unions are of course like anyone all in favour of freedom, it's just unfortunate that their policities by and large tend to directly attack individual freedom. You're left with the freedom to choose what the State offers you.
I suspect teachers genuinely believe in teaching as opposed to home teaching - it's their job, what they do all day long, what they decided to do. You're not going to find many teachers saying "yes, I think we should abandon schools and have kids taught at home". Unfortunately, being human, because this issue directly affects their job security, they are going to be unable to consider the matter in a truly unbiased manner. It is only possible to be unbiased about a subject when you are unaffected by it.
I have only two children, both privately educated and now studying at the university level, but if the entire social security hammock implodes sometime in the next 10 or 20 years, the homeschoolers who raised huge families will certainly end up having the last laugh, as they will at least have a big, closely-knit family to care for them in their declining years, as the rest of us are paid a billion Zimbabwean dollars a month as our pensions.
I don't think anyone is asking the teachers to support HE. But I don't think they should be attacking it as a social evil, in the same way I don't attack businesses which choose not to buy services from me.
Free Thinker
Interesting point about the safety net of a large family. You are making me feel better about having three kids! I've also taken the view that it increases my chances of one of them being rich enough to keep me in my old age.
Too painfully close to the truth to be really funny!
The unions' job is to protect their members' interests, which they see as keeping them in a job - a position which is hard to argue with! Individual teachers will want to keep their job, but will want their own children well-educated. They may be able to do this by taking their own kids out of school while, if they continue to work, keeping up the union sub.
Interestingly, a friend who is a teacher was asking my opinion on HE the other day, and I did wonder if I was being "sounded out".
And about the second income given up...I don't know what it is like over there in Britain, but here in the US, homeschooling is a multi-billion dollar market. And a LOT of that is made up of families selling their unit plans and other products and services to other homeschoolers, not to mention other home-based business many are involved in. And what I love is the fact that new companies find it hard to break into the market...we're a "vapor market" as they've called us because standard marketing doesn't work where parents prefer to take the recommendations of their friends than the glossy ads in magazines.
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2009/01/the-coming-war-against-home-schoolers.html
"The coming war against Home Schoolers
I knew this was coming. The inflamed, all-seeing red eye of political correctness, glaring this way and that from its dark tower, has finally discovered that home schooling is a threat to the Marxoid project, and has launched its first open attack on it.
Before long, those who wish to declare independence from the state system (and cannot afford monstrous private school fees) will face endless interference, monitoring and regulation.
How do we know this? On the 19th January, an obscure person called Delyth Morgan levelled what I regard as an astonishing smear against people who educate their children at home. She suggested that such parents might be abusers, saying (I have taken these words directly from the Education department's own website): 'Making sure children are safe, well and receive a good education is our most serious responsibility.
'Parents are able, quite rightly, to choose whether they want to educate children at home, and a very small number do. Iām sure the vast majority do a good job. However, there are concerns that some children are not receiving the education they need.
'And in some extreme cases, home education could be used as a cover for abuse. We cannot allow this to happen and are committed to doing all we can to help ensure children are safe, wherever they are educated."