Home Education is Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!
 My partner and I have been home educating our daughter since she was born. At nine she has never been to school but has still developed a wide range of skills and knowledge. She is very sociable and inquisitive and we have no regrets about taking an alternative approach to learning and education. The only difficulty is how to describe something that, though essentially very simple, has many aspects and variations.
We were watching Mary Poppins together when inspiration came to me! Hopefully you will have seen the film and may remember a crucial part of the story when the children’s father, the starchy Mr. George Banks, complains to Mary Poppins about the “highly questionable outings of every kind” on which she has been taking the children. He compares a British home to his bank and expects them both to be run with ‘precision'.
“Tradition, discipline and rules must be the tools
Without them: disorder, chaos – moral disintegration!
In short you have a ghastly mess!
The children must be moulded, shaped and taught
that life’s a looming battle, to be faced and fought!
He has a low opinion of ‘popping through chalk pavement-pictures’ and ‘tea-parties on the ceiling’. By the end of the film the children, with the aid of Mary Poppins, have helped their father rediscover the joys of life and in the final scene the Banks family are all flying kites in the park and having a great time.
The film seems to illustrate two very different views of children and what they need to grow and learn. Mr. Banks has a traditional view that children must be moulded and shaped, controlled and taught; life is all about traditions and a proper career. Perhaps schools were established to respond to this view and it could be argued that they haven’t changed much since Mr. Banks’ era.
Mary Poppins takes a very different approach, although she doesn’t seem to be advocating disorder and chaos let alone moral disintegration! Yet in her world the children experience ordinary things as magical, they meet a great variety of people, have fun, learn from their experiences and are free to grow in the world around them. Perhaps she is good at relating to how young children often perceive the world, where much is mysterious and unexplained, and they have yet to learn all the logical, adult reasons why tea-parties shouldn’t happen on the ceiling!
An increasing number of parents in the UK and other countries, seem to be taking more of a ‘Mary Poppins’ view of education and deciding that schools can be too rigid and ‘traditional’. We now live in an information-rich age and it is easy to discover facts. What seems needed these days is not one set of facts, rather flexible skills like creativity, initiative, working with others, and knowing how to discover knowledge. Children will need to be able to think for themselves in order to discover answers to the new challenges that await their generation, not to mention navigating their individual path in the world.
It’s difficult to develop these flexible skills and abilities within a one-size fits all system, which tends to focus on the George Banks view of children as empty vessels waiting to be filled, moulded, shaped and taught. Flexible skills are best developed where children have space to experiment, to explore the world and follow their interests, with time to concentrate or to sample a wide range of areas, and where they become responsible for their own learning. It’s also good to make sure that a lot of fun is had along the way – there is great joy in discovering the world through ‘popping into pavement pictures’ and having ‘tea on the ceiling’!
So while none of the home educating families I know are exactly like Mary Poppins, they could be said to have some similarities! I asked a few for some comments and one local family put it like this:
"For us, the aim of education is to be equipped to achieve what we aspire to in life; to be able to look in the right sort of places for information when we need it so that we can make the choices that feel right at the time. One of the best things about HE for us is the flexibility it offers - we have time to consider."
Another parent points out that home education benefits the whole family:
"Home education has sparked a catalyst of change within our whole family - liberation of the children has led to liberation of ourselves, including a whole new career and home! We are now all free to do and learn what makes us feel alive, and are finding this 'learning together' process happens more and more as the children get older. Our main aim is that the children will have the freedom and confidence at the end of this process to know themselves and be HAPPY, thus forming their OWN direction in life."
It may surprise you that an alternative to school exists, however, the law in Britain has always stated that it is parents who are responsible for ensuring their child receives an education suitable to their age, aptitude and ability. Currently, most parents fulfil their responsibility by sending their child to school but:
“education is compulsory, schooling is not.” Ivan Lewis, Education Minister
It may seem an immense challenge to think that you could take active responsibility for educating your child, but research indicates that it is hard to get it wrong:
“Whether parents use the national curriculum or no curriculum at all, whether they use formal methods or allow their children autonomy, whether children learn to read early or late, home-educated children outperform school children in studies that have been done in England, the United States and Canada. … children are natural learners, they are born wanting to learn. What surprises home educators is that in an information-rich culture our educational institutions sometimes manage to successfully block that basic desire to learn.” John Randall, MP
In 2002 Paula Rothermel of the University of Durham carried out the first major exploration of HE (home education) families in the UK. Her results unequivocally showed that:
“Overall, the home-educated children demonstrated high levels of attainment and good social skills, outperforming schooled children on a range of standard tests.”
Of equal interest was her finding that you don’t have to be rich, or highly educated yourself to home educate your child.
“Common to all families involved was their flexible approach to education and the high level of parental attention received by the children. Children benefited from the freedom to develop their skills at their own speed. Thus, parental input and commitment, regardless of their socio-economic group and level of education, may be the most important factor in children's development and progress.”
Children with special needs can also be home educated, indeed the personal approach can be highly effective rather than having to fit into a system designed for the ‘average’ child (whatever one of those is!). In fact, one of the main motivations for many families is recognising that all children have their own unique needs and gifts.
There is no right way of doing it. Families take a wide range of approaches from subject or topic-led studying, to completely child-led, free-form methods, and every style in between. The education provided can be tailored to each child and each family, and take account of their talents and needs.
"A typical day? There is no such thing in our home. We have a general scheme of things of course but our mood/the weather/our ideas in the morning help us steer a course through what our day might bring. We do sometimes have structured days - usually because we have been interested enough in something to agree to go along to things ranging from day/overnight visits, a workshop which may last an hour or so, or a whole week of schooling!"
In the UK there are various support organisations, websites, internet discussion lists, books, groups etc, that offer help and advice to parents considering HE (see end for details). In Cumbria, two groups meet regularly in Penrith and Kendal. The groups are primarily about getting together for play, fun and social interaction. Various trips, visits, camps, talks and activities are also arranged and we produce a newsletter to coordinate our activities. As well as the groups, individual families frequently get together.
One issue that always comes up in discussions about HE is ‘socialisation’. For some reason the assumption is that school is the only way of having contact with other children. Home educators generally have a busy social life both with neighbourhood school children, after school and at the usual clubs and societies, and with other HE friends. Without school there is much more time to visit friends, play, go on expeditions, visit museums, see relations etc. HE children also miss the negative aspects of school socialisation – a group of 30 children selected by age is hardly a normal social situation after all!
Again, research shows that HE children are good at relationships, both with children and adults, and have no problem gaining the skills needed in society.
“Families listed competence in interpersonal communication and discussion skills together with moral and social awareness, responsibility, self esteem, motivation and independence, as skills they believed their children developed by being home-educated.” (Rothermel, 2002)
“Home schoolers (US) bring certain skills—motivation, curiosity, the capacity to be responsible for their education—that high schools don’t induce very well.” Jon Reider, Stanford University Admissions Official.
HE is not for everyone, but equally, school is not for everyone. In thinking about choices in education, home education has a lot of positive advantages to offer the whole family: less pressure and stress with more time to be a family, as well as the opportunity to explore and learn about the world in the way that works best for your child. Learning often becomes integrated into life and ceases to be a separate activity. A final comment from Paula Rothermel’s study:
"Families valued the freedom and flexibility that home-education brought them and many reported not having realised that home education would be so fulfilling and so much fun."
For more information, check out the links page, or contact me via the mail form. I can’t promise that your umbrella will lift you over the chimneys like Mary Poppins, but there is plenty of magic out there for you and your children to discover!
© Martin Wise, 2004 |
