All my children went to secular school! You can't offer them as good an experience! And update on our home ed outcome.

"All my children went to secular school and grew up having faced trials and tribulations of what a school experience offers. There are limitations to home schooling and a child needs to experience all aspects of life to develop and that includes the good the bad and the ugly.. Your child cannot achieve its full potential sitting in the house"

Sorry this is from Loose Women, not sure she meant secular school but she was sure she was right.

You don't know this, you didn't do it. No child can experience all aspects of life we live in too varied times. If you didn't home educate you can only speculate on the limitations of home education.

"My neighbours kids are home schooled and the children spend more time running round the back garden and walking the dog."

Ah you know unless you watch them 23/7 you can't really know. There is no such thing as school time in home education and learning can happen any time. walking my dogs is one of the most social things I do. My own child would have looked like she had no school time cause she didn't, she learnt through exploring things she found fun. It is called autonomous education. She is now doing a levels at college and shocked that her friends have had that timetable all their lives while she has run free. 

"Interesting.. What a shock she will get when she enters the world of work.. That's what school prepare children for."

She is doing 3 A levels, Maths, Further Maths and Chemistry alongside tennis coaching lol. She is a level one coaching assistant and has already had paid work. She got on to those courses with no previous formal learning just her own love of exploring the subjects. She is up and out and does not miss lessons, it is her choice, her investment, if she wanted to leave she could, if she wanted to be late she could. She isn't, she doesn't want to, it is all her own very passionate choice. Why would a child that could do that not be able to hold down a job. Stick to your rigid ideas if you must but she could probably run rings around you on most subjects and certainly in having an open mind and being interested in the truth and not prejudice. (Many people were engaging with this woman who just was not listening)  Children are not lazy sods unless coerced and forced, left to make their own choices they are almost always amazing! She is my fourth child so I know about school and I still have the scars from protecting my kids from very wrong assumptions regarding the capacity of neurodiverse children who develop in a completely different way. 

She is also a volunteer peer tutor to a mature student who has seen her marks rise three levels after only a couple of weeks of her help. You really really do not know what you are talking about. She has been asked to be part of the interview process for many new appointments and he college has gone out of its way to allow her to study these A levels as she has no GCSE's. They have created a workaround, her mentor has done some autonomous learning to make sure she can stay. She is typical of the home educated children I see news of, moving on to formal education in the groups and amongst my many fb home ed friends. This is the expected result of home ed. And you would have to look very hard to find a home ed adult who is not working, running their own business, thriving at uni or following their dream.

"Good teachers make sure children are learning at their own pace, while still being stretched - and any teacher worth their salt can make the learning fun."

I think teachers are more and more handicapped by government demands that do not align with what we know about child development, in fact go entirely opposite to it. That may have been true once although in a childhood where I was often in staff rooms as my school had different holidays to my mother's and my own schooling and my four kid's experience I do not recognise that claim to be true, it is harder now than ever to do that. Teachers are drowning in directives and paperwork and all that matters to their masters is what the statistics look like. But however good they are it would be hard for them to match an education tailored exactly to the child's needs, preferences and developmental level.  

"I speak from experience when as a teacher I have had to help children to catch up with their peers."

"Well we've never met any teachers like that. Most just don't want them to fall behind, but again what are they behind of."

That shaming phrase, fall behind, fall behind an imaginary norm, all children are unique, that norm will be at the wrong place for most of them although some are resilient enough to manage. Home educated children are rescued from that shaming blaming system. It is a shame if some have to go back, especially if it is not a choice but circumstance but there is no way of knowing if they would not have been more "behind" if they had stayed in school. Many children in schools are behind this imaginary marker of success. It is not the kids who always match this norm who do best in life, I feel sorry for those who excel at school and find that actually life is nothing like it.

 

At primary level perhaps this does not matter so much because it is believed that children at this level are not able to master the material at such complex levels as, say, secondary children are

Well this is where school is wrong for so many children, children like mine are very able to but they are not able to write it down till secondary level, or not sufficiently to demonstrate the sophistication of their understanding. They have problems transposing numbers so make mistakes in simple maths but later go on to understand complex proofs and logic with relative ease. Primary school especially is abusive as performance is all that matters, performance and stats. School tells these children that they are unintelligent and a failure and how many never learn different, I had no idea of how very wrong they were about me until well into my 50s. Home ed lets the child learn and teach through conversation, hard to imagine how school could match it. Perhaps if it became a resource to help children answer their many questions rather that shut up sit down keep still stop talking. Due to my own dire and abusive education where I was blamed and shamed for having a different brain not a plodding sequential one but a leaps and spurts and make odd connections one I have protected my children from the damage schools do to people like us. We are the wrong shape for mass teaching, but I have learnt a lot about learning and child psychology and development in the process. Good luck with your Phd, it would be wonderful if a change that protected neurodiverse kids from plodding repetitive curricula and being profoundly misunderstood could could be instigated but you must know that government usually go in exactly the opposite direction of what quality research suggests would be efficacious.

Thing is children who are home educated can play through the primary years and pick up everything that is taught so laboriously to the children trapped in the classroom for so many hours, so many years, as a bi product of play and curiosity.

Why School Damages Children by Imran

Another post by Imran which he has kindly given me permission to blog.
A permission I requested so that his  thoughtful and informed ideas can be available in the public domain.

From a post to a home ed support list. 

Hi New Person, and also to ___

Thank you for saying what you said about school, and challenging us for

our anti-school bias. Given the anti-school bias that you pointed to in

this forum, I acknowledge your stand for something different, for

presenting an opposing point of view.

Having said that, I disagree with your point of view; I believe that

school damages children. The only instance when it can be a salvation

is when home life is so distressing that going to school is a relief. I

maintain that most children are damaged by schooling. The problem is

that this "damage" has become normative, and that there are no controls.

Last point first. I had a good time at school. Wasn't bullied much, did

okay academically, and pretty much enjoyed myself. I don't have another

me who was HE'd at the same time that I can draw comparisons with. This is a

challenge that we all face. How can we be sure that what we are doing as

parents really is the best for our children?

By normative abuse, I mean that school is so part of our culture, that

we don't see, or even stop to consider what are the disadvantages, and

the damage it does. If everyone suffers the same way, then it’s harder to

see the damage because it doesn't stick out. If I use bottle-feeding as

an analogy, I can make my point clearer. A woman bottle feeding in

England, doesn't stick out the way she would in Sweden or among the

Yanonami in the Amazon. A child fed on bottle milk appears to be

thriving. What's not apparent is how the health of the colon is

compromised, or the immune system is compromised. So it is with a child

that appears to be happy and doing well at school. What's not apparent

is the internal, intrinsic compromises; internal processes that don't

develop to their full potential. This doesn't get noticed because

everyone else's processes have been similarly compromised.

Schooling impairs neurological function. The numbers of

connections that each neuron can make to others is reduced, thus the

ability to think divergently (i.e. the ability to have your thoughts go

off in many, many directions) is impaired. Children's social skills are

distorted by being forced to mix with 30 others of the same age, and be

ordered about all day by an adult. This is not the same as learning to get on

with people of all ages, in real life. That after all is our

evolutionary legacy. We are designed to live in multi-generational

communities, learning by imitating and trying and asking. We don't need

to be taught in order to learn. We are born with the ability to think

conceptually, and only need the space to give our thoughts and ideas

expression.

If you are not convinced, you could look at the results. Many US states

require all children to sit SATS. HE kids do considerably better than

schooled kids, with those being autonomously educated often doing best

of all. Why is that? Why should those with the least formal HE do better

than those with the most formal of education i.e. schooling? I think it

is because the ability to learn is natural to us as human beings. School

gets in the way. That was after all the way the Prussian aristocracy

designed it. They didn't design "skoles" for the sake of the infant

peasantry. They designed it to instill compliance and obedience, and to

destroy the capacity for independent thought. That played right into

the hands of the industrialists who lobbied their governments to make

school compulsory so that they would have a workforce that would put up

Victorian factory conditions, day after day, without a murmur of

dissent. Schools weren't designed out of concern for the literacy of

children, which goes some way to explain why literacy in the US has

actually declined since the advent of factory schooling. An educated

proletariat is a dangerous proletariat. An educated worker is a

dangerous worker. He is more likely to stand up for his rights, know

what they are, and/or leave to get a better job, with a better wage. It

serves the needs of capital to keep workers dumb.

It was not out of benign concern that the Europeans exported factory

schooling to their little brown subjects in the Americas, and Africa and

Australia and Asia. The British Raj didn't bring schools to India as an

act of charity. Educated Indians would be dangerous...unless of course

you can occupy their time elsewhere, in a school, engaging in

meaningless tasks, learning to be subservient to a foreign Queen,

versus to their own parents and traditions, and their own Gods. This way

you can stop them from really educating themselves; which is why I

believe that Hitler outlawed home education. Too bad if your parents are

Communists, or opposed to the Nazi vision, he wanted to ensure that no

one got to escape the poisonous influence of the Hitler Youth.

So there you have it, school as a tool for advancing the agenda of the

state. That is not the same as being designed to educate our young.

Think about it if you were to design a system for educating children,

would you really design it this way? Would anyone? In this system,

bullying is endemic, and all suffer: those that bully, those that are

bullied, and those that are bullied. In this system a child is lucky if

she gets 10 minutes one to one time with her teacher in a week. In this

system the poet has to endure physics, and the artist has to endure

maths. The kinaesthetic child has to sit still, while his more sedentary

friend is forced to jump. No child gets what they need it when they need

it, as their needs are always subservient to the needs and demands of

the school factory. In this system, the average child will spend over

14,000 hours of her life, when all she needs is 80-100 hours of one to

one time to learn to read as well as you and I, and to cover the entire

school maths curriculum. This system produces people who cannot think

for themselves. I see it in the work I do in the Middle East, training

Indian workers in communication skills. Years of being taught to the

test, of being ordered about and told what to do has altered their

neurons. They have been conditioned not to think, only to please the

teacher, as that is how you ensure you get good grades, or at the very

least escape punishment. They don't think. They shut up and put up,

waiting to be told. Just as Johann Fichte, the Prussian philosopher who

lobbied the Prussian ruling class to institute "skoles” said they

would.

That is an affront to human potential. That is why I disagree with your

point of view. Schools do damage.

Regards

imran


Another post by Imran is blogged here.

Home education

Beth and I have been home educating for 15 and a half months now and she is a lot more relaxed and beginning to be self motivated.

When Beth was at school her special needs teacher always told us to play games with her to help her improve her number skills, but what works in general and in theory does not always work in practice. Previously Beth would have found the possibility of not winning too upsetting (we are still wobbling on a knife edge here but she is much better than before); you might say well a child has to learn to lose well and be a good sport, but what about games are meant to be fun and children learn well when having fun. Beth also had acute confusion between numbers especially 8 and 9 together with impulsive counting on which led to her getting her position on the board wrong. She does not take well to even the slightest hint of criticism perhaps because in the school system she has been wrong from the start just for being who she is, perhaps because she has a highly sensitive nature and is easily shamed.

Playing this game of Monopoly with her I watched her understanding of simple counting and number labels accelerate, it was fascinating and reminded me of Montessori’s “windows of opportunity”. She learnt more in that game than in the whole of the previous year and I think this was because the game happened at just the right moment and this is what makes autonomous learning and unschooling so effective.



This level of confusion in basic number skills does not mean however that Beth does not understand number concepts. Here she is with her brother (supposed to be revising for A level maths) learning basic algebra, and picking it up straight away.



We both love stories and I try to make sure that Beth’s dyslexia doesn’t mean that she misses out on children’s literature, both by reading to her and by supplying her with audio cds of her favourites which means she can listen to a book as many times as she wants too. I have also recently found a great organization called Calibre which loans tapes and CDs to the blind and dyslexic and this helps cut down the cost and provides variety.

The book we are reading at the moment is Physik by Angie Sage, the third part of a gripping and inventive magical trillogy.



Despite being unable to read fluently yet Beth has amazing comprehension and is always ahead of me in guessing what will happen next and very rarely has to ask for clarification of the plot. Being literate really has nothing to do with the act of reading, to my mind it is much more to do with an understanding of the way language can be used to entertain and entrance, to terrify and to bring one to the edge of one’s seat with anticipation. Beth has had these pleasures from a very young age and yet at school she was labeled as having literacy problems because she will be a late developer of clerical skills. I feel this is a dangerous and fundamental misunderstanding that pervades our education system. Taking her out of that system has limited the damage, but four years of being seen as defective will take some time to undo and emotionally she is still very fragile about her weaknesses.

She also has plenty of time to just play with no peer group telling her that she is too young to play like this or that she is being babyish. Nonsense I know as many adults love dolls houses but still the sort of taunt used by kids trying to maintain their status in the playground culture.





And this week she has started a totally autonomous project, exploring the textures that can be found about the house and making rubbings of them and has also begun to combine the textures to make art, and best of all has organized them herself into a ring binder. Of course the offcuts, scraps and rejects are still left for me to tidy up, but there is hope on the horizon!

Maybe she will let me take a picture of some of them to share soon.