Why we home educate

We home educate because my youngest pleaded and reasoned with me to do so for a full hour at the age of 8 after seeing a news item on home education.  Her arguments were lucid, intelligent and undeniable.  This episode stood out all the more clearly as her behaviour had become very worrying at the time, alternating between crying and screaming and very little else.  She had been at school for four years and had felt increasingly misunderstood and criticised by the staff and been teased and bullied by many of the children.  She has learning differences including dyslexia and dyspraxia and possibly dyscalculia.  We had just initiated the statementing process as the school seemed to be punishing her for her problems rather than modifying their methods to meet her needs.  We did not do this lightly, I have a sister with a high functioning autistic child and getting a statement including the inevitable tribunal ate up a whole year of her life.

We had spent many years ‘negotiating’ with this school to get them to meet the needs of my older two dyslexic children.  This had been a very difficult and stressful experience and gained us the label, publicly expressed, of difficult parents.  The school’s reluctance to help seemed to stem from the fact that my children although massively underperforming, could still get an average mark and so did not threaten the school’s position in the league tables.  Also in hindsight it was due to them not having a clue what to do as no member of staff had adequate training in learning differences and although they had outside agencies they could call on ,such as an English Language Unit, it cost them money and made very little difference  as ignorance was also rife there.

My fourth child was born 20 years after my first so I had had plenty of opportunity to observe my children learning autonomously and very effectively both preschool and in their free time while at school, so when I read about autonomous home education it was like a bell going off in my head.  It also tied in with the conclusions I had come to through the reading I had been doing about child development and learning since my first child was born; a passion derived from my own dissatisfaction with the way I had been parented and educated.  We were fortunate in realising that we didn’t need to reproduce school at home as Beth was too traumatised 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.

I would like to say that after nearly three years of home education Beth is a happy and balanced child with no problems at all, but I cannot, the special needs have not magically disappeared and although not now vilified because of them she finds her difficulties very frustrating, especially her problems with reading.  Like her severely dyslexic brother she is a voracious consumer of literature and the fact that it has to be pre-recorded or read to her by a parent definitely cramps her style.  She also has some anxiety and social issues however we have made definite progress and with very little of what a school child would recognise as work she is now taking off with her reading having read the first Harry Potter, doing lots of writing and understanding maths at a level at least average for her age.

As Tech so eloquently says no one can know everything and anyone who says they do is lying, that is only going to get exponentially truer. How can people imagine it possible in this era of such rapid technological advances? We truly cannot begin to imagine what sort of future our children will inhabit. It seems to me that the child, immersed in the community, able to access as much or as little of the current culture as they wish and able to follow their own interests, is far more likely to get some sort of intuition about what they need to know in order to live happy fruitful lives.

More on home education here, here and here.


For Jax's home ed roundup and Debs's blog carnival.