Parental 'rights'

Does anybody else ever feel like hunting down certain home educators and beating them round the head with a rolled up copy of the Guardian, until they stop talking like idiots? No? maybe it’s just me. Once again, I have encountered somebody who suggests that there are such things as ‘parents’ rights’. Needless to say, a very important ‘right’ is the ‘right to home educate’. Let me try one last despairing time to make this clear; children have rights and the adults around them, including their parents, have duties. These are two completely different things.

 To see the absurdity of the notion of a ‘right to home educate’, let us look at some of the  rights which children enjoy. Among these are the right to be sheltered and fed, the right to an education, the right to protection from abuse and exploitation, as well as a number of others. Parents have a duty to ensure that these rights of their children are observed. Education and protection from abuse are precisely the same sort of rights, but some parents get muddled up and start thinking that education is some sort of right of theirs; this is why you will sometimes hear foolish and misguided people talking about their ’right to home educate’ their child. This is dangerous nonsense and to see why, it is only necessary to think what we would say if a parent began appropriating some other of the children’s rights and claiming that they were actually parental rights. How would this work?


Well, children in this country have a right not to be sexually abused or trafficked. Suppose I decide that this is in fact my right. I might say, ’As Mary’s father, I have a right to decide whether she is sexually abused or trafficked.’ This sounds wrong, because of course this is not a parental right, but a duty. In the same way, I could not claim that I had a right to decide whether my child had access to food or not. She has a right to be fed and I have a duty to see that she receives food. Claims such as, 'I have a right to home educate my child', are wrong for precisely the same reason. The parent has a duty to ensure that the child recieves an education; this is very different from having a right.  


As soon as parents start talking about ’rights’ over their children, they fall into error. We have no rights at all; just duties. Our children have a right to an education and parents have a duty to see that they get it. We can fulfil this duty in a number of different ways and as long as we see it in that light, as a duty and not a right, we will not go far wrong. Any talk of parental rights, whether about education, food, sex or anything else, is abhorrent and shows a horrible misunderstanding of both the legal and ethical situation.

Oxford University and home education

My daughter has now been at Oxford University for eight months or so; long enough for me to make a few tentative observations on the matter. The first thing I have noticed is that the tutorial system used at Oxford suits home educated young people very well. At most universities, large groups of students attend lectures in what is essentially another version of the classroom teaching which most of them experienced at school. At Oxford, on the other hand, one professor meets with a few students in a normal room to discuss the subject under consideration. Some of these meetings are one to one.



This method of education is very similar to the conversational teaching which most home educating parents use routinely with their children. The child expresses a view and the parent responds. Instead of one person being a teacher and the other a pupil, it is a cooperative process. This was certainly the way that things were done when my daughter was being educated at home and it worked brilliantly. The Oxford system is simply a natural extension of this.


One thing that my daughter has remarked upon is that many of the students seem to have the same attitudes as those at school. She herself chose to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics because she had always been fascinated by philosophy and, to a lesser extent, by politics and economics. This does not at all seem to be the case with many of the other students. They have evidently chosen to do PPE not because they are interested in philosophy, but rather because this subject is likely to help them get on in the future. When my daughter attempts to discuss some aspect of politics, she has been told on more than one occasion, ‘Oh, don’t talk about work; we want to have fun.’ This struck her, and me, as quite extraordinary. These are young people who still think in school terms of being made to learn things that they don’t want to so that they can get the right qualification.