Home education

I sometimes find listening to the debates of home educators in this country rather like the conversations at the Mad Hatter’s tea party; incomprehensible and lacking in all logic and coherence. Take the exchange yesterday on one of the home education support lists. A woman whose home educated son plays the cornet, wishes him to take music examinations. There were three main suggestions. Two of these were that the mother should contact a school or use a private teacher. The third was from a man who felt that taking examinations in music were unnecessary. This is all very strange.

I am not at all musical, to say the least of it. Nevertheless, I thought that music should be part of a balanced education and felt that it was worth my daughter learning to play a few musical instruments. I accordingly taught her the recorder, piano and guitar. My only knowledge of all this was that I could read music; an ability which anybody could teach themselves in a week or so. I certainly cannot play the guitar or recorder! I mean literally cannot play a single note on either instrument. This does not matter at all. In the end, my daughter dropped the recorder and went on to get Grade 5 at classical guitar and Grade 2 at piano. This was easy enough. One can send off to the ABRSM for the syllabus and then buy the music for the pieces for the examinations. It is also possible to buy a CD of the pieces being played, so that one knows how they should sound. Scales will need to be learned as well, but this is just donkey work and rote learning. No musical ability is required. Anybody can teach any musical instrument at all without any prior knowledge or experience.

Why then all the talk of schools or private teachers? Surely the beauty of home education is that the parents take control of the process and wrest it away from professionals? This minor exchange on a list which has over one and a half thousand members seems to me to shed some light upon the state of home education, at least in Britain. As soon as something slightly out of the run-of-the-mill crops up, the natural impulse seems to be to turn to a professional, rather than to tackle it one’s self. I have been thinking a lot about this business this morning, wondering what it says about the mindset of many home educators. Have they been indoctrinated into believing that anything in the way of formal education must be conducted by a qualified teacher? If so, why are they home educating?

The Deuchars family; an apology

It was hardly possible to move here yesterday for all the Deuchars of various ages milling around the place. They had come here because I had mentioned the Open University in connection with home education and then stayed to denounce me because I had said that their family had a Christian background; a wholly unacceptable suggestion that both were at pains to deny. One quite sees their point. In much of the British home educating scene, ’Christian home educator’ is more or less synonymous with child-beating religious fundamentalist. I am happy to acquit the family of the damaging allegation that they have a Christian background, which both mother and daughter seemed at pains to deny!

I have in the past been curious to know whether or not Shena Deuchars used the ACE materials and as somebody else raised the subject yesterday, thought it worth adding my own two pennorth. This too provoked irritation, not only on the part of the mother, but also her daughter Katherine who zoomed in at once to abuse me, even ticking me off for not using their church’s full name. Sometimes, people from the United Reformed Church, which was formed in 1972 from an amalgamation of the Congregational Church with the Presbyterians, are referred to, both by themselves and others, as being ’United Reform’ for short. Katherine thought that this was gibberish, although it is not uncommon to hear Methodists, for example, say of somebody, ’Yes, he’s United Reform’, in the same way that one might say ’He’s C of E’. They mean by this to signify that the person is a member of the United Reform Church.

I can see that in future I shall have to be very careful what I say about any matter which might be thought to touch upon the Deuchars, mother and daughter both! No more mention of the Open University, for instance; talk of the OU being thought in Swindon to be a coded attack on their family. It would also be wise perhaps to avoid saying anything further about Christianity, Exeter, law, proof reading or copy editing; one cannot be too careful in avoiding the causing of inadvertent offence. I reserve my own opinionated teenage daughter as an ultimate deterrent; only unleashing her if the situation calls for a devastating response. I can see that others have a lower threshold for going nuclear in this way!