Tag Archive | inspiration

Every day with a child is a chance to influence a future

Mar1

Since it’s Mother’s day this month I thought I’d bring back up this idea from way back. For it still is true and is so remarkable when you think what it is you do when you’re a mum, and I think you need reminding how incredible you are!

Actually, it involves fathers too, and they quite rightly have their own day of celebration. So this is for all you parents.

Have you ever considered what the title says: that every day with your child, presents an opportunity to influence a future?

Have you ever thought of it like that? Possibly not when continuous days with children can be extremely wearing, doing activities at their level a bit boring, and their endless energy totally exhausting!

But if you think about it, every moment you spend with children influences a future. Their future. Your future. Society’s future. The earth’s.

Why is that then?

Well – children are so readily influenced; so believing and naive and absorbent to learning. The experiences they have with you, however large or seemingly small, make an impact on them. They are like little computers gathering input from the things around them, from the things that happen and are said to them, and assimilating that with what has happened before. Small children don’t even have the filters that come with maturity to distinguish right from wrong, good from bad. They just absorb it all. Take it fairly literally. Digest it. And what they perceive becomes part of them.

So whatever experience they have with you, whether it’s fun or loving, wise or trusting, harsh or unjust, exciting or dull or dismissive, it moulds their understanding and view of the world, their education and even their personalities to a degree.

All interactions with our worlds shape who we are and what we do with our future. And the biggest influence on that shape comes when we are young, through the people we’re with.

Like your child with you.

That’s the way in which being with children has the opportunity to shape the future; we’re shaping a future being.

No small responsibility then!

But it needn’t be daunting. For it is quite simple really. Simply being with children – and being simply a good parent – does the trick. And don’t panic about that good parent bit – you probably already are or you wouldn’t be reading this.

Being a good parent is about being engaged and positive and fair, encouraging and caring, showing them what an unbelievably exciting place the world can be, what a myriad of fulfilling possibilities there are, how incredible all aspects of the planet are, how being loving and caring of the planet and the people in it will bring love and care back to them, and how to deal with aspects of the opposite in a way that dissipates harm rather than expanding it. Just showing how a simple acts of kindness and goodness makes life good – that’s enough to shape a good future – make it simple and sweet. (And that will also include a bit of ignoring at times too, so don’t worry – they need their own head space and down time as you do).

These are the ways in which we have the opportunity to enhance a future. Everyone’s future, for the way in which our children grow up will impact on everyone if you think about it broadly. As they come into contact with others, they will send out little ripples of influence out into their world too, impacting on those around them. Their learning will expand from them and help others learn. It is a wonderful, ever evolving cycle and it starts with parents. And perhaps it’s even more influential if you are home educating parents showing the world a diverse way of doing things. Diversity is always good – it helps the world to grow.

That’s what you’ll be doing as you parent your children. So if you celebrate Mother’s Day, celebrate parents per se, celebrate the incredible opportinity you have to make small impacts upon the world. And celebrate the important irreplaceable job you do as a parent.

Enjoy a Happy Parent Day. You deserve it!

Change your ideas about growing an educated being

Feb1

I’ve been delving into a new book. It’s about gardening, or to be more accurate; not-gardening. (Stick with me – this is going to lead onto education). Not gardening as we know it in terms of managing our own isolated little spaces by prettying up some parts, killing others, controlling nature and forcing it to do what we want it to do, rather than what it wants to do. It’s not about any of that.

It’s about seeing our garden, front yard, window box, whatever, not as one small personal patch, but as part of a gigantic whole earth to which we are connected. And seeing ourselves as guardians of this bit of earth we actually share with other parts of nature, rather than gardeners who keep it out. We should steer away from a insular view of our space where we separate, tidy and control each corner, bed, or ‘room’ as contemporary garden design likes to label them. For in reality nothing in our garden actual exists in isolation, it is dependent on the bigger environment that it is inevitably connected to, despite our attempts to fight it; the insects, the soil, the location, the garden next door and down the street, local flora and fauna and climate. It is all invisibly connected. It’s all nature. It is all interdependent and consequentially important… (The book’s worth a read: ‘We Are the Ark’ by Mary Reynolds. Or find it here; wearetheark.org)

And I immediately thought; what an amazing parallel there is between this view of our gardens and our view of education and educating.

Nothing about learning exists in isolation. So we should equally stop trying to compartmentalise it, or the kids. It might just work so much better for so many.

Over the decades we’ve been generally led to believe that educating needs to be a manageable and controllable process of developing certain outcomes in our kids through rigid and structured approaches, that requires separating kids into a plot (school), and isolating them from the rest of the world. We fertilise some aspects of our children’s development (the academic mostly) and try and kill off others (like their creativity for example), almost like we try and genetically modify crops. We keep subjects as separate from one another as brick edging so that no cross pollination occurs, instead of seeing all the language, maths, sciences and humanities as interconnected. We try and weed out the idiosyncrasies of our diverse learners in attempts to make them all the same, make them learn all in the same way, at the same time, in the same climate, which clearly doesn’t work for many children, just as it doesn’t work for all plants. Then, when the children don’t grow in the way we want them to grow, we try and prick out the weaker ones, giving them various labels that are in no way useful. Like ‘disruptive’. ‘Slow learner’. ‘Attention deficit’, thus making an issue of a child’s natural tendency to investigate, experiment, move about, be curious and intrigued and thus unable to sit still, which to my mind is a sign of their developing intelligence and eagerness to learn. Even worse, we try and ‘fix’ these traits on occasion by various means, some as harmful as crop spraying.

All instead of opening our eyes to the glaring obvious truth that many kids need something different from the suffocating education system we have allowed to become the norm.

When you’re home educating you can see their education as different from that. You can look at the bigger picture – the whole earth view rather than approaching it in isolate little patches of learning. And maybe you’ll begin to see the interconnectedness of all subjects, all approaches, all the little activities you do as important, however jumbled they are, and trust that they all contribute to each other and to the rounded development of an educated being (not a schooled being).

This is what real education looks like, as opposed to hot housing.

All learning overlaps. Whether the activity you’re doing is labelled ‘educational’ or not, it will have a valuable influence on your children’s learning as a whole. Just living a life has an influence on skill building, formulating knowledge, reinforcing it, that will transition into educational outcomes (if we want to label them).

I always think cooking is a good example of this – relevant to all ages. To cook you have to research, to read and use language, witness scientific changes as heat brings a change of state to certain substances, you have to learn and have a mathematical knowledge of amounts. You have to develop the skills needed to use and manipulate tools, materials and substances with different properties. You have to use creative thinking, imagination, and problem solving when compromise is needed. And doing this with others will develop the skills of cooperation, job sharing, conversation, among other social skills. Even the clearing up expands skills and understanding of yourself as part of a community, or team, and that you do not exist in isolation; that what you do impacts on others, particularly the mess you’ve left behind, and how to take responsibility for it.

If you wanted to label the subjects involved in all this you could call it ‘doing’ maths, English, science, language, PSE or whatever the latest personal development label is.

But if you see all activities your kids are doing as a valuable part of an infinite education, you’ll realise that anything they’re doing, in whatever form, wherever they are, impacts on this whole, from squatting on the pavement watching ants, to investigating YouTube, playing with their mates, or gaming. Including all the activities that don’t necessarily have a label!

I’m not saying we should regulate nothing. What I’m saying is that home educating gives us the opportunity to educate the whole child, and all their diversities, through a range of diverse activities that interconnect and are part of life, not just part of a school, directed towards schoolish outcomes (like test results) And perhaps that’s how we should see it, rather than a tidy, container-based, manipulated and isolated set of subjects to be ticked off, the result of which process often begets failures.

Our gardens are part of a whole ecosystem, and should not destroy any part of that ecosystem’s health from the smallest insect to the tiniest weed, in the way we take guardianship of them. Not least because we depend on that broader ecosystem for our own health!

Equally, our children’s education does not have to be contained in specific packages, subjects, rooms or timetables, or make kids suffer. It is a growth of interconnected skills, knowledge, understanding, and personal development, that evolve through a variety of overlapping experiences contributing to an educated whole, in a more organic and holistic way than it has been previously. Many unstructured home educating families are proving, have proved, how well this works. An organic, mostly unstructured, and holistic education is more compatible to the organic and natural earth that exists around our youngsters and which they will need to take guardianship of.

We are beginning to take a broader view of our gardens and their relationship to all nature, to the whole earth and the all other living organisms upon it .

Why not take the same view of education? Many families already do, with great success, proving it doesn’t have to be completely packaged, structured or rigidly contained in the way we’ve done previously. We need to be brave about broadening it beyond the restrictive concept we generally have had of it, because that’s as damaging to some kids as weed killer is to plants. Instead, allow it to expand, overlap and bloom in a much more holistic, diverse and healthier way, more related to an earth-wide whole.

Home educating gives you a wonderful opportunity to do just that.

back to school – OR NOT!

Sep2

This blog is not here to persuade anyone to home educate.

I say that because I have received so many heart warming messages over the years, about my work here and in the books, to tell me that it was through my writings that parents finally found the courage to give it a go; to home educate. And although it’s absolutely delightful to know that my work to support people over all this time has clearly done its job, it’s also a bit of a responsibility!

I say that lightly, of course!

I’m just so glad it’s helping, glad that it has rescued many a child from a school situation that wasn’t working for them, and many a distraught parent from witnessing it. It was only ever meant as support, and a bit of encouragement for those teetering on the edge, thinking they couldn’t do it, who couldn’t see beyond the institution of mainstream education that has conditioned us for so long to believe it’s the only way.

It isn’t! Not going back to school – or going to school at all – is an option.

Schooling, and I say that rather than educating, is such a huge part of the establishment having indoctrinated us since it became compulsory, it’s become monumental to think of doing anything else. (Scroll down the page listed above; ‘About Home Education’ to the education philosophy and you can read more on the difference between schooling and educating). And if we paid attention to the many pessimistic traditionalists (usually those with absolutely zilch experience of home education) home educating is doomed to failure.

Not true.

Today, there are thousands educating this way and thousands of youngsters graduated from home education and often university, out in the work place, living and working independently in the ‘real’ world, (ours among them – now in their 30s) and you couldn’t tell whether they went to school or not. A post on my blog ‘Do home school kids ever manage real work’ was one that had the most hits. So I included a special final chapter in the second edition of my ‘Notebook’ that expands on that, called ‘How does it all play out when they’re grown up?’ which illustrates what our Home Ed contemporaries are doing now. It makes for inspiring reading!

So if you’re seriously considering home educating, don’t let others put you off. Especially those who have no knowledge or experience – and often don’t want anyone to do anything different from them – don’t listen to the myths, especially the ones that suggest your kids will be weird and different! (This blog may help dispel some of them)

Look at it for yourself. (You might find my YouTude Video helpful).

Home educating is a very doable, successful, and exciting way to educate without school. All you need is to do the research, a good relationship with your child, to be willing to make the sacrifice of time and energy, and to keep your mind open and be flexible.

It is the schooling that now looks weird to us and many of our home educating contemporaries. It looks totally and utterly unnatural, schools becoming little better than cloning and conditioning factories which attempt to eradicate the very thing this planet and its people need – diversity.

No, I have never wanted to persuade any parent to home educate if they’re not up for it. But what I do want to say is that if you feel you want to, take courage and go for it. There’s plenty of support out there – you are not alone. There are thousands now for whom it’s working splendidly.

It is a wonderful inspiring adventure, one that, as I’ve said before, we never once regretted.

New Choice

Jan2

Happy New Year! I hope you’ve had a good time and are raring to go. Sometimes, when January arrived I could be less than raring to go – more hungover from the indulgences and laziness of the season. So if you’re feeling a little like that here’s a little story.

When my daughter used to teach Drama classes she told me of a warm up activity she did with the students to get them thinking and responding and working beyond the ideas they first thought of. It was called New Choice.

The idea was that she would start them off with a scenario to improvise; like choosing a pet from a pet shop for example and choosing the way they acted it out, what stood in their way, who took what role, etc. After a while, when they were settling into their roles, she would call out ‘new choice’ and they would have to abandon their original plan and think up something completely new. Like, for example, what to do if the pet shop was shut, of if they’d taken the role of the shop keeper, they’d have to switch and play another role, or twist the plot to a different scenario, create a different atmosphere perhaps. It certainly developed a plasticity of thinking – something we could all do with!

Being me, as soon as she told me about it I couldn’t help but relate it to life – and education. For isn’t that just what happens; you just get settled into a routine and the universe ups and shouts ‘New Choice’ at you and you have to think again. Parenting is certainly like that.

I also thought, what a wonderful set of skills for youngsters to build, especially within the current climate of learning, work, economy, politics, society, etc. For this activity, whether in drama classes or in life, pushes you to develop the essential skills of adaptability, flexibility, problem solving, resilience through change and crisis, and the ability to invent strategies that enable you to keep going however up-skittled you are by what’s thrown at you. It forces you to look for the positive possibilities, how to let go of the old and forge new pathways. Just think – if our kids could do that, they’d be set up for life.

Many home educators have, of course, already experienced this. They have had to abandon the school approach to learning because of failing, unhappy or unwell children, have had this ‘new choice’ forced upon them. Most are making good. And in the end it’ll probably reap personal dividends you may not have originally thought about as relevant to education.

Education is obviously all about learning and development. But how to learn and develop is as important as what to learn. Personal skills as vital as academic skills; if you’re going to put your academic skills to good use in an unstable world. Many people fail to recognise this part of educating in their blinkered quest for ‘results’.

The thing is; results are never wholly predictable and life is as unpredictable as the weather. As is progress, employment, budget, climate, all of it, it shifts all the time. What our kids will need in order to manage this instability are the skills required for adjustment, versatility, the ability to create new pathways, to visualise new choices they may not have spotted before, and the courage to take risks associated with thinking beyond what they first thought of.

Life = and learning – is as unpredictable as the weather. Build the skills to cope with that.

January is as good a time as any to perhaps reflect on your home educating approaches, whether you’re stuck in a box, whether your children and young people are building those personal skills as a result of your approaches and whether it’s time to shout ‘New Choice’ and be bold enough to go for it.

Happy new choice!

Happy new home educating year!

4 simple things

Aug2

It’s August! It’s the holidays. Slack off. Chill out. Have a lovely time with your children and young people.

Let their days happen without an agenda for a while for they’ll learn just as much through the simplest of things, many you won’t even have anything to do with.

But when you feel you need to have some input here are:

In celebration of Mothers

Mar13

It’s that Mother’s Day time of year again and I’ll probably be pampered by one or other of my wonderful children, even though they’re living independently now after all those years home educating.

However, as well they know, the commercial, profiteering and pollutive bandwagon that Mother’s Day has become quite revolts me (imported cellophane-wrapped, hothouse flowers and plastic flower pots being up there with other environmentally damaging stuff, for one)

Add to this the fact that all this buying of single-use tat for mums, can also mask the whole point of Mother’s Day; to celebrate the enormous importance of mothers.

Okay, we know mothers are important, but it often lies buried under the buying, and is seldom ever spelt out in words. When there are written words to describe that importance, you can repeat it, and learn and teach others why mums everywhere need our respect. (Dads too). Which is why I wanted to reiterate here something I’ve said before: the most valuable thing that you will ever do is parent your children.

So how come?

Because it’s not just your children who are affected by your parenting, or your own family life. It’s about something much bigger than that. And in order to understand that you have to step back and look at the bigger picture.

Think about ripples. When you chuck a stone in water the stone doesn’t only affect the place where it hits the surface, its impact sends ripples out through the whole pool. Right to the edges even, right to places it was nowhere near and never touched.

Your parenting is like that. Because your children are affected by your parenting more than they are affected by anything else in their lives. And that parenting, and the way your children are, will be sending ripples out through society just like the pool.

Your children affect the children they meet, the communities they join, the work they do as they grow, the families of their own that they may one day create. And it will not only be their own little communities they affect, for as those communities interact they affect others beyond their own ripples in their own pool and affect societies to come. And your children do not only affect this planet as it is now, their actions affect the future of the planet too.

These small babies of yours, toddlers, children, and so on, and the way in which you are bringing them up actually affects everybody. That’s how the bigger picture looks. And that’s why the most valuable thing that you ever do is to parent your children. Even more astounding is the fact that your baby may become the next Einstein, Prime Minister, David Attenborough, or the person who discovers the cure for cancer, or develops solutions to our changing world and the challenges it faces. Equally important are the less heralded jobs that all need doing like caring or teaching or nursing or entertaining or emptying our bins. The way you raise your baby affects all this.

And that’s why mums are, why parenting is (dads too), so, SO important.

It’s also why it is so important that we value it and celebrate it. That we value it enough to give it our time, thought and attention, we value it enough to prioritise our parenting duties, value it enough to make sure we do it well.

Of course, the next big question is; how do we do it well?

To do anything well, whatever it is, requires; focus, energy, being engaged, commitment, putting ourselves out, thought.

It also involves; research, consideration, decision making, sometimes sacrifice of other things we were formerly engaged in.

And changes to; ourselves, the way we behave, the way we think, our way of living.

The biggest requirement is respect:

Respecting our parenting enough to devote energy and commitment to it, be responsible about it.

Respecting ourselves enough to do this job to the best of our abilities, smarten up our act a bit, think through our morals, practices, behaviours, habits and language.

Respecting our children enough to value time spent with them, listening to them, being involved with their doings, guiding, educating them (and that happens as much through our interaction with them as anything else), cherishing them and nurturing them. Caring.

Now this may all sound too much of a demand on our time and energy and too much for us to aspire to or achieve. But it isn’t. For it is so, so simple.

It is simply achievable by just being a good, caring person. A good caring person who is there.

Being a good caring person you will pass that goodness and care onto your child. They will then understand what goodness and care is all about. And they will in turn send ripples of goodness and care out into the world, helping make it a good place to be. And that’s simply because of your parenting.

That’s the effect your parenting has. It has an effect far beyond you and your children. It has an effect throughout the world. That’s why it’s so important.

It is the most valuable thing that you could ever do. Mum or dad, that’s the value of you. Worth celebrating I’d say!

Try and celebrate your day without harm to the planet and you’ll be teaching your little ones to do the same.

Will we ruin the children’s lives?

Feb6

I missed it! The advent of the one thousandth blog posted here.

I was busy moving house, settling into new routines of living and trying to find that network of support you’ve built up over the years of living in the same place, which you tend to take for granted until it disappears that is. Support like folks to fix your laptop, mend the car, sort out a leak in the roof and most important, install some decent heating.

So I completely missed the fact that since I started here, over twenty years ago, I have written over one thousand blogs about the life and times of a home educating family, now all grown up of course, and about education in general.

One from the archives – before the Internet dominated our learning.

Home education has dramatically changed since then, the biggest of those changes being the growth of the facility of the internet which has increased its accessibility; to others, to information, to a whole home educating community you were never aware of, consequently making home education so much less daunting, more doable and more connected.

When we first started out none of that was available.

And that connectivity has more importantly changed something else as well. It has changed the way many parents see education and schooling.

Most parents accepted that schools, the education system and the politics behind it, was bound to be the best education their child was likely to receive, the best and only way for their children to become educated adults.

No one is quite so accepting now. Flaws in the system, what it provides in the form of ‘processing’ the young in contrast to educating them, and the impact this has not only on their achievement but on mental health too, are much more visible as people talk and share and discuss it, through a whole range of public platforms that were not available before. It’s removed some of the elitism attached to those in the know about education (supposedly) who dictated what happened to our kids, which we never had the opportunity to challenge or question in the way we do now.

Now we do. Parents are raising questions, discussing problems, are much more able to shout their opinions widely and publicly express their distaste in an outdated system no longer suited to contemporary society. Consequently, finding courage through this connectivity, the number of home educating families seeking alternatives increases daily.

Anyway, back to this post-one-thousandth blog and the reason I mention it. It was to share with you what those little children of six and nine when we started, who are around their thirties now (can hardly believe it) are up to in case you worried that home educating would ruin them, as I know this can be a very large and imposing worry for many considering home educating: Will we ruin the children’s lives? (Odd how no one questions whether school will ever ruin their children’s lives – even with tangible truth of it now)

I’m happy to say that neither of them have been ruined, not from my point of view or theirs! And we all still have that lovely relationship developed through home educating. Furthermore, they are both educated, intelligent, working, independent young people, busy about their lives, like pretty well all of the others they grew up home educating with.

Our eldest has just completed a Masters Degree (Distinction), whilst working and running her own business (all through Lockdowns), after having a complete career change because of Covid. Our youngest also changing track, now working in a garden centre after deciding that being Manager of a shop in a renowned retail chain was not for her. She could not reconcile her distaste for selling polluting mountains of tat wrapped in plastic, and is looking towards a greener career.

Both have developed the skills of flexibility and adaptability needed in today’s working world and continue to grow and extend themselves. And their PR skills are exemplary – they are not social misfits as some fear that home educators will become. There have of course been many ups and downs on their journeys – as in all life journeys wherever you are educated. But I think home educating; by achieving what they needed through diverse approaches helped develop an attitude to life that showed them that; whatever isn’t working in life you can probably change even though that might not be easy, but you can find the courage to do it anyway.

And that’s what I would say to any new home educating parent reading this, or anyone considering doing it; that home educating is not always easy (school’s not always easy either) but if you can screw up the courage to do it anyway the rewards are immense. And no, you won’t ruin the children.

A Home Education Notebook is now back on Kindle

Jan20

It’s taken a while but finally I’ve sorted it; ‘A Home Education Notebook’ is available again on Kindle after a short absence.

The reason for the delay was because my focus got stolen by moving house, which is all consuming as anyone who’s ever done it knows.

Moving house means establishing new routines (like where the nearest food is), getting to know new people (builders, plumbers, tech gurus and fixers) and of course new friends and communities.

Meeting new people, who always ask about your life so far, means more explanations of home educating and I receive a variety of responses, mostly in the form of a barrage of questions; do you do lessons, do they have teachers at home, do you have a timetable, what about friends, tests, curriculum, GCSEs etc?

Whilst the Lockdowns made the concept of ‘Home Schooling’ more familiar, the more seasoned home educators among us knew it was nothing like home educating, it was just doing school stuff within the four walls of home. Completely different. (Expanded in a post here)

However I still find it difficult to explain those differences even now, how education is not necessarily about lessons, or tests, or teaching, or exams. To explain how children learn without lessons, or teachers, or tests and timetables, they can actually learn for themselves (Shock! Horror!) That learning can actually happen in an organic, holistic, autonomous, interest-led way from the things children are naturally curious about, by being out, observing, engaging in, analysing and involving themselves in finding out about the world and building the skills needed to do so, even without age-related structures usually imposed upon education. Along with all that how home educated children also have friends, develop social skills, and mix happily in company (see this post about socialisation).

The stories in ‘A Home Education Notebook’ written as it happened, demonstrate that the best. Along with ‘A Funny Kind of Education’. The articles themselves are an illustration of how the everyday experiences we had encouraged and developed children’s knowledge, skills and understanding of learning quite naturally. And how – even more surprising to some – this happens because children want to learn.

Children don’t necessarily want to be schooled. But they mostly want to learn, if they’re allowed to in their own way, in their own time, through subjects that matter to them in their worlds. The success of this has been shown time and time again by all the home educated youngsters who’ve grown up and out into the world, making their own decisions, incorporating any structure and traditional approaches and outcomes as and when (and if) needed to get them there. And so proving that home education really does work and adequately prepares young people for the ‘real’ world. The real world being the one outside that bizarre world of school!

This new edition of ‘A Home Education Notebook’ concludes with a chapter about all those home educated young people we grew up with and what they’re doing now post-twenty, who are proof indeed!

So if you’ve been waiting for the Kindle version of this new edition, it’s back again. It’s the book readers have told me that reassures and inspires them the most. Hope you enjoy it.

Kindle edition available now

Share your story?

Nov7

I’m a bit rubbish at communicating on Facebook these days. It seems to be less frequented or valuable than it was, full of adverts, and now there are many other forums we can use to connect.

Fb wasn’t a thing when we started home educating – I bet you can hardly imagine that. But it soon became an invaluable tool for parents to connect through, share ideas and resources, arrange meet-ups and reassure one another, making home education feel more doable than some people first thought.

It was the chance to so easily connect with that support which made home educating a less scary and isolating prospect than it potentially could be. Stepping away from the mainstream path millions of others were heading along can be daunting. Thanks to social media no one needs feel cut off, unsupported, or without anyone to turn to now.

And actually it’s been very supportive for me too, to receive your lovely messages and comments and see how my work and words get around and find their way to those who need it. And I feel so blessed when folks have taken the trouble to connect with me and let me know how my books have helped. If you’re one of those and I didn’t reply personally please know that your comments and messages have meant so much.

Meanwhile I recently had such a nice comment from a Fb friend, along with a potted version of her story, I asked her permission to post it here because I know many of you won’t see it on there and it’s most uplifting to read.

Here’s what she said;

“It was your books that finally gave me the confidence to believe what I really already knew in my heart- that our youngest would be better off out of school. His older brothers were in a specialist residential school for very able boys with Asperger syndrome but he didn’t quite qualify for diagnosis, so mainstream-or not- was the only option.

After we took our son out of school in yr 5, I remember walking past the back to school signs and rows of uniform hanging up in the shops and just grinning because I knew I’d never need to buy any of it, ever again! The relief of knowing he wouldn’t be going back into that hellish place where he learned nothing except to feel that he was stupid and weird and generally rubbish, was immense and I just wanted to celebrate. It was definitely the best decision we made for him. He went to college for A levels because he chose to, a year ‘late’ and is now taking a gap year to work and save money before doing his degree. I’m certain that school would not have put him on this path. He’d have left as soon as possible, hating the idea of learning anything because he was ‘too stupid’. His confidence still isn’t great but at least he has ‘proof’ from his results that he is capable of learning anything if he chooses to and sufficient life experience to see the benefit of hard work to get where he wants to be. He also has friends!”

I think it’s these shared stories that make for the best support for parents starting out because they’re straight from the horse’s mouth. We can have faith in them as they are the reality of home education and consequently they are the ones that give people the confidence to go for it themselves. I know when we started out, hearing the stories from those further along were the most valuable, inspiring and reassuring. Although without the internet then we rarely heard them. Very different now!

So if you have a story to tell, or would like to share yours, maybe you’d like to get in touch and I can post it here and we can go on supporting each other in this wonderful alternative to school.

Thirteen years of writing this home education blog later…

And thank you once again to all of you who’ve been in touch over the many years I’ve been writing this blog. It is truly appreciated and I’m always so delighted to hear how my books have helped. Bless you!

Processed education can be as unhealthy as processed food

Oct24

An exclusive exert from ‘A Home Education Notebook’:

Some days I got so tired I wondered how I was ever going to get the dinner. And it was those days that packaged and processed food I normally abhor looked really appealing.

One particular day springs to mind where my youngest made mint creams which took a bit of supervision, mostly in the form of keeping her fingers out of it especially when they’d been other places. And the eldest made fudge and just needed an occasional question answering but then went onto maths which she was struggling with and needed explanations. This was much more demanding than anticipated as I couldn’t remember how to do half of it and had to look it up. Then the youngest was on a website trying to research something it wouldn’t and getting more and more frustrated. And I just seemed to seesaw between the two of them like this all morning. By afternoon I decided we needed to get out for a swim before I was torn in two, but that finished me off. So I admit to resorting to the easy option of opening a packet for dinner.

At least I thought it was the easy option.

Sometimes I think the packaging designers must sit in their studios laughing as they think up the most complicated arrangements of plastic and cardboard just to annoy tired parents at the end of a demanding day.

We rarely ate packaged or processed food. I like my meals to have ingredients as near to their natural state as possible – that’s where taste and nutrition comes from.

But when I’m beyond scrubbing potatoes or cooking anything inventive we resort to it at times, even though I never relish it. For processed and packaged food tastes like … well, it doesn’t taste of much at all. It is limp, lifeless, tasteless – apart from salt, suspiciously full of unknowns and mostly totally uninspiring.

And it was that day I thought; this is just like education really. Education has become so processed and tightly packaged it is almost unrecognisable as education.

Just like how hard it is to recognise nutritious ingredients in processed food, education has become so over processed it too is losing some of the value of the original ingredients. It has become as unpalatable as eating forced and cling-filmed strawberries in the middle of winter. There is no taste. There is nothing to arouse the senses and the effect doesn’t last.

Isn’t that like systemised schooling?

I used to think my mother was a bit of a nutcase insisting on buying dirty carrots. Now I know why she did it. Carrots with the soil still on them keep without rotting for ages. Those washed and plastic-packaged ones from the supermarket just turn gooey and stink like mad.

Packaged and processed education doesn’t last forever either. And I reckon it turns the children gooey.

I read of an experiment someone once did on a class of school children. They were told they were going to be tested on a certain subject at the end of the week and given information to learn for it. The children sat the test and the expected number did well. A few days later the same children did the same test without warning and hardly any of them scored well. The learning they had processed for the test didn’t last – just like the carrots.

Education like food needs to be as near as possible to its natural experience in order for it to be lasting, inspiring, arouse the senses and be worth having. Experiences are the basis for all learning, for meaningful learning. Learning packaged into tightly restrictive curriculum or second hand learning in workbooks, removed from the original experience, loses its appeal just as much as food. Learning and education need unwrapping.

It is natural for children to learn. During their everyday lives at home pre-school children learn loads of things. They acquire skills. They pick up knowledge. They do this naturally, experientially. Just as we all do all of the time.

All experiences teach us something. Our interests and pursuits broaden our minds. So do books, Internet, telly, ordinary every day interaction with people and things. And also our work, our outings, anniversaries, celebrations, social gatherings. Learning is natural. And learning from first hand experiences in this way is meaningful, rich, stimulating, and retained. Children learn naturally from this all the time.

Then they are removed from that natural learning environment just before they’re five and shut away from it in schools. We’re told that the only valuable learning is that which comes from teachers, packaged into a National Curriculum and contained in expected outcomes and objectives.

So children are processed through this type of learning and adults are conditioned to devalue learning outside of that. And what happens? Children begin to lose their ability to learn anything that isn’t neatly wrapped for them. And I see an awful lot of teenagers who have about as much enthusiasm in doing anything as I have in eating those out-of-season packaged strawberries.

In both the strawberries and the teenagers the zest has gone.

With food I have options. Mostly I buy food in its natural state. I am deeply suspicious of processed pies, potato alphabets, pasta shapes in suspect sauce and the infamous turkey Twizzlers! But sometimes at the end of a hard Home Educating day I’m as pleased as anyone else to open a pizza. When I can get it open that is.

But I do have the choice and you will probably know which is better for me. I suspect you might also be thinking that I would be a better parent for giving my child a natural potato that’s been baked than a processed pizza.

Yet it’s funny how people don’t seem to have the same view of education.

Everyone seems to think that a packaged and processed education is better for children than a natural one.

I got more criticism for allowing my children a natural education than I did putting them through an unnatural educational process. Yet if I continually gave them processed food instead of natural food I wouldn’t be considered a good parent at all.

Odd that!

Years ago, children didn’t have much opportunity to learn. They didn’t have opportunity to learn skills or access information like they do now. And many children didn’t live in homes where education was valued more highly than earning a crust of bread. Children were needed to mind siblings, pick potatoes, crawl along factory floors in between dangerous machinery and sweep chimneys.

Well I don’t know whether folks have noticed but that’s changed. Most of our kids today live in an environment where education is available, where there is access to information, where skills can be learnt. Naturally.

They are surrounded by people using skills and accessing information. And quite naturally they will learn from that.

But we as a society have been led to believe, as education has become more packaged and processed over the years, that this processed type of education is the only valuable one.

Our attitude to processed food is changing, thank goodness. We’re beginning to value unprocessed meals. We’re even beginning to see how processed food can make us ill.

I’d like to see our attitude to processed education changing too. For not only is some of it meaningless, unfulfilling and un-lasting, it too can make our children ill.

Like with unprocessed meals that I actually peel and prepare, I tried to give my children an unprocessed experiential education as near to its natural state as possible. If we were learning about plants – we had plants to hand that we dissected. If we were learning about history – we did it in a historical setting like museum or castle. Get the idea?

This way, just like fresh picked, in-season, unprocessed strawberries, the flavour of the educational experience we gave them was meaningful and stimulated all their senses in a way that is still lasting.

You can read more supportive stories in ‘A Home Education Notebook’. And the new edition has a new added epilogue which tells the stories of the children we home educated alongside now that they’re grown up!