Reflections of a home educating mum

Looking back it seems such a long time ago since I home-educated my own children, and yet it is only 6 years, but such a lot has happened in that time. My eldest is now married and nursing at a psychiatric hospital in Australia, my middle child is also married and works in a bike shop as a mechanic, and the youngest is at university studying automotive design. All quite different paths and such varied routes to get there, all the more amazing since the oldest and the youngest were diagnosed with dyslexia or a dyslexic type condition whilst at university.

So do I regret home-educating my children? Would they have got better help at school? I don’t think so, I think the one to one tuition from me and others who helped me on the way have been invaluable. As a mum I knew my children well and I could help them move forward, encouraging them in their strengths and challenging them, or supporting them in their weaknesses. One of the most valuable lessons I think they all learnt through the home-education experience was how to think outside the box. Has it been easy? No! But it has been worthwhile, of that I am confident.

Jo Storie
NorthStarUK NetNanny

“Never be within doors when you can rightly be without!”

In this week’s Home Page News, I want to share some thoughts which might have greater resonance to those parents with younger children – those up to Year 8 or 9. It is very easy, especially when using a ‘system’ like NorthStarUK to end up spending a lot of time each day sitting at a desk reading books or looking at a computer screen. In some respects there is a certain inevitability about this; however, we really must guard against the “‘bookish’ tail wagging the dog!” Our days as parents are short; this was especially brought home to me when my eldest daughter had her own baby before Christmas. To me, she was still my little girl – despite just enjoying her 29th birthday. As parents we really do need to strive to enjoy our children when they are children and we should not permit bookish work to get in the way of this! In fact, I would go further, and say that rather than fitting the day in around our bookish work, we should aspire to do just the opposite – the fit book work around the other (dare I say) more important things of the day!

Charlotte Mason was a great advocate of outdoor living – “Never be within doors when you can rightly be without,” she wrote. Even in winter she advocated spending hours outside every day – she saw this as the natural place to raise children.  This was not based upon some romantic Wordsworthian view of nature but a recognition that Creation is a great place to learn.  Whether we are called to live in Blighty or in more exotic climes the reality is that most children have a natural curiosity about things outdoors; this provides lots of learning experiences. In addition, being out of doors naturally slows down the pace of life and provides parents and children with all sorts of opportunities to talk, discuss and develop quite deep understanding in ways that are difficult to achieve in a ‘schooly’ setting indoors.

Can I urge you, this week, to prioritise the non-bookish times, to try to make formal learning fit in around the other things in life and perhaps, even in the ‘bleak mid-winter’ in the Uk find time to go outdoors!

Charlotte Mason and making time to parent

Charlotte Mason (1842-1923) is one of my favourite educational thinkers. Largely home educated herself (and born in North Wales, I might add!) she trained to be a teacher and had a passion for educating children throughout her long life. In the opening lecture in her seminal book, ‘Home Education’ Mason writes, “It is a great thing to be a parent: there is no promotion, no dignity, to compare with it.” In many western societies parenthood has been largely devalued over the last generation or so; it has become something that one fits around the more important role of ‘work’. Indeed, recent surveys have suggested that many parents now prefer to be at work that at home with their children, since they find ‘work’ to be less stressful!

Even within the missions community it is not uncommon for pressure to be placed upon parents to ensure that they both fulfill their roles as workers and fit their children in around these. I have spoken on this topic in the past but suffice to say in this Home Page News that this perspective is wrong and comes from a non-Biblical approach to missions. Whilst we should not, as parents, raise a generation of spoilt and molly-coddled children, at the same time we have to recognise that being a mum or a dad is the highest calling that can be placed upon us.

Charlotte Mason continues, “The parents of but one child may be cherishing what shall prove a blessing to the world.” We do not know what blessings our children will bring to others during their lifetime. As parents, therefore, the best way to spread blessing is to start at home; and, dare I say it, if this means doing less outside the home, then I would suggest that this is the wiser road to take.

What a Swiss educator can teach us about the role of parents

From the very first, we have always regarded NorthStarUK as a complementary education process. We are not a school and we are not in the business of replacing parents; what we attempt to do is to come alongside parents (and more latterly schools) and provide assistance in those areas where folks feel vulnerable or in need of support. This is critical to the way that we see our task and is the reason why we are so committed to home education (and not, please note, home schooling!)  It was Pestalozzi, the great Swiss educator, writing at the beginning of the 19th century who said “The mother is qualified and qualified by the Creator Himself, to become the principal agent in the development of her child; … and what is demanded of her is – a thinking love.” We would also like to add the dad to that quote, but I am sure that you understand the point that Pestalozzi is making.  Indeed, I would suggest that Pastalozzi’s comment is worth repeating especially in our age where governments across the world appear so zealous in their desire to strip parents of their authority to make their own decisions regarding the educate and rearing of their own children. More than anything else, we at NorthStarUK, want to empower parents to be able to confidently educate their children and to bring a ‘thinking love’ to bear upon all that takes place within the family.

Home Page News 18th January 2010

At church yesterday the speaker asked us all – ‘what puts fire in your belly?’ ‘What, in your life, excites you when you think about it?’ He was particularly asking us to reflect on the work that we do for the Lord, and especially inviting us to focus on those areas that we are especially called to minister in, over and above everything else. As I sat there I thought about NorthStarUK and also about gifts – not the sort that we receive at Christmas, but rather those that our Creator gave us at birth. For many years I worked as a special needs teacher. Many of the students I worked with were amongst the weakest in the school, in terms of their academic prowess. But each and everyone one of them had gifts; they all had abilities given to them by their Creator. Often these were talents that school did not notice or value; nevertheless, they were still gifted individuals – indeed, much of my most important work, I felt, was to try to convince them that they had abilities, because many years of schooling had often caused them to lose confidence and led them to devalue themselves. It also struck me that schools do not have a very good track record of working with exceptionally talented individuals, either, unless these talents coincided with what schools were looking for. I thought of Mozart – a child prodigy; how would he have got on in one of our local schools – now it has to be admitted, he would almost certainly have known more about science or geography, but would he have had time to compose – he was writing music from the age of five! Schools inevitably aim at producing generalists; our Creator, however is more concerned to produce unique, talented individuals who have a role within their community. As parents, teachers and educators let’s spend some time this week reflecting on the gifts that each of our children has been given and help them to have a fire in their belly as they develop those gifts and talents in the coming years.

Badman and the DCSF’s ‘doomsday’ scenario

Much has been written about the Badman Report and most home educators have, rightly, been indignant at the manner in which the Department for Children, Schools and Families aided and abetted by some in the educational media and children’s charities have decided to wage open warfare on sensible law-abiding parents whose only ‘crime’ is to step outside the government prescribed education system and try to offer their children something better!

Though there is ample research that demonstrates clearly that children who learn without schools do at least as well as their schooled peers, that their employment outcomes are excellent and that they integrate well into society, Graham Badman has chosen to ignore this. Was this consultation a genuine attempt to improve relations between local authorities and home educators or was it, in reality, little more than a ‘stitch-up’, a sham, where Ed Balls, Delyth Morgan and others within the DCSF could ensure that the last island of educational independent in this country was brought within the controlling tentacles of government? Badman’s unwillingness to acknowledge research that has findings favourable to home education and the membership of his advisory committee, which included three specialists on safeguarding children and a champion of ‘children’s rights’ and no current home educators would suggest that Badman and his masters knew quite well what recommendations they wanted to see at the close of this consultation.

Though Badman has been compelled to acknowledge that there is no evidence to support Delyth Morgan’s shameful association of home education and forms of child abuse, Baroness Morgan, herself, has never publicly apologised for this slur and Graham Badman’s recommendations clearly assume that home educated children are intrinsically more vulnerable and need greater protection from their parents, than those children who attend school!

Is the real issue that home educated children simply highlight the failures that are so common within the school-system? Perhaps the teachers’ unions dislike the fact that untrained mums and dads do a better job than their members or that unpaid parents with limited physical resources appear to be more successful than a nationalised education system costing billions!

Perhaps, in the end, this whole Badman exercise is based upon fear – the fear that more parents will recognise that successive governments over the last twenty years have experimented with the nation’s children, promising much, delivering very little and changing strategy often enough to disguise the outcomes of their actions.

Once parents recognise what has occurred, the number of families home educating could explode as thousands of parents decide to take full responsibility for their children’s education and leave the far riskier national school environment.

Is this ‘doomsday’ scenario what is truly behind the DCSF’s current attack on home educators?