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

Ruth Slack – a life well-lived!

Last Friday, along with a number of colleagues from NorthStarUK, I attended a service of thanksgiving for a wonderful Christian woman called Ruth Slack who passed away two weeks ago. Ruth was 63 and, with her husband Roger, pioneered an innovative Christian school in Stockport as well being prime movers in establishing Home Service, the Christian support organisation for home educators in the UK. At our last biennial Home Service conference in September 2010, Ruth appeared to be well but through the Autumn she became increasingly ill until in January she was diagnosed with cancer of the pancreas. Ruth passed away on the 7th February.

The reason I am sharing this with you is twofold; firstly, Ruth was a giant of faith who lived a life extending God’s Kingdom into education, and in particular home education; she saw this as a fundamental part of her calling to be a Christian. She helped a huge number of Christians, particularly those in the early days of their home education adventure, when they often felt most vulnerable. The second reason I raise this is to return to my Latin phrases of Week 23. You may recall that I wrote of two phrases but only mentioned one – tempus fugit. The second phrase is ‘carpe diem’, which is most often translated as ‘seize the day’. The Roman poet Horace first used the phrase and I intend to return to look at this next week. However, for today I simply want to use it in the context of Ruth’s life. Ruth, as much as anybody I know, ‘seized the day’; she was determined to ‘redeem the time’ and use her life to extend the Lord’s Kingdom primary not through teaching but by example and living a life that was saturated in grace – seizing the day does not always mean being always vigorous and busy – sometimes it can simply mean being who God calls you to be and demonstrating His grace to a needy world.

“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.

What schools can learn from John Holt

I am a great fan of the American educationalist John Holt. I am very aware that this does not necessarily endear me to some Christians who struggle with what they perceive to be his radical child-centred educational agenda. Whatever one might think of Holt’s philosophy of learning (and I feel that we have much to learn from it) his assessment of schooling is compelling. Holt argued in his seminal first book ‘How Children Fail’ that the academic failure of children was often not despite the best efforts of schools but actually because of them!  He maintained that structurally, schools are not good places for children to learn in. Writing in the 1960′s and early 1970s’s these were profoundly radical ideas, which in some respects led to the progressive movement in British primary schools during the mid to late 1970s.

Though progressive education with its open plan classrooms and mixed age classes is often ridiculed nowadays, at its best there was much that was wonderfully innovative and creative about it – I can still recall my first teaching practice in an open plan upper junior classroom in Cowbridge in Mid Glamorgan. These were pre-National Curriculum days and children had fun while teachers had freedom to create lessons that were stimulating and focus on the interests of children.

I do not wish to appear nostalgic and there were many failures and disasters in classrooms where teachers simply did not have the vitality, creativity or sheer teaching skills to work in this way with 30 or more children.

Nevertheless we as home educators can learn much from the progressive approach to education. The rigidity of modern western schooling, that has replaced it,  is most certainly not the model that we should aspire to mimic in our homes! And the fact that most of us are only working with two or three children actually means that we have the time to spend being innovative. The challenge for all of us is to be brave enough to be different. Maybe you can add one of John Holt’s books to your Christmas present list and allow Holt to stimulate your thinking!

Another good idea to come out of Rochdale!

Last week I was invited to speak at a meeting in Rochdale in Lancashire. A group of folks are busy setting up an excited new venture known as Gateway Christian Education, aimed at supporting Christian home educators within the region. It is a radical proposal involving a sort of flexi-schooling model where parents an opt into particular activities during the week, ranging from all-age worship in a Monday morning to one-on-one tutorial support in particular IGCSEs on a Tuesday or Thursday.It is an exciting project and one that I was delighted to endorse; I have been a long-time advocate of Christians radically considering the school as an institution and coming up with an institutional alternative that does not resemble conventional schools. Although I am a strong supporter of home-based learning, I know that this is not for everybody; however, monolithic schools that promote a secular worldview and values are not the alternative either.

In recent years, many Christians have become involved in establishing Christian schools, that to all intents and purposes institutionally resemble ordinary schools – children are expected to attend for five days a week, they are segregated according to age, classes are managed by a single adult who makes virtually all of the learning decisions for that group of children. For those of us committed to looking for a Biblical educational model, this seems like a mimicking of the way that everybody else does it! What excites me about the Rochdale project is that these folks have started with a blank piece of paper and asked the most radical question of all – in educational terms; “if we were starting afresh, what would a Biblical educational organisation aimed at educating children and young people look like?”

Now, I do not think that the answer that the folks in Rochdale have come up with is the only one possible; the Lord who has provided us with such a richly varied creation would not permit that. However, I do believe that conventional schools with their rigidity and lack of parental involvement would not be the first choice model. The challenge for all of us involved in Christian education is to explore what a Biblical model of education would look like and be bold enough to move forward into something very different even when that ‘something’ appears quite scary!  If you want to know more about Gateway Christian Education please feel free to visit their web site by clicking here.

By the way – if you want to know what the first good idea to come out of Rochdale was, click here!

Students as owners of their own learning

A few days ago I spent an hour chatting with a friend about her 17 year old son who is struggling with A levels. She wanted my advice, although if truth be told, I think she needed to tell her story to somebody much more than hear what I had to say. I have known her son for many years; he is a great lad with many gifts, notably as an artist. He scrambled through his GCSEs, with mostly middling sorts of grades. His mum wanted to speak with me because he struggled to organise his work and submit work to deadlines during his GCSE years; apparently the problem is persisting now that he is studying A levels. Except in art, where he works with enthusiasm, the young man either submits only scraps of paper as homework or does not submit any at all. How is it that a young man studying subjects that he has chosen to do can appear so disinterested and can so struggle with managing his academic affairs?

Whilst it is true that one cannot diagnose a general malaise on the basis of a single case, my years of teaching in face to face schools have convinced me  that there is one thing in particular that schools do very badly; they struggle to empower children to take ownership of their own learning. Fundamentally, school structures remove real power from children and young people to such an extent that large numbers of children come to see school learning as something that is done to them or for them but not necessarily (in an empowering sense) by them.  With this mindset, teachers are there – so the student thinks – to ensure that they get through exams, and work is submitted because the teacher wants it. Learning is not a process owned by the student ultimately leading to maturity and self-awareness.

Fundamental to the way that NorthStarUK works is a firm commitment to establish structures and patterns that provide children with opportunities to take ownership of their own learning – what subjects one studies, when in the week each lesson’s work is undertaken, even when to take holidays; these are all aspects of NSUK life that enable a student (with enormous support from parents) to learn skills that will enable them to move into further study with maturity and understanding.

Within a family setting, these radical approaches to learning can relatively easily be assimilated. The challenge for those of us working within a school context is to find ways to increasingly empower students so that they too, acquire these skills.

Bruised reeds and smouldering wicks

I recently heard a sermon (or ‘preach’ as it seems to be called at one of my daughter’s churches) which looked at a wonderful verse in Isaiah 42. The verse reads, “A bruised reed he will not break, and a smouldering wick he will not snuff out.”

At first sight these are strange verses and their meaning may not be particularly apparent. However, more than thirty years ago I had a friend at university to whom these verses were especially precious. In her previous year, she had suffered from something akin to a nervous breakdown. This had forced her to drop out of her course; in fact she was only in my year because she was retaking her first year. During her recovery, she told me, she had struggled as a Christian both with why she had fallen ill and the thought that she was letting the Lord down by not living a vibrant Christian life. A wise Christian therapist had pointed her to these verses and shown her that at the heart of the Christian faith is a God who has boundless compassion for those who are most week and vulnerable.

I was reminded of my friend as I listened to the ‘preach’. Two thoughts struck me – often home educators (especially mum’s) feel very inadequate for the task; those overseas often feel even more vulnerable. We have a God who is especially concerned with the ‘bruised read’ with the ‘smouldering wick’, about to be snuffed out! My second thought was that as home educators we often live exceedingly busy lives. We need to ensure that we have time to help the ‘bruised reed’ or the ‘smouldering wick’ – those people who need our support and care. My university friend of many years ago did not actually need me to say anything to her, but she did need somebody to listen.  If we are too busy to find time to care as a result of our ‘bookish learning’ then it would seem to me that the answer is simple – spend less time on the book work!

Ofsted tentacles stretching towards home educators

The government’s Chief Inspector of Schools clearly has far too much time on her hands!  Christine Gilbert, clearly feeling that the challenge of raising the standards of education in the nation’s schools is not enough to keep her occupied, has decided to focus her attention on home educating families and, in the process got it all wrong!  According to Ofsted, a key finding of their report was that  the current legislation around home education severely hampers local authorities in fulfilling their statutory duties to ensure that home educated children receive a suitable education. And yet, no such duty exists! In English law, ALL parents are obliged to ensure that their children receive a suitable education by sending them to school or otherwise. Steve Richards, NorthStarUK’s Educational Director stated, “It is profoundly disturbing that Ofsted, itself, does not know the law and prefers to attempt to pressurise the new government into reviving Badman and Ball’s discredited agenda for state regulation of family life.”

In the opinion of NorthStarUK, this sort of discriminatory behaviour has to stop – home education is as valid a life-style choice as school-based learning – this is what is enshrined in English law and it is about time that Christine Gilbert focused on upholding the law and the rights of parents rather than engaging in the publication of bullying misinformation.