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

Education is essentially about preparing young people to take their place in the world; since we cannot teach them everything, what we do teach these young people inevitably requires that we select certain things as being important enough to be placed within the curriculum and other things that we deem less important. Every education system in the history of humankind has done this. It is out belief system that helps us determine what is most important from what is less important.

The biggest difference between contemporary western education and almost every other educational system in the past is the lack of honestly of our contemporary systems in claiming to be religiously neutral. Previous education systems acknowledged that this was actually a nonsense – it is simply not possible to devise an educational system apart from a belief system. Next week I hope to spend a little time exploring what belief systems underpin western education.

Now, a book could be written de-bunking that perspective, but there is one thing that I do want to raise this week. There is a big lie that has been embraced by Christians in the area of education over the last 150 years; namely that secular schools are essentially neutral places when it comes to instructing children about the big questions of life. For so many Christians, who actively support this REACT campaign, the view is that it is OK to leave God out of every other area of our schools – history, geography, science, English and so on, as long as he gets a mention in RE. Indeed , their view would be that this is only just in a multi-faith society. This single act, however, consigns God to the periphery, indicating to children that he is either non-existent or so unimportant that he hardly gets a mention in the important things of life. My problem with this is very simple – this is not neutrality towards the great questions of life, this is practical atheism, this is suggesting to children that the sensible way to approach life is to leave god out; further it teaches children that those people who do take matters of faith seriously are marginal and that faith is nothing more than a personal choice having little or no bearing upon the public world where we all live. As the west becomes increasingly post-Christian in its perspectives Christians really do need to look closely at these issues afresh – the world has moved on and so too have our schools.

Our modern age is not very different from that of 2,000 years ago. Whilst there are very few ‘signed-up card-carrying’ Epicureans around today, many people live their lives embracing Epicurean beliefs about life – there is only the here and now, and if God is there at all, he is unknowable and disinterested.

The biggest question that we each have to face is how we respond to Paul’s statement – God ‘… is not far from any one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being.’ Do we embrace the teachings of Epicurus and say that atoms are all that exists – ‘eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die’ or do we accept what Paul told the Athenians and then attempt to understand what this means for us in our lives. It is possible, after all, to ‘seize the day’ and waste a life.

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.

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!

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.

Unlike many face to face schools in the area, last week it was business as usual for us at NorthStarUK. One of the joys of online learning is that, whether one is a tutor or a student, we can all work wherever we are even without an internet connection (at least for a while) whatever the weather. The Head of our local secondary school said that while school was closed last week, students could access lesson material on the school’s recently developed Moodle server, since teachers would be uploading lessons during the week. As school was closed, she declared, they would be running as a ‘virtual school’ where students could work as normal.

I must confess to having a pet hate for the term ‘virtual’ when used to describe any online activities – whether it is schooling or ‘reality’. The term suggests that the activity is somehow ‘not real’. It is most popularly used to describe immersive activities like games or scenarios where ‘virtual reality’ is used to differentiate it from ‘real’ reality. The danger is, of course, that one somehow thinks that what one does in ‘virtual reality’ has no consequences in the real world – one can play violent games or engage in questionable behaviour in ‘virtual reality’ and because it is not ‘real’ it does not have moral consequences. As a Christian however, I would suggest that all behaviour is ‘real’ whatever the context and all behaviour has moral consequences.

My objection to the term ‘virtual school’ boils down to my dislike of modern schooling as a ‘construct’ and also the notion that what the Head was suggesting last week was somehow ‘unreal’. In one sense at least, what she was suggesting was ‘unreal’. Having spoken to a small number of students at the school over the weekend it seems that none of them did any work last week – online or otherwise – the worse snow for a generation in Dronfield led them to go out and play! Who says that children do not have an intrinsic understanding of what is important in life!

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!