School

School maybe an unusual topic to find on a home ed blog, and yet school and home ed are so closely linked that I don't feel my blog would be complete without some reference to it.

Like anything, if you've decided to do something different to the norm, it's likely that you have deeply considered the norm and why you want to do differently. This post is not about the reasons that I home educate my children. There are too many of those for one post and I may tackle some of the others at another time. However, school is obviously one of my reasons and one that I have been thinking about a lot.

My last rambling post was about the journey we're on and the places we've visited. I'd like to come back to that and analogy because school is one of the places we've visited.

George 1 was at school for 3 years and one term before we finally made the leap. George 2 went for just one term in reception. Both enjoyed aspects of school, both disliked aspects. Of course they did! Isn't that the same with any part of our lives? There are bound to be things we love and hate about life.

So what about school made me decide to Home educate?

School obviously provides social experiences and opportunities that can be found no where else - except perhaps prison (as was pointed out by the headteacher of the school they attended) I have worked in a prison and I fully understand where he was coming from when he said that, what I failed to understand was why I would think that is a good thing. As a home educating parent, I now have to provide ALL of my children's social experiences. However, they are never prison like in their nature. I'm not saying that school is like a prison (although the 10ft fences are perhaps making them more so), however in terms of socialisation, its a fairly false social environment. Every day children only see the same group of people. They may be friends or enemies, but every day they must spend 6 hours with those people.

There are many many many issues around curriculum and what teachers are expected to do and what children are expected to achieve. I dislike routine testing and this really was one of the key reasons why I decided to home educate. The job of a teacher has now become impossible. I have great admiration for those teachers who enter the profession with a view to changing the world. However, there's a lot wrong with the system, accepted by government officials, parents and teachers who all want to see change but no one knows what the change is meant to be.

There are two key issues that I can see which make the system fundamentally flawed.

The first is the National Curriculum. Who ever decided that children can only learn about The Great Fire of London in KS1 and Brunel in KS2? What a shame this is. When you home educate the law states that you must educate your child full time according to their 'age, ability and aptitude'. This is completely lost within the schooling system however. The fluid nature of home ed means that I can teach a topic to 4 children of different ages and abilities, and each will get out of it what they are capable of understanding. We can then repeat this topic a few years down the line and once again, they will get out of it what they are capable of understanding. For example, we looked at the water cycle this morning. George 2 understood that steam is water, George 1 worked out that this is how clouds form and then went on to do an elaborate water boiling/evaporation experiment. Had a teacher tried to do this second part with George 2 he wouldn't have followed or been interested in it. However, with only one shot at learning the principle, he may never understand. I can come back to this in a few years when George 3 is ready and George 2 will get more, maybe George 1 will be interested in different types of clouds by then or why clouds form over the sea and drop rain over land. Home ed make learning so much more natural. Schools cold easily adopt a similar system if they weren't so tightly regulated.

The second issue that I see with school is parents. I'm not trying to be offensive or antagonistic here, but parents expect schools to do too much. Most parents would say that their children go to school to learn. They learn English, maths, history, geography etc etc. However, an increasing amount of time is now given over to teaching children about life and helping them to become the next generation of fully fledged citizens. Shouldn't parents be able to teach their children about voting, employment, friendships, relationships, moral behaviours. It was the schools who were blamed for the riots last summer across the UK. It's schools who now have to cover careers advice since connexions was shut down.

There is little time for teachers to do these things and cover the basic educational needs of the children. Therefore, children are leaving school knowing how to take drugs safely and what to do if there's an overdose (no talk of not taking drugs in the first place), how not to get pregnant or catch an STI, but many of them still don't know how WW1 started or how to do long division. Yet ask most parents and they'll tell you that those are the things they think their children are learning.

I truly believe that parents need to take back the responsibility for their child's education. I'm not suggesting for one minute that we should all home educate - it's certainly not for everyone, and I may have taken back my responsibility in a rather dramatic way, but we need to be parents and teachers need to be teachers. That way, perhaps both homes and schools can be more successful.