Some conversation over the weekend has sparked some thoughts; this is not a reply or a justification but i felt that 10 years in and on the cusp of sending in a school application at the specific request of my daughter, was a good time to write down the things that that conversation crystallised for me.
Here are some things i believe about home educating and about schooling; they are personal to me, i don’t wish to inflict them on anyone else, nor do they intend to criticise any other choices. This is what i believe is right for my family. I say again, this is not a reply, or a justification, it is the helpful crystallisation of those thoughts.
*I believe passionately in home educating. It hasn’t behaved, in this house, quite as i thought it would but i am 100% convinced by the results and by the 4 highly individual, highly entertaining, exceptionally normal children that it is producing.
*I do believe home ed both goes in hand with, and initiates, a certain type of parenting here. We have always been honest and open with our kids, we’ve always offered them choices, we’ve always told them how we feel, but made clear that unless we foresee damage, we’ll support choice. We can’t entirely remove how our feelings might affect their choices from the equation, but we do try to avoid emotional pressure.
*I do believe both our style of parenting an HE are a long game; the skills have not occurred in a linear fashion, nor have our children been forced into anything. We’ve listened to requests, listened to feelings, encouraged skills, allowed for variation. When people have liked a playgroup or nursery they’ve gone, if they’ve passionately hated something, they’ve been removed. The one mistake of this type i ever made was trying to keep Amelie in nursery when she was clearly telling me she did not wish to be there. It was the one time, beyond the “she’ll settle as soon as you leave” line i believed about Fran and Maddy in very young nursery classes and the “co-sleeping ends in needy children”, that i have listened to social pressure over instinct. In 10 years and 4 kids (28 ‘years’ of parenting) that i feel i made a very real error of judgement on those occasions; when i have listened to my children and myself, we seem to have got it right.
*I really believe that constant listening, questioning, waiting for the next move on their part and quiet support results in children who make their feelings known and their needs known at the right time. I don’t believe in forcing anyone’s hand any more than i believe in walking away from them crying. I will always help them over hurdles they need helping over, whether it is speaking up for them or just encouraging them, but a leg up a climbing wall that looks like fun is not the same as pushing someone off a drop slide that looks frightening. I’ve seen the results of not being able to tell the difference and i believe than knowing your children well and listening to word and body language is the only way ot get it right.
*I absolutely did not home educate because i had a rubbish time at school. I DID have a boring, tedious and often painful time at school, where my skills and assets were not recognised and i feel the environment harmed me. I’m a bigger person than inflicting my insecurities on my kids and given none of them seem to be much like me, i think we’ve done a good job of teaching them self-confidence.
*I home educate partly because of specific needs of some of my children.
*I home educate because i believe there is a better place to be than a classroom when you are young. Pretty much anywhere else.
*I home educate to offer freedom, space, opportunity and something unique that they can always say about themselves. I evaluate constantly, endlessly and extremely self-critically and i question, all the time, whether we are still meeting needs. Most of all, i home educate so that my children feel unique and feel in control of their own destiny and so that they learn, from the age of 0 upwards, that there is always choice and always another option.
*It is an uncomfortable truth that i also home educate because i passionately believe that schools are often shallow, meaningless, time wasting, small minded, tiresome and dull places to be, because the news is full of dumbing down and failure in the education system, because i rarely meet a teacher with anything good to say about them and because i think the lack of depth and imagination in a curriculum that is identical across the country is pitiful and cannot possibly be good for the future and diversity of this country.
*I don’t believe that any of my children will have an enhanced quality of life if i send them to school. If they choose to go to school, i don’t think that my feelings are a good enough reason to stop them. I believe that i have done a good enough job of instilling questioning brains and individual thought in my children that should they choose to go to school, they’ll either make it work for them, or have the sense to leave.
*I home educate because i am much more afraid of the consequences of someone else failing them than i am of me failing them.
*I am the parent i am because i have chosen to trust a process, one i would like to watch evolve over 18 years but recognise i may not get to do so and because i have chosen to be my own person and then take the consequences of it. I am the parent i am and a home educator because i love being with my children, because my family unit feels like a community where we all have an equal say and because it is exceptionally pleasant to have 5 other people in the house who i treat, and who treat me, as humans who have a say. Within reason this home is run by consensus and agreement and i am phenomenally proud of that. Much of what happens here has to do with an intrinsic “breathing” of the organism we are and often choices, decisions and emotional needs are worked out slowly by dint of us simply living and interacting together on a daily basis. I think it has only occurred to me this weekend how hard that might be to comprehend from the outside.
*I do NOT want my daughter to go to senior school, i am not happy about it. I am choosing to trust that this is part of the process, because how *I* feel is *MY* process, not hers. I trust and feel entirely happy with, the fact that she has vacillated endlessly about primary school, never getting to a conclusion and never (for reasons i cannot explain) prompting us to say “right, lets do it then” and yet when a form arrives and she says “i want to send it in” we both immediately said “that’s fine, we agree you should”. For the record, that reply has absolutely NOTHING to do with us feeling less able to do a senior school education and everything to do with it just seeming ‘right’. We’ve offered, again, the option to start primary school immediately and she doesn’t want to. It is that fact, beyond all other things, that makes me feel that the process, the life plan, the style of parenting and the way we have brought her up, is working absolutely as we planned.
*No matter what, i will never, ever interfere with what we have worked so hard on here in order to set anyone else’s mind at rest. I had a brief flicker of thinking it might be easier to do that before i remembered i’m 34 with 4 happy, healthy children who i am the parent of; no one can possibly understand our children better than we can. Someone once told me i should try being a lesbian once just so i knew whether i was or not. It was clearly ridiculous to suggest it and i don’t see why my kids need to spend time in school is like so they know if they are happy to be home educated any more than every school child’s parents should home educate them for a couple of weeks so that child can make a choice too.
Please go back and read the first 2 paragraphs before being upset by or cross with my thoughts 😉
Hi,
brilliant post, wonderful to read. Thankyou for sharing that.
Although I am just starting out on HE with my daughter, and no doubt doing things very differently to you, your post contained many aspects I could relate to and agree with.
I cant imagine anyone being upset or cross, what comes across so clearly is your strength and integrity as a parent.
Kara x
I think that it is great how you put the girl’s wants above your own even if you don’t fully agree with what they want you will support them regardless and not let your feelings influence any decisions they make.
I really admire you for the way you are dealing with Fran’s need to go to secondary school. I hope that if either of my two ask to go to school then I can deal with it in the same way as you and give them the freedom to choose for themselves without my influencing them.
Take care
Emma
x
Makes sense to me 🙂
I think providing the knowledge that they have choices is underrated actually, I think it’s very empowering (gag-making word, I know, but I was trying to make a synonym based on ‘strength’ and then realised we have a word for that already!). I can see that in Violet’s short time at school she’s not just accepting passively “that’s what school is like”, but she’s evaluating and double-checking that she’s getting what she wants from it. It will be interesting to see whether she loses that though 😉 But perhaps with siblings at home and 7 years of HE behind her, she at least won’t forget the basic school/no school choice 🙂
Oh, and btw, War Horse was amazing 🙂 Take plenty of tissues 😉
I think it’s a better to allow your child to do something you *really* don’t want them to do than to stomp your feet and say “mama knows best” and impose your own choices on them. She may love school, thrive in that environment and thank you for the freedom to chose, she may hate it and come back home, either way she will know it was HER choice and that’s worth a lot.
To a certain extent I run my house this way too. Really good post. Very feisty…
‘and i don’t see why my kids need to spend time in school is like so they know if they are happy to be home educated’
This was the only thing that I wanted to say – I suggested a trial in school only to help her make an informed choice between two things *if* she was struggling to decide between them. NOT because I thought it would help her decide she was happy to be home educated. A slight difference but a difference nevertheless. I struggle to see how a choice can be made if you don’t know what you’re choosing between. Something adults do all the time granted but something we learn maybe not a skill that comes easily. But that’s my thoughts, not yours, not hers.
I dunno – It was a good chat tho 🙂
I have absolutely no idea why you got moderated then. It was a good chat though on reflection i have no idea why it didn’t occur to me that she has chosen, therefore she doesn’t really need to be helped to choose!
Wow, that’s one amazing post. It’s great that your so for the girls’ own choices and letting them learn from any possible mistakes. I think a lot of kids don’t get enough of that, mine included.
You’re doing what’s right at each moment, but ‘trying school’ doesn’t have to be a lifelong decision. You’re still a home ed family, and would be even if all four of them went to school, because of your mindset. I agree with just about everything you wrote… and having once home educated, it would be very hard to lose that style of parenting/living/discussing and generally treating children as real, intelligent people. It IS hard to let go, and encourage them to make their own paths in the world. I’m finding it hard enough seeing my two fly the nest, and they’re both over 18. Going to senior school is like a smaller nest-leaving, with the advantage that she’ll return each evening. If it doesn’t work out, it will have been an interesting experiment. I don’t think trying school is AT ALL like trying to change sexual orientation. It’s more like trying piano or karate or whatever. More time-consuming, admittedly, but the same kind of thing… just seeing if a different style of education can fit into what’s already there, and into the lifestyle you all have.
I think it’s probably a lot easier for Fran to imagine what school is like than for a schoolchild to imagine what being HEd is like 🙂 She sees it on TV, it’s talked about in the media, her peers obviously talk to her about it, she can extrapolate various aspects of it from her experiences at Brownies/dancing/etc, and so on. To truly understand what it’s like to home educate or be home educated, I do think you have to live it – it’s a pretty deep concept really.
I think Fran HAS made her choice, for the moment at least 😉 She’s curious about school – which seems completely natural to me – and wants to try it out next year. Because that’s what it will be, a trial. She’s not signing a contract to stay for 7 years. So far she hasn’t seen or heard anything that’s making her want to swap her current lifestyle for it, and I can well imagine that by next summer she might still think that actually being very happy at home outweighs the curiosity.
“You’re still a home ed family, and would be even if all four of them went to school, because of your mindset.”
Actually, this I disagree with. I don’t consider Violet as being home educated now. My mindset hasn’t changed, but WHAT HAPPENS EVERY DAY has. I have several friends who tell me that although their children go to school, that they are home educating *as well*, because, you know, they have conversations with their children and tell them about things and take them to museums, and it really pisses me off. That sort of stuff is just decent parenting, to my mind. HE is about choice, freedom, not being institutionalised, being out of the system, etc – Violet doesn’t have that. (She’s gaining other stuff which is important to her, but if I ever start spouting bollocks about how she’s now educated at school as well as at home, do please roll your eyes and remind me not to be a pompous twit!)
Chuckle. Sue, i don’t really think that, it was merely an extremely over-dramatic illustration of it not being necessary to live absolutely everything in order to know whether it is for you or not.
Alison, i think i’m half way between, in a way. I agree with you about the “decent parenting” bit and like you, i doubt i’ll simply let go of my interest in her education. I hope that we’ll get the opportunity to flesh out things that interest her still and make sure that she is getting the most out of the opportunity. In a way, i’d like the academic side of school to be a very small, untroubling part of her experience. I don’t believe in facts for facts sake, so if we can make sure she finds the academic side of it easy, she’ll have more chance to enjoy the rest of what is on offer.
But maybe that is because i don’t exactly think of us as “home educating” any more, we are just living.
Ah, i know, if she goes to school i will still consider myself “responsible” for her “education” – because of course i am, so in a sense i feel like some elements won’t alter, the path will just be guided by someone else.
Very interesting post. I’ve always thought along similar lines; if either of my two want to try school at some future point they can. I agree wholeheartedly with Alison over the whole HE being one thing and school being another and get equally pissed off with people who think they Home Ed around school.
When I first came to HE 6 year ago I loved having friends with older HE children than mine so I could see what might lie ahead for me and mine. I still feel very lucky to have those same friends with children at different crossroads again to see what might come up for us in the future and be around to hear how those decisions are made and what the outcomes might be.
enjoyed this, good strong reasoning and a properly laid out argument (hoorah for that!)
LOL at (with) Alison. I share that viewpoint about HE. I keep having really vivid dreams at the moment about Hannah wanting to go to school, but I wake up in the morning and nothing has changed. I dreamt last night she was going to divorce me for bad parenting, so not sure where all that is coming from. In a way, I’m surprised that she is NOT curious, in the way Fran is, when what I’ve tried to do all along is instil a sense of curiousity in her.
We’re not all curious about the same things (thanks goodness, or I can’t see much hope for the human race!) and I don’t see why there should be a ‘natural’ curiosity about school, any more than anything else. I guess we are influenced by the choices of our friends and family, though.
If people are curious about anything then I reckon it’s a good thing that they get to explore that as much as they want to. That’s kind of at the heart of the way we home ed so I think it’d be rather inconsistent of me if I didn’t accept that about school too. Neither of our kids is remotely interested in school, at the mo. P says she’ll probably want to go to college (that’s probably the most common route for teen home edders round here) when she’s older. Leo wants to go to art college, apparently. But there’s time enough for lots of thinking and mind changing. A lifetime, in fact…
I meant ‘natural’ in the sense of normal, understandable, reasonable, not odd, not abnormal, unsurprising – that sort of thing. Not that it was some sort of developmental milestone!
E.g. I grew up without a television. If I’d never actually got to watch one, but I knew that most people I knew (all the people I knew, I think tbh) had one, I would have been curious about it I expect – that seems natural to me, in the sense described above. (As it was, I saw bits of tv here and there, and it didn’t look like I was missing out on much, and I could see the advantages of not having one 🙂 )
I don’t like having HE friends with older kids when they all seem to start going to school. Makes me feel panicky inside. Can’t write anything sensible. Good thoughts though. x
Michelle, if it is any consolation, she told me last night she is planning on going for a term to see what it is like. I’m not holding my breath either way really, there doesn’t seem to be much point in doing anything except “wait and see”.
I love you heart Merry, I jsut wish I shared it. But what if Fran were a crowd pleaser? What if you had genuine concerns, not about her academic ‘health’ at school, but about her yearning to fit in? Would you still allow her to make that choice? I struggle with this. JA wants to go to school – not for any academic reasons, but purely social ones (i.e. to keep up with his mates from his old school). I don’t feel I can take the risk of letting him go because I know he will do anything to ‘fit in’ – even if he knows that behaviour is not the right way to behave 🙁 At 11 these might only be small misdemeanours, but I am worried where they might lead to. It would be fine if he fell in with a nice hard-working crowd, but J is not that sort of person – he is a clown – and I think he would be in grave danger of falling in with the ‘fools’. In all honesty I don’t trust him – mainly because of the things he says openly about not wanting to be different from everyone else. If Fran were less trustworthy, more of a crowd-pleaser and less of the self-confident, self-assured, self-motivated girl that she is, would you still give her the choice? Or would you keep her safe a few more years?