Educating the elite and doing sod all for the rest…

I’ve been in contact with a few home educating friends lately who have teens doing such entrepreneurial projects. Projects that give them purpose, that inspire and motivate them, with possibilities they could take forward in the future. Like little business. Writing and networking on the Web. As well as pulling in a few qualifications alongside.

And I can’t help thinking that these kids will make a success of their lives because they have so many diverse ideas and valuable skills gained from being in a home educating environment. Because while you’re at home you’re living life and living life gives you life skills and that’s what they’ll need for their future in today’s economic climate.

Schools aren’t big on ideas and life skills – not if they can’t be tested. Schools have become just too outdated in the way they educate; they’re still educating like they did when schooling began.

When schooling began, and information was scarce and academic skills were confined to an elite few, school was a place where you could transform your life with knowledge and ideas.

Now it seems a place that conforms your life into a no-ideas mediocrity. Except for the privileged few of course.

In this new age of no jobs I’m not sure how this is going to help.

Kids are going to have to rise above mediocrity. They’re going to have to have ideas in order to generate an income. They are going to have to think beyond the standardised boxes schools try to keep them in through grade obsession. Think flexibly and be adaptable, not stay in one tight and narrow framework like schools con them to do.

What we need to do is stop mass producing kids towards one outcome – mostly political i.e. for grades and league tables. And start thinking about how best to educate them to be able to live their lives in thoughtful, purposeful and independent ways, whatever form, that will enable them to support themselves, maybe create businesses, find incomes through a diversity of routes rather than a single track. Because the single track to single job prospect looks a bit bleak.

Politicians don’t seem to get the fact that they are just an elite few with elite lives. Yet they’re still making educational policies which make them even more elite whilst doing sod all for the rest.

The MAJORITY of the population leads lives that are very, very different from elite, which are full of challenges and mountainous obstacles and for some enormous poverty and non-employment.

What’s the good of more grades in that scenario?

Schools need to stop selling grades like they were a magic bullet. And start educating for life skills and ideas.

We once needed grades to prove we had knowledge and get us a job. Now kids need ideas to help them overcome the biggest challenge they’ll ever have to face; possibly no job!

What’s the best way to educate for that?

Home Education – from someone who knows….

Yay! She did it! So pleased…

You see, I enlisted the help of my lovely daughter to present a little film I scripted.

I’ve wanted to do one for ages. Just to help increase understanding of home education. To try and trample on those grimy myths, misconceptions and judgements from people who really don’t know anything about it, never have experienced it, yet are so quick to criticise.

And to allow the public to ‘meet’ a now-adult who was home educated in the virtual flesh. Because when thinking about home schooling folks only ever seem to think about children and seldom imagine they turn into ‘normal’, well-adjusted, working adults who contribute as much as anyone else.

See what you think.

Here’s the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eej9PxRw_P0

If you’ve got people in your life quick to judge, or you’re just thinking about home schooling your child and you want to ‘meet’ one perhaps you might find this helpful.

You can help too, by passing it on, ‘Liking’ and posting it on Facebook, or mums’ and parents’ networks regularly and extend understanding beyond the home education community.

Thank you!

Excited…

Soooo excited; slipping away for a few days break next week. It’s really strange because I won’t be seeing my two lovely girls this time but spending time with a very special friend who lived near when we were raising our kids and having all sorts of fun together. Getting caught in thunderstorms and picnics on marshes with plenty of mud spring to mind. They’re all grown now of course but we will be reminiscing, drinking tea and wondering when they got so big.

So I thought I’d leave you something to read whilst I’m away: the next issue of the brilliant magazine, Education Outside School, especially for home educators is out now – but however you educate you’re bound to find something inside that’s useful to you as a parent. So do take a look.

http://issuu.com/educationoutsideschool/docs/eos_issue_8_spring_2013

More soon…

Worry a little less…

 I have to admit to being mega excited. I’m going to visit my youngest at uni tomorrow.

We’ll probably have a bit of a girlie day seeking our treasures in charity shops, or maybe explore the galleries and museums. Once a home educator always a home educator – or maybe that’s just being a parent.

Doing this sort of thing with my youngest was not always a pleasure!

She was such a lively little thing, full of the need to investigate and explore as all kids are if they’re allowed and not told ‘Don’t’ all the time. I hate to think what would have happened to her in school where this was considered of no value. Although finding the balance between investigation and what was appropriate was definitely a challenge.

She was the one who investigated the deep end – before she could swim. Nearly gave her dad and me a heart attack – we had to be vigilant. She was the one who liked to investigate whether it was possible to climb up something not meant for climbing. She was the one who found investigating the world’s things and their properties, (melted candle wax springs to mind), was far more worth doing than tedious stuff like writing, reading or maths.

Home Ed kid all grown up

And, of course, just like you no doubt will be doing with your littlies especially if your home educating, I wondered how it would all end.

But, with gentle practise occasionally among all those investigations, she bloomed into a young person who can read and study, write her essays and work out her student budget admirably.

And I think she has come to that as much due to that investigative nature as anything academic. Because what all those investigations did were build an intelligence and interest in the world to a far greater degree than tedious written exercises day after day which children can see no point to.

For, the truth is, once they are interested in the world, in living their lives within it, that’s all the motivation they need to practise and gain the skills needed to do so, academic or otherwise. As mine did.

So, whilst I go and spend a day with this once wilful and challenging child – now an intelligent and beautiful young adult – maybe this story will help you worry a little less!

(You can read more of those antics in A FUNNY KIND OF EDUCATION. See the Books page for an extract)

Education – a matter of heart!

Valentine’s Day. It seemed a good day to say this again because it’s all about a HEARTfelt education and why happiness is so important to it…..

….But what’s happiness got to do with education?

Well, everything:

Unhappy children do not learn well. What’s worse is they begin to develop an unhappiness about learning itself. An unhappy association with learning can become a stumbling block that can carry on throughout all of a life.

To have that happen is a true impediment or handicap. And it is truly sad for it doesn’t have to be like that.

We all need to learn, grow, develop, and change constantly throughout our lives. Life throws at us constant challenges most of which require us to learn and change in some way, even if the tiniest ways. If we cannot do this comfortably, if we cannot do this learning and changing comfortably and happily, it sets us up for unhappiness on and off all through our lives.

For really that’s all education is despite schools having us think otherwise; it’s simply about learning and growing and changing. For all learning changes us a little as we assimilate new ideas and skills into our lives and let go of old ones. Education is as much about growing and changing as it is about academic learning. And it starts from the minute we are born (probably even before) to the minute we die. We learn and change throughout the whole of our lives.

So education and learning do not only start and end with school. A child learns enormous amounts before he even goes to school. He even learns one of the most complicated skills of all – the use of language through speech. And how many times have you heard people say that they learnt more when they left school than they did when they were there. We all certainly learn more of the valuable stuff outside of school – the stuff that gets us through our real lives.

Think about this for a minute. Dynamic thought isn’t it? The fact that education is taking place in our lives long before school years start and after we finish as well as during that time inside it. It’s so obvious really but many people never even think about it. And that pre and post school education takes place without teachers or classrooms, tests or curriculum or schedules, and even without being between the ages of four and sixteen.

Being comfortable with the idea of learning and changing throughout your life is one of the most important things that will make your life happy and successful. The two go hand in hand. For I don’t call an unhappy life a successful one however wealthy one becomes.

And to be happy with learning should be a crucial part of any education.

Education is actually the mainstay of our whole lives but the academic education that takes place in schools is the only one people tend to focus on and value. And sadly it is the one that seems to have the most devastating effect on all our learning after it and that is going so disastrously wrong for some children. And I believe the reason it’s going wrong has to do with one vital element; happiness.

It’s because education in schools is tending to make children unhappy with learning. In fact I would go so far as to say that it is making them unhappy in themselves, as well as with learning.

If our children are not happy in school they do not learn well. They do not realise their best potential. They do not have happy lives or begin to understand what will make their lives happy in the future. And that’s really important because our children are our future, both personally and globally.

I’m not interested in happiness because it’s all twee and rosy and unrealistic. I’m very, very realistic and down-to-earth. And realistically I know that happy people make a much better society than unhappy people. Because generally speaking happy people do not violate or abuse one another, they do not commit crimes or vandalise, destroy or disturb. Happy people feel good enough about themselves to care for one another, care for the community, their environment, the planet. This is why happiness is so important. Happy people make the world a better place in all respects, corny though it sounds. And happiness is a matter of the heart.

My heart, and the hearts of many other parents and some teachers too, tells me that education in schools is not working because, despite what schools tend to make us think, education is a matter of heart as much as it is of head. But education in schools has become only that – a matter of the head.

The only concern the educational system seems to have is children’s heads. Most particularly what they can stuff into them, without any regard for their hearts.

I’m not saying that all schools are unhappy places. What I am saying is that there seems to be an awful lot of unhappy, unwell, disheartened, unmotivated, academically failing, even suicidal children between the ages of four and eighteen.

What happened to these children I wonder? What happened to their hearts and their heads? For I bet they started as bright and happy toddlers, investigating everything, into everything, intrigued by everything, nosy and inquisitive and desperate to learn as all children are.

We watched it fade in our children. I’d already seen it fade in some of the children I taught in schools. I saw it in the boredom on their faces. I saw it in the resentment in their eyes. I see children who are humiliated and shamed by a curriculum that isn’t suited to them and staff bullying to teach it. I see children who are disruptive from not having their educational needs met. I see children who are withdrawn and depressed from not having their hearts attended to. I see children who are apathetic with lack of fulfilment. And I see children who truant from a system and environment that is totally inappropriate for them.

I see it in all these children who are having their heads stuffed without regard for their hearts.

It seems that what happens to children is that once their learning gets controlled by the politics of our current educational system they no longer receive the heartfelt education with which they started their lives.

You will probably have given your baby and child a heartfelt education when they were at home with you. You will have nurtured and taught and encouraged and developed skills within them without even realising, that will have suited their needs and their characters, their gifts and their strengths. You will have made them feel important and loved and valued. You will have done this simply by parenting them in an attentive and respectful way.

Then they go to school.

All of us all of our lives need, and have a right to, an education that is close to our hearts. That develops our heart’s desires as well as our heads. That starts from our individuality and builds on it. That values us as people for who we are and what we can do.

It is not really possible to achieve this with a tightly prescriptive National Curriculum which requires targets to be met or an institution with an agenda that has little to do with an individual and a lot to do with political popularity.

It is possible to do it through home educating though.

Education is essentially about people, the development of individual human beings, who should have their individualities respected. Not disregarded.

To enable this to happen for our own children we removed them from school, just so they could continue the type of education with which they started their lives, before they were totally and irrevocably switched off to learning for the rest of their lives like so many young people that I see.

During the time they were learning out of school we were forced to think very hard about education. For once our children’s education was no longer wrapped up in curriculum and tests and outcomes and strategies and exams, that someone else designed for some other need rather than those of our individuals, then we had to think what we wanted it to be without all that wrapping. We had to think what education really was, underneath all that.

We have learned and changed much throughout our children’s education. For as I’ve said education goes on throughout our lives, both ours as well as the children’s. What we learned most of all was that

education is for life – not just for schools.

 Now that our children – or young people as they have become – have been involved again with the education system, albeit higher education, I see that ugly agenda of politics and grade winning overtake the real important education. But being older – and wiser – they can manage it better.

Younger children can’t.

If you want to consider educating your children’s heart as well as their heads, if you want their education to be a happy one as well as an academic one, then think about home educating as the serious and successful option it is. And join the community of thousands of others who now believe that happiness has a lot to do with it.

Or fight for something better in schools.

Whichever path you choose, your children deserve it.

My book ‘Learning Without School’ has lots of information about home education starting with help in making the decision.

For a real life look at what it’s like in a home educating family try ‘A Funny Kind Of Education’ Listen to an extract here; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7PRuMTYP8E&feature=youtu.be 

Click on the My Books page for more…

Clockwork straitjackets…

  Hours and hours of uninterrupted chat! Couldn’t have ever conceived of it when we were home educating our children and had little ears tuned into every conversation.

My friend and I can now chat for ages although even without all the kids at home full time we still talk about them.

Between us we have one working, two at Uni, one at college, and one undecided. And the great thing about home education is ‘undecided’ doesn’t matter. Because time scales don’t matter. Children can learn as it’s relevant.

Home educators can ditch ridiculous time scales that suit the institutions of schooling but don’t suit many a child. They can make their own time scales, whether it means getting up late and learning later in the day, or doing it at the crack of dawn even before washing if they’re keen. It means they can learn when they’re motivated and stick at for hours if they want instead of having to stop and shuffle off to different lesson. It means they can read when they’re ready not when others deem they’re ready. They can stop wasting time doing tests and SATs and continue with real live learning. They can do GCSEs when they’ll get the best value from them whether that’s at fourteen or twenty four or if at all!

And our experience is that they can do all this and still become educated, motivated, intelligent and qualified and go forward into productive lives, despite not sticking to time scales which schools terrorise parents into believing are of value.

Nothing is worse than believing your child is ‘underachieving’. Underachieving in school terms only means they are not achieving set outcomes within set timescales. It doesn’t mean they’ll never achieve them, although in school they may not get another chance. Learning doesn’t have to be like that.

When home educating, you begin to see that these time scales don’t really matter at all and it’s shocking that thousands of parents are made to feel bad about their kids because of them.

What’s so ironic about this is that home educating families very often find that once you remove those time constraints children very often achieve what all kids are achieving within a very similar framework. And without having to feel bad about it.

When kids are twenty who would know if they talked early, or read late, or didn’t understand fractions till they were fifteen?

Keeping education within a rigid timescale is making an unnecessary strait jacket for it. And it’s positively terrifying to think that they are told they have to make decisions about the whole of their future by the time they’re choosing options at thirteen.

‘Undecided’ in my view means keeping options open. It means recognition of the fact that we are all different, and that the best way to approach education is the best way to approach life; with flexibility and an open mind. Let’s stop making young people feel bad because of clockwork straitjackets!

School is so wrong for so many…

…It’s also very right for so many although you maybe wouldn’t expect a home educator to say that. But I readily acknowledge that for some it works extremely well. What could be better than a stimulating and vibrant environment, where caring and inspired adults teach and encourage children to realise their highest potential within a warm and friendly community?

But does that sound like school to you?

We’ve been sold school for so long as the ideal way to education. But, actually, it isn’t ideal, it isn’t good for many children – and that’s just the climate I’m talking about never mind the learning – and some children don’t learn much of value there anyway. They are educated for something else instead; how to survive in a school setting and pass tests. Which is a bit of a waste as once outside the school setting life’s nothing like that, had you noticed?

For example; what if when you went into work you were only allowed to work and mix with people who were the same age as you? What if you had to endure the disruptive, frightening and bullying behaviour of your peers, which bosses could do nothing about, and you had NO POWER to do anything about either? What if your work was considered of no value unless it put the company up league tables? And what if you were told you had to endure it for the next ten years or so – for your own good apparently even though it may make you ill – and you had NO VOICE in the matter whatsoever? No CHOICE at all? How would you feel about working in a culture like that?

Yet this is the culture in which many children find themselves in school. For some kids it’s okay, it doesn’t seem to bother them or they’re in schools which are more respectful of children. For others it’s hell.

When I worked in schools I saw much that wasn’t doing kids any favours. It was the wrong approach to learning for many. Some failed to thrive in that environment. The emphasis was on scores not on people. It was an unpleasant and threatening atmosphere at times. But no one seemed bothered.

After we started to home educate a GP friend of mine said that he was seeing an increasing number of school-stress related illnesses among children, so much so that he did sometimes make the parents aware of the choice to home educate.

And that’s where the crux of the matter lies – in CHOICE!

In our lives outside school we always have choice. We think we don’t but it’s really that some of our choices are far too difficult to contemplate! However, the choice is always there. But choice has its drawbacks; you have to make decisions all the time. You have to take charge.

Children are so disempowered by the choice-less system of schooling that they have no ability to take charge – of anything. Sometimes they don’t even get a chance to in the home. Then parents and employers moan that young people have no common sense, no motivation, no initiative, no ability to make decisions, little understanding of what’s required of them outside school.

Is it any wonder really? When do they ever have the chance to learn to use their initiative, their common sense, to make decisions? And why would they understand about life outside school when school is nothing like it?

Schooling is SO prescriptive now that it takes away all opportunity for children to develop these kinds of essential life skills. But because we are so used to it, because we are threatened that without grades our kids won’t have a successful life and that justifies any means to get them, because it has become so ‘normal’ to subject our kids to this and call it education, little changes for the better.

What we need is less prescription, more people to care. And to understand that school isn’t that ‘normal’ in comparison to a working life outside, and parents to really think about what it’s all for and what it’s doing to their children.

This is what home educators do. Home educating parents are just ‘normal’ parents who have begun to understand that school isn’t the only answer to educating children. And the more there are of them choosing that route the more it will provide proof that other ways work too for those who want them. And maybe even schools can learn from that.

School is so wrong for so many. Thanks to home education we can choose to make a difference.

 

(Want to know how you do it differently? Check this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7PRuMTYP8E&feature=youtu.be )

Author reading – well, trying to…

Make yourself comfy and listen to a short extract from ‘A FUNNY KIND OF EDUCATION’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7PRuMTYP8E&feature=youtu.be

My daughter thought it was so funny – she says I sound like something off Jackanory! I didn’t think she’d know what Jackanory was but kids know everything these days! After all the hysterics (from her – she was filming it for me) and bad language (from me – well; I’d held back during all those years of home educating) she also put together a film of Bloopers but I’m not sure I’m releasing that!

Anyway, hope you enjoy it!

Doing it in your PJs

I’m working in my night things again; it’ll probably be 10am before I’m dressed!

This is because once I’m up I start having ideas and want to get them down before the rest of the days’ dross takes over.

This was a habit I started when Home Educating; getting my own stuff done early before the children got up and the habit has stayed with me until now.

It wasn’t unusual actually for us all to be in PJs until late in the morning because the children were also enthusiastic about what they were doing and didn’t want to be bothered with trivial things like washing or getting dressed. I know how they feel.

Now this may be considered slovenly by some – and there are always plenty of judgements about home schooled children not ‘getting on’ or being ‘lazy’. But what could be more impressive than a youngster keen to get on with their activities, PJs or not? That’s what motivation is, isn’t it?

When children experience what motivation feels like then it overflows into a great deal of the rest of their lives, even some of the things they may be less keen on.

I used to wonder what people thought when they saw the kids hanging in a tree or making mud pies, because they were never seen inside studiously investigating something or practising writing or maths. They were only ever visible when they were out having fun – but we learnt a lot having fun.

When we had people visit we sometimes had critical and smug remarks about ‘fitting into society’ and working to a ‘real life timetable’.

Yet our kids, and many of the other home educating kids who they sometimes worked with, who also had rather unusual approaches to their learning like enjoying it or doing it in their PJs, sleeping in and working late, are generally able now to get up of a morning and get to work or their lectures on time despite that. In fact, I would say they are better able than many because they know what motivation is – they’ve felt it. Instead of having it switched off by other people imposing routines and dull activities on them.

Many home educated kids lead their lives by their own routines simply because they’ve been allowed to devise and practise their own routines. They know what’s appropriate and when it’s appropriate because they’ve learnt for themselves and do not have to rely on others to tell them.

And they know when it’s appropriate not to work in PJs.

So don’t worry yourself about these incidental little things. Home educating is a unique and individual way of raising your children, but it’s far more natural than school. And it will teach certain life skills to the children that will stand them in good stead when they enter the working world and have to be diverse in order to lead productive lives. It might well be diverse thinking that they need in order to generate incomes in this current working climate.

My kids might have worked in their PJs or been round Asda in a pink sparkly leotard when they were little. Now they’re grown they know other practises are more fitting. Yours will too.

Better go get dressed!

Towards an educational philosophy

Just letting you know I’ve added a new page today…

I know that many parents worry about formulating an educational philosophy when they start out home educating, not only for themselves but also to explain their ideas to the Local Authority.

So to try and support those of you who need it I’ve added a page with ideas and tips to aid the development of your own. The ideas here are only ideas – not intended as truth or gospel – and may well not be in line with your own thinking. But even that might help you move towards what is!

Hope it’s useful. You can find it here: http://rossmountney.wordpress.com/towards-an-educational-philosophy/

Do please comment and let me know your thoughts on the matter. The more ideas here the more people are helped towards a successful and happy education for their children.