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 Schools have become just too outdated in the way they educate; they’re still educating like they did when schooling began.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?

Thatcher bites the dust…

No one can divide feeling like Maggie.

Don’t know whether I feel more divided about her than I do any politician – just suspicious of their motives, as always.

I admire the fact she was the first of her kind; I hope she’ll be the last.

How pleased I was for women when she got in – not so pleased after a while. She didn’t represent real women at all. She was just like a man with a handbag.

How chuffed I was that a woman actually got an important role for once.

Not so chuffed about the fact it probably destroyed any faith in women in that kind of role and probably has ruined it for all women politicians who follow on.

We thought at the time a woman and a mum at the head of the country might do something important. With sensitivity. I think she had the sensitivity of a rampaging bullock, even if one with a full set of balls. And a handbag.

But perhaps she had to – to survive.

But I feel no more for her than I do for any politician and that is; a deep lack of trust, a sense that they have a personal and mercenary agenda that’s not going to do the rest of us a hell of a favour, and that they all tell us terrible lies. The word corrupt springs to mind. They are as genuine as fake Gucci.

Whilst she wore her flash shoulder pads and pearls people went hungry, homeless and jobless.

Today, whilst politicians flash about with disgusting incomes, creating cuts that people other than them have to bear, we bleed as a result. Some hungry, homeless, jobless.

No difference really.

Another one bites the dust – who cares. Except that, as always, it’s the commoners who bite the bill.

Gove’s ghastly discrimination against non-academics

If Gove can disregard professionals telling him that he’s making a big mistake with the curriculum, what the hell effect can I have? (see this article)

But I can’t be silent; his blinkered approach to what’s needed in education is too dangerous to ignore.

When he says that kids need more academia – which kids is he talking about? The kids of the elitist upper classes like him or the rest of our children?

We used to need academia. Back in the dark ages when peasants couldn’t read, write or understand numbers beyond bartering.

But we have a different culture – with Internet now – has he noticed? Has he noticed that the destructively prescriptive curriculum is the very reason that thousands of parents, teachers, other professionals and children, are leaving the system?

And he thinks making it more prescriptive is going to help? Ask any teacher – he’s got it so wrong.

By forcing more academia on kids we are failing to address their wider needs as real people, not elite people. The world is full of very real and ordinary people making extremely valuable contributions, living their lives in hard working, moral and principled ways, managing to be independent, house and feed their families on an income too small for politicians to even imagine. For many of them, academia played no part and their children are probably not interested; more of it will drive more from education and we’ve enough disenchanted youngsters already.

And anyway is education only about academia? Because if it is, then it’s extremely narrow and disrespects and even discriminates against all those who lead lives through other approaches.

Not everyone needs academia to go forward to a fulfilled and productive life. But of course, that depends on your definition of a fulfilled and productive life. Is the only life Gove sees as worthwhile the sort of elitist, academic life that he leads?

There are youngsters who go on to lead fulfilled, productive, wage earning lives that are equally valuable and contribute something without academia. Who live these valuable lives without being posh, rich, academic or political.

Did the people who do valuable work like emptying Gove’s dustbins need academia? Because they are doing relevant and important jobs without it. Did the people who care for the elderly, clean hospitals, build roads, produce our food, cut cabbages in all weathers, work on production lines – did they need academia? Or those creative people who build new businesses? Not everyone needs or wants academia to lead valid and fulfilling lives.

Not everyone needs curriculum either.

So what do youngsters need?

They need experiences. They need to be inspired.

They need to feel what it is to be motivated. They need to understand that their world is such a rich and wonderful place it is inspirational to learn about.

Do they feel that now? Is more academia going to help? Doubt it.

They need to experience what it’s like to be fulfilled by what they do. They need to feel what it’s like to create life by their own hands and their own work. They need to find their strengths through a broad range of experiences that give them confidence, courage and self esteem. They need to understand how vital are good connections with others.

You don’t get any of that through contrived and disempowering curriculum.

Our young people need respecting for not wanting to be academic if they choose. Through respect they learn respect. Not through a curriculum that disrespects the fact that we are all different and makes failures out of those who don’t fit.

Academia as a basis for education is past its sell by date. What we need for our kids now is to ignite them and show them how they can make a valid, productive and rewarding contribution, whoever they are, academic or not.

The point is proved by the thousands and thousands of families now opting to educate their children outside of schooling and some without curriculum too. Very, very successfully. And many teachers are home educating too, not because as teachers they can teach – as teaching isn’t always required really. It’s because these teachers have seen what damage an overly prescriptive curriculum does to kids – it switches them off to learning.

Education will continue to be poor as long as it is governed by politics and politicians far more concerned with winning votes, and using children as pawns to do so, than the development of the young.

Until we make education politics-free and bring it back to a humane level – i.e. the development and nurture of human beings and all their idiosyncrasies and needs – it will continue to worsen until we have squeezed all the good professionals out of it and squeezed the last droplet of enthusiasm for learning out of our children.

It’s time to stop using education as a means to produce vote fodder through a prescriptive process akin to factory farming. And start educating in a broad experiential way that heralds what it is to be diversely human, academia being only a very small part.

Let’s shut our kids up…

Let’s shut our kids up and stop them thinking for themselves. Let’s mass produce them to think what we want them to think and regurgitate it on demand and call it qualification. Lets disregard their need to express themselves in physical, creative, original and independent ways and tell them that they need to do what they’re told. And let’s disrespect them so severely we can make them believe that they have nothing of worth to offer and the only thing of value to know is what we tell them to know. Let’s make them all the same, think the same, dress the same, mould them towards the same outcomes, like products on a conveyor belt, even though they’re all different. And lets keep them stuck inside an institution that bears no relation to the social, cultural and working practises of the real world whilst we do it And let’s tell them they’re wrong to question it even though they may be right.

Oh – I forgot – we already do. It’s called schooling. And it’s about to get worse.

Professors, parents, teachers all say that an over prescriptive curriculum is ruining education. And what does Gove do? He makes it even more prescriptive, completely disregarding those who know about it when he doesn’t.

See this article in the Independent.

Can you tell I’m a bit steamed up by this idiot and his ideas? He’s prescribing what kids should learn and he fails learn himself; learn from all those who know better than him because they work in the field.

It is beyond belief. It is beyond any more words. It makes me ask; is there no hope for our kids’ education?

Well, only through home educating!

The slaughter of good teaching lambs

I met a new young teacher the other day. She had only been teaching a few years and was fresh with the fire of enthusiasm, love of children, and her new job.

Why then did I have that sinking image of yet another lamb going to the slaughter on the altar of the education system?

Because I’ve seen it happen so many times. And because only a few minutes into our conversation she’s voicing her shock and dismay over the incessant and destructive testing of children, the disruptive effect of SATs and learning objectives wasting their time when all she wants to do is inspire kids to learn. She also talks about the awful pressure teachers are put under, often bringing out the less pleasant side of personalities, in their fear to survive.

Since she and many, many other teachers think that schooling is totally losing its way with the education of the young, since thousands and thousands of parents are opting to home educate, since parents of school children are becoming increasingly anxious, and since many teacher/parents are also taking their children out of school because they know that what goes on there is not good for kids’ development, it beggars belief that the politicians who’ve created this increasingly damaging system can remain so staggeringly blind and ignorant to what’s really happening

What’s really happening is that parents and teachers and children are leaving the system in droves. You’d think politicians would at least be intelligent enough to ask why that is.

I worry this new teacher will be another one, poor lamb! I wonder how long her enthusiasm and passion will last before it’s tarnished by the pitiful processing of kids that politics demands of teachers and another enthusiastic teacher is lost.

A good teacher can ignite the fire of learning passion.

I see too many ending up doing the opposite because, so sadly, their own fires inevitably become extinguished.

OMG – another league table!

“Ofsted is launching a league table ranking local authorities according to inspectors’ ratings of schools.” So says the BBC news yesterday (here). My heart sinks. Actually, it does worse than sink, it vomits!

Because most of what’s bad about the educational system starts and ends with league tables.

In a misguided attempt to make schools better they have made them worse, because they have made schools’ terrified and obsessive climb up league tables more important than educating children at a human level. League tables have overtaken humanity. And education is about humanity, or should be, although you would think it was just about statistics. It isn’t. It is about developing the next generation of the human race. And league tables will not help that happen.

Why? Because they change the focus of what goes on in schools. League tables put more pressure on schools – as if they weren’t pressured enough. Schools put pressure on teachers, who will pass that down through their teaching to the kids. And who do the kids have to pass it onto? No one. They’re the suckers in this who end up carrying it all, pawns in a statistical game.

Ofsted is a complete farce anyway – ask anyone involved in teaching. It is purely political and doesn’t improve schools at all. But it is sold to parents as the government’s way of helping make schools better. So-called ‘failing’ schools as per the Ofsted reports have ‘Superheads’ go in with the answers. However the answers are not IN the school, they very often originate OUT of it. ‘Superheads’ cannot change the glaring obvious fact that communities are different, every region is different, the culture and the economy is different from area to area, parenting and support for education from the home is different, and that all means that the kids your kids learn with, the pro-education attitude (or not!) of the community, the intelligence of their peers is very different catchment to catchment, and there’s no controlling background however ‘super’ the head is in bullying kids to pass tests and fighting the way up league tables. For that’s what a ‘good school’ becomes about – fulfilling tables and massaging stupid statistics, masking the true fact that individual children are being prostituted in their pursuit.

What needs to happen instead is that politicians needs to do something about the economic, societal and cultural poverty of these areas OUTSIDE the schools. Rather than making schools another notch on their league table bedpost and panicking parents to move to Camden and Richmond (see the article). We can’t all live there and if we did the result would be that some of those schools would start ‘failing’ too.

“We’ll be asking a question – why is it parents in some parts of the country have less than a 50% chance of getting their children into a good primary school where there are other parts of the country where that chance is over 90%?” says the article.

I’ll tell you why – because some parts of the country are totally neglected while an elite demographic is promoted. Perhaps I’m wrong – perhaps we should all move to Camden and Richmond. Maybe then they’d sit up and take note of the fact that we are not all born equal, that kids are not all parented equally, and that is what makes such a huge difference in schools. And no amount of superheads or league tables will make any difference, except to make it worse for those dedicated people who try their hardest in the classroom to equalise it as much as they can.

I would rather have humane schools with the particular needs of real kids at heart than a school obsessed with political climbing any day. And I feel for those parents and teachers who are trapped by yet more ridiculous politics.

I’m sure it will mean, we will have even more home educators – as is happening every single day!

Exam factories – it gets worse…

“Business leaders say some UK schools have become “exam factories” and are calling for children to be given a broader education.”

So says an article on the BBC education and family news website. (Read it here).

It’s something I’ve been saying for years. Schools have had to trash real education because of the misguided obsession of the government with grades. But it doesn’t matter how many grades you get or how much Maths and English we make a child do it won’t improve things. Because all this does is train children to lead school lives and not develop in them an understanding of how to lead lives outside school.

So, how do they lead lives outside school?

They have to take charge.

In schools, busy as they are with grade-getting, kids are trained not to take charge. They are told what to do, when to do it, what to wear, what to say. They are herded with masses of others and told to put up with the consequences of herded animals. They are manipulated to believe that nothing they think, say or believe is of any consequence unless it is exactly what schools want them to think and believe and relevant to ticksheets. And they are drilled in passing exams by the untrue threat that without them they won’t have any chance of a successful life.

Well people like Jamie Oliver didn’t get the grades but they seem to be doing okay. (Read his bio here)

School life is in no way replicated in real life beyond school. In real life we have CHOICE. And we have to make independent choices. We have to take charge. But the put-up-and-shut-up culture forced on kids by schooling, by prescriptive curriculum and by unnatural social clustering, fails to prepare young people to do this. Schooling as it is basically restricts children’s skills and their thinking – how can that prepare them for life outside school? And the more intensive and prescribed it becomes, the less effective it will be in preparing children to take charge of their lives.

Yet all the government can think of doing is making it more prescribed – a recent example; Latin and Greek are to make a come-back into primary schools (read the article here), as if that’s the answer to masses of children who haven’t even been parented well enough to understand the use of decent English and the impact it has on them being employed. We think learning Greek and Latin’s will improve that? It’s a joke!

It’s also a vicious academic circle that makes an elite few succeed but ill equips the majority.

But it isn’t only schools that are to blame. Parents are as much to blame by subscribing to it but I can understand that, as a result of the system themselves, they have also been trained to believe it is the best way forward.

It may be the best way forward for some. But not for all. There are other ways forward. Thank goodness for home educators who are proving it. The most successful thing about home educating being that children are educated in real life.

‘Home’ educating is a bit of a misnomer. For the children are mostly not cloistered in the home as the name suggests but out and about in a real community, with real working people and families, with a wide social range, learning real social skills by speaking and interacting, taking part in decision making about their education and their lives, having the opportunity to question and think thus developing the mental skills to tackle real life as well as pass exams, and learning how to take charge of their lives as people in life do.

This is why home education is so successful. Because children lead real lives, not just school lives, and are all the more skilled, competent and intelligent for doing so. That’s what we need of schools. Not exam factories.

The Best Start In Life? – Are you joking?

If you are a parent you need to watch this programme then do some serious thinking: The Best Start In Life? http://www.itv.com/itvplayer/video/?Filter=327517

After I watched it I want to scream several things:

- IT CERTAINLY ISN’T

- THERE ARE OTHER WAYS

- GRADES DON’T GUARANTEE HAPPY AND PRODUCTIVE LIVES

- AND PARENTS SHOULD STOP BEING CONNED

When I watch this kind of pressure put on kids to get grades (at the expense of everything else) I could weep. As the psychologist in the programme suggests it’s damaging. It destroys happy family lives and relationships. And it doesn’t necessarily get people where they want to be. It is all a huge political con.

Why?

Well, politicians want votes don’t they? They get votes by pleasing people. The majority of people are parents so they have to try and give parents what they want. Parents want their kids to be clever in school; they’ve been led to believe that this will get them good jobs and lots of money. Many of them also want their kid to beat the kid next to them and get grades they can swank about in their social circles. So the politicians can please parents by making kids seem clever by getting lots of grades. They do this by manipulating the education system so much that it no longer resembles education but more of a sausage machine that produces grade-getting sausages at the expense of children’s needs. So then we create lots of obedient little sausages with the grades to get good professional jobs, except there aren’t enough jobs to go round professional or otherwise. And anyway, as many rich and successful people find out, having lots of money doesn’t necessarily make you fulfilled and happy – other things in life do and they need many other skills now excluded from the sausage making machine in the race for grades. Grades may make kids seem clever – but the kind of clever you need to be in the outside world has nothing to do with grades. Yet the politicians don’t care about that because they want people making money, because money making voters promote industry and pay tax to the government and so on and so on.

It’s a vicious soul destroying, planet destroying scenario. It destroys souls because it makes people who don’t achieve it believe they are failures. It destroys the planet because it buys into the idea of money and consumerism being the ultimate goal.

And it all starts by parents putting pressure on children to get the grades.

As an alternative, there are thousands of parents – increasing all the time – that have decided to take another route. They remove their children from the sausage machine scenario and educate them outside in the real world, with real people, giving them real experiences that teach them real life skills. Some of them don’t even do tests and exams of any sort. Yet they go on to live productive and happy lives, thanks to a real life understanding, as ours did even without the GCSEs that politicians hold up as magic keys to the parents and the parents hold up as magic keys (or rods!) to the kids.

We have a massive employment crisis in this country. We have a massive crisis with children being so switched off to education by schooling that they cannot even see how it would be of benefit. We have a massive crisis with so many kids who feel that no one even cares – so they stop caring too, about anything, even themselves.

And this grade-getting approach to education is one of the contributing factors to those crises. Because it prostitutes real education for political purposes.

We need to educate our children to have diverse, entrepreneurial skills, to be rich in experiences and therefore understanding, to have care and interest, to be flexible and adaptable, to have well practised social and communication experiences – the kind they’ll need to make themselves employable not the kind they need to survive school, to think broadly, extensively, globally.

A single-track, grade-getting education with a political agenda won’t do this.

But home education does!

(To learn more about the way parents home educate visit the brilliant blogs on the Home Education Blogs Page. Or you can read my guide to home education; Learning Without School, and of our personal journey in A Funny Kind Of Education. See the My Books page)

The GCSE farce and educational worth…

The half term over, the children go back to school with both anxiety and excitement and I’m just the same as I launch back into my morning routine without my home educators!

Up in the village on Monday morning I saw the tiny tots dragged to school when it’s barely light, the older kids with rebellious slants to their so-called uniforms, and the trendy ones waiting to catch the college bus eyeing each other up. And I can’t help thinking about all the home educators who don’t have this to do. Brilliant isn’t it!

It seems ages since we were home educating. When we didn’t have to worry about uniforms or pack-ups, tests and SATs. When our learning routines revolved around all the wonderful things there are to learn about the world, to go out and do and see. When we could schedule our day to completely suit the needs of the developing child, rather than drag them from bed in the morning when their brains and bodies are switched off. When we could make best use of their potential by shifting our learning routine to later in the day and evening. I miss showing the kids our world and how to increase their understanding of it, even though it was a challenge at times.

Despite those challenges, home educating was a wonderful way of life, a learning way of life, a life of learning about the real world outside the synthetic one determined by a system that is far too out of date for our contemporary children. There is something almost archaic about seeing these uniformed school kids bound by this dated routine filing into dated buildings when there are so many other options available now in our progressive technological culture.

I know there is nothing more inspiring than a good teacher and home educating sometimes misses out on some of those. But they’re rare. Good teachers are often destroyed by the process they’re forced into; trying to teach kids who often don’t want to learn what the schools want them to learn, in a place they don’t want to be, in a way that isn’t working for so many. We read about the great grades that children get. But we rarely read about the thousands of children who are let down and don’t get the grades. And now some are having to re-sit because of the recent bungle over GCSEs, it’s importance sidelined because of hot election news from America. (Read about the GCSE bungle here). How awful that must be for those kids. But it’s indicative of what a farce the educational system has become; a commercial-like system that promotes the product – exam results – as more important than the process; the education and care and worth of developing human beings.

By home educating, parents have saved many kids from this big let down and made their education a successful demonstration of the value it brings to life and makes our kids feel worthy rather than let down.

It’s time to recognise that we perhaps need schools now for something quite different from merely schooling for grades and controlling what kids wear.

We need education to show our kids how important they are for our future and that their individual education matters more than the system.

(Read more about our family learning life in A FUNNY KIND OF EDUCATION – extracts on my books page).

I wanna break free…..

…Free from an idea that has plagued and held back children’s education for decades. The age old, out-dated idea that the more qualifications you force children to do the more educated they become.

And I want us to break free from that idea because it just doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t matter how many qualifications a kid has they are not worth anything unless they know how to apply themselves to living a life.

I also want the world to break free from the idea that the more qualifications you require of teachers the better their teaching will be. That doesn’t work either because grades don’t make good teachers; caring, empathetic and engaged people do.

Yet it said on the news that teachers are going to face tougher tests http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-20083249 in the hope of making better teachers.

What blinkered thinking!

Because the problem is that still focuses on an end result – grades – whether in teachers or kids. As if grades were the answer to everything. And as long as we think that we are going to train our teachers to train our kids for that end only.

But grades don’t make an education. EXPERIENCES do.

We don’t need teachers who’ve been drilled through grades themselves and therefore will drill kids to do the same. We need inspired teachers who can engender understanding in children of themselves and the world.

We don’t need teachers pumped full of facts who will then try and pump our kids full of facts to regurgitate on demand for test passing. We need people who will nurture a sense of care and responsibility in our children for self, others and the earth. Facts and figures and exam results are no good to anyone who doesn’t have a sense of care.

Care makes an educated person. Care of themselves. Care of how they relate to others. Care of the way in which they relate to the earth.

In fact, we need to break free of our idea of education as examination and see it as a caring nurturing of the young.

So don’t think you’ve got to make your home educated child do masses of exams in order to make them educated. Exams are just an end result and only prove what is true on ONE day. What makes them educated is their experiences. And how much they care about the way in which they use what they learn to make themselves a better person, improve their lives and make a contribution.

They will be far more educated if they can understand that than by educating for exams.

So that’s what I wanna break free from. Free from these antiquated ideas that were set up before the world could read or had the Web. And initiate a new way of thinking about the education of our kids and the training of our teachers.

A new way that’s based on an experience of care, not on an end result.