Liddle Britain

Who is right about home schooling?

Rod Liddle

21 September 2006

Rod Liddle says that we should leave teaching to the professionals, however much they annoy us, and stop pretending that children benefit from learning obscure languages or how to paint like Cézanne at home

Those are my italics, although one fears that, in time, they may well become the italics of Alex Bartholomew. She is nine years old. Perhaps she will enjoy being marched to a mountain and charged with the task of replicating a Cézanne, and even consider it ‘fun’, if she is a bit weird. Hell, perhaps she will knock off a quick Velázquez on the train back to Avignon, before preparing a perfect supper for the family in the rustic tradition of the Cévennes, translate a few pages of Job back into Greek and Hebrew, posit a new theory which unifies quantum mechanics with Einstein’s theory of relativity, and explain to the entire family why Dvorák is, melodically and structurally, an also-ran. And she may think all that is fun, too.

Nine years old! The Department for Education and Skills estimates that there are some 90,000 British people who have taken their clever, beautiful children out of the politically correct, quasi-Trotskyite, bearded and often lesbian clutches of our state and private school teachers in order to drag them up mountains to paint stuff and tell them, on the way back down, why the Romans were great. There are no official figures for the working-class equivalent of these recidivists, which is to take their hideous, obese, thick children out of school and let them watch TV all day (and risk prosecution for it). That business is called ‘truancy’ rather than ‘home education’. But the individuals within that official 90,000 — and the number grows by the week — are almost exclusively middle class, well educated themselves and maybe a little nostalgic about their schooldays. One should wonder why this state of affairs has come about.

Two thoughts immediately occur: first that the education system is somehow alienating a growing number of parents each year, perhaps partly through its self-evidently dumbed-down curriculum and also through its leftish interpretation of history and culture (read James Bartholomew’s piece again and you will see that he is implacably Eurocentric and even Euro-supremacist, as your modern educationist would have it). Second, that a growing number of parents from the middle class — and especially the media-monkey, metropolitan middle class — are incalculably pleased with themselves and think that they know everything; enough, at least, to think that teachers are useless and that they can do the job themselves a damned sight better.

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Mrs H Mulholland

May 10th, 2008 10:12pm Report this comment

Whilst, as a teacher in a state secondary school, I appreciate Ron Liddle's support for state education, as a home educator I find many of his comments insulting. I do not home educate my children in some pretentious manner, nor do I allow them to watch TV all day. I teach them myself because I believe that the curriculum has been dumbed-down and I want to teach them to think for themselves and be self-motivated.

Arabella

May 1st, 2009 12:22am Report this comment

It is unfortunate that such home schooling is associated with vegans and evangelicals. It is even more unfortunate that your children will have no friends and learn little outside the textbooks.

Dan C

June 30th, 2009 11:57pm Report this comment

It is indeed unfortunate that Arabella believes that a home-educated child "will have no friends and learn little outside the textbooks" - though to an extent the definition is a little misleading, and thus it is a common misconception. Home schooling can be a more rounded form of education than the 'status quo' of school as as much time is spent outside the home as in. In the ten years we have been educating our daughter and her younger brother we have developed a network of friends in National and local organisations in people who have made the same choice (for a variety of reasons: most often because their children have been bullied and the schools did not have the time or motivation to sort it out). These kids' ages range from 2 to 18, and when together they mix far better than you see in school, as their instincts for helping and encouraging each other are not subdued by the competitiveness that is often encouraged there by the suspicions that come from the unnatural dividing of different age groups. We go on many different trips and outings and have regular meets for social and sporting activities. These children have at least as many friends as they would have in a school; they may see less every day, but how many of those you would see at school were really your friends, and the others just those that you chose to ignore?

As for subjects covered and understood the range is at least as great, as we are not restricted to what is in the National Curriculum or the syllabus. We can study whatever we like - using books, newspapers, magazines, current affairs and special TV programmes, the internet, PC-ROMs - and spend as long on it as we choose, not having to break off "just when things are getting interesting" at the end of a single or double lesson, and join the jostling throng on the way to the next lesson or the playground.

Some home-educators no doubt have niche religious or dietary convictions, but no more than the general population. We are no different from all other parents, except that we see that the state is markedly failing the young people in its care - both academically (one in six leave secondary school unable to read and write effectively) and morally (they are abandoning them on the altar of iniquitous correct socialist educational ideals). And we have taken into our hands the responsibility that is ours in law: to decide on the education of our children "either by regular attendance at school or otherwise" [Education Act 1996, Section 7].

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