In a class of her own

Wednesday, 13th September 2006

James Bartholomew has decided to home-educate his nine-year-old. Even good private schools, he says, cling to the national curriculum and fail to teach basic grammar

I think it is right that parents should be able to pursue particular ideas on what they want their children to learn. Why should politicians and civil servants decide what is important and cause it to be learnt by every child in the country — in the process ensuring that many other things, such as a second modern language, are not taught?

Private schools are not — in theory — obliged to follow the national curriculum. But they live in terror of a bad report from school inspectors who follow government guidelines. One thing Alex wouldn’t get in any London preparatory school I’m aware of is a knowledge of Italian. She is already getting towards the end of the time when she is most easily able to absorb a foreign language and I don’t want to leave it any longer.

Home-education is growing fast in Britain and has already become big business in America where two million children are now being educated at home. The reasons, as in my case, can be a mixture of things.

One of my minor reasons is that I want to remove her — for a time at least — from the undercurrent of propaganda in most schools today. Geography lessons have, to a remarkable extent, been turned into vehicles for passing on the views of Friends of the Earth. My children come home from school believing as uncontested facts that forests are being destroyed apace and that if this does not stop, the planet is doomed.

Much teaching about the environment is based on one side of the argument alone and I think that is the opposite of what education should be. Another kind of commonplace propaganda is a quiet but insistent subtext in the teaching of many subjects that business and capitalism are bad. I would like her to hear the other side of that particular story.

More personally, I want Alex and I to have more contact while she is young. She is a lively, charming girl. I don’t want to see her only in the evenings when she is tired and has homework to do. I want to know her better and for her to know me. I want to enjoy her sparkle and share the learning experience with her. I think that will be exciting.

The reactions of friends are usually positive and teachers, surprisingly, are often the most enthusiastic. But there is one recurring negative response, ‘What about her socialisation?’ Many worry that children cannot learn to rub along with others without going to school. Yet I am told, by those who have studied the evidence, that it is actually the other way around: those who are home-educated are better ‘socialised’.

I have also noticed with my elder daughter that the longer term goes on, the more she says ‘whatever’ and affects disinterest in pretty well everything (except horses). Only as the holidays progress does she rejoin the human race and allow herself to be enthusiastic. I have come to wonder whether schools have a tendency to put children off learning.

That could be arrogance before a fall. Alex may be going to resist learning even more when I am her main teacher. She may refuse to conjugate être and not give tuppence for the universe. I can’t know whether this is going to work. But I am going to have a jolly good go at it.