Who is right about home schooling?

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

I think it was the bit about Cézanne which really got to me. It came early on in last week’s article. Perhaps you read it; my colleague James Bartholomew was explaining how he had intended to tutor his daughter Alex, now that he had taken the liberating decision to remove her from school because the teachers and everybody else were useless. From now on he’s going to teach her at home, or in agreeable bits of the world where there is usually a nicely crisp dry white wine available and a modified peasant cuisine. The Cézanne bit followed a short passage wherein James bemoaned Alex’s shortcomings in the grammatical department and how he intended to put that right. Here goes:

‘I don’t want to give the impression that I will be a Gradgrind. We will have some fun, too. Alex loves to paint. We will go to the major Cézanne exhibition in Aix and see his paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire. Then we will see the mountain itself from the same viewpoint that he used. I hope we will settle down to paint it ourselves — perhaps copying Cézanne’s technique.’

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.