I’ve been thinking about the home education community in England and how different it can be from one area to another.  On a Thursday during term time, my children and I go to Wargrave in Berkshire to attend the Camp Mohawk Home Education group.  Many of the children there have been home educated for some time and the reason that they are home educated is because their parents knew about home education and believe it to be a better alternative to schooling. Each has their own way of putting their home education into practice, but generally they make those choices consciously.

Where we live, on the edge of Greater London, a large number of the teenagers and children out of school are being home educated because they have experienced problems at school.  Sometimes this means that they were badly bullied, on other occasions that they were disruptive or violent in school and have been expelled.   Often the parents are unwilling home educators, who don’t believe in their own ability to educate their children satisfactorily.

I always say that I have a foot in both camps, really.  I did remove my children from school because they were unhappy, but I have come to believe that home education is a far better - and less damaging - way of educating children.

Often parents who are home educating due to necessity, rely on advice from local authorities or teachers who have no actual experience of home education at all.  In my dealing with my local authority I have been astonished at how little curiosity or even interest they have in the ways in which home-based education, particularly autonomous education, differs from school-based education.  They simply expect it to be the same, and expect that their knowledge and experience of schooling will be applicable to home education too.

Even if you decide to run a school at home set up, however, there are significant ways in which home based education may differ from school.  The most significant difference is that there is a lot less pressure for a child to be literate early in the home.  At school, where many of the activities are explained in work sheets or work books, there is a huge pressure on children to be literate as early as possible.  Some researchers have linked the increase in dyslexia and dyspraxia with this emphasis on early literacy, and certainly the amount of time that a child spends naturally running around, balancing, swinging, all the things which are suggested as ways of helping dyspraxic children, is naturally cut down if you have children sitting down trying to learn how to read.

If you are home educating, and available to your children, then most of the things which are done in school by reading can be done by talking.  Although local authority inspectors seem to have a superstition that children haven’t learned something unless they have written it down, this isn’t true.  People are perfectly capable of learning many things without writing any of them down.

At home, parents can put things into context for their children.  If they ask a question, in answering you will naturally draw upon what you know of their interests and experiences and help to make sense of whatever it is.  You don’t need to think about it, this is something which parents do naturally.  Teachers do too, but their knowledge of their pupils is limited by the number that they are trying to teach at one time.

In common with many people setting out to home educate, I initially had a plan and a timetable and intended to run a school at home.  I think probably that was helpful to the older two, as they had been in school, and it made a good transition from school to home.  But pretty rapidly I learned to trust that my children were learning and exploring and curious about the world, and we moved gradually from planned to unplanned, didactic to autonomous.

I fear that many of the people who are forced to home educate due to circumstances, don’t come into contact with ideas about autonomous education, which offers a whole new model of how people learn and why.  They are used to teacher-centred education, and believe that this is the model to aspire to.  In the case of parents who were not academic themselves at school, this puts a huge amount of pressure onto them to be the teacher, to learn the things that they want to teach to their children and to pass them on, just as in school.

It makes me sad that there is so little writing about the alternative, in which the parent is not the teacher, but the facilitator, and where the family can explore together, gaining more information and learning more where necessary.  I have found this to be a joyful experience, where we spark questions and then work to find answers together.  It’s a creative and inspiring process which has far more benefits than the alternative, where the parent seeks to learn the information and then to transmit it to children.

In the course of my first couple of years as a home educator, I began to realise how much I had been indocrinated in the course of my education, with the way in which things are normally done.  Splitting the world into subjects is something which may make sense in school, but in the home you begin to see the world in a much more integrated way, and realise that there is no way of separating maths and English and science from cookery.  You begin to see that explaning liquid measures with diagrams and numbers is so much less easy than doing it with jugs and bottles and jars.

Much of the difference in the autonomous approach, is that you trust the children to ask their own questions, and to find their own answers.  It can be a little unnerving if one of your children isn’t curious about reading for years (one of mine didn’t read well until 11) or if their curiosity centres around computer games and fast food… but once you understand the ways in which learning from firsthand experience differs from learning by being lectured, it is impossible to go back, I feel.

It is my vision, that as 3D worlds like Second Life expand, one could have a place where anyone can learn about anything, with no entry requirements, no exams to pass, no restrictions on the learning that one can do.  How mad is that, anyway?  We live in a culture that puts up barriers to progress in learning.  In order to be thought fit to learn one subject, you may have to jump through innumerable hoops in other subjects.  In my educational utopia, every school is like the teen challenge experience I have just participated in… children with freedom to attend a group session or do their own thing, hanging out with other teenagers, or finding something they want to do… with equipment and resources available when needed.

That’s a vision for the future, but meanwhile in the UK, it can be the reality for home educated children, if only parents know it is an option and that it works.