Children Missing Education???

There's been a lot of concern in blogland recently (eg here, here and here) about mission creep, especially in the way that policy guidance and local authorities are now approaching home education from the viewpoint of Children Missing Education.

Only today, I learned of a local home educator who had challenged her LA visitor when this official mentioned home education and Children Missing Education in the same breath. Apparently, the LA officer very quickly backtracked to the position of "It's not you, of course, your provision's wonderful, but there are others ..." (etc, etc). But it's not about a single insulting instance, it's about the way that the two terms are becoming increasingly linked in the standard, unexamined parlance of government and local authority officials. In the minds of stressed workers, whose minds are probably far more obsessed with whether or not they will have a job next year, it just becomes easy to lazily and unquestioningly use one term interchangeably with the other.

And this is dangerous. Like other stock phrases like "You're making a rod for your own back" or "If you don't listen to me it'll end in tears"(there's a great list here), if you repeat a thing often enough it becomes accepted as right and proper. The less we challenge the nomenclature, the more at risk we are.

Our children are not missing education. There are plenty of children in schools who, for one reason or another (undiagnosed special needs, bullying, shyness about voicing bewilderment) ARE missing education. But the assumption is that only those outside of school need to demonstrate that education is indeed taking place. Once again, home educators appear to be seen as guilty until proven innocent. Only months after Badman, it looks as though we have a new fight on our hands.

Colour Vision Envy

Dd got to try her hand at watercolour landscapes yesterday, at an art group for home educated teens. All these young people came up with rich and evocative blends of sky, sea and land simply by applying swooshes of colour to a page. Dd didn't enjoy it - being a sci-fi kind of gal, she thinks that only monochrome and bold graphic lines will do. This made me absolutely green (how much of the world we view through coloured lenses) with envy. She was casually dismissing something that I'd love to be able to do, but, as a colour blind person, I find incredibly challenging. (Remember these little tests from your school days? It was my first intimation that adults don't necessarily have all the answers when the school nurse was adamant that I must be faking my inability to discern the numbers hidden in the dots because "girls can't be colour blind". Wrong!!!)

Guided by a very talented home ed mum, all those at yesterday's art group could see colours in the world around them and then mimic these by blending paints on a palette. Yet dd complains that "watercolours just aren't for me", while I look on in awe at anyone capable of negotiating the colour wheel.

I hope she opens her mind to it all, but I guess that's the way things go when your child has freedom to choose - they're not necessarily going to place the same value on those things that seem deeply impressive to their parents.

Writing with reason

Dd is spending a lot of time thinking about bashing out a novel in the space of a month. This is the target set by NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, which argues that one of the things that prevents most of us from becoming really creative writers is that we're overly aware of our "inner editor" - a mean little English teacher who leans over our shoulders and tells us that we can't possibly continue until we correct this bit of grammar or that clunky plot device.

It's great fun and frees her to think about churning out words rather than obsessing about quality. We've also discovered a cool new writing group for local teens, where she's met some really like-minded people. I love it that she's found spaces where she can express herself and that she has the freedom to really throw herself into these activities without worrying they might get in the way of her homework. Remembering my own schooldays, I'm still at a loss as to why educators believe it's an efficient way of learning to pile on hours of evening busywork, often only to reinforce how little they've actually understood during their lessons in school. I'm sure that some would argue it at least encourages a work ethic, but if so it's an ethic based on threat of punishment rather than for its own sake. You could dutifully plough through a worksheet or you could really be playing with ideas. I know which sounds most like real intellectual activity!