NotSheep

I had one of those conversations with someone who just doesn’t get it last week; every home-educating parent will know what I mean. It started as a casual chat, then the fact that we home-educate came up. The woman I was talking to mentioned that she was a teacher; I find that teachers are sometimes very positive about home-ed and sometimes very defensive. This one surprised me though; she just couldn’t see how it would work at all. The first thing she said that surprised me was, “Someone obviously comes and monitors what you’re doing.” - I know a lot of people ask if this is the case, but I don’t think I’ve ever encountered someone before who assumed with such conviction not only that home-education was monitored by education authorities but also that it needed to be. When I questioned this, she told me - as have other teachers - that some parents just wouldn’t bother; I know this is true, but I suspect that the parents who can’t be bothered are very unlikely to take their children out of school; they’re too glad to get the free babysitting. I also suspect that the vast majority of parents would bother if there wasn’t a school system effectively saying “oh don’t bother - leave it to us, we’re the experts, you know nothing about education anyway”.

Then she asked how my children would ever get qualifications and I explained some of the various routes they could take. I tried to explain that I am not anti-teacher, nor even anti-school, but that I am anti-system: I do not believe a system can cater for the individual. She responded that there has to be a system; she seemed to see some of the problems with a system, but to be unable to accept that any child could learn outside one. She surprised me by saying that “some children are just lazy” - I tried to say that I thought that was very rarely true, that certainly some children weren’t interested in academics, that some children weren’t interested in working on specific things at specific times, but that in my experience, all children, when presented with something that interested them, were active learners. She just didn’t believe this.

Then “what will you do when they want to learn something you don’t know about?” - heh, that happened a long time ago. I talked a bit about how children learn all sorts of things without being actively taught, about how parents could learn alongside their children, about how people could teach themselves - and she disagreed. I asked if she believed that nobody could ever learn something without someone else teaching it to them; it seemed she’d never considered this possibility before, but that yes, she did think that. I’m baffled as to how anyone can think this for more than 20 seconds: knowledge would have come to a standstill very early in the history of mankind if it were true. How on earth did any of us over the age of 30 learn how to use computers?

She also questioned how someone with no “teacher training” could actually teach. I tried to explain that what I do is very unlike what a teacher in a classroom does. I asked her to try to imagine that when she returned to her school in September, she was told that she would have five pupils in her class, all of whom she cared about a great deal. There would be no curriculum requirements, no requirements for them to do SATS, no paperwork, no answering to the principal or anyone else. She would have absolute freedom to do whatever she felt would fulfil their educational needs. And she would have those five pupils right through their years in school, so she would get to know them very well.

She couldn’t imagine it. I don’t mean she thought it was beyond her imagination; I mean she said, “oh that would never happen”. Well, yes, I know it would never happen, but I was asking her to imagine how different it would be. But she just couldn’t. She was so firmly tied by the system in which she works that she just couldn’t see beyond the traditional approach of a school system at all. She just sat there shaking her head and saying “but it’s not going to happen”.

Then she started talking about how imminent changes to the curriculum are supposed to “stretch the brightest children” and “personalise” learning - but commented that while the theory was all very good, there was no additional funding for it, therefore it wouldn’t work, and that class-sizes needed to be smaller before the education system could improve anyway. I’m not sure I believe that class-size is relevant, really; I think the problems with the system are far deeper than that, but anyway…

(As an aside, I did read a bit about these curriculum changes and my reaction was twofold: first, the thought that the changes are meaningless within the context of a system, and second, horror at the grammar and spelling of the documents published on school and education authority sites: “teacher’s will become aware”???!)

Then came what I felt to be one of her most revealing comments, though I don’t think she realised it: “If I could have my way, I’d get out of school and be paid for going around to home-educated children and teaching them to read.”

Where to start with that one? Her subconscious admission that she doesn’t enjoy the system? Her assumption that children can’t learn to read without being actively taught to do so? Her belief that as a “qualified” teacher, she’d be better able to do it than a child’s parents?

I don’t want to give the wrong impression; the woman I was talking to wasn’t a stupid person, nor an unkind one, nor even argumentative. She just could not get past her unquestioned beliefs about schools: that they are essential, that parents are incapable of teaching their own children (and shouldn’t be trusted to do so even if they were), that children are incapable of learning without being led. Her attitude seemed to be that parents are incompetent and/or disinterested, children have no thirst for learning, and the school system, though not perfect, is the only possible way to provide education.

Every time I think of this conversation, a quote comes to my mind: “Once your consciousness has been raised, it cannot be lowered.” I wonder where her consciousness stands now?