Monster & Teeny

We spend most our time in the company of other Home Educating families. Any of our non HE / schooled friends are so used to it being what we do that it’s no longer an issue or topic of conversation. But having recently started a new job I have been doing a walking impression of a HE FAQ this last month and as Monster started a new Badgers this week I primed him a little for the possibility of ‘what school do you go to?’ type questions.

Most of the time I forget we are / do something different, it’s not a massive part of who we are, just one aspect of us. But in much the same way as I forget that I have red hair until a hairdresser comments on it asking if it’s my natural colour or someone talks with tact about fat people in my presence reminding me that I am overweight I forget about these traits and then remember that actually to the casual observer or someone who doesn’t know me well they are probably quite defining. HE is the same - easy to forget you’re doing something very different to the rest of the country when you’re safe in your HE bubble but actually it is very different, very unusual and very worthy of the vast amount of questions I’ve been answering the last month.

The reasons we had for coming to HE in the beginning have long since become obsolete and irrelevant. But, before I even had children I always swore I’d celebrate them as individuals, value them for the people they were and support them in identifying, reaching and achieving their dreams and their potential. That if I gave them nothing else I would ensure they were secure and loved, confident that they were important, worthy and wonderful people. Raising them to be good, confident, capable adults able to recognise and facilitate their needs and desires. Home Education, I believe fulfils all of those criteria for my two children and is the key to those early building blocks in achieving those long terms aims, for us, for now.

However I do recall that as a child the very last thing I ever wanted to be was different. I wanted to blend in, to be like everyone else, to not be marked out. Nowadays I generally take pride in not being one in the crowd, in having an identity, in being an individual. It’s what I encourage most in Monster and Teeny and what I take most pride in seeing them display. But I am aware that even I have my days when I don’t want to be flying the flag for HE, I can’t be bothered with being different, I can see the benefits in anonymity and fitting in. For now HE is our decision, Monster and Teeny are still young enough for us to be making big decisions like that for them, I am 100% confident that in these early years we are doing our very best by them in not sending them to school, we are rescuing them from the tyranny of the standard, the curse of homogenisation, the damage of the classroom and the playground and the trials of the National Curriculum, we are empowering them to learn who they are, what their passions might be, allowing them the freedom to be individuals and discover their potential all within the secure and loving environment of home. Every need is catered for, every whim indulged and it is this which I am doing in the hopes that when they do fly away it will be with confidence and with a clear direction to their path.

For every time I challenge the idea of school in my current FAQ incarnation I state how unlike real life a classroom is, how we never sit in alphabetical order, grouped by birth year, geography and sometimes even gender, handed all we need to know as prescribed for us in a one size fits all manner in one hour bite sized chunks with it clearly marked for which compartment within our brain it should be slotted. How actually school stunts our socialising, limits our choices of relationships and allows no room for individual passions or interests. How it is no preparation for ‘real life’ at all. I also know that actually that whole prescribed daily routine, that head-down-get-on-with-your-work mentality is actually very common place in many workplaces and how work is something you endure rather than enjoy. At school it is for the extrinsic reward of a gold star, an A grade, a piece of paper stating you have a qualification. At work it is for a paycheque, a job title, four weeks annual leave and a pension plan. Actually in many ways school does a perfect job of preparing the workforce of tomorrow. It teaches them to be hungry and thirsty at nice evenly spaced times throughout the day, to find their common ground with the person sat next to them, to work for the praise / financial reward from others and to view work as something to be endured rather than enjoyed and that it does indeed take up nearly half your working hours.

I am very aware that in choosing to Home Educate Monster and Teeny I am marking them out as different. I am aware that already, with Monster only being six it will be something that he will be talking about in adulthood. If he started school tomorrow he would still have ‘missed out’ on nursery, reception and nearly half of year one. It has already shaped him and who he is. I know that the longer we continue with this path, the more it will define them and who they become. It will be one of the first pieces of information that they will impart about themselves in new relationships for years to come. It will come up at job interviews, in the pub, be part of their CV, form all the memories of their childhood, be a massive part of who they are. It will be what defines them for years and will either be the credit or the blame for whatever they choose to do with their lives.

One of the expectations on HE which has always really bothered me is that everyone expects brain surgeons in training to be the result. If a HE child ends up working in McDonalds it would be considered a failure for HE. But let’s not forget that McDonalds is staffed by schooled children and noone is holding them up as the example for schools failing. I truly hope and expect that self motivation, a zest for life and getting the most from every opportunity and a curiosity and quest for learning more will be indicative of my children’s Home Education. I don’t care if they never gain a qualification in their lives, I have no ambitions for them to attend university, be recruited into ‘top jobs’ or exhibit other badges of success. I hope they manage always to retain and be true to who they are. I hope whatever they choose to invest their time and energy in repays them with fulfilment and happiness, I hope they will think of us and know that whether we failed them or not in our choices we always did the very best we were able to manage for them and that all of our decisions were based on what we felt would make them happiest in life. So far I know I am raising free thinkers, potentially radical individuals who will strike out and be heard, who will fight for their rights and who expect and anticipate that nothing is beyond their grasp but they will need to work out how to achieve it. I’m not after burdening their shoulders with my dreams, I want to leave them free for their own.

So what if they want to go to school then? This is a question that I get asked fairly regularly. I am pretty vocal on the plusses of Home Education, the negatives of school and yes, I probably am anti school in many ways. I confess to having been fairly critical of people who have chosen school for their children having tried or considered Home Education and if I were to decide tomorrow to sign Monster and Teeny up for school then I would deserve all that crisicism thrown back at me tenfold. But you know what? When I was a child, although I didn’t love school I wouldn’t have ever wanted to be Home Educated. My favourite books were the Malory Towers series, my favourite TV show was Grange Hill. I fantacised about having a best friend to share secrets and make up with just like in my books and magazines, I was desperate for sleepovers, parties, my first crush, the joy of new stationery and pencil cases every September, being part of the school choir and finding our who’s class I’d be in next year. I lived through school, I knew it didn’t offer all or any of those things but I’d still not have passed up the chance to be there.

So my answer to the question ‘what if they want to go to school?’ is always ‘then to school they shall go’. Never do I want to be resented for not letting them go there, for ‘making them different’, for preventing them from any experience, opportunity, hell, even any disappointment. If and when they reach an age where they can rationalise why they want to go and I truly believe it is more than a passing whim or wont then of course they shall go to school. This has always been about the children, not about me. They are Home Educated, I am not a Home Educator. This is their lives we are defining, not mine. The resource exists, if there is anything to be gained from it at all then it should be taken and grapsed with both hands.

Until now all of the ‘many children who have been home educated go on to attend school, most with very successful results’ have been anecdotal ones I have read about rather than known personally. But in the last year I can name and actually know various of the children I am talking about. Next week another child I know will be counted among that number. That does not unnerve me in the slightest - I believe in Home Education to such a degree that I think it gives children a head start wherever they go be it school, the workplace or adulthood generally. When my work as a facilitator here is done I am confident Monster and Teeny will go off and be the best they can. That might be in five years, it might be in ten or fifteen, but they will know when they are ready because if I’m teaching them anything at all, that is the most important lesson.