Putting the Ed into Home Education

We had visions of virtual and real networks of learners working on projects and hypertext themes through his website, a group of kids working on a newspaper or discussing philosophy. We saw ourselves as enabling his education, supplying the broadband and the biscuits for a group of like minded enthusiastic learners.

We saw an open curriculum driven by the group's enthusiasms, interests and natural curiosities. We saw the sort of group learning that the National Curriculum won't allow teachers to develop, the sort of co-operative work that checkbox education precludes.

And now after almost a year of home education, successful negotiation of the LEA assessment and some hard work by our son we look again at that vision and our enthusiasm and to be honest, we're considering opening discussions with local secondary schools for September 2004. Why? Not because we don't think there is a better education to be had outside school, not because we think he'll be happier - he's calmer, happier and learning more now than he ever was at school, not because we don't think we can support his learning through to GCSE or A Level. No we're thinking of backing down because we have failed to find any others who want to concentrate on the education part of home education.

There are numerous sources of emotional, legal and practical support out there. There are plenty of opportunities for 'socialisation' and sharing time but despite repeated attempts to find families who want to simply learn together, there seems to be no coherent network or framework for study or learning. We've posted to Internet groups, we've advertised in the library, we've talked to people (some very well known and respected in the HE community) but we've met walls of indifference. We've begun to feel that we're the only ones who want to get together to study ethics or Animal Farm, read New Scientist or the subtexts in Blade Runner, or simply play with equations or read novels.

We've set up a Wiki website where kids can work together on projects, we've floated the idea of a properly produced newspaper but to no avail.

We took our son out of school so he could learn better and get a real enthusiasm for study and learning. We've spent a lot of this year developing his study skills. He's worked really hard and come a long way but he needs others. He doesn't need people to play with, learn to interact with or socialise with - he has plenty of them. He needs people to bounce ideas off, argue with, explain concepts to so he can get them straight in his mind. He can do that with us but it's not the same as working with his peers not just other 10-year-olds but 6 year-olds or bright 12 year-olds, kids he can teach and be taught by. Peer-to-peer networking.

The National Curriculum has squeezed this peer-to-peer learning out of the classroom. We believe it could exist outside of school but only if others, not to put too fine a point on it, are as obsessed with 'learning' as we are. Of course HE is a lifestyle choice - I gave up work to do it, our family is structured around it - but it is most basically a learning choice. We do not decry those who are doing it to bring their children up in the way they choose with the values and ideals they want. We want to bring our son up with the love for learning and the skills to do it that we value. But for us home education is about education - heh we've even embraced the sacriligous term 'home schooling' to try and make clear what we are trying to do.

It's almost as if we're scared of 'learning' and 'education' that the words have been taken over by Ofsted and QCA. They have indeed created a hegemony around those terms, but we can wrest control back. We can redefine , reposition them, create a new set of ideas that our friends who are dissatisfied with contemporary curricula and scared of the secondary school around the corner can embrace. At the moment our friends look up form the property pages and don't see learning. They praise us for our bravery and return to looking for a house in the right catchment area. These parents would see HE as a real option if they thought it was built on learning and equipping their sons and daughters to compete for a job.

This article is partly a last ditch attempt to find other families who want to build a different sort of school that combines home and education. But it is also a challenge to the HE community - if we are going to seriously present an alternative vision of education, one other parents can see as attractive, one employers can see as relevant and one government can see as a challenge, how much emphasis are we putting on learning?