How I came to home educate

My sons were very unhappy at school, for entirely different reasons. My elder son was bullied, bored, beginning to think that he was bad at everything, and withdrawing into himself. He had got to the stage where he didn't even feel able to answer safe questions, like "do you have a pet?" or "have you any brothers or sisters?".

My younger son was the youngest in his class, and struggling to keep up. The school recognised this and wanted to institute an individual eduational plan for him because he wasn't look-and-saying all the words a seven year old should be looking-and-saying in order to get an average mark in the key stage 1 SATS. That's probably because he was going to be just six and a half when he took his SATs. For their purposes, however, he was seven.

The younger boy, Thomas had always been a very lively child - running and climbing, swinging and spinning all the time, constantly full of energy and moving all the time. At school he hated being "on the carpet" in front of the teacher, having to sit still.

What worried me the most was the attitudes that they were picking up towards learning. They thought of it as boring, hard work and something that they were forced to do. Some thing separate from the ways that they enjoyed themselves. That saddened me a lot. I don't have many paper qualifications, and I didn't do a degree, but I am very well read, and interesed in nearly everything, except country music and football.

Eventually I came to the conclusion that I had to do something, but what? I didn't have the money for private schools, and I don't drive. In any case, the good schools in the area I live in, which is on the edge of greater London, are all oversubscribed.

I had come into contact with a home educating American family through a friend, and wondered if that might be an answer. I phoned the local council to establish that it was legal for me to home educate and then set about finding out as much as I could about it. I joined mailing lists, scoured mnessage boards... but this was 1998 and there was hardly any information available online for the UK. I began to be interested in what I was reading, however.

If you had asked me then how I forsaw my home education, I think I would have called upon the film of the Railway Children for inspiration. I imagined us around a table, studying geography or history, before the children scampered off into the garden to run about and identify wildlife.

Initially I lacked confidence, and wanted someone to be telling me what I ought to be doing with my children, what was appropriate to the ages and their abilities. I set out a timetable and drew up lessons for them.

I found that early part quite difficult, until I decided on the advice of a mailing list, to give them some space to unschool. I developed different lists of places to go and things to do, we went on a lot of nature rambles, visits to the library, trips out to the museums.

I started changing the way I organised things, thinking that maybe a project-based system would do better, individualised for each child, because I found it impossible to decide on a level appropriate to a 9, 7 and 5 year old child. That did work better than a timetable and lessons, but it still didn't work well. What I found was that the children wouldn't be doing what I had laid down they should do, but they were doing things that were equally valid.

I had seen emails from people who were autonomous educators on the mailing lists, and frankly I thought they were completely crazy when I first came across them. Here were people who were allowing the inmates to run the asylum; who made no distinction between reading a book and playing a computer game, beween gardening for vegetables and plaiting your hair. Surely their children needed to be told what to do, or they would play computer games for the next ten years?

While I was shaking my head over the crazies on the mailing list, I was at the same time reading everything I could lay my hands on... articles about home education, about the way things are learned, about how different people learn in different ways. I began to understand the nature of autonomy, and how compelling someone to do anything changes their way of viewing it. This was what I had already recognised in my sons... that making them do things at school turned them into work and made them bored with them.

By the end of my first year as a home educator, I had become a radical unschooler, fervently committed to autonomous education for my children.