Finding your own style

If you hang out with home educators for any time, you will soon realise that each family has its own style of home education, and they vary enormously. For those outside the community, there are home educating families who do not seem that different from schools, using commercially available or home made curricula, having set lesson times, homework, tutors.

There are those families who don't appear to be that different from the feckless layabout uneducating families so feared by the authorities... they don't lay down any rules about how their children should learn, don't follow any set plan, and simply talk about a lot of stuff in an informal way.

The vast majority of home educators fall somewhere in the middle, between full-on school, and full-on autonomous education.

Choosing which style of home education is right for your family means examining your own educational philosophy and family style, and deciding what fits in with your personalities, your likes and dislikes and your parenting dynamic too. Everyone is different, every family is different.

Home education is a journey in which you learn more about yourselves, and so it is possible that you will start off in one way and finish quite differently. Some people home educate as a stop gap, between schools, or waiting for a place at their chosen school, and obviously that family needs to consider keeping up with the national curriculum in order to ensure that their child hasn't dropped behind when they rejoin the school system.

You need to look at your personal style of parenting, what other activities have to fit into your week, your relationship with your children, your relationship with learning and education, what resources you have, what resources you think you need, who else can help, who your children are, and who they want to be.

Examining your own attitudes to learning and education, and discovering that although it is a word you have used probably thousands of times, when you REALLY come to think about education it is not an easy thing to explain or define... all these will help to shape the sort of home education which is appropriate for your family. Nowadays there is a lot of information online for you to use, and you can tell if something speaks to you, or seems completely bonkers.

I'd say setting down your educational philosophy is a very important first step, especially in the UK. One of the judgements in court cases reating to home education, set out the idea that home education should be efficient... and it was decided that efficient meant that it achieved what it set out to do. In order to judge the efficiency of your home education in those terms, it is necessary to know
what you are setting out to do. That's where your educatinal philosophy comes in. And that's what may vary from family to family.

Some families may start out thinking that achieving the same sort of qualifications as a schooled child would hope to achieve might be a very important aim for their education. Their educational philosophy and approach would be quite different from a family which rejected examinations because they encourage children to learn to pass exams rather than learning and loving a subject for itself.

Some families will have religious reasons for trying to prevent their children from learning about evolution, computers, sexually transmitted diseases or horoscopes. Others will want their children to gain the widest possible experience of all age-appropriate material. This will all influence your educational philosophy.

Although I know it is tempting to want someone else to tell you what to do and what to think about your educational philosophy, it isn't possible for someone else to tell you what you think... you need to work it out for yourself. And write it down. Then keep looking at it and revise it when your ideas change.

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.