Photo used with permission from North York Photography
My thoughts have been on home education a lot recently as one of my granddaughters has moved from home education to school.
For a brief while in the late seventies I taught my eldest daughter and son. But then we moved from England to Scotland and they attended a school which was run on the lines of A S Neill’s Summerhill, a free school or non-compulsory educational school. With two younger children and another little one on the way, this became very expensive, and commuting a long distance to the school was a burden. Also, we had moved again within Scotland and wanted to be local to any schools they attended.
The time came for my five-year-old to go to school and I decided to home-school him. All worked well but he asked me on several occasions if he could go to school. Eventually I thought, okay, let him experience it.
It was not a happy time, the teacher said she couldn’t get any sense out of him as to what he had been learning at home. He was reading avidly; he’d had fun learning at home and this comment set alarm bells ringing. I felt it showed a lack of child-centred understanding; children of that age have difficulty explaining things to an adult sometimes. After a week of him going to school, I remember the conversation clearly.
“I’ve been going to school for a long time now, Mummy.” There was despair in his voice.
“Would you like to be at home again?”
The sigh of relief and the beam on his beautiful, freckled face was enough for me.
My other son joined him in our lessons. After this, my elder son did too; now eleven, he was at the local academy and very unhappy. Soon our little daughter was born and life was busy. We had lots of goats, chickens, dogs, cats and several acres of rented land, all adding to the children’s education.
Life changed again, a sad move, the large idyllic house and land we rented was to be sold. We had many discussions on education. I had recently been introduced to and researched Steiner education. However, the only Steiner school suitable was far away from where we were based and we didn’t want to commute or bring our children up in a city.
To cut a very long story short, we moved again, back to England where we finally settled in North Yorkshire and the children attended a Steiner school in the rural area where we lived. They all had a happy education; although in hindsight my younger son would have been better off with home education. To try to keep children together to receive the same education can be a mistake, we are all unique after all and have very different needs, whether child or adult. All of my six children followed their own paths on leaving school. Some attended university, receiving high grades on graduation, others were creative in different ways in their lives.
Life moved on and years later when my sixth child and youngest daughter was born, I thought she would eventually go to the same school. But it wasn’t to be. For us, the class she would have entered into was not right for her for a variety of reasons, so home education was the only option to consider to fit in with our beliefs and lifestyle. Some people may consider it a luxury to be able to choose. In our case, not at all. I had to forfeit options I wanted in my life, and it kept us financially unstable. However, I was happy to choose home education, the privilege was all mine.
She thrived and I was fortunate that she was, and is still in her thirties, very self-motivated. Every so often, I would ask her if she wanted to go to school and we would have a discussion. Everything was working well even when I went off to Durham University to study for a degree, as a mature adult. She came with me, except when a lecture wasn’t suitable. So, for four years, (I completed an MA too), we travelled the many miles to the university, by car and train.
By the time I graduated, home education was still working well despite the fact that many people said repeatedly that she would become socially deprived. Not at all. She is one of the most well-balanced people I know and her social life has never suffered. As a child, she was able to converse with adults as easily as with another child. This is an aspect I have observed in many home-educated children; they become very self-confident.
By this time, she was fast heading towards thinking about exams so she studied with Oxford Open Learning and was able to sit her exams at the local sixth form college. She applied for universities, succeeding in obtaining a place in the university she most desired. She achieved a First. I am proud of her and of myself for taking the path of home education with her. We both learnt a lot, and best of all we had fun doing so!
One of the most enjoyable events was when I was studying for my dissertations for my BA and MA. I was researching and exploring how tourism was changing a small Greek village. My daughter came with me and we lived in this village on a Greek island for six months in total.
What a wonderful time. She made friends with the local village children, played in the garden of our temporary home, which was complete with chickens and a donkey next door who woke us up each morning. I remember clearly when it was siesta time, we would return home from my interviewing for me to sit in the shade and write while she would find a shady corner to record, via a Dictaphone, the antics and movements of the insects in the garden. A lot was learnt in our stay there and we built fond memories. She has a connection to Greece to this day.
Home education is not for everyone, but it certainly was for us.
In my next post, I will share some of my thoughts about the positives and negatives of home education and school.