Home Educating and “Good parenting”

Apologies to all those who read my daughters’ first attempts at blogging!  Here’s some more from How Children Learn at Home, by Alan Thomas and Harriet Pattison.

Thomas and Pattison look at a study by Desforges and Abouchaar on how parenting influences academic achievement. They found that

Home background is crucial to educational achievement in school… “good parenting” is uniquely influential on children’s achievement even when all other factors, such as socio-economic status, are taken out of the equation.

“Good parenting” in this case meaning

• provision of a secure and stable environment
• intellectual stimulation
• parent-child discussion
• good models of constructive social and educational values
• high aspirations relating to personal fulfillment and good citizenship

 

From all their time spent with home-educating families, Thomas and Pattison conclude:

By the nature of the task which they have undertaken, home-educating families are almost guaranteed to fulfil the greater part of Desforges and Abouchaar’s “good parenting” ideals. In fact the interviews showed parents providing these factors in abundance. In this sense, what home educating parents do with their children is not so much a radical departure but simply an extension of what is considered to be good parenting anyway… Remarkably it seems that parenting, rather than teaching, is sufficient to enable children to learn. (pp70-71)

Which is nice!

Home Education on the Wright Stuff

Some HE peeps were discussing this on twitter this morning. Unfortunately I couldn’t watch it (too busy “socialising” – HE swimming sesh) but recorded it for later. The general consensus was “lightweight, simplistic and predictable” (@frockery).

When I did watch it, the main message the programme managed to convey was how ill-informed and prejudiced the presenter Matthew Wright was on the subject. So biased, in fact, that he was almost putting words into the callers’ mouths.

MW: so do you have any friends?
JOSIE (age 13, HE for 2 years): I didn’t have any friends at school, but I have loads of friends now.
MW: NO friends now? Mmm.
Everyone in the studio: she said LOADS of friends!

Wright obviously heard what he wanted to hear, that HE kids have no friends and are missing out on loads of opportunities, and their parents are “mad and arrogant” to think that they could do a better job than teachers. He carried on in this vein with every caller (some of whom, to be fair, did their best to get across the positives of HE) – anything negative about HE met with a resounding “I’m with you on that!”, anything positive with “with all due respect” (of course they’re completely wrong) after the caller had hung up.

Fortunately the section finished with Jane, who called in because she had taught at a Saturday school and met a home-educated boy there who confounded all her expectations/preconceptions: “he was smart, witty, sociable, mature and very very likeable.” She then went on to educate her disabled son at home for three years, and he is now at University. Jane ended with a plug for Education Otherwise, and a warning that HE can be exhausting.

My experience of home educated children so far has been much closer to Jane’s – it was through getting to know HE families and their kids that we decided it would be a great thing to do for our family.

In Wright’s own words: “I obviously can’t understand home education in any shape or form…” No one is asking you to understand it Matthew. Just please don’t spout off about something you know nothing about, and are not prepared to listen to people who do.

But what about socialisation? Or, our week.

One of my least favourite things about home educating is having to explain myself to everyone. We’ve been under the radar so far, with just the usual “got your hands full!” since having three children age 4 and under. But now Jude looks old enough to be in school, everyone, the postman, receptionists, builders, well-meaning people on buses, want to know what’s going on.

And of course, everyone asks that bread-and-butter question of the HE debate: “but what about socialisation?” I imagine by this the people I talk to mean, but if you shut them up at home all day, how will they make friends? In answer to this question I thought I would post a brief run down of our week, from 10-16th November.

I’m sure the postman isn’t reading this. Indeed, if I did answer in this way to everyone who asked, I probably would be letting down the cause of home-educators-are-normal-people-too quite spectacularly. So unfortunately you, dear readers, are the recipients of my venting. You have my thanks and my apologies Anyway, here goes:

THURS Bible Study. Children in creche with several toddlers and babies. Jude (6) helps out with them. The children have lunch with Grandma S and spend the afternoon and teatime with Grandma J.

FRI morning playing with siblings. Friends G, S and L (age 2) over for lunch, then meet up with Grandma S and other friends S and N (also age 2) for a trip on the DLR to the Museum of London.

SAT Jude and Andy go to a football session in the park in the morning, with about 25 other kids. Grandma S’s for lunch then back home for the football. Andy’s best friend from school, Uncle P, plays with them all afternoon.

SUN church, Jude goes to Sunday School (Andy stays with girls who sleep in). We don’t see anyone other than the 100 or so people who go to our church after we get home though. Oh no, wait, DS goes to play with friends N, J and N (age 8, 5, and 6) from church for a couple of hours after we get back from a walk in the forest.

MON lunch again with Grandma S (what would we do without her?!), and our friends S and H (age 3). Think that’s it.

TUE Grandma S takes girls to toddler group. Jude goes to Beavers in the evening.

WED we see lots of our HE friends at swimming. Jude has a dentist appt then we go to a cafe for tea and cakes. He makes friends with another 6-year-old in the park afterwards, they play for about an hour. When we get home X, age 8, who lives next door comes over. The evening is spent playing with Lego in the front room and watching Octonauts.

In brief, probably over 80 different children played/interacted with over the course of the week, as well as numerous adults. Not too bad for kids kept in a cupboard

Home education in the news and on Mumsnet

Lovely positive coverage of a home educating family by the Yorkshire Post.

More parents are at home with the idea of teaching children themselves

Ok, I’ve just got the title. Ha I got the link through the Mumsnet Home Education Facebook group. Do have a look – it has over 50 members now and looks like a great source of advice and encouragement.

The Home Ed section of Mumsnet talk is a great place too, but unfortunately threads like this one tend to get hijacked by people who want to argue about socialisation, registration, compulsory visits and educational/social welfare checks for HE children (sigh). It’s important to debate these topics in public, to put our arguments and points of view across, and try our best to rectify misconceptions and mistakes. It’s important to engage, to communicate, and there are some people who do a brilliant, tireless job of that on the HE board.

But often in the midst of all of that, the original post asking a question gets lost. And that’s why it’s good to belong to Facebook and email groups as well. Because if there’s one thing you can’t get enough of when you are home educating, it’s support.

How Children Learn at Home

Have just started reading How Children Learn at Home by Alan Thomas and Harriet Pattison (borrowed it from the library). It’s very encouraging

Perhaps both the greatest fascination and the greatest difficulty in studying informal learning is getting to grips with its sheer ordinariness. As will become apparent, informal learning remains, as it is during those first years of life, a commonplace, unremarkable and yet astonishingly efficient way to learn. (p2)

Thomas/Pattison list some of the benefits of learning at home: being able to take advantage of times when children are most receptive, the ability to cut a lesson short if it is not productive, the fact that “lessons” (if there are any) take much less time due to not having to do classroom admin or management.

By far the most important difference between more formal, structured learning at home and in school though, is that learning at home becomes an individualized and interactive process. Parents repeatedly refer to being able to strike while the iron is hot, to deal with problems as they arise and to avoid going on to something new until the prerequisite knowledge or concepts have been acquired… Shared learning is an everyday feature of home education, especially as children grow older and move into areas their parents know little about or have forgotten from their own schooling… It probably enhances the quality of learning because the children are active partners in the process rather than passive recipients of adult-administered knowledge. Sometimes children jump ahead of parents in a new area, leading them to gain in confidence in their own learning as well as seeing that it is quite acceptable for an adult not to know. (p6)