Three Degrees of Freedom

Chinese New Year - in January 2012

2012-01-26T20:33:00.006Z

I've missed it. I assumed it was in February. Last year, wasn't it in February?

This year the date was January 23rd and enter the Year of the Dragon. I'm a horse myself. A wooden horse, no less.

It gave me the shivers when I realised that I might have been the Trojan horse itself. A gift boldly given that contains nasty stuff that you don't expect. Sometimes life is like that. You think you have it figured out. You might have psychic friends who tell you what to expect - warn you of the worst or the best... Then it springs. Or, at least, you wheel it in and it delivers exactly what you don't want.

You take a strange byway. Your life might even double back on itself and you find yourself facing that aspect of yourself that you thought you'd done away with years ago. Or that you'd sorted. That dreaded truth. However, you hadn't dealt with it. You'd just buried it and hoped it was dead. And now it's struggled its way out of the earth and is lumbering after you, eyes glittering, and reaching its purple fingers towards your frantically thudding and terrified heart. Yes, like a zombie. Little wonder those films are terrifying...

We're always being tested, always learning.

No wonder I feel comfortable as a home educating facilitator.

It's closer now. Lumbering more loudly. Scraping its misshapen feet along the ground. Moaning and - oh, dear - is it crying?

That leaden feeling that you have made a mistake somewhere. That you've committed yourself to a course of action that has brought you to the moment. The moment when...

the zombie grabs you, cracks open your breast bone and yanks your heart from your palpitating chest...

Have you made a mistake so big? Have you condemned your children to misery because they haven't passed millions of exams and fought the good fight in school?

You yank your heart back, stuff it into its rightful place, seal up the gaping wound and stare the zomb down.

Have I done the wrong thing? you ask yourself.

Nah, you reply.

It's all good.

Brains for tea anyone?

Er hem, happy new year

2012-01-13T19:32:00.004Z

Lower case: happy new year. I am a bit late. Well, I'm a lot late. Hope it was, is and will be a good one for you.

But it doesn't mean much, does it really? It's a convention. The new year could start in October or February (as in the Chinese New Year) or 6:14 on August 12th. Or never. All years could be just one big and very long year. It would do marvels for our counting skills!

Anyway, I've had a stressful morning what with Talktalk (a bit ironic that name) deciding that we no longer deserved our broadband connection and - oh, dear me - we shouldn't have our landline either, ducks. Even though what we'd done to pay for it was what we had always done, and we had paid (as we thought) for it as usual. But they said no. What a palaver... Little wonder they get rather uncomplimentary comments for their customer services. Dear me, yes.

So I am on the hunt for a new package. Take note Talktalk people: shortly I will not need your talkietalkie. I will have new talk abilities. You will be all talked out in my house, and I wish you goodbye. In fact, I never signed up to your service. The service I contracted for was provided by Pipex some years ago until they were swallowed up by talktalk.

Anyway, it won't be long now before I am free from your incomprehensible letters and your non-attempts to use a long-defunct email address. Thanks but no thanks.

The Spartacus effect

I was just reading Mum6kids' blog. What a lady Mum6kids is, and such a sterling writer. I do enjoy her blog and I'd like you to enjoy it too.

It's here:

http://mum6kids.wordpress.com/2012/01/13/the-spartacus-report-as-the-government-tries-to-get-the-sick-and-disabled-to-pay-for-the-bankers-crisis/#comment-5111

And here is the despicable government's attempt to let us, the poor and sick people who are already so many strikes down in the game of life, take the kicks from the boot of dodgy capitalism and greedy bankers.

http://www.benefitsandwork.co.uk/news/latest-news/1510-12-january-newsletter?utm_source=iContact&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Benefits+and+Work&utm_content=esa+victory

As you know if you read my blog we look after my mother. She fell in August and broke her leg which was duly fortified by a metal spike through it. They couldn't, however, replenish the normality of her brain which has been failing for many years.

It's subtle, perhaps, her mental decay. You might not catch it and, when we tell you she is not competent to make her own decisions; you might say there is nothing wrong with her as some of the hospital staff tried to do.

My mother says every day that she wants just a cheese sandwich for lunch. Every day. It doesn't sound much, does it? Quite reasonable a request, but she makes it every day. Every day. Despite the fact that she always gets something much more nourishing. And, if we say we're making her a cup of tea, it's the 'Only half a cup of tea, with a little bit of milk'. There are, of course, many other signs that my dear old dear is demented. She doesn't have a huge memory loss which counted against us when we told the hospital that she is off her trolley. Did they care? No. Did social care care? No, they were just interested in how much money she had tucked in her fleecy socks. The social care guy told me it takes £400 to keep my mother in a hospital bed. We get about £54 a week for looking after her.

Small wonder, then, that they don't want her. Small wonder that she's been assessed as fine. No wonder that our lives are on hold, our family members live apart, that we are running two houses in tandem, that every day - every day - H or I listen to the same comments about the same things, over and over, ad nauseum and ad infinitem.

If she lives another ten years I doubt I'll be here. I'll be pushing up the daisies or rounding Cape Hope in an old tyre because you just can't do it, hour in hour out, day in day out year in year out without something going pop in you. Something to do with self. Self-determination. Time for self. Life for self in a self that ain't getting any younger.

So Mr Cameron with your army of helpers and your large juicy, fruity salary, do you think you could listen to just a cheese sandwich for lunch just a cheese sandwich for lunch just a cheese sandwich for lunch only half a cup of tea with a little milk only half a cup of tea with a little milk just a cheese sandwich for lunch only half a cup of tea with a little milk only half a cheese sandwich with a little cup of milk for very long and how long would it be before your brain curdles...

All for about 54 quid a week. And that doesn't even pay for half of our combined food shop for a week.

But, by all means, squeeze the poor and the sick out of the pittance they get from our loving and caring society. Make them all pay for being poor and sick because, for sure, the big clever bankers and those suited, shouting, share-dealing abdabs in the city of London should not pay.

Thanks to the House of Lords for trying to stem the bloodletting that sees money flowing upwards (A MIRACLE) from the poor to the rich in this society, courtesy of the already rich.

Cheese sandwich anyone?

Nice to see you

2011-12-30T21:20:00.006Z

Well, I'm back. I've been away from you but I've missed you.

I've travelled far and wide and I've never left my location.

I've ridden on the beams of light called thought and struggled to understand that singularly fascinating subject called Quantum Physics.

I've visited a thousand new ideas and marvelled at a million stars.

I've watched films that made me think about life, the universe and everything, and those that haven't made me think at all.

I've seen the end of the sensational series about a wizard called Harry Potter and his friends (and enemies) and chewed over the fact that my children - now grown - have had the boy who lived as their companion for many years.

My life has changed little, and changed completely.

My thoughts are roving yet revolve around certain subjects and people.

This last couple of months I pushed my comfort zone a bit by learning a few hours worth of Russian.

I promise to stretch myself even more in 2012 by reading Y's Christmas gift to me, a book called Russian for Dummies. And I look forward to ever more happy hours reading, learning, thinking and growing.

Now off to relax with The Nutty Professor (a film, not a person!)

Should we use the 'p' word

2011-11-29T22:38:00.004Z

Oh, politics. Shouldn't be talking about it because it's not home education, is it? It isn't even rocket science which you could, at least, argue is of interest to educators.

But I console myself with the fact that, of my two children, one is vastly interested in politics and even pauses in her day to day life to debate political issues with me.

Everything, in fact, is grist to the home educating mill. Everything is educational. Everything.

What a glorious thought.

Remember, remember

2011-11-20T12:56:00.002Z

I think that one channel - I can't remember which - played the film 'V for Vendetta' on November 5th this year. Although the last few years we have faced dangers from the forces of the mighty governmental machine to grind home educators into the dust of history at the moment it's all pretty quiet. Or is it?

What is happening in those halls of power? I don't necessarily mean the Westminster ones. I mean the real halls of power referred to by Neil Tayor, one of the infinitely wise members of the home educating fraternity around the world. He speaks at a conference on Home Ed. and you can find his illuminating words here:

http://www.home-education.biz/blog/education/european-home-education-conference-2011-neil-taylor

Back to 'V for Vendetta'.

The character, V, has hacked into the communication system in London to give the country his views on the state of Britain. This is a quote from that film.

"Good evening, London. Allow me first to apologize for this interruption. I do, like many of you, appreciate the comforts of every day routine — the security of the familiar, the tranquility of repetition. I enjoy them as much as any bloke. But in the spirit of commemoration, whereby those important events of the past, usually associated with someone's death or the end of some awful bloody struggle, are celebrated with a nice holiday, I thought we could mark this November the 5th, a day that is sadly no longer remembered, by taking some time out of our daily lives to sit down and have a little chat.

There are of course those who do not want us to speak. I suspect even now, orders are being shouted into telephones, and men with guns will soon be on their way. Why? Because while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression.

And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission.

How did this happen? Who's to blame? Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror.

I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you, and in your panic you turned to the now high chancellor, Adam Sutler. He promised you order, he promised you peace, and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent.

Last night I sought to end that silence. Last night I destroyed the Old Bailey, to remind this country of what it has forgotten. More than 400 years ago a great citizen wished to embed the fifth of November forever in our memory. His hope was to remind the world that fairness, justice, and freedom are more than words, they are perspectives. So if you've seen nothing, if the crimes of this government remain unknown to you then I would suggest that you allow the fifth of November to pass unmarked.

But if you see what I see, if you feel as I feel, and if you would seek as I seek, then I ask you to stand beside me one year from tonight, outside the gates of Parliament, and together we shall give them a fifth of November that shall never, ever be forgot. "

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/V_for_Vendetta_(film)

If only we had a 'V' in our world.

Out of sight? Out of your mind!

2011-11-13T20:15:00.003Z

Well, the dear old Times Educational Supplement has begun a new assault on home education with the load of complete old tennis balls being served up here:

http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6129600

It begins, charmingly, with this:

"As many as 100,000 children may be in home education; the true figure is not known. The vast majority are in the charge of loving and conscientious parents, but hundreds are at risk of abuse and neglect."

You can fetch the sick bag now.

As to the number of home educating children, you can probably easily find that out if you check the list of juveniles on the database of the local library. Most home educating children fetch books from said library. In fact, after my children began home educating, we took a little schooled friend of Y's along on one of our visits. You could've knocked me down with a toothpick when she told me that it was her first time there. I thought I had misheard her.

"You've forgotten your library card?" I asked S in all ignorance and disbelief.

"No, I haven't got one," said my daughter's friend.

"You mean it's at home?"

S started to look uncomfortable. "No, er, this is the first time I've been to the library..."

The child was eleven years old. She promised to demand that her parents help her to procure a library card as soon as she went home, and I'm pleased to say she got it. I felt as if I'd run a marathon and won it twice.

Hundreds are at risk of abuse and neglect. Hundreds out of a possible one hundred thousand.
Er, statistics? Where are they? Are you going to produce them? Eh?

Leaving aside the fact that countless professionals charged with children's welfare were informed and reinformed of the strange home situation that Khyra Ishaq was unfortunately subject to, little LA visitors are empowered to pass along information to social workers if they are alarmed about a child's welfare. The poor child would have been starved over a long period of time and during that time she was, supposedly, safe in a school.

The sensible comments following that piece of bog roll journalism are worth reading.

And, from Dr. Helen Lees, comes this follow-up letter:

'Having just been awarded a PhD for research on the discovery of elective home education (EHE), I can unequivocally report that your cover story "Out of school, out of sight" (4 November) is rubbish. Not only does the article rehearse old and dismissed arguments, but it also provides no new ones. It does not even offer an accurate and balanced portrayal of the Khyra Ishaq case as it relates to EHE, nor about the Badman review and the subsequent cross-party enquiry that found it had substantial failings. The article attempts to cover the complexity of the issue, but ends in a state of ideological bias against EHE as a valid educational choice.
You failed to consult academic or EHE organisational voices. Why? There are plenty of scholars and home educators who see things very differently from the article's single narrative of doom.
It is true that EHE is an issue, but it is one that highlights the failings of schooling and social services. Furthermore, it brings into relief the shortcomings of government bodies that operate without proper care or respect for practitioners and educational research. Educationally, EHE is one of the most innovative and exciting growing movements of the current time.
Alas, even the miserable black and white pictures are misleading and full of prejudice. Think on it TES, and think again.'

Dr Helen E Lees, Research fellow, School of Education, Stirling University.

Ah, Dr. Helen. I think I love you.

Now why did I just embolden a few sentences? The whole letter should be in bold... Where's my blue pencil?

Thank you

2011-10-30T21:00:00.003Z

Surely the measure of a writer is one you want to return to. One you want to re-read. One whose words echo in your soul. One who makes you think of them at odd times in your day.

One who enchants and caresses you. Who makes you feel good. Who challenges your day-to-day assumptions. Who lifts you up and keeps you uplifted.

I hope I'm one like that for you. I hope that, by reading my words, you are coming back, reading again, feeling better, remembering bits from my blog bytes and pondering the messages I leave you.

I hope you get as much from me as I do from you, my dear and gentle readers.

Thank you.

Human Rights? Not for minors!

2011-10-15T23:55:00.006+01:00

Article 5 of the Human Rights Act - Right to Liberty says:

"1) Everyone has the right to liberty and security of person. "

Shouldn't that be non-negotiable? Is it non-negotiable?

Apparently not. There are exceptions. One of them is this:

"(d) the detention of a minor by lawful order for the purpose of educational supervision..."

So does everyone have the right to liberty and security of person?

No. Minors don't.

(As a tribute to one of my favourite films - Galaxy Quest - I will say 'Minors not miners"! )

So what is the use of Article 5 of the Human Rights Act?

And why should minors (not miners) be exempt from its protective power?

And what is so important about education that - supposedly - carrying it out incurs a get out clause in Article 5 of the Human Rights Act?

Then we have Article 4...

Article 4: Slavery

(1) No one shall be held in slavery or servitude.

(2) No one shall be required to perform forced or compulsory labour.

(3) For the purpose of this Article the term "forced or compulsory labour" shall not include: (a) any work required to be done in the ordinary course of detention imposed in accordance to the provisions of Article 5 of this Convention or during conditional release from such detention;(b) any service of a military character or, in the case of conscientious objectors in countries where they are recognised, service exacted instead of compulsory military service;(c) any service exacted in case of an emergency or calamity threatening the life or well-being of the community;(d) any work or service which forms part of normal civic obligations.

Isn't education generally a form of slavery or servitude?

One definition of slavery:

"Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property and are forced to work.[1] Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation."

In other words, children are treated as property of the state in state educational factories and are forced to work. If they don't work they are punished. Children can be held against their will from the time they enter the state educational system; they are deprived of the right to leave (and, should they leave, they are branded as truants and their parents - as the children's legal represntatives- will fall foul of the law and be punished by it). Children can neither refuse to work nor demand compensation for the many years of servitude they pass through in the state educational system.

And, if you consider that minors cannot enter into contracts, the school as a contract is pretty meaningless.

Says a lot for the Human Rights Act (1998)...

A load of wind and watter, as my elder relatives would term it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/946400.stm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery

I'm wondering...

2011-10-03T16:11:00.003+01:00

Seems to be that time of the year when I take stock, when I think a lot about what I'm doing, what I'm wondering, what I am and what I'm becoming and what I want to be.

What I never thought I would be is tied to my dear elderly mother's apron strings... At my age.

She's got me. She really has. And H. He has been magnificent. He has been caring. We both have.

Not that we're uncaring normally. Anyone who has children has to care.

But this time my mother fell and broke her right leg. She went to hospital in great pain, had an operation,and went to a second ward for recuperation.

Then she came home. Without official carers because she said, "My family will care for me at home". And, do you know, she was right.

We are. Caring for her. At her home. We have to.

They deemed her capable of making her own decisions so she refused other carers, and now we're it. Mostly H is it. And I'm doing the outside stuff. Shopping. Paying bills. Dog walking. Sorting stuff.

And I'm exhausted. Because it's so stressful. Because a mother is supposed to take care of you. Not you, her. Because she isn't capable of making her own decisions no matter what the hospital people said in their knowledge of her for a few weeks. She isn't capable. Her dementia doesn't show too obviously. It's subtle. It hasn't reared up and destroyed her ability to remember. That's not the way it's robbed her. It's much more complicated. But, of course, the hospital people know best. They've had a student nurse ask her a few questions, and - voila! - my mother is deemed to be competent mentally.

Hmmm. We know that she isn't. We know that whatever the government approved list of questions (did Mr. Social Care Rehabilitation guy call it MIMSY?) says my mother is not mentally capable of making sensible and reasoned decisions.

Now our family is paying for the cult of the ten minute expert. The cult of the one size fits all assessment of mental competence. And we aren't expert. We know nothing. We only know my mother couldn't cope for ten minutes in the full glare of the day to day life that most of us endure normally. We've only known that for years. We've only been caring for years. In this family. With no outside help.

No outside recognition.

The doctors and nurses assessed my mother as having a score of 26 out of 30 when she was admitted to hospital. She is capable, even though I was telling her everything that the doctor said, repeating the same message in different words until I could see that she'd finally understood what I was conveying to her.

Just like I've been doing for years. Interpreting the big wide world for my dear daffy old darling.

And I am so tired. It's the stress. It's the deep stress.

But it's all a learning experience I suppose.

http://alzheimers.about.com/od/diagnosisissues/a/Mental_Status.htm

Obituary of Common Sense

2011-09-18T14:57:00.003+01:00

An Obituary printed in the London Times – Interesting and sadly very true.

"Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Common Sense, who has been with us for many years. No one knows for sure how old he was, since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape.

He will be remembered as having cultivated such valuable lessons as:

– Knowing when to come in out of the rain;– Why the early bird gets the worm;– Life isn’t always fair;– and maybe it was my fault.

Common Sense lived by simple, sound financial policies (don’t spend more than you can earn) and reliable strategies (adults, not children, are in charge).

His health began to deteriorate rapidly when well-intentioned but overbearing regulations were set in place. Reports of a 6-year-old boy charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate; teens suspended from school for using mouthwash after lunch; and a teacher fired for reprimanding an unruly student, only worsened his condition.

Common Sense lost ground when parents attacked teachers for doing the job that they themselves had failed to do in disciplining their unruly children. It declined even further when schools were required to get parental consent to administer sun lotion or an aspirin to a student; but could not inform parents when a student became pregnant and wanted to have an abortion.

Common Sense lost the will to live as the churches became businesses; and criminals received better treatment than their victims. Common Sense took a beating when you couldn’t defend yourself from a burglar in your own home and the burglar could sue you for assault.

Common Sense finally gave up the will to live, after a woman failed to realize that a steaming cup of coffee was hot. She spilled a little in her lap, and was promptly awarded a huge settlement.

Common Sense was preceded in death, by his parents, Truth and Trust, by his wife, Discretion, by his daughter, Responsibility, and by his son, Reason.

He is survived by his 4 stepbrothers; I Know My Rights, I Want It Now, Someone Else Is To Blame, and I’m A Victim.

Not many attended his funeral because so few realized he was gone. If you still remember him, pass this on. If not, join the majority and do nothing.

From http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geraldwarner/100015877/the-most-widespread-child-abuse-in-britain-is-perpetrated-by-the-government/"

I had saved the above because, mostly, I believe it. Of course I don't believe in the sentence 'Common Sense lost ground when parents attacked teachers for doing the job that they themselves had failed to do in disciplining their unruly children'. It's a loaded sentence: a sentence loaded against parents and for teachers. It assumes a lot. And you know what 'assume' does - it makes an ass out of u and me.

Unruly. What does unruly mean? I mean what? Does unruly simply mean that the teacher cannot control a child? Is it good for a teacher to control a child? And is a child who is controlled by a teacher not open to the blandishments of a paedophile? In other words, that is a child who is in danger. After all, school spends a good deal of its time making its users conform and yet warns children against conforming to certain adults' desires. Can young people discern the Janus-faced quality inherent in these teachings? Won't they be mightily confused? Conform and risk attracting abuse. Or don't conform and risk disapproval and ostracism. It takes a brave child to stand up against the pressures of peers and superiors (adults who have control over the child). And that child often gets exiled from the place of pressure.

Do parents attack teachers? Well, the media says they do. Personally I haven't known many parents who attack teachers about anything. They might disagree with teachers, but they don't attack them. You're going to say that my experience isn't too extensive and just because I haven't seen it doesn't mean it doesn't occur. You'd be right.

Can you really discipline an 'unruly' child? I mean can you punish a child? Does punishment work? Will the child merely turn into a conformist or a silent rebel when punished for some transgression as defined by the institution? Won't a silent rebel eventually outwardly reveal his or her inner rebellion? Doesn't anger at injustice flame in the depths of every rebel?

So. Unless you strictly define the terms, you cannot just lob the bombs implied in that sentence, can you? Or you can, but it's not fair. It's not fair to parents, teachers or children.

The piece about Common Sense is good though. And seemed to be relevant when the Labour government was attempting to convert all of us into pathetic cotton wool people. Let's hope those days are over altogether.

Or are all governments still pulling the cotton wool over our eyes?

Summer wind-down

2011-09-02T20:08:00.003+01:00

Wow. What a weird summer.

More like a summer and an autumn mushed together. Have you seen those trees laden with bright berries? Isn't that a sign of a really hard winter?

In one or two ways, it's been a hard summer.

It's been hot and sweaty and red-faced, and that's just the dog.

Has education lounged about, taking a break then?

Not here. We've been Chinese fluting as usual. Practicing piano. Grafting away on those websites and moderating as a new activity. Drawing and painting. Communicating with friends. We've been entering writing competitions while not believing that we can win but doing it anyway. We've been off to the Lakes visiting Kendal and Keswick on a coach tour where two young people pressed camera buttons a lot. We've planned to conquer the world on various games and not necessarily this world. We've coped with my mother breaking her femur and ending up in hospital. We have cared for her house and her cat. We've thought about health a lot and what it means to us.

In other words, we've been living and learning.

Doing what comes naturally. What we all do all the time.

Time constraints are largely irrelevant because people who are interested in what they are doing keep doing what they are doing.

Summer.

Summer is winding down. But we aren't buying uniforms and we aren't buying into the idea that they are necessary.

Sorry that it's been so long since I set cursor to blog, but it's been a strange summer.

Nice to be back though.

Seriously uncooperative cats

2011-07-22T20:00:00.003+01:00

You know I saw a cat being attacked once.

It was a horrible sight. A person attacked the beast and the poor animal turned, arched its small back and spat. Then it used claws to draw blood. The man wasn't pleased. He wanted to cow the creature. He wanted that creature to obey him, to do what he wanted done. That's how it should have behaved because he wanted it to behave that way.

The cat, being full of vim and vigour, retaliated in a cat-like way. With teeth and claws and scratching...

The cat did not cooperate with the man.

The cat was uncooperative.

Hostile, you might say.

People, too, can be uncooperative and hostile.

Why? Well, they might not want to do whatever it is you want them to do. They might object to being treated like naughty two year olds. They might resist doing whatever you want them to do because, after all, they are sovereign beings and they don't need telling, do they?

Do you tell your neighbour how to park his car, where to hang his laundry, which bits of trees he should pollard? No? Thought not.

Why?

You don't direct your neighbour because your neighbour is a sovereign being. He can decide many things for himself. Of course if he parks his car in such a way to block yours, then you might have a gentle word. If he sticks his laundry in front of your window when he has a perfectly good drying spot inside his property line then you would be sensible to question him a bit. And, if he lops off branches from your side of the fence, he's in for a little talking to, isn't he?

You'd think he was a tiny way along the mad boardwalk if he transgressed these norms, wouldn't you? A bit nuts. Losing it.

And so we come to Gill's blog about Lincolnshire and all the other places who think that Lincolnshire rocks. This is a link to Gill's blog. Our amazingly radiant and brilliant writing Gill who upholds the truth, the honour and the right.

http://sometimesitspeaceful.blogspot.com/

""Threatening behaviour can consist of the deliberate use of silence.""

That sentence is from this document:

http://lincolnshirescb.proceduresonline.com/chapters/g_work_uncoop_fams.html

Its title is 'Working with hostile and uncooperative families'. It reeks of maladminstration already, doesn't it? Hostility to any family just billows from its very appearance.

Why on earth you possibly should want to write such an incendiary piece of bollocks I don't know. Are you trying to be deliberately provocative, Lincolnshire, and all the other places who have similar poison flowing in their veins? Don't you like people? Do you think you are superior to people? Do you think you are the saviours of the world? Or just Lincolnshire or wherever the others come from? Who are you aiming to please here? What is your purpose for foisting on the innocent internet such venomous twaddle?

If you are trying to induce hostility in folks going about their own business in peace and harmony then you are doing sterling work, my friends. There's nothing at all like putting people's backs up in the first second of attempting to 'help and support' them, is there? Your basic pre-Psychology Psychology course would have taught you that, wouldn't it?

'Softly softly catchee monkey' quite clearly isn't a proverb you've ever been exposed to, have you, my dears?

There are other things you have quite caught on to. Thinking. Allowing. Being. Seeing the best in people. Understanding that your understanding is really limited. That you are failing in being service providers and instead are dictators. You are setting people you encounter up to fail whether or not they are guilty of doing whatever it is you are determined they must be doing.

What bothers me is how do they get away with this tosh?

Who authorises such complete idiocy? Such arrant nonsense fit only for burning.

Who spends the money to require another human being to so degrade, jeer at, throw aspersions at and justify assumptions that should never even be countenanced at all?

Oh, bloomers. We do. We spend the money. It's our money being used against us to hurt all us hostile uncooperative sovereign beings who don't need help, don't want help and won't take help. Of course help, in this case, is a pejorative term (debasing and negative). Anyone who can spew bellicose bile like that is anything but helpful. Anyone who can nod at the pages and smile is guilty of monumental hubris and incredible ignorance of the respect and decency required of a civilised man or woman towards his or her fellow human beings.

You should be ashamed of yourselves, Lincolnshire, and all you others. Hide your sorry heads in shame. Take the nasty piece of vitriol away and start Psychology classes, and don't skim-read your textbooks.

There will be an exam later, and you shall be judged.

Research, music, pride and fun

2011-07-09T15:26:00.005+01:00

Yesterday I reaffirmed what I've thought for a long time.

We like to home educate because it's - well - just plain good fun.

E was speaking to one of her friends about World War II. The friend mentioned what her grandparents did during the war which led E to come along to ask me what my parents did. Some of what they did she already knows and I've even written my mother's story which was published in Ancestors magazine, and there's a side panel about my mother's time in the Women's Timber Corps in my 'Toiling on the Soil' article mainly about the Women's Land Army in Family History Monthly, July 2011.

E was interested in her dad's father's experiences so we started to dig, with our limited knowledge, and found some very interesting things. An afternoon went by. Our knowledge has increased and been enhanced. We know more about my girls' grandfather (sadly not with us now) than we did.

Now I'm listening to music from Lord of the Rings as played by E. So haunting and beautiful. It's a piece I just thought I'd always hear on CD. But now my daughter can play it on her piano. Wonderful.

How talented they are, my once little girls. How much my heart thuds with pride these days. How I have to hide it with a brisk 'That was lovely, dear.' How I love my beautiful young people.

How pleased I am that we home educate, and they have the freedom to be themselves in this world of encouraged conformity.

Cats and kittens

2011-06-25T16:09:00.003+01:00

When a cat wants to eat her kittens she calls them mice.

Old Bulgarian proverb

Or when a government wants to take over your home educated children it calls you, the parent, a child abuser.

A government wants to rule the citizens of its country. How much more comfortable it is for governments to ensure that citizens have no ability to reason, to ask questions, to rock the stability of the boat that does nothing for most of them but everything for some of them, to reassess and retread, to promote change...

When a cat wants to eat her kittens she calls them mice.

Great proverb.

Draughty guidelines

2011-06-18T20:03:00.004+01:00

I wasn't going to post about them.

Was I?

Well, if I wasn't I've changed my mind.

On the whole, I'm one of these people who ignores instructions. It's from years of following instructions to find that a) I'm more confused if I follow them and end up somewhere miles from where I want to be or b) I don't have a clue what they are saying and therefore I get more frustrated and upset carefully having tried to follow their careful beckonings. It's just... because the world doesn't come with instructions. There aren't certainties, and attempting to cover ALL the potholes we can break our legs in doesn't just work.

There's always another one to trip us up.

So someone (or more than one someone) who is still nameless to me has laboured long and hard to bring forth guidelines ostensibly for local authorities to get to grips with the incredibly mysterious matters belonging to home education.

These guidelines cover a lot of pages. Here at http://www.box.net/shared/6lk1826muy

But we have guidelines. We already have guidelines. And we have dedicated and sensible home educators telling local authorities how to do it. How to treat home educators. How home educators should be treated and how the law should treat home educators.

In my view it's like this. I live near the sea. Two minutes away. There's a pedestrian path along the side of some grass-covered dunes right beside the mighty ocean. This path is for people to walk on. The path is to keep people out of the way of cars that zoom up and down near them.

The path is shared by many, many cyclists whose cycle path ends just north of where people walk. So the cyclists see the pedestrian pathway as a continuation of their cycle-way, and the people on two feet see the concrete walk-way as their pathway.

The law favours the two-feet: the argument is won by two wheels because soft bodies are a lot more able to be damaged in a row with two wheels.

For me, it's an analogy. Home educators are the two feet. Local authorities peddle themselves along mowing down (or nearly mowing down) home educators who are going about their business legally educating their children. But in a radge between those with wheels and those with bodies but no wheels, the wheels are the winners. And the legal upholders (law/police/the state) of the right of way (home education) do not enforce the right of way.

Either the law upholders don't think that the soft bodies are worth worrying about or they like the wheeled ones better. Or both.

Or neither.

It's just an analogy. One I enjoy.

Hey, phew! watch out for the bikes now!

Inveterate detectors of lies

2011-06-16T16:56:00.003+01:00

Children are inveterate nosers-out of the double-dealing and lies of adults.

Don't you think?

When Y was somewhat younger she came in after school full of something that made her big eyes bigger. They were made bigger by her passionate iteration of 'What matters'. By that she meant the stuff that adults think is important and even vital is not. For example, the head teacher of her school considered that straightening the lines the children formed after their break at lunchtime to be really important. Catching and stopping bullies was ignored.

The head teacher also insisted that rules - the great God Rules - should be slavishly and mindlessly worshipped. Y's rules were different. She knew that small children SHOULD NOT BE BULLIED, and did something about it when they were. She chased the bullies who, having the habit of hanging around in crowds like flies around a corpse, then flew away before her determined onslaught. She was tall and imposing, and she ran at them to STOP the tormenting of little things in the playground.

"But why didn't you tell a dinner nanny?" I asked innocently.

"But Mum," she spluttered, filled with indignation. "They just say you shouldn't tell stories, and tell you that you're lying!"

My indignant crusader. All of seven years old.

Young people are more adept at finding the truth in every situation and, sometimes, acting on their impulses of mercy to help other people.

Do you think that is why we remove our children's wisdom from society by boxing them up in schools?

Seeking a new path to truth

2011-06-11T20:35:00.001+01:00

"When you seek a new path to truth, you must expect to find it blocked by expert opinion."

Albert Guérard

I'm a fan of iodine. The Japanese are fans too. They consume far more iodine than we Brits do. The women have less incidence of breast cancer which is attributed to their increased intake of iodine.

I was advised to take kelp (containing iodine) when I was diagnosed as being hypothyroid. That is my thyroid gland wasn't working well and when it's a lazy little thing then the person sharing the body with it is a lazy little thing also. I didn't mean to be lazy - I just couldn't help it. The gland running my metabolism was a bit slow. So I started taking kelp, and, finally, finally began losing weight. OK, the exercise, taking loads more fruit and vegetables in and watching my portions of dinner didn't hurt either.

But I blame the kelp for getting me on my feet and making me feel more like the old vibrant and vivacious Danae.

So check this out:http://www.lewrockwell.com/miller/miller20.html

If it doesn't sound right or feel right, don't do it.

If it seems good to you, go for it.

Life's too short, as a friend recently remarked to me. Life is too short for me to shuffle around like a ninety year old. I'm going to go out there and grab life by the tail.

After I've swallowed my kelp tablet!

I like home education because...

2011-06-04T14:56:00.004+01:00

I like it because...

we do it. Sometimes we do a lot of it, and sometimes we're just living, and sometimes you couldn't tell the difference between home education and living.

I like it because...

I can go to the toilet when I need to.

I like it because...

I meet interesting people who have brains and can tell good stories and jokes.

I like it because...

it's not rigid. I can change my mind, kick back, take the day off if my head decides it just can't cope.

I like it because...

it can make my teenagers likely to steam with outrage over injustice and population abuse.

I like it because...

it allows me to determine what I allocate in time to which activities.

I like it because...

I'm not just 'taking' it from someone else; although someone else might be giving knowledge I might choose to acquire.

I like it because...

I feel free letting the rhythms of my body clock determine what I do.

I like it because...

I see the struggles and the triumphs in my youngsters' lives; I see their varying moods; I see my youngsters. I don't just see them at the end of a long hard day in a school salt mine.

I just like home education.

Don't know why.

I just signed out

2011-05-29T14:51:00.002+01:00

I just signed out when I meant to sign in.

Or, no, I meant to stay signed in, but I signed out.

Does that mean something?

Probably not.

Was I fated to sign out at the particular second I signed out? But then I signed back in so was I fated to sign in after I'd signed out?

Gosh, a girl could go slightly daffy thinking these things.

Was I going to talk about fate? Signing in? Signing out?

No, I think not.

A person I've known as a name and a presence in home education - a careful and loving presence, a beneficence - has died. Just died.

It made me think about when, exactly when, I'll find myself in the same situation.

And it's made me realise I haven't hugged my dear ones today, visited my demented mother, played with the dog long enough, written another paragraph in my long-languishing novel, or emailed the friends who have a right to expect an email from me.

So I'm going to do those things now.

Graham Stuart and the great ugly puffing dragon

2011-05-24T15:13:00.006+01:00

We've narrowly escaped lumbering our future home educating pals with the purgatory of having the Local Authorities and school denizens being given a twenty day bullying permit. That is, prospective home educating families would not start home educating the first day that their children left school, but be left in limbo. Neither in nor out. Shake it all about. Give the LAs a green light to work on the newly fledgling home educator. Let the LA inspector or assessor or whatever their label is for it these days get at the family; let them convince the poor neophyte, struggling-to-become home edders that home education really ISN'T for their kids.

Oh, dear.

But our friendly champion was magnificent in debate last year when Labour was about to get with the action. He was about to ride down the opposition yet again. He was on his horse, hefting the spear of protection and... well, you can read it all here:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmhansrd/cm110511/debtext/110511-0002.htm

All in Hansard, at column 1216.

The magnificent Graham Stuart. The thing about Mr. Stuart MP is that he listens, he researches and he thinks about consequences, intended or unintended, and he is able to change his position once he has considered and reconsidered an issue. That's a rare individual.

But it shouldn't be. It's what we should be able to expect of every MP, shouldn't we?

Yet, Mr. Ian Mearns says:

"If a child becomes unwell or is injured at the hands of parents or other relatives, the focus of attention is often not on the family but on the director of children’s services in the local borough."

Dear God in Heaven, I mean we're bothered about the director of children's services in the case of a child becoming unwell or injured. We're bothered about the reputation or the job of a man or woman who is so removed from a situation as to be unimportant. And do we know how many directors of children's services have fallen on their swords after they've totally ignored the death or injury of a child/children purportedly in their 'care'? Well, I'm betting is a vanishingly small number if it isn't zero.

Then, again, if you have children you'll know that they become unwell. Now and then some youngsters have accidents. Sometimes they have accidents when they're told not to do something. It even happened to me. My dad told me not to run on a gravel path. He said I'd fall. Sure enough, I did and I hurt my knees. Those poor suckers bled for ages. Dad was unsympathetic: 'You shouldn't have run. I told you.'

These days, the director of children's services would've been phoned and the whole thing would've been made stratospheric.

When you think about it, it's all about vested interests, isn't it? Mr. Mearns goes on to tell us that, although middle class parents can, of course, home educate effectively, these lower class folks just can't.

Do your research, Mr. Mearns. Actually, 'lower class' home educators do really very well. It's not known why. We can take a guess, though. We can feel that those parents want the best for their children. We do better when we're motivated to do better and you can bet your keyboard that those parents want to do better for their youngsters.

I could go on all day praising Mr. Stuart and criticising the prejudice on view and the sleazy logic of people who comment on his speech. But I won't.

I'm going to watch another brilliant St. George in action. I'm going to enjoy the second episode of Garrow's Law. Again.

Georgia O'Keeffe, amazing artist and art teacher

2011-05-19T17:31:00.006+01:00

"During her years teaching in Amarillo, (Georgia) O'Keeffe wrangled with the school board over the curriculum of the art classes. She refused to accept the Prang drawing book that the school district had ordered for her classes. Instead she used the Dow method, which she had learned the previous summer under Alon Bennett at the University of Virginia. And to everyone's consternation, she encouraged to bring in objects from the local surroundings. She felt that things that were familiar to the children would make it easier for them to see the natural lines and colors in the subjects, while the traditional copybook patterns were stereotyped, interfering with true self-expression."

Yup, that's often the case with school books.

True self-expression. It would be nice to see that encouraged in schools, wouldn't it?

Extract from the book Georgia O'Keeffe: An Eternal Spirit

Unsociable

2011-04-25T17:54:00.003+01:00

You know, I sometimes have a little laugh about socialisation.

I mean I'm probably the most unsocial person I know.

I don't like parties. Can't hear what people are saying. Don't drink. And, if I like the people, I've probably told them all the news and heard all theirs before the party gets going.

I can take or leave people. Some people. Some people can take or leave me. I have high standards for friendship and most folks - I'm afraid - don't qualify.

I like my own company. Or the company of a good book. Or the radio. Or the t.v. Or my dog who is a good friend.

And my family, but not all the time. And it wouldn't be good for them if I were hanging around their necks all the time either.

I can be sociable sometimes, if I want. I can laugh and dance and sing and make merry and tell stories that people giggle at or marvel at or whatever.

But, deep down, I'm happy being on my own. I don't need a lot of social stuff to keep me topped up with sunshine.

The LAs wouldn't like me if I were in their schools. They'd think I was odd, weird, a bit off, er, unsocial. But my view is that this is me. Take me or leave me. It's up to you if you wish to be my friend. If you don't, well, I possibly won't miss you.

There are people I miss. People I have cherished that I haven't seen for many years. Some of them I'm back in touch with and, hopefully, we'll bridge the years and be friends again.

Or not.

Either way, I am what I am.

Unsocial.

You have to let me be the way I am. I cannot bend myself or break faith with my personality. You can't turn me into a character from Friends because I'm not that kind of social animal.

I'm just unsocial I guess.

Just...me.

Thoughts on a good education

2011-04-17T20:21:00.003+01:00

The Labour government DCSF used to say: "All children and young people are entitled to a good education. This doesn't necessarily mean children have to go to school: many parents choose to educate their child at home'.

I have to take issue with the first part of this. According to Protocol 1 Article 2 of the ECHR 'No person shall be denied an education'. OK, a person should not be denied an education and nothing is mentioned about a good education. The state provides an education but scarcely anyone agrees what a good education is and many voices will howl me down when I say the state provides a good education, including my own. How do we actually know what a good education is? Other than some helpful judges with an almost impossible task, no one can define what a good education actually consists of. If I were like my father, I would say everyone should have an education in the classics and in Maths, and maybe have a run around a football field once a week for a bit of a diversion. If I were a P.E. teacher I would probably say that English is a natural thing for English people, and we should be doing more push-ups, football, rounders, cricket, cross country running, ski=ing...

I would hate both definitions of a good education because I am not good at Mathematics - oh, I can get along and I can excel myself if pushed, but I'm not a cleaving-to-numbers-natural mathematician. As to P.E., I was one of those children who dreaded the lesson, unless it involved dancing, and hated the idea of being at the mercy of several bullies who knew how to take advantage of the opportunities advanced by the myriad wonders of Physical Education, indoors or out.

So, for me, unless you're a budding Steve Cram or you loaf about doing Calculus in your fun time, don't ask me to vote for at least two members of the National Curriculum.

The convent school I attended had Sewing classes (don't laugh, it did). Oh, the humiliation. The pricked fingers. The continuing and absolute hatred I had for my kit, my uselessness and the horror of having to 'make a dress' for the 'fashion parade' at the end of term. It was a term already contaminated by the terror induced by the prospect of having to emigrate to unknown Canada at the end of it. I laboured: I did labour on that darned dress. I learned to detest the material I'd bought - the cheery bright yellow mocked me, the patterned yellow leaves and flowers irritated me. I heaved at the thought of more endless, boring tacking. In the final countdown, my dear aunt who was a dab hand with a needle took pity on me and finished the garment. I wore it on the catwalk. Everyone was underwhelmed. I was embarrassed. I was sick at heart, but relieved to get the ordeal over and relieved that I wouldn't be 'tested' on something so foreign to my nature again.

So what makes a good education? I think it comes from inside yourself. I think it's your motivation. I think it is what interests you, and what interested me was reading, reading, reading, other people, history, French, reading and writing, more reading and, gradually, even more writing. In my adult life, people now pay me for my writing. Putting pen or word processor to work was an 'out of school' habit. I didn't write at school. I did the minimum amount of writing I could do at school because my writing, my real writing (my love) was private. It did not belong to the school, it belonged to me. I didn't want my adoration of the written word to die prematurely because I was forced to write.

So it was a secret. All those years ago it wasn't ready to flower and grow and be stomped upon by the foot of criticism it would probably have received in school. You get very little encouragement in school, I found. It was all 'Well, you should have/could have done it this way...'

Or even, once, after one of my short stories was marked, I was asked, "Did you copy? Is this your own work?"

Mrs. English Teacher, no, as I told you at the time I didn't copy. I read everything like a pig enjoys truffles and I got good because I did what I enjoyed doing and enjoyed getting good at, and your severe, distrustful look and your swingeing insult could have blighted the little plant behind the bushel but, thank the universe, it didn't.

It was mine and you didn't put your big feet all over it while it was growing - my talent was buried under a bushel until it was ripe and until I felt confident enough to let it try itself in the full glare of light.

Then it flourished. As all true real passions have the ability to flourish when they aren't trampled all over by strangers with gigantic damaging assessing criticising plates of meat.

I gave myself the best education I could give myself. I gave me the education I would've wished the schools I attended had given. I did what I was good at and I wasn't put off what I loved until what I loved became what I was good at.

Unfortunately, most of what school gave me was heartache. Years of time wasting. Hours of droning boredom.

My life gave me my education. How do you deliver an education? You are fooling yourself. You cannot deliver an education. You can help someone through their thoughts and emotions and finding out information, but never ever stomp on their little talents.

Those little talents might, one day, save the world.

Good, good, good, good quotations

2011-04-13T15:29:00.010+01:00

'We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.'

Winston Churchill.

I was pottering around looking at information about the Women's Land Army in World War I and II (for an article I'm writing), and I found the above quotation from Winston Churchill. I know that Mr. Churchill is reviled in some quarters but I've always had a sneaking admiration for him. He failed miserably at school; his father didn't know what to do with him, in fact. I think that often happens with incipient genius.

Those superbly-charged brains sometimes do not fit in.

"Young Winston attended Harrow School, on the outskirts of London, where he was schooled in the classics. He hated most of his school time at Harrow and had little interest in learning Latin, Greek or mathematics. But he did love poetry, history and writing English essays."

"Winston was short in stature and very headstrong and stubborn. During his early school years, Churchill didn't get along well with other students. He recalled how he had to hide behind a tree when some other boys threw cricket balls at him."

http://www.school-for-champions.com/biographies/churchill.htm

Yet he learned English. Kept in a class for three times as long as anyone else, Churchill parsed sentences and stared at the blackboard for many hours. He owed a debt to Mr. Somervell who was charged with teaching the least likely boys the English language. The ones who were deemed stupid stayed with Mr. Somervell, and the others who were bright went on to tackle Latin and Greek.

"President John F. Kennedy summarized Winston S. Churchill's rhetorical grandeur with the statement that "In the dark days and darker nights when England stood alone--and most men save Englishmen despaired of England's life--he mobilized the English language and sent it into battle."

http://workinghumor.com/quotes/winston_churchill.shtml#

Well done Mr. Somervell. Your work will never be forgotten.

The enlightened principle

2011-04-12T20:38:00.000+01:00

"Not even the apparently enlightened principle of the ‘greatest good for the greatest number’ can excuse indifference to individual suffering. There is no test for progress other than its impact on the individual. " Aneurin Bevan, In Place of Fear (William Heinemann Ltd, London, 1952), p. 167-8.

Gotta love it

2011-04-08T16:47:00.003+01:00

Do you love the internet? I do. Isn't it - regardless of a bunch of rubbish on some websites - the most amazing educator? It's made my little life a lot easier. Where once I said "Well, we should go to the library and look that up." Now it's "Let's go on google (or one of the other search engines) to see what we can find." What an amazing force for good. I salute the internet. Thank you to all you lovely and varied people who contributed to its development. And here is the equally adorable Wiki entry all about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet The internet: you couldn't make it up really.

What do we measure?

2011-03-27T12:38:00.004+01:00

"The gross national Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our door and the jails for the people who break them (...) It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl (...) Yet the GNP does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials (...) It measures everything, in short, except that which makes worthwhile." Those wise words came from Robert Kennedy and were quoted in Doing the right thing: Measuring wellbeing for public policy. Bobby Kennedy is speaking about the ridiculous measure of economic growth to determine the health of a country. Taken from http://www.internationaljournalofwellbeing.org/ Found by H, researcher extraordinare. Thanks once again, H.

'Free schools'

2011-03-22T05:50:00.005Z

Yes, they should. Free schools I mean.

A lovely person from Home Education Business Forums has brought this to our attention:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/mar/21/free-schools-creationism-department-education

"Government spokesman says the education secretary is 'crystal clear' that teaching creationism is at odds with scientific fact" it burbles.

Hmmm. And I thought you could rely on the writing on the package. Free schools? Ha! Nothing free about being told you can't teach creationism, is there?

And it's an oddity that scientific fact is a) not always fact and b) is often widely and vehemently opposed to the current mode of thinking in science.

Professor Brian Cox may whittle on about black holes but even he has to admit that, once we get inside one, the black hole is merely a big cavity of mysterious happenings. Let's face it, creationism may be entirely appropriate inside your friendly neighbourhood black hole.

What is it behind all this then?

It's the struggle again with what you personally believe and what the state thinks is right and wishes you would believe. It's the space between your ears that's up for grabs. Believe that science is fact and you're approved of. Believe that a supreme being decanted us into life and you're not.

And, once again, the human being - that bright source of restless curiosity - is relegated to a plaything in the clash between the world views of other people. Because no human child is clever enough to sort his or her way through the various theories and come out with some sort of conclusions that satisfy him or her.

"The BCSE, which describes itself as the leading anti-creationist organisation in Europe, wrote to Gove to express its "extreme concern" at applications from groups such as the Everyday Champions Church and the Christian Schools Trust to run free schools."

Why does the BCSE (whosoever they are) wish to express 'extreme concern' at other people learning whatever they choose? Why must we all believe in science the way most folks conceive it to be? What's in it for the BCSE? Why are they so bothered what children learn about the universe?

I believe in a certain type of loo roll (toilet paper) but I would defend to the very verge of death your particular right to like another type of bog wiper.

I suppose that makes me open-minded.

And if the government tells us we should prefer one loo roll over another?

Is that the government's job?

What are they so afraid of? Is it that science, when analysed by those eager young bright minds (or any minds at any stage and any age), will appear to be fairy stories told by those with reasons to tell them?

I'm not against science. I've sat in a fair amount of classes learning all types of the stuff and had many hours of pondering over the beauty of a lot of it. I say let the creationists rock on with their creationism, and the scientists point out the loveliness of science. Teach both and let the brilliant brains that sit and listen work it all out.

"There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact." ~Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883

The Y Factor

2011-03-20T15:45:00.002Z

"Forced by the relentless ambition of the Y-chromosome to reproduce itself, women were reduced to a state of serial pregnancy, increasingly enslaved by dependence on men.

This suited the Y-chromosome as the sexual landscape turned in its favour. The irresistible opportunity arose to build a harem, a herd of women just as dependent on its owner as his sheep or cattle. Women themselves became domesticated and imprisoned. The temptation to polygamy was overpowering and examples were all around. Men, driven on by the lash of their Y-chromosomes, could copy their cattle and become the stud bulls of their own herd. But the damage didn't stop there. The enslavement of women through serial pregnancy required much earlier weaning than before. No longer required to be able to walk and run before being released from the breast, the young child need to be weaned. Some archaeologists believe this was accomplished by the invention of fired pottery which allowed cereal grains to be boiled into a pastry gruel which could be fed to unweaned infants. Once her child was weaned, a woman could become pregnant again soon afterwards. The bull/man would have no difficulty at all with that part. But the children, ripped from the security and unconditional love that breast-feeding embodies, were left feeling bewildered and abandoned. Far from gaining a sense of independence, they were bereft, deprived of the strong sense of their own value and autonomy which builds during this intimate and prolonged contact. Some believe that children even now never really recover from this shock. They struggle to regain trust in a world that has for some reason unknowable to them abruptly changed for the worse. The trauma of early weaning has even been adduced in modern theories of depression. The feeling of powerlessness implanted by the sudden withdrawal of love and nurture at the mother's breast, when even the cries of despair go unanswered – as they must for early weaning to succeed – leaves a long shadow in the psyche of the very young that can darken their whole lives."

Professor Bryan Sykes thinks it's all the fault of the Y chromosome, ladies.

Read his book Adam's Curse. Well-written and very interesting.

Excerpt from
Adam's Curse – A Future without men - by Bryan Sykes, Bantam Press, 2003 p. 237-238

For all the phenomenal women out there - and the phenomenal men

2011-03-13T14:54:00.003Z

This poem isn't mine. I wish it was. It expresses what women can be and what they are. It's by the phenomenal Maya Angelou.

Phenomenal woman

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I'm telling lies.
I say,
It's in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.

I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It's the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing in my waist,
And the joy in my feet.

I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can't touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them
They say they still can't see.
I say,
It's in the arch of my back,
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style.

I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

Now you understand
Just why my head's not bowed.
I don't shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing
it ought to make you proud.
I say,
It's in the click of my heels,
The bend of my hair,
The palm of my hand,
The need of my care,

'Cause I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman
That's me.

Thanks to H. for finding it, and Maya Angelou for writing something so profound to celebrate womanhood.

Fair mood or foul

2011-03-12T12:54:00.004Z

Did you know that if you're in a rotten mood you're a less effective learner?

Obviously the opposite is true too.

When you think about it, it's fairly reasonable. You can't focus on anything, you feel irritable and upset, and the last thing on your mind is trying to retain knowledge.

But the research is there:

"Findings show that both positive and negative mood may hinder or promote information processing. In two experiments, we show that negative mood impairs transfer effects and learning."

Yes, that's just what I said in non-experimenter language.

"Additionally, mood affected performance if it was induced before the learning phase; participants in a negative mood needed more repetitions to reach the mastery level and also performed worse in the transfer tasks, although there were no greater mood differences in this problem-solving phase."

In normal words, people took longer to get good at something if they were feeling bad about anything.

Common sense.

When you have a bad experience while learning it can affect your performance so try to keep everyone happy. It's an easy way to boost performance.

The research came from 'How do we learn in a negative mood? Effects of a negative mood on transfer and learning,' found in the Journal of Learning and Instruction, Vol 17 no 1, February 2007

Health

2011-02-28T20:28:00.002Z

Illness is just nature's way of telling you that you aren't well.

Reasons to home educate

2011-02-25T19:45:00.003Z

There are lots of them...like reasons to be cheerful.

Likely to be individual and personal to each individual, each person, each family.

One reason we home educate because of the parlous state of state education. Have you visited a school lately? Noisy, rude, ugly, decrepit, fully detestable, and that's only the buildings

And the fact that the denizens of two schools could not stop my eldest being bullied. Emotional abuse is emotional abuse, even if it's not in the domestic sphere.

And my youngest daughter's face when she emerged from school in the last few weeks before she left. The happy child I had known in primary school had been replaced by a miserable young person I hardly recognised.

In my opinion, the internet, books, museums, conversation and other people's knowledge could easily replace teachers' 'deposits' of information.

I'm not religious but I can see that other folks would wish to extend their deeply-held beliefs to their dearly beloved children.

Thinking back I know that, if I had followed my most submerged impulses, my children would never have marched into school. They would have educated themselves, with my enthusiastic encouragement, at home where opportunities for true education abound and out in the community where they would have become valued, integral parts of their society.

I didn't like other people's versions of anything and everything being fed to my children as if they were truth incarnate.

I wanted my daughters to be able to control their own bodies, at least enough to visit the toilet when necessary; not to be controlled by those very sad people who have a need to control others. It is a form of torture to deprive a human being of the right to perform bodily functions.

Our children are not necessarily possible recruits for the army. They do not have to be taught to drill like soldiers.

I hadn't encountered wise words of the likes of John Taylor Gatto before the children were 'sprung' from school. Some years after the deregistration, those words soothed, encouraged, incensed, and informed me. I shouted 'yes, yes!' to John Taylor Gatto. I leapt up from my seat as I realised the reality of his real experiences. His knowledge. Every student teacher, every politician, every policy maker should have a well-thumbed copy of Gatto next to his or her elbow.

I digress. Why should you home educate your children? To follow an individual and personal pattern. To give your child the very best of yourself, other people and the world. To filter your lifelong experiences to enrich the milk of their day to day knowledge. To boldly go wherever your child needs you to go, and wherever he or she needs to go.

Each child knows him or herself best. Each child has a destiny, a plan. Home education is the map which fully fits the child's journey.

And that's why we home educate.

Freedom from plans

2011-02-20T19:46:00.004Z

I shouldn't be writing this. I didn't plan it.

I'm too tired.

Don't know why but I could sleep as I'm typing.

I was thinking about how much I hate people interfering with other people's lives.

I was thinking how much discomfort I suffered at the thought of home educators having to put up with strangers judging and assessing them, and proposing plans for their children's education.

That was the plan, wasn't it? From Mr. Badman and Ed. Balls in 2009-2010.

It's the children's freedom to self-educate or be taught or do workbooks or do their own research or sleep in or go to a special educational place that I like in home education. It is the sheer flexibility of home education that delights and enthralls me. It is the unexpected steps or leaps that children suddenly make and without anyone planning them. Planning things - some things - is like trying to plan when a flower will open from a bud. Sometimes some things should just happen and not be regulated.

Home education and plans. No, I don't think so. Not unless the children have the freedom to adopt a plan. Not unless the children have a choice.

Local Education Authority plans? No, I don't think so.

Revolutionary

2011-02-09T11:39:00.002Z

"All revolutions, all revolutionaries, are amazing. The ultimate purpose of the revolution is to work to create a better world to live in. To try to move above and beyond the hierarchies and power structures that inevitably cause the vulnerable in any society to suffer."

From http://www.tibetcustom.com/

Thanks to Just Jo of facebook for pointing this out.

There's a bloodless and whispering revolution going on. All across every land. And, as with all revolutions, it has its detractors and its enemies.

It's the fight for children's souls. It's home education.

They'll say all kinds of nasty things against it. They'll tell lies. They'll make you feel guilty for being interested in it.

Sometimes they'll drive you back to pushing your child into school.

More times they won't.

Because you're a free radical. A secret and hearty revolutionary.

Because it's time.

Because it's time to change.

Because you love your children.

Because, deep down, the guilt at treating your child like a number, like a series of marks, will gnaw at you.

Guilt is a good thing. It tells us that something is wrong. It tells us that we can do better. It tells us that our children need to be free. Free radicals. Radical in owning their lives. Radical in thinking for themselves. Radical in being curious. Radical in being real.

There's a whisper of revolution. Then it'll be a murmur. Then it'll talk. Then it'll shout.

Home education. Home education. Home education. Home education. Home education.

Every Child Matters - what does it mean?

2011-02-04T19:02:00.004Z

Every Child Matters (ECM).

A bit confusing, isn't it?

Our ex-government wished us to believe that we parents should be told what we want for our children. We want what most parents want. We want healthy children who achieve what they are capable of and we want them to become independent of us as and when they can.

The ECM five desirable outcomes are:

Be healthy
Staying safe
Enjoying and achieving
Making a positive contribution
Achieving economic well-being

Of course, the ECM agenda only related to England.

"However, at a deeper level Every Child Matters is a language game or discourse - a favoured way of thinking that is imbued with the full weight, authority and power of the English state."

There you have it. The ECM, like so many other productions of government, is a language game. As a language game, it includes those who play the game and excludes those who don't. It excludes those people who believe that the government should butt out of their children's lives and get on with their own business.

"As a power based construction of reality, this favoured way of thinking not only expresses an entitlement for England’s children and young people, but also inherent within it is a potential to exclude some groups of children, young people, their parent(s)/ carer(s). The Every Child Matters way of thinking has the potential to enmesh formal and informal educators in an unquestioning participation in the cognitive and semiotic traps of the ‘brand’, and in the assumptions, taken-for-granted beliefs, language games and the premises and practices inherent in that ‘brand’, which,

'While they create a way of seeing and suggest a way of acting, they also tend to create ways of not seeing, and eliminate the possibility of actions associated with alternative views of the world. (Morgan, 1986, p 202)'"

Since home education is an alternative view of regular or school or state education, then we immediately have a problem, Houston.

So the emphasis is on a bunch of symptoms, like childhood obesity, and the real wound, the real culprit dividing folks and engendering problems in society is the lack in some families and the overabundance in other families.

"In taking a shallow focus on such ‘symptoms’, attention at both national and local level is diverted away from deep and widening health inequalities between advantaged and disadvantaged communities in England (Department of Health, 2008)."

Once again, the shell game distracts us from the reality that underlies the lies in Every Child Matters:

"...as Wilkinson (1996) argues, it is from deeper inequalities in socially divided societies that negative physical and psycho-social health emerges for children and young people and also for their parents/carers. Linked to this are questions about the ‘invisibility’ of major aspects of children and young people’s lives within the five outcomes. For example, the whole question of spirituality is not mentioned anywhere in the outcomes framework."

"Inherent in Every Child Matters is a seductive and powerful potential to enmesh formal and informal educators in an obedience and passivity that may run contrary to our vocation and calling: to participate in a favoured way of thinking that glosses over, or institutionalises the invisibility of deep structural inequalities in contemporary English society. In engaging with the information and critique offered in this article, my hope is for formal and informal educators to be reminded of their active choice in how we operate in our roles and in our practice:

Whether as autonomous self actualising practitioners who have, “...a disinterested love of her fellows and an understanding of the aims she is pursuing and the methods of so doing - in other words, a mature person with knowledge, judgement, objectivity, and a sense of values in social affairs” (Younghusband 1947, cited in Jeffs, 2006).

Or, as an unquestioning technician of a favoured way of thinking promulgated and sanctioned by government – inherent in which is a specific and particular moral order."

I think most home educators saw through the role of technician during the threatened Badman and Balls invasion of our country of home education.

We are not technicians; we are autonomous self-actualising practitioners raising the next generation to the art of autonomy and self-actualising.

Quotes from http://www.infed.org/socialwork/every_child_matters_a_critique.htm

To home education! An alternative and a reality. May you be spreading your light forever.

Love that Lao-Tzu part 2

2011-02-03T17:25:00.005Z

'He who overcomes others has force; he who overcomes himself is strong.' Lao-Tzu - Chinese philosopher.

As I said before. Or rather Lao-Tzu said.

Yes, a lot of truth in that. I am always fighting the deep and utter destructive force of self-dislike. I'm not sure where it came from. Perhaps a father who dealt out unrestricted criticism. Perhaps a mother who never really cared for her own personality.

Who knows?

Only now. After ........... years of living am I starting to say, "Just a minute, pet, y'er as good as anyone else." Sometimes pet feels as good as anyone else. Sometimes pet doesn't.

But the fight to go up a few levels to self-love without reaching the vaunting heights of overweening pride - which isn't likely in my place - is enduring.

Funny, though. Sometimes, I believe in myself. Other times, I definitely do not.

Could it be hormones? Intuition? Memories of various errors?

I still don't know.

I do know that this year I'm on the path of self-confidence. I'm spending time with myself doing things with myself that I know will generate good feelings and confidence. I'm taking time to enjoy being me. I will ensure that I know more about myself and celebrate the uniqueness that is Danae.

There'll never be another person exactly the same as me. There'll never be another human exactly like you, dear reader, either (unless you're a twin or a triplet or....). It's a great thought. It's a terrible thought.

Make the best of yourself. Do be the best you that you can.

Take care of yourself. Because you're you. Because you should. Because you're here now. Because your best can be pretty amazing, if you let it.

Love that Lao-Tzu

2011-02-03T16:41:00.000Z

'He who overcomes others has force; he who overcomes himself is strong.' Lao-Tzu - Chinese philosopher.

Ain't that the truth?

Funding cuts

2011-01-28T10:54:00.004Z

Funny how Scotland and the North of England are having lots of deep cuts, but the South of England isn't so affected. In the Scottish Review, Alf Young writes:

"...two weeks ago, on 13 January, we were told that, 'because of the most dramatic reduction in public spending imposed on Scotland by any UK government', what we can expect from the government and Scottish Enterprise in the year starting this April is just £2.9m. That represents a cut of 69.5%. It couldn't be much more dramatic. Indeed I have asked the chairman of Scottish Enterprise and Scottish ministers if any other body is being asked to take a bigger cut. It is out of all proportion to the squeeze being imposed from London. In cash terms, the overall Scottish budget is being cut by 4.5% next year. The enterprise, energy and tourism budget, which includes overall funding for SE, is down by 5.9%. I have asked of an explanation of why the cut we are facing at Riverside Inverclyde is an order of magnitude or more greater than any of these. But so far no explanation has been forthcoming. Our other funder, Inverclyde Council, could have decided that it too would cut its contribution next year. Like all Scottish local authorities, it is also facing a squeeze. But it has confirmed its planned contribution of £2.1m. Beyond March 2012, we simply have no idea what money, if any, will be forthcoming from the Scottish government and Scottish Enterprise. We have been told this is a one-year settlement and no commitments can be made after that. There is even talk of a review of regeneration policy. We will do what we can to deliver on our reduced budget. But the long-term commitments we were given when this regeneration challenge was first offered and accepted don't now look worth the paper they were written on."

http://www.scottishreview.net/AlfYoung77.shtml

Wheels within wheels. Politics: the art of broken promises.

Bye, bye, libraries

2011-01-25T18:12:00.003Z

There once was a society that banned books. Not all books. Just some books. It was Germany. It was Nazi Germany. Nazi Germany did not like books. At least, Nazi Germany did not like some books. So officials piled them up and burned them. I wonder what they would have done to the internet?

Our society does not value books. It does not protect its library services. LAs, looking for ways to cut more things of value to ordinary people (besides, of course, ordinary people's jobs) are rubbing their hands in glee at the thought of getting rid of libraries. Unless, of course, those people who are the backbone of the land - the volunteers - will offer to step forward and run the libraries.

The writer, Philip Pullman, is on it here:

http://falseeconomy.org.uk/blog/save-oxfordshire-libraries-speech-philip-pullman#

Did you linger in libraries when you were an emerging writer, Mr. Pullman?

I bet you did.

Were they important to you?

I bet they were.

When I was little, libraries, to me, smelt of holiness. They were a sanctuary of quiet, and an oasis of learning. They were respected. They were well-thought of. They were necessary because you just couldn't manage to buy ALL the books you might ever need.

Everyone can use libraries. Any age. Any stage. Come. Try a book. Even buy a book.

They give imagination free flight. They make you laugh. They flick the conscience. They stimulate your desire to know and grow. Books do.

So get rid of the libraries. Great plan.

A pivotal service in our country.

Shows that we are literate. That we read. That we seek knowledge. That we love knowledge. That we cherish knowledge.

And we meet other people in those places. And, if we have a home that's expensive to heat, we can sit reading in peace until closing time, and save a few pounds on the gas and electric in the flat or the house. Then there's always the social side of it. A smile from a toddler as he reaches that big fun book he's had his eye on since he first got strollered through the library door. A nod from the elderly gent combing through the newspapers. It all adds up to community.

Isn't too much to ask to spare them, is it? The staff probably get paid peanuts; our library building is old and tired, but still has life and value.

Do we value important things in this country?

No, only money. We only value money. And what value has money?

What indeed?

Democracy

2011-01-22T13:34:00.001Z

'"Democracy is the best political system of slavery ever invented. In a democracy, the slaves believe that they are "free" and have a "voice" in their affairs. Thus, they are willing slaves and, as such, the possibility of a revolt is much less than in an overt system of slavery." - Christopher S Hyatt, 'The Psychopath's Bible'

From
http://www.activistpost.com/2010/12/10-modern-methods-of-mind-control.htm

I was led to this website by a friend on facebook. Thank you, Lou.

Asking those questions

2011-01-21T19:14:00.005Z

I have asked myself those questions: Did I live? Did I love? Did I matter?

They're interesting questions. What does it mean to live, for example? Have I ever skied or surfed? No. In some people's eyes, then, I haven't lived. Then, again, other people might live to ski or surf and, if they can't, they might feel that they haven't lived. What does living mean?

I think I loved. I've loved a few times, not terribly successfully. Occasionally, for a long period. Other times, I haven't done badly. I totally love my children too, but I watch that they don't get smothered by my care and mother love because I want them to have their own lives, their own loves, even if I don't approve. They need space to make the most of my mother love.

Did I matter? Presumably, I've made a difference in a few lives. Given a bit of advice that's helped. I've certainly been free with my examples of home education and encouraged people to think outside the ticky box system that we call education. I'd like to hope that, should I die tomorrow, some folks would shed a tear or come to the funeral. But I wouldn't force them. Funerals aren't fun. At least, I'm not a fan of them.

Did I live? Did I love? Did I matter?

I don't know.

The jury's out - hopefully for a long time to come. I don't think I'm ready to answer those end-of-life questions quite yet. Get back to me in thirty years or so. Eerie, though, how we hoard our ambitions and put off doing til tomorrow what we should have done years ago. Maybe it's a wake-up call to think of the questions we'll be bound to ask ourselves at the end of our journey.

Or maybe I'll ask them later.

Procrastination - an art I'm getting good at.

At the end of life

2011-01-13T19:44:00.002Z

"At the end of our lives, we all ask,

DID I LIVE? DID I LOVE? DID I MATTER?"

Brendon Burchard

Live today.

Love today.

Make a difference.

Ten weeks in a nice warm place

2011-01-12T16:48:00.004Z

I'm due to go to Nottingham on Monday to visit a very dear friend who has been asking me for, at least, fifteen months to visit.

Not exactly the ten weeks in a nice warm place that my other friend mentioned in her phone call. She wants to go. But she is trapped by her duties and the service she gives to her family and her dog. She can't go. I know of no one more deserving to have a ten week holiday than J. Her tolerance, patience, warmth and friendship is enduring.

I would like to be super-rich to send her on a ten week all expenses paid cruise.

I'd like to send everyone on a ten week all expenses paid cruise or vacation. Out of January. Out of the cold. Out of the thoughts of Christmases past.

So everyone who reads this please imagine that I can send you on a ten week all expenses paid cruise or vacation at a time of your choice. Just kick back and imagine it for a minute. Feeling good? Me too.

I feel good when other people feel good. I feel happy when other people feel happy. We're all connected. Every one of us.

So to everyone who reads this blog I wish you the most exciting, spiritual, amazing, fascinating, easiest year to follow your imaginary ten week cruise.

Just imagine what we could manifest if we really concentrated on everyone's good...

End of year thoughts

2010-12-31T19:57:00.005Z

E received her law course results and she got a good pass. The personal feedback about her essay was somewhat disappointing to her until I pointed out that the law students had been set up to fail. Why else would the course demand a rigid word count? My daughter could have (and did) write an essay twice as long as that required then pruned it ruthlessly.

We said, "You have passed a difficult course with a good grade. You were seventeen when you decided to take the course - a University level course - and you passed. This is a magnificent accomplishment so please, please be proud of yourself."

E has great difficulty in being proud of her accomplishments - they are never quite good enough, even though she does exceptionally well. I shall carry the pride for her. I am proud of her huge efforts, her diligence, her determination, her persistence even when she is feeling unwell, her questioning heart and her sense of justice.

She deserves every success. I know it has been hard for her to stand outside the coddling, infantilising cocoon of school and still make her way. No one submits your work for you. No one arranges your exams. It is a lonely road in many respects, but, when you have reached your goals, you can tell yourself that "I did it my way." To do it despite society's pressures must develop your character. To succeed despite the constant chant that 'School is best' is a massive accomplishment.

I salute all home educating young people in their homes, in their friends' and neighbours' and acquaintances' houses as they go about building a real community. I salute them in their places of interest and anywhere they go. They are all magnificent. They are all such examples to us of what people should be. I salute them.

And to their parents: teach your young to recognise, understand and give love. Teach them to listen and watch. Teach them logic. Teach them to respect themselves and other people, and you will have taught them everything of worth that one human can pass to another.

May you all succeed in whatever you choose to succeed in this New Year, and on into the future.

I wish you all happiness and good health, and an exceptionally good 2011.

Happy Holidays

2010-12-24T16:36:00.004Z

If you celebrate Christmas, please enjoy yourselves on December 25th. If you do not celebrate Christmas, please enjoy yourselves anyway.

Give a thought to those who are huddled in the snow in this deep wintertime. Whatever they have done or not done, do they deserve to freeze?

Spare a moment to think how to enlighten the cosmos, and shine your candle - no matter how small - into the dark regions of this most beautiful world.

Be peaceful. There is nothing worth fighting about; not land, not money, not possessions.

Remember that we are all one. We were born in the Big Bang that generated the Universe, and we are miraculous mosaics of stardust.

No one is other. No one is not you. You are everyone and everyone is you.

Be kind. If you cannot love someone, try to understand him. If someone hurts you, forgive him because you damage only yourself in hating him.

Cherish your children. They are your most tender gifts to yourself.

Have a lovely, peaceful, caring Christmas.

Thick, thick snow and World War II

2010-12-19T14:00:00.005Z

Six days to go before the day. Christmas which I perennially misspell as Christams.

Our heating has been belting along, bless its tiny boots.

My mother's heating went off at 10:00 o'clock last night. She put the electric heater on, and surrounded herself with hot water bottles. Surprisingly, she slept and this morning she rang me.

She's lucky we live within a two minute walk. Elderly, bent over, unable to hear or understand a lot of what she hears, my mother is now tiny and very frail. She was young during the years of World War II, recalls it all with horror, says it should never happen again, deplores the fact that many, many regions of the world are torn apart by war in these modern days.

My mother is a survivor. She is a heroine: she and other young women chopped tree after tree down during the years 1942 to 1946 to send them to be made into pit props, telegraph poles, ladders, newsprint, and other such necessary items. Timber Corps women were part of the Women's Land Army.

"By July 1943 there were 87,000 Land Girls and they were joining at the rate of 4,000 a month. Despite this, in 1944 the government, led by Ernest Bevin, declared that Land Girls would be excluded from post-war education and training schemes. This led to protests and strikes, and Lady Denman resigned. However, Her Majesty the Queen made the people aware of her support for the WLA and eventually the government was forced to compromise. A Land Army Benevolent Fund was promised £150,000 and resettlement grants of £150 were agreed, but Land Girls received no medals for their services. The much prized uniform was taken back. One was only allowed to keep greatcoats and shoes, but only if the greatcoat was dyed blue· "

My mother loved her greatcoat. She said it had style and suited her. You would think they could've given those young women their coats as a small thank you, wouldn't you?

In 2000, for the first time since the World War II ended, the Land Army women were invited to the cenotaph to remember their fallen friends, brothers, fathers, uncles, cousins and sweethearts.

They were honoured in 2008 by the Labour government issuing a badge for the Land Army and Timber Corps girls. Gordon Brown said:

"We have been slow to thank you. We could have done this years ago but I'm pleased that we can do it now. We owe you a huge debt of gratitude."

Scotland went one better, erecting a life-size bronze statue of a Timber Corps girl in the forest near Aberfoyle in 2007.

I was pleased to be able write an article for Ancestors magazine about my mother's experiences in the Timber Corps. In the inimitable way that some mothers have, she read it and commented: "Well, that was better than I expected."

Here and now, for my little mother, for all the women who undertook heavy manual labour, left their families, lived in huts, trudged through snow, laughed at adversity and saved thousands of tons of space in British ships for food and necessary supplies, I dedicate this blog entry.

To you wonderful women - God bless you, wherever you are.

Tuition fee fight

2010-12-10T16:50:00.002Z

I salute the students.

I thought the power to revolt was dead in the water. I thought it had disappeared beneath the oceans of Brittania. Drowned and dead.

Apparently not. The students are out in this filthy weather shouting their slogans, resisting being kettled by the arms of the state (police).

Using the right they have to say 'no' in a peaceful demonstration.

I think they are marvellous.

From the sublime to the ridiculous. From fifty percent of this country's young people being encouraged to go to University now we have anyone whose parents aren't loaded struggling a) to get in and b) not to be encumbered with debt for twenty five years.

Punish the poor and the middle class when they never benefitted from the good years, but, oh yeah, make them pay in the bad years.

I believe that the bankers etc. organised the terrible chaos we're in. How else were they to stop paying savers the rates the savers were owed?

Protest on, my young friends.

"They (the youngsters), like many others from across the country, had just spent the day protesting or lobbying or saying a speech, all in the hope the government would listen."

They don't listen, darlings. They only listen when you agree with them, when you're one of them. They aren't there for you, my children. We, home educators, could tell you how deaf they can be, how frustrated you all would be.

Protest on, even though you think you may have lost. You will carry the day.

Life is stirring in all of us. The knowledge of fairness is raising its head. The sense of something wrong is dawning.

"There were shouts of 'I can't breathe' and calls for medics for those with bleeding heads who had been hit by baton-wielding police. Ian Dillets, a student from SOAS said:

"Everyone is cold and hungry and would like to go home, but we're not allowed to go home. There are a lot of people now standing around saying if they're not going to let us out we might as well go and get angry.""

Are our children to be treated like criminals? Who are the police protecting? The rights of the state to do whatever it damn well pleases. We are more than the state. We are greater than any Parliament.

Times are indeed a'changin'.

"Tim Mortimer, Leeds University Union Activities Officer, said he had great trouble seeing Simon Burns, his local MP for Chemsford yesterday:

"I rang and emailed him several times but he managed to wrangle his way out of it saying as he was a minister he didn't have time to meet with his constituent. It's a bit upsetting. MPs are condemning any kind of violent action but were not allowing people legitimate means to get their point across.""

Maybe he doesn't represent you, Tim. Who does he represent then? Who are these people? What is this system? These are questions that Tim might be asking himself tonight. The questions we all should be asking. Don't we deserve better than this? Don't our children deserve better than this?

Quotes from

http://www.guardian.co.uk/leeds/2010/dec/10/student-tuition-fees-protests-leeds-view

Music to my ears

2010-12-08T15:59:00.006Z

Last week, I was in the same room where E was playing some new piano music. She struggled with it.

After thirty minutes, she came away from the piano and eventually, after a chat, she went off to do something else.

Yesterday, E sat at the piano and played the new music. Beautifully. Perfectly. Effortlessly. I was quite transfixed.

After her practice she said that she had found that, most times when she struggled to understand a topic or produce work, if she left and went back to it, she could do it. It was as if her subconscious had been beavering away on the topic.

I have a theory too that, now and then, you just aren't ready - mature enough - to do something. It just isn't the right time. I know that happened with me and Maths. I couldn't do it - always had trouble and grief. Following bucket loads of frustration, I left it alone. But, a few years later, I could solve the Maths problems and wondered what had been wrong before.

Well, there was nothing wrong. I just didn't hit the right time. I was not yet mature enough to cope with the questions.

Recently, E passed her Grade 5 Theory test with a mark of 83% and received a merit. She has her new shiny certificate. E is now determined to bring her piano playing up to the same level, and she will because she wants to.

I am, once again, so proud.

Police abuse children

2010-11-26T20:26:00.003Z

Yes, I meant to say that because I'm angry. Are police allowed to abuse children? Only if those children are protesting which - I really thought, I really did think - that any citizens of this damned country could do. March peacefully. Carry banners. Protest. Disagree. You know that kind of thing.

But I should have remembered the miners. I should have recalled that square in China where the tanks rolled in. We thought we had the right to say no to something that affected us.

Well, we were sadly mistaken, weren't we?

"It's the coldest day of the year, and I've just spent seven hours being kettled in Westminster. That sounds jolly, doesn't it? It sounds a bit like I went and had a lovely cup of tea with the Queen, rather than being trapped into a freezing pen of frightened teenagers and watching baton-wielding police kidney-punching children, six months into a government that ran an election campaign on a platform of fairness. So before we go any further, let's remind ourselves precisely what kettling is, and what it's for."

That is from here:
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2010/11/children-police-kettle-protest

My children weren't there, but they might have been because they think that you can protest, you can carry banners here and that the police just stay on the sidelines making sure that everything is OK.

They'll know different when they read Laurie Penny's feature.

They'll know that abuse only happens when social workers say that your parents are abusing you. They'll know it's one big CON that government cares for you. Any government. They care only for corporations. The little guy can go get kettled.

I hate this country. I've never said that to you, my dearly once-loved, beautiful country. I hate you.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1

2010-11-24T18:58:00.005Z

We went yesterday. The buses had changed their routes so we were forced to trek up and down in the freezing cold and driving rain to arrive at the cinema.

The cinema was graced by eight people other than ourselves, not one a giggling adolescent phoning her boyfriend or chatting behind her hand to her friend. We had the latter pleasure during the last Harry Potter film.

I enjoyed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1, and had a short snicker at the line: "You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide".

"Introducing 'educational reform' and a programme of 'evaluation' -- the motto being "You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide" -- he {Voldemort) uses murder and oppression to set about creating the perfect pure blood society."

http://uk.movies.ign.com/articles/113/1133326p1.html

I think Joanne Rowling has captured the social engineering/education/ media entrainment to the Labour message perfectly with her Potter series, whether or not she affects to support the Labour government with her gifts of money. I recall sitting watching the situation at Hogwarts, under the tender unmercies of kitten-loving, bow-wearing gargoyle Dolores Umbridge in her triumphant and terrible march through the school and seeing almost the same situation that we, home educators, were facing in the UK.

I was uncomfortable, even as I chuckled because it was too close. Really too close for comfort.

"The Muggle-Born Registration Commission was set up by the Ministry of Magic following Lord Voldemort's takeover on 1 August 1997. The public goal of the Commission was to force all Muggle-born wizards and witches to register with the Ministry, then undergo interrogation as to how they "stole" their magical power from "real" wizards and witches. The true purpose of the Muggle-Born Registration Commission was to imprison and degrade Muggle-borns. Dolores Umbridge was the head of the commission. "

http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Muggle-Born_Registration_Commission

The scene where Filch was standing on a long ladder hanging up the new edicts banning this, that or the other will stay with me forever. The apparently pleasant but deeply vile character, Umbridge, reminded me of certain people who wished to deprive others - home educators, for example - of liberties they were accustomed to. She was convinced of her own rightness, and never swerved from what she saw as her duty to repress and punish.

I am a Harry Potter fan. I see that the series is rich with allusions to the recent plight of home educators. I know that much of the Harry Potter series is clever, entertaining and funny; however, it will always make me shiver just a little.

Freedom

2010-11-22T14:59:00.004Z

I like the way that I don't usually have to plan anything.

Sometimes, of course, I do. Outings, dental visits, walks, talks, dish-washing, when to pop the heating on... Those kinds of things. And this year I'm thinking about Christmas shopping in two doses because, although they are sisters, my daughters are different and enjoy different things.

But, mostly, I have freedom to decide what it is I wish to spend my time on. My time is my own. It is a commodity owned by me. Not so in schools where your time is micro-managed down to seconds and you have to do all kinds of things that you can't be bothered with, find irritating or just plain hate. But no-one's giving you the option to refuse or offer palatable alternatives.

E. is just finishing her piano practice and is off to study some Japanese, and then, she says, she'll wash her hair. She has the freedom on the whole NOT to be at someone else's beck and call; not to have to do things she finds annoying or boring or that eat up her time to do other things that she finds interesting and enlightening or fun.

She is free to determine her own schedule. Her own life.

What a tremendous gift for Christmas. Or any time at all.

Home educating is a gift I say thanks for all year round.

Nothing to fear, nothing to hide

2010-11-16T18:01:00.006Z

As you know, if you have followed my blog posts, an ex-friend tried to tell me that 'If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.'

It's what is called a false dichotomy. Either you have something to hide and therefore you fear discovery or it's OK because you aren't doing anything that anyone could possibly disapprove of and you don't care who knows what.

Of course, there's another possibility and that is that you just want your doings, whatever they are, to be private.

I'm quite a private person. I don't like to have people watch me eat, laugh or frown. Sorry, that's just the way I am. Private, shy and quiet. At least, that's the old me. The old me is being constantly upgraded and superceded.

(That is the real me, not the assumed me for public consumption who will leap upon people who threaten my children's freedom and 'engage' them if necessary. The people, not my children. My youngsters are usually engaged, thanks).

So nothing to fear, nothing to hide (deliberate reversal). We have lots to fear. The ceaseless trampling of freedom in the name of other stuff like safeguarding. The unholy rush to protect civil servants' jobs by 'making work' by vilifying parents and telling parents that they suck and they must do better. They can attend courses which makes everything all right then. The make-work principle reaches up into all areas in politics, I believe, because I don't think politicians really know what they are supposed to do.

Just a thought: Do we even need them? Politicians. Would we miss them if they weren't there?

Wouldn't it be nice to try a year without Whitehall? No cuts, no policy writers, no Hansard.

Would we want it all back?

If you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear.

Yeah, right.

Some stray thoughts after reading Kelly's blog post

2010-11-10T12:54:00.005Z

Kelly's blog, in case you haven't discovered it before, is here:

http://kellygreenandgold.wordpress.com/

She is talking about notification which is a scary concept for me, and I wondered why. Then I thought if I am a sovereign being why do I have to notify anyone when I make a move?

It's simple. If I and I alone am in control of my child's education, why do I have to allow a school to let the local authority know that I am removing my child from their register?

Doesn't letting the LA know imply that the LA is in charge of my child's education?

Yet the law makes clear that it is me who will be sued if my child believes she has not been offered an adequate education for her needs. So what has the LA to do with my child's education?

If we visit a doctor, that doctor may prescribe and advise, but that doctor is not in charge of my child's health. I am. I can choose to procure the prescription for my child and listen to his advice, then again I could leave that doctor's list to find someone else. Or I can opt to employ a homeopath to help with a health problem. I could do many different things to ensure that my child becomes and stays healthy.

That an LA can look into the provision of education, and has the power to deny me the right to home educate seems, to me, to make a mockery of the fact that I am controller of my child's education.

Completely contradictory, isn't it?

Understanding LA officials' thinking: Single-loop learning

2010-11-04T19:38:00.006Z

I have to credit H. for finding this information while he was looking for something else. Thanks, H.

This is an important blogpost to me because the ideas I will mention to you go a long way to explaining what I don't understand.

I don't understand LA officials' thinking. Basically, I have questioned whether or not LA officials and lots of other institution-based people think at all. Perhaps I am a little relieved that, according to Chris Argyrus and Donald Schon, inhabitants of that strange grey world actually do think, but they may not think as we think.

"Where something goes wrong, it is suggested, an initial port of call for many people is to look for another strategy that will address and work within the governing variables. In other words, given or chosen goals, values, plans and rules are operationalized rather than questioned."

That, in a small package, is single-loop thinking. When something is a problem, the urge is to 'fix' it not to examine what is wrong with it. "An alternative response is to question to governing variables themselves, to subject them to critical scrutiny." That is double-loop thinking.

We often mention it ourselves. Why do LAs keep trying to 'fix' schools when the very assumptions underlying those heaving chambers of sheer torture DO NOT WORK as a place where children learn and question and grow? Why do LAs not leave home educators alone to continue our double-loop thinking? Why do institutions like schools and their overlords LAs never question why they do what it is that they do? Why do they never look at the outcomes which appear in the children themselves? Why does no one stop and say enough is enough - we were and are wrong, we need to change?

One answer is that single-loop learning is easier for institutions.

"When the error detected and corrected permits the organization to carry on its present policies or achieve its presents objectives, then that error-and-correction process is single-loop learning. Single-loop learning is like a thermostat that learns when it is too hot or too cold and turns the heat on or off. The thermostat can perform this task because it can receive information (the temperature of the room) and take corrective action. Double-loop learning occurs when error is detected and corrected in ways that involve the modification of an organization’s underlying norms, policies and objectives."

"Single-loop learning seems to be present when goals, values, frameworks and, to a significant extent, strategies are taken for granted. The emphasis is on ‘techniques and making techniques more efficient’ (Usher and Bryant: 1989: 87) Any reflection is directed toward making the strategy more effective."

No one questions whether or not children should go to school. Officials just benchmark schooling as THE education, no matter whether or not schooling actually produces rounded individuals who can function in any situation relatively effectively or analyse new data to effect changes. The techniques are to get bums on seats. The point that the bums don't wish to be there is ignored in favour of bums on seats regardless of what the bums see as fitting for themselves so the bums use their legs and walk out. Again, no reflection takes place. The single-loop kicks in. We should have bums on seats therefore make the parents of the bums pay when the bums leave.

Argyris and Schon compare and contrast single- and double-loop learning:

"The former involves following routines and some sort of preset plan – and is both less risky for the individual and the organization, and affords greater control. The latter is more creative and reflexive, and involves consideration notions of the good. Reflection here is more fundamental: the basic assumptions behind ideas or policies are confronted… hypotheses are publicly tested… processes are disconfirmable not self-seeking. "

So organisations tend to be single loop because - well - it's easier. They aren't required to account for how much money they spend in - what from the outside seem like - ridiculous or misguided projects. Their people aren't navel-gazing to study the necessity of following policies that a cat would find objectionable. They self-seek. They conform. They obey. And then they are promoted.

"The focus of much of Chris Argyris’ intervention research has been to explore how organizations may increase their capacity for double-loop learning. He argues that double-loop learning is necessary if practitioners and organizations are to make informed decisions in rapidly changing and often uncertain contexts (Argyris 1974; 1982; 1990). As Edmondson and Moingeon (1999:160) put it:

The underlying theory, supported by years of empirical research, is that the reasoning processes employed by individuals in organizations inhibit the exchange of relevant information in ways that make double-loop learning difficult – and all but impossible in situations in which much is at stake. This creates a dilemma as these are the very organizational situations in which double-loop learning is most needed."

Nissan may go for a suggestion box where the lowliest worker can deposit his interesting ideas and be noticed. Institutions like LA would no doubt think the suggestion box beyond the pale. You get the best thoughts from workers who have incentives to think. You don't encourage thought from individuals who are cogs in the machine.

"The next step that Argyris and Schön take is to set up two models that describe features of theories-in-use that either inhibit or enhance double-loop learning. The belief is that all people utilize a common theory-in-use in problematic situations. This they describe as Model I – and it can be said to inhibit double-loop learning. Model II is where the governing values associated with theories-in-use enhance double-loop learning."

It's not a surprise that Argyris and Schon find that most institutions use thinking from Model I.

"It involves ‘making inferences about another person’s behaviour without checking whether they are valid and advocating one’s own views abstractly without explaining or illustrating one’s reasoning’ (Edmondson and Moingeon 1999:161). The theories-in-use are shaped by an implicit disposition to winning (and to avoid embarrassment). The primary action strategy looks to the unilateral control of the environment and task plus the unilateral protection of self and others. As such Model I leads to often deeply entrenched defensive routines (Argyris 1990; 1993) – and these can operate at individual, group and organizational levels. Exposing actions, thoughts and feelings can make people vulnerable to the reaction of others. However, the assertion that Model I is predominantly defensive has a further consequence:

Acting defensively can be viewed as moving away from something, usually some truth about ourselves. If our actions are driven by moving away from something then our actions are controlled and defined by whatever it is we are moving away from, not by us and what we would like to be moving towards. Therefore our potential for growth and learning is seriously impaired. If my behaviour is driven by my not wanting to be seen as incompetent, this may lead me to hide things from myself and others, in order to avoid feelings of incompetence. For example, if my behaviour is driven by wanting to be competent, honest evaluation of my behaviour by myself and others would be welcome and useful. (Anderson 1997)"

Don't be embarassed by your environment. Control it.
Protect yourself and your co-workers.
Win at all costs, regardless of hurt to others 'outside'.
Never expose your feelings or thoughts. Stay safe by siding with the organisation, whatever it does.

I think we, home educators, would vastly prefer Model II.

"The significant features of Model II include the ability to call upon good quality data and to make inferences. It looks to include the views and experiences of participants rather than seeking to impose a view upon the situation. Theories should be made explicit and tested, positions should be reasoned and open to exploration by others. In other words, Model II can be seen as dialogical – and more likely to be found in settings and organizations that look to shared leadership. It looks to:

Emphasize common goals and mutual influence.
Encourage open communication, and to publicly test assumptions and beliefs.
Combine advocacy with inquiry (Argyris and Schön 1996; Bolman and Deal 1997: 147-8)."

"Exhibit 2: Model II characteristics

The governing values of Model II include:

Valid information
Free and informed choice
Internal commitment

Strategies include:
Sharing control
Participation in design and implementation of action

Operationalized by:

Attribution and evaluation illustrated with relatively directly observable data
Surfacing conflicting view
Encouraging public testing of evaluations

Consequences should include:

Minimally defensive relationships
High freedom of choice
Increased likelihood of double-loop learning
(Taken from Anderson 1997)"

It strikes me as I'm typing this how far schools stray from the rosy path of Model II or double- loop learning. In fact, taking a gander at the consequences again, I can see that schools:

maximise defensive relationships
inhibit freedom of choice and
decrease the likelihood of double-loop learning.

It seems unlikely that LAs would opt for double-loop learning when the institutions they watch over do anything but.

Argyrus and Schon go on. I'll cover their thoughts on individuals and their organisations next time.

Everything you see here that isn't mine has been taken from
http://www.infed.org/thinkers/argyris.htm#

Have a peek at it. Just to keep yourselves in the loop

Dancing pigeons and tv programmes

2010-10-28T20:56:00.002+01:00

I'm starting this blog entry without knowing what to write about.

I'm reading the above sentence.

Now I'm thinking isn't that what home education is all about?

A lot of finding out and muddling along until you look back and say that everything turned out all right?

That's how I do home education.

I'm not organised into 'Well, let's all learn how to teach a pigeon to dance today' because I wouldn't know where to start, and my young people (after laughing) wouldn't wish to spend their time teaching a pigeon to dance.

Would yours?

But my young people learn their own things, teach their own version of pigeons to dance, and check in with me to chat about it.

And now I've got to go watch 'Have I Got News for You' to keep E. company. There's nothing like sharing jokes with another human being to make you feel like you're bonding with them.

Which you are.

Free education?

2010-10-19T14:33:00.006+01:00

At dinner last night, I had an image of free education (as you do).

It was rather like those wild-eyed and enthused people who stand on soap boxes and talk at the tips of their voices about something that is meaningful to them.

I think my vision involved Socrates; although it could have been Plato or another of the philosophers who spent their time down the Forum spilling out their wisdom, without pay. Doubtless, they were wealthy because your average slave wouldn't have survived the trip down to the Forum without being carted off by his master and because, other than lifetime-taught knowledge, they were kept ignorant.

Post-image I did what I often do. I went surfing. Not the kind with big waves. The kind with radio waves or microwaves or whatever the net uses.

"The word 'education' is derived from the root word 'educare'. Education refers to acquiring information from outside while 'educare' means to bring out or to elicit that which is inside. Man should bring out the sacred qualities latent in his heart and put them into practice. The worldly education that you pursue and the jobs that you undertake are related to the head. They are subject to change. But the human values like compassion, forbearance, truth, which originate from the heart, are changeless."

I am always thinking about this, but seldom organising the words to say it. If you do not have a moral and spiritual base on which to stand, you are an animal. A sentient animal, maybe. A clever animal, perhaps. But still an animal. Inhuman and inhumane.

From home educated roots grow values like compassion, forbearance, truth, vision, enthusiasm and empathy as well as spirituality. That is, I believe that home education is the one sure place where young people can grow into themselves and grow into their humanity.

" Education should transform man into one of compassion. It should not make him stone-hearted. Once a Britisher found Mahatma Gandhi in a very dejected mood and asked him for the reason. Gandhi replied, "The hard-heartedness of the educated makes me feel sad." He was worried about the current education system, which was making man stone-hearted. True education is that which fosters compassion and love and ultimately leads man to divinity. Such education is the need of the hour.

Can one be called educated just because one knows how to read and write?
Does mere acquisition of college degrees make one truly educated?
Can that which has no moral and spiritual values be called education at all?
If education is meant only for a living, don't we find the birds and the beasts living without any education ?
(Telugu Poem)"

Looking at our world, we can see why Gandhi might be depressed with the hard-heartedness of the educated. We know he wasn't speaking about home educated people - he spoke of the products of 'free' schools.

"When, on seeing someone in pain, you feel the urge to relieve it, when your heart melts at the misery of your fellow beings, then you are a true human being."

Are we now true humans? Are we? There is a government in power now seeking to reduce the deficit, and reducing so many people to despair and illness for which they (the people) alone will be blamed because, if you are poor, it is your fault in the view of our leaders. If you are poor, you must be punished. If you are poor, you must suffer for your poverty, as if poverty were itself a religion.

"Modern education has become artificial. True education is that which inculcates in the students the noble qualities like truth, devotion, discipline, compassion and sense of duty. What is the use of possessing high intelligence if one lacks virtues? Mere intelligence is not enough. Is not a fox also intelligent? Intelligence should be coupled with virtues."

What is the use of being human if we treat our fellow humankind like secondary citizens? What is the point of having a brain and thinking if we label our co-travellers on this earth as losers or scroungers? There is so much plenty to go around everyone yet most people struggle and strain to live a reasonable life, not even a good life.

Why do we elevate the pursuit and conquest of money to the status of a god while abasing and debasing mankind?

All quotations from
http://www.eaisai.com/baba/docs/d000515.html
True Education Leads to Divinity

Girl guidance?

2010-10-13T20:22:00.004+01:00

As a lot of you know, the hush-hush department of home education has recruited two? people to write guidance on home education for the poor struggling local authorities who apparently cannot understand a little case law and a few sentences of law.

Think of the consternation in Whitehall. Think of the look on Penny Jones's face.

I think I'll think of Penny Jones a bit longer.

Penny Jones, ardent supporter of children's rights and what they say (as long as they kow-tow to government edicts, of course).

How dare home edders squat on Penny's turf? She's the one who will be cheerfully toiling away in the high-status cupboard she has earned from many years of government service. She's been done out of her job. What should she do now?

Since a lot of my friends are being made redundant... No, scratch that, since a lot of friends are being kicked out of their jobs without being made redundant and getting compensation for losing their jobs, I don't really care if this concludes Penny's no doubt stellar performance as chief bottle-washer to Sir Graham Badman (approaching journalist or government marketing minion be aware that Graham Badman has not actually been knighted except by mistake by his master Ed Balls) and she ends up in the washed-up end searching for another post.

I would just like to link again to the post which shows Penny Jones being trounced by a bunch of non-schoolchildren:https://heyc.org.uk/news/2009/11/aug-2009-heyc-dcsf-meeting-transcript

I look at it now and again to remind me that there might just be a God.

"JASPER GOLD: I’d just like to say, that, it may be a small number of cases, within home education, are maybe ending in abuse, or whatever you’re trying to suggest, but if you look at the number of cases in private, and independent, and state schools which end in abuse, it’s over twice as much.
GARETT ROSS: I have the statistics here.
JASPER GOLD: We have less things to worry about. We have less than half the national average for abuse. So by mixing up saying that we’ll need to register a curriculum, in the same report as saying something about right of access to the child’s home, is completely inappropriate. You’re mixing the educational aspects, which are not [inaudible] in any way by the governments [door slams] with the rights of the child and the protection of the child, when it’s actually not home education that’s responsible. Do you really think someone who had abused their child cares enough to take them out of school and educate them on their own?"

Brilliant logic. And no, an abuser probably wouldn't take a child out of school because any abuser would realise that that would draw attention to his (or in a tiny minority her) family situation.

You may as well put a neon-coated board up next to your front path with "THIS WAY TO THE ABUSER'S HOUSEHOLD" in flashing lights on it.

Anyway, if you're feeling a little blue about the whole guidance being written behind your back situation, then take a read or two of that magnificent day when Chloe Watson ably supported by the lovely boys and girls at Home Educating Youth Council left poor old Penny flat on the floor.

Come to think of it, we should've asked the HEYC to write some guidance for LAs? Wouldn't that be more in the spirit of home education. Let the children lead...

Great Balls of fire

2010-10-08T20:17:00.003+01:00

"...Morley and Outwood MP Ed Balls, who along with his wife was tipped as possible shadow chancellor, becomes shadow home secretary."

Labour's new leader, Ed. Miliband, selects his shadow cabinet by picking from Labour's old line of favoured MPs.

Mr. Ed. Balls (remember him?) has been made home secretary of the shadowy kind.

"Mr Balls said he was "surprised but pleased" to have been given the home affairs brief.
He said: "Obviously the economic argument has been very important to me - that is why I stood for leader of the Labour Party. But to me it's never been about the job you are doing and the particular personality, it is about winning the argument. For me, this home affairs brief is very important."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bradford-west-yorkshire-11504286

If my crystal 'balls' are performing correctly, then home educators can expect to be picked up by truancy sweeps and grilled about their terrorist leanings as Balls takes charge. We home edders shouldn't expect to travel abroad on holiday any more (no passports) and Mrs. Balls aka Yvette Cooper is now matron at the Foreign Office so she'll turn the other countries against us.

"Home Office:- immigration - passports- policing- crime prevention- drugs- counter-terrorism- ID cards "

http://ask.metafilter.com/153722/What-does-the-UK-Home-Secretary-do

Oh, yes, look for ID cards to be promoted for home educators and their children too. Just in case you were relaxing when Balls got the chop along with his socialist party in the last election.

A final word from the commenter, failed law student, on
http://hurryupharry.org/2010/10/08/alan-johnson-named-shadow-chancellor/

"The thought that fascistic Balls could ever be home secretary scares the crap out of me. He scares the crap out of me, full stop. He is everything that is wrong with the way Labour operated when in power."

There's no shadow of doubt in my mind that you are right, failed law student.

Quick, intervene

2010-10-07T20:33:00.003+01:00

We may as well not have an economic crisis on.

Everyone is desirous of taking lots of money to intervene in families.

I mean, families!

Once upon a time, you might say a cheery hello to the bobby on the beat, you might give the bin men a pound or two at Christmas, you might thank your lucky stars that the street lights were shining through the darkness of winter.

Now it looks like the latest buzzthought is that, by INTERVENING in families, the world's evils will be swiftly brushed away.

Expensive? Yes.

Involving armies of box-tickers? Yes.

Legions of social workers, school nurses, doctors, police? Likely.

What was once corrected or encouraged by your Ma and Pa will now be surveilled and standardised by your lovely local authority worker. What a parent did will be done by the ever-knowledgeable non-expert inexpert expert with possibly a day's training in what a child (or indeed a family) should not be and should be doing.

Parents will be defunct. Useful only to support the length and breadth of the increasing rotten structure with more and more of the money they should be employing to live on and enjoying generally.

Mothers and Fathers will be stakeholders (hopefully) in children who are to be reduced to a pennyworth of commodity. Trimmed and revisioned, little ones can step out into the world in the safe and wondrous knowledge that they have passed muster with council officials and the world in general before they take their exalted places as batteries for the masters to drain.

Does your child need intervention?

She needs it like she needs a hole in the head.

Does your son have to endure bossy-boots professionals crawling all over his personal life?

No way.

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner said in Freakonomics that parenthood has changed from an art into a science.

We are now the subjects in a gigantic experiment.

It's said that those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.

They must hate 21st century Britain then.

Freakonomics and Frank Field

2010-10-02T15:13:00.005+01:00

Frank Field again (soliciting early intervention):

"One conclusion has stood out from all the academic readings in which I have been engrossed over the past three months. Using one of our cohort studies, Leon Feinstein measured children's abilities at age two, three and five years and then went on to look at what happens to these children in school.

The gob-smacking findings (to use that gentle phrase of Chris Patten) was that, as children turn up for their first day at school, they possess a wide range of abilities and that children from families on the lowest incomes were more likely to be towards the bottom end of the range of these abilities. And there they remained when a second set of tests were taken at ten.

Even worse was that those children from the least privileged homes who did score well in the early years- and way above some children from much richer homes - were found at aged 10 to have lost ground at school and to have been overtaken as a group by what were poorer achieving children from richer homes.The Review's attention has therefore, unsurprisingly, been centred on what happens during those first five years that so impacts on a child's life-time opportunities. As the Review will be written advocating action, we are considering whether it is possible to marshal a range of intelligent interventions that radically alter what would otherwise be the current fate of poorer children."

(http://www.frankfield.com/media/pres...-life-chances/)

Well, Frank, did you read Freakonomics? A book by Steven Levitt (a 'rogue' economist) and Stephen Dubner? They found that adopted children have lower school test scores than other children. Why? Because lots of mothers (and fathers) who gave away their babies were actually of lower intelligence than those who adopted the children. IQ *(as measured by school tests) is largely genetically determined. The adoptive parents, however, did make a difference because adopted children went on to have good jobs, take further education and postpone marriage and child-bearing until they were out of their teens - outcomes that could be attributed to the influence of their adopting families.The whole thing could be sorted by getting rid of school (and other) tests. Everything that is measured has winners and losers, and most things that are measured are possibly not correlated with 'success' in life. As far as I can see, often schools are measuring memory. If a child has a good memory, s/he gets good scores. If not, well, tough luck, kid.

Freakonomics - it's a good read. I recommend it.

Addendum: Frank has uncovered a good reason for ditching the whole school system too. From the quotation above:

"...those children from the least privileged homes who did score well in the early years- and way above some children from much richer homes - were found at aged 10 to have lost ground at school..." which would suggest that school not only did not enhance some children's test-taking ability but also made it worse.

Thanks, Frank, if school tests are the be all end all, you've just proved from your own writing that school doesn't matter for some children and, in fact, it can do them damage.

Well done, Frank. Go to the top of the class.

Progress

2010-09-25T12:22:00.003+01:00

I just thought I'd write a few lines (sounds like school, doesn't it?) on progress.

A few people's blogs have mentioned the concept this month. It appears to be related to children going or going back to school and it can be a bit of a tin of worms. Home educators panic a bit when they see coevals of their own children 'progressing' in school. They question what they are doing. They think about exams and measurement of what cannot be measured which is knowledge and wisdom.

Anyway, what is it? What is progress?

What does it mean?

Does it lead anywhere?

In my teens I decided I would take up the guitar. Not a modern screeching impressive electric one. I bought a cheap cheerful ordinary-looking guitar and was sold a plectrum to go with it which I never actually used. The local music shop offered lessons with a pleasant enough young man called J.

For two years I went on the bus, accompanied by my guitar in a large black case, to the middle of our local town to see if I'd 'cracked' the guitar. I suppose, on one level, I progressed because I went through the simple starting-to-learn book and graduated to the next-to-simple-starting-to-learn book.

But I never felt right. The guitar did not sing under my fingers. My hands did not itch to play the guitar. I confessed my feelings to J and he advised me to practice more. I did.

However much I strummed away, I grew increasingly aware that the guitar and I were not destined for a career or even a heavenly time of hobbying together.

I - I suppose you might say - progressed through whatever set me off on this hunt to become a guitar player to the realisation that I would never be a 'real' guitar player (whatever that might be). Meanwhile my friend - another J - told me that, at the age of 30, his big brother had picked up a guitar and began to play and play well.

After gnashing my teeth I had a moment of truth and I gave the guitar away to an eager friend who was desperate to learn.

I have not since regretted my time struggling to progress with the guitar. Maybe I needed that space with a musical instrument to inform me that my interest in music will probably remain that of a close admirer.

Outsiders would think I failed at guitar. I think I learned a lot from guitar. I learned that I have to really adore something to dedicate the time to it to become competent if not good at it. I learned that I cannot magically be good at something that I have little or no aptitude for.

I have made progress.

Fresh Fields II

2010-09-21T20:55:00.006+01:00

David Cameron has decided to 'bury' the Poverty Tzar's guide to - er - under 5s.

Mr Field has apparently clashed with Mr. Cameron. Mr. Field has a habit of clashing with other MPs. He did it with Labour when he was Poverty Tzar before.

But he was singing the old song with the group that we, home edders, pointed out was vulnerable to state abuse and that is under 5s.

There's no money to access and assess. There's no money for anyone but corporations whose greed and corruption has caused the disastrous state of the economy.

Mum6kids, bless her, has pointed out the icky comments on the reply from the government to a petition home educators put forward some time ago. She says in the comments section of my previous post Fresh Fields:

"Have you seen the Govt response to one of the petitions? the final line says:"As you will appreciate, we have not yet been able to consider in detail our approach to home education and whether or not any changes to the existing arrangements are required"That is jolly concerning."

That very response was delivered to my email address and I agree, Mum6kids, it is of concern. It'll be the local authorities pushing for more powers than they already have and which they have amply demonstrated that they cannot use with sense and sensitivity. Or at all, sometimes.

I think that the government is being harried by the opposition and, while the government appear to be open to complaints against home education, Labour will think that they are in with a chance to reanimate the dreadful crimes against us - a minority group - that they almost succeeded in committing earlier this year.

I doubt very much whether we are of sufficient numbers or pose any real threat to the Con-dems at the moment. When/if the economy gets back on her feet and money is again available to counter freedoms of thought and conscience (nod to Kelly's book), then we will have a rumble on our hands.

But we will be better prepared. We know more. We know who to trust and who to reject when they pretend to friendship. We know what to do. We react more and we react faster. We are much fitter and fleet on our toes. Home educators will never again be the trusting little band of marginalised 'weirdos' that we were once perceived to be.

Our savvy and now-politicised children will see to that.

Fresh Fields

2010-09-17T10:59:00.004+01:00

Frank Field. Labour MP. Fell out with the big bosses. Now is IN with the Coalition government.

From the Evening Post, a report states that "Former welfare minister Frank Field said that attainment by the age of five matters as much - if not more than - what happens in school, with children with poor development at that age more than six times as likely to end up with no worthwhile qualifications."

So we can guess what's coming next. Oh, yes, interference in the family of children under school age from the lingering remnants of social engineering idiots like Field.

Before I get to the ins and outs of monitoring of every little tot in the UK I will say Frank, mate, haven't you noticed that you Labour lot allowed the banks to make a scandalous amount of money in dodgy circumstances and now the Coalition lot are making us pay for it. In other words, Mr. Field. THERE IS NO MONEY TO INTERVENE IN YOUNG CHILDREN'S LIVES and, hallelujah, thanks to the universe that there is no money to intervene in young children's lives. Zippo, nada, niente.

"In a progress report on his Poverty and Life Chances review, handed to the Prime Minister this week, Mr Field called for the establishment of an "Index of Life Opportunities" to identify children in need of support in their earliest years.

And he said the pre-school period - from conception to age five - should be renamed the Foundation Years and be viewed as part of every child's educational life."

Why should you stop there, Frankie? Surely the pre-birth time is the one we should all be monitoring and intervening in? Stop pregnant mothers doing dumb things, eh? You should be ashamed of yourself, Mrs. or Miss Enceinte, for eating that dangerous brie cheese. DON'T GO into that bar - someone was smoking in there last week!

Of course, pregnancy is just too darn late. Better analyse the thrashing tail of the sperm of the potential baby's father and give it a rating on the poverty level of its energy.

"Excuse me," says agent of the state standing at the top of Lover's Lane in Anytoon, "I'll just get a vial of your um-er baby seed, Mr. Babyfather."

To what ludicrous lengths will these 'people' go?

How long before our patience snaps and we tell them where to go?

"What happens to children in the first five years of life matters as much, if not more than, what happens in schools, yet around seven times as much public money is spent on educating children in schools than on helping parents during critical pre-school years," he said."

Who says this? Where's your research? What's the status of the research? Who authored it Stephen Heppell, Graham Badman and Maggie Atkinson, signed off by the great Balls himself? And you can help parents by sharing out the massive amounts of money in this country. That's how you ameliorate the effects of poverty, you noodle.

"The proposed Index would measure children's social and emotional development, cognitive and language skills, communication skills and well-being - the indicators which make the most difference to long-term development - he (Field) said."

Meanwhile, pregnant ladies, women with small children, families in whatever shape everywhere in this pestilential would-be eugenically-controlled United Kingdom beware. The education expert Field is about with his possible legion of clip-board carrying cretins ready to save your babies from the joy of childhood. Run while you still can.

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23879049-poverty-report-targets-early-years.do

Castles in the sand

2010-09-05T19:52:00.004+01:00

Hmmm, I am in one of those liminal moods when I don't know exactly what I'm wanting to write about. I know I want to write but what should I say?

I'm back on the silvery sand of yesterday, braving the cold wind, watching two children of six and five build a castle with walls and turrets, a moat, outer buildings, and part of a town. They dug furiously, and concentrated with fierce intent, and I thought how amazing children are. What magnificent beings and how we short-change them by trying to impose our views of the world on them and make them conform to whatever passes for reality with us.

We should be led by them, not leading them. They are fresh and joyous. They have yet to discover cynicism and discontent.

Of course, I love being with small/young children. I find them totally fascinating: I adore the way their minds cope with new things and weave stories about the world.

I was asked, as I built up the walls under my captain's directions, what the objects were on top of the walls which my other captain was carefully hefting into place. "I don't know," I said, rather torn between saying a sand castle and trying to recall the word I thought she might be meaning. The little captain said, "It's a turret," and her older brother said, "I can't believe anyone wouldn't know that was a turret."

But, because I helped with the sandy constructions I was thanked by the captain saying, "This is the best castle ever. That's what we need. Team-work. This is excellent."

I felt I was forgiven by letting them down about the turrets.

It took me back to my own dear ones at that age. Priceless and precious though they are in their teens (and I do like teenagers), they are so interesting when they are close to babyhood, although every age and stage brings its enjoyments.

I remind myself never to forget what miracles they are. How much I love them. How I would do anything I could do for them. How I want them to unfold and grow into the best people they can be.

I remember what it is to really savour being a mum. And someone who watches a dear young great niece and nephew on the beach and is taught by their little faces which are lit up by the thrill of achievement as they create forts and castles and half a town before the tide comes in.

A clever man said

2010-08-31T18:47:00.007+01:00

A clever man said: "Now consider the nature of American education. The primary goal of high school and colleges is to get students to understand and integrate ideas and facts from a variety of disciplines in order to enrich their lives and prepare them for the real world. Like all teachers, I secretly hope that each of my eager students will assimilate what I tell them and, when I meet them later in life, profusely thank me for changing their world views. Why does this so rarely happen? The answer may lie, in part, in the distinction between confronting and being confronted by events. As a teacher, for example, I lecture, or psychologically confront, a large group of students with a bewildering number of facts, theories and stories. The role of the students is to be passive recipients of information. I confront them with information; they are confronted by it. In a twisted sort of way, a lecture is like a trauma for the audience. People are passively confronted by a bewildering amount of information over which they have very little control."

Yes, I often felt battered and beaten by teachers and lecturers. Leaving class, I just wanted to recuperate from the blows.

Dr. James Pennebaker is right. It's because you're done to. You have no control. You can't jump up in the midst of the lesson and shout "Please, please, be quiet for ten minutes until my brain starts feeling more normal."

Dr. Pennebaker's experiments have demonstrated that we like to be in control, that things will be seem to us to be less traumatic if we can control them. Or, if they are traumatic, we can talk about them and thereby reduce the shocks after the events.

We had a bit of a struggle to get Pennebaker's book called 'Opening Up'. It's full of delights and goodies. It's in demand by the distant library we borrowed it from. I don't wish to let it go.

"The primary goal of high school and colleges is to get students to understand and integrate ideas and facts from a variety of disciplines in order to enrich their lives and prepare them for the real world."

I'm guessing that Dr. Pennebaker has not encountered John Taylor Gatto who would disagree that schools and colleges do any such thing. He might, however, agree with the 'preparing them for real life' bit. It always amuses me that anyone would think that you can be prepared for real life by being locked away from real life.

But, there you are, a quotation from Dr. James Pennebaker, a very clever man indeed.

We are all heroes

2010-08-21T14:06:00.014+01:00

Logically speaking, I've always been a fan of Mr. Spock. You SciFi fans will know who I mean, of course - the pointy-eared, green-blooded Vulcan of Star Trek's starship Enterprise fame.

I was a fan of logic before I really knew what logic was. Now, it strikes me that logic could be the answer to many of the world's woes.

Think of all the trouble caused by Mr. Badman and his ever-changing round of statistics last year. Think of the - sigh - late, late nights and strained eyeballs as you pondered his nifty use of the median because it gave a better and more damning result than the usual measure the mean. His choices of rotten-looking half-quoted comments. His pushing of the glories of schools. His telling us that we over-ride our children's rights of decision-making by forcing them into home education (a stupendous case of the pot calling the kettle black since no one I've ever heard of has given a child a choice about going to school).

Yes, statistics can be mean and they often don't mean what they say but can be employed to say what you mean and support your position in a meaningless way.

"I'm just being honest about the fact that few of us have the time, energy, need, or capacity to carry out to carry out Socratic missions. This is not to say we don't need more people like Socrates (or the child who declared the emperor naked). As the last six chapters have illustrated, the world is rife with charlatans, cheats, flim-flam artists, incompetents, unscrupulous careerists, and fools in high places (often with big egos). In addition, the intellectual world is not immune to politics or fashion. At times, it stampedes and at times it circles the wagons. As a result, bad things happen. We've seen plenty of examples."

Other people stampeded and circled by the enemies of your personal state would have cracked, broken, bowed down, cried and given up, said it was inevitable, muttered that you can't fight city hall, drunk some bottles of wine and whinged or otherwise ignored what seemed to be an unstoppable charge of unscrupulous careerists and fools in high place (with their big egos).

Home educators did not. They rose magnificently to the challenge. They will never be fooled again; they'll always be alert, on the scent, on the mosey down often sweet-looking paths snuffling out the bad, the threats to their children's intellectual rights of self-ownership, the springing colonies of mould that tarnish liberty.

We are, indeed, then a lazy motley lot who don't care about their children. Don't alert them to the arrows piercing freedom. Don't bother with their minds' development. What a bunch of people doing nothing at all to ensure that their children get the best of the best of everything available of what their children desire!

"So we need our skeptics and iconoclasts, our unmaskers and our sticklers for the truth. We should build monuments to these whistle-blowers in the fields of knowledge and create an annual holiday in their honour. Above all, we should listen to what they say (without losing sight of how often our trusted sources also get things right)."

I'd like a statue in our honour. I would. Perhaps a replica of Rodin's The Thinker, and a whole bunch of thinkers all thinking in different poses. One group would be doing statistical analyses, another would be blogging truth, another would be researching and writing, another would be organising events...

It would be a big statue.

We're not likely to get one, though.

"But most of us are ill-equipped to walk in Socrates' sandals, and most of the rest don't want to.
As we learned from Socrates, unmasking false experts can be hazardous to one's health. It usually involves speaking truth to (or about) power, and power didn't become power by turning the other cheek. What happened to Socrates is extreme by today's Western democratic standards, but, with the exception of stand-up comics, serious iconoclasts and unmaskers have a harder life than the rest of us (unless they are extraordinarily gifted like Richard Feynman). As the old saw says you have to go along to get along, and they don't."

Socrates died, of course. He was done to death, but he had the last laugh because he was true to himself. He didn't go along to get along. He went on his own terms. As we did. Not that we went, but we lost a lot, we suffered a lot, we surrendered so many hours of time we could have spent more agreeably with our dear ones. We gave up our time and energy to fight and pitch battle against unscrupulous careerists and fools in high places who would rob our young of their rights to form their own opinions and be their own people.

"The fact that our unmaskers and debunkers risk all that is precisely what makes them heroes."

All quotations above were taken from 'The Undercover Philosopher: A guide to detecting, shams, lies and delusions' by Michael Philips.

"In fact, Socrates once said, "I know you won't believe me, but the highest form of Human Excellence is to question oneself and others."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates

"No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race. "
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman

What have I forgotten today?

2010-08-13T21:28:00.003+01:00

Darn, I've forgotten to lock the front door and now the dog's lying in front of the inner door in front of the front door and I just can't move him because he's fast and twitching in his lovely doggy dream.

What else have I forgotten?

Well, I haven't forgotten to spend time with my youngsters. I went in to see them sleeping this morning before I uttered those awful words, time to get up, and I saw them as I saw them years ago when they were tiny. Funny how in sleep they are tiny again. I bent over them and gently kissed their beloved, blessed little heads. At least I didn't forget to do that.

I hugged H. That was something important, not forgotten, and I thanked him to go along with the hug too because he does stuff for me, and sometimes, just sometimes, I do forget to say 'thank you.' My manners, they're slipping. 'Please' was the first to go. Do you notice? No one says it anymore. A few foreign folk and elders and that's more or less it...

I think I nearly forgot to do some research, but no I did it, and read all of my favourite blog entries to catch up on what everyone is doing and admire their zest for home education and their energy doing things and thinking about things that sound so interesting.

I remembered to cradle my dear demented old darling mother's head, and tell her that everything would be all right as she looked up at me; she looks to me to fetch her shopping and pay her bills and generally take care of her. I remember to send thoughts of love to her, even when I'm not with her, and hope that, on some level, she is content and even happy.

I recall the need to stay positive, and how we all struggled last year and what a difference a few months make, but I remember how it felt to struggle and strain and stress and feel like the bottom and top were knocked off my personal egg space and how invaded and looted my life felt and how afraid I was for all the home edders starting out, and those going along and the other ones finishing, and I wondered if the finishing ones would be the last to know a precious and wondrous freedom of thought.

It is so precious, and so precarious. I hope I remember what it was like to face colonisation of our rights forever. I hope I always remember the frantic phone calls of a home ed. friend who was terrified by the unyielding and unrelenting power of the state. I remember the faith and hope and constant belief of home educators when faced with this terrible time. I recall their words, their sacrifices, their unceasing flow of doing and being in the face of a juggernaut intent on destruction.

I hope I never forget important things like those.

Now, where did I put that key?

We treat children like objects

2010-08-08T11:29:00.004+01:00

Newspapers are all out for sensational stories.

A mother, driven to distraction, wanting to keep her children safe and seeing the only way is to kill them for instance (the Riggi family). It makes a strange sort of sense for, if you're dead, as far as we know, you can't be hurt any more.

Here we have it from the mother's own lips: "Yesterday, it emerged she had previously told friends her children would ‘always come first."
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1301005/Mother-charged-murder-deaths-children-blaze-flat.html?ito=feeds-newsxml#ixzz0w0doIvNL

They were her joy. She could see the unfolding of them, like precious, amazing flowers like the miracles they were. And they were under threat.

Why?

I can surmise only, of course. I think they died because their father proposed to send them to school. A prison. A place where they couldn't and wouldn't unfold. A place where their spirits would wither and shrink.

Why?

Perhaps he saw them as a way to punish her - someone he'd loved, someone he'd wanted to live with forever, made vows to, had babies with. When love turns to hatred the casualties are worse than your own pain sometimes. Often, the casualties are the happiness of the children.

Why?

Because we see children as objects. We talk about them as if they are not there. We decide to do things with them that they cannot change or object to.

Our society treats children like objects. It demands that we stick them into school. Even babies have to be schooled at nursery. Even children who are ill have to be tutored in hospital.

All for their own good of course.

Mrs. Riggi knew this, I suspect. She knew that her babies were become pawns in the fight between herself and her husband. She knew that he would hurt her through them, as so many men choose to do when they are animated by lust for revenge and emotional pain themselves. She knew that their lives would be hurt through the rending and clawing that she and her husband were going through.

So she took them away from all of it. She kept them safe.

It's not what other people would seek to do, but it is a solution. They will never be damaged by the hell that adults would plunge them into. They will never see the day when their parents are so scoured and embittered by each other's human reactions that the children find themselves unable to trust a living soul.

You can push people too far. You can degrade, humiliate, impoverish, ridicule, isolate, annihiliate, void, damage, hurt, claw, extinguish, break and crucify a human being one step too far.

And I think that is what happened to Mrs. Riggi.

Khyra Ishaq and Ed Balls

2010-07-30T19:41:00.004+01:00

Hmmm, I have tried to avoid commenting on poor Khyra Ishaq. So many people have commented on the case and so much better than I could.

Of course, I say case because it's easier and more comfortable for me to say than to acknowledge that a young child died in dreadful circumstances at the hands of her mother and stepfather.

I think we're all guilty. Us, all of us, as human beings we are a community. We are all guilt-bearers. So many of us could have acted. Some few did, but their fault was to leave it to others to sort out. We should all be sorting these things out. We are all responsible.

Every man's or child's death diminishes all of us.

A young child's demise is always a tragedy.

Even more obvious to me is the tragedy was preventable, and caused by fear. I think that the people who dealt with Angela Gordon were frightened of her. They were afraid that she would sue them for harassment.

We have to decide what kind of people we are. If we have social workers who can intervene in a situation where they have a strong belief and a definite reason to believe that a child's life is in danger, then that is what they must do. But they must not knock on doors and hassle ordinary people trying to do the best job they can do.

We should hang our heads in shame that Khyra's death and her siblings' torture is now a game to be played between factions in Parliament.

Ed Balls is off again: 'Ed Balls, the then education secretary, wanted to force home-educating families to accept annual visits from local authority inspectors, a move that led to home-educators demonstrating to parliament. Balls, now shadow education secretary, said he strongly urged Gove to re-introduce the legislation on home education as "an urgent priority". "He will have our full support," he said.'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/jul/27/khyra-ishaq-home-education-safeguards-call

Sure that would suit your sub rosa plans, wouldn't it, Mr. Balls?

It would, however, remove the scapegoat that Birmingham SS used to justify doing little or nothing to help Khyra.

All despicable.

And Balls should be told straight that for all the Khyras who may or - as is overwhelmingly likely - WILL NOT be helped by a visit by an overworked and clueless local government person, many more children who were driven to distraction or near suicide by unsafe practices in schools WILL be forced back to those institutions of torture.

And that man will be guilty of advocating that the only escape those children, children who are suffering torture and degradation and isolation every school day, shall be denied to them.

He has been told all this. He doesn't care. It's a hobby horse. It's a dead hobby horse, flogged to death and lying in splinters on the floorboards. But he doesn't care. So long as he gets his way. So long as the game is played on both sides of the House.

Vile people.

Whatever evil did we do to deserve them?

Children's Commissioners

2010-07-26T20:39:00.004+01:00

The Children's Commissioner - frankly a terrifying combination of words and what would it mean to a child? - for Scotland is a chap called Tam Baillie. He was chosen by children.

"Since the Commissioner works for young people, he was chosen by them through a series of interviews. The interviews included questions about what he was going to do to help. There is also a website set up that enables young people to contact SCCYP."

(From Wikipedia)

Good idea since he was going to represent their views. Let the children choose.

Who chose Maggie Atkinson, the Children's Commissioner for England?

The ever-lovable Ed Balls.

"England's Children's Commissioner says she has had official confirmation that her £135,000-plus-a-year post will survive the Government-commissioned review into its value for money.
Maggie Atkinson is "extremely optimistic" about the way the independent inquiry is being carried out and says the Prime Minister's office "has already confirmed" that her post will not be abolished."

This is from http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6050874

So Maggie Atkinson believes that her role will continue.

What does this mean?

Well, I analyse it this way. Either Maggie is a fantasist who thinks that telling people her job isn't going in the abolition of overt quangos is the route to securing her cushy number for a few more years.

If she is mentally disturbed I think she is not eligible for such a role.

If she is telling the truth; however, we have proof that this government is promising reviews, carrying them out and then doing what they wanted to do in the first place. Just like the last government.

In either case, it is bad news.

In the first instance, we have a possibly delusional woman confronting children.

In the second case, this government is behaving exactly like the last government with promises to engage people and listen to what they say but, in the end, lying.

Tech does a wonderful job revisiting the charming Maggie Atkinson here:

http://freedomineducationunderthreat.blogspot.com/2010/07/maggie-maggie-maggie-out-out-out.html

Can't we do better than these dreadful people?

Anyone could do better. Anyone with moral standards that is.

Apologies

2010-07-18T20:19:00.003+01:00

Apologies. When I was young I made apologies for being young and being here.

Now I'm not so young I find that the world does not apologise to me for the times it stands on my toes.

I will not apologise for every problem or fault - mine or not - like I did when I was younger.

I will not creep around this earth seeking to have people agree that it is my right to live and be.

If they don't like it, tough.

I'm getting hard. I'm getting too old to not do things I want to do that won't hurt anyone. I am getting past apologising for my being and my dreams.

I am sorry but I don't do apologies anymore.

I do try to tell my children to be themselves and make no apologies for it. Don't live as if you are trying to please someone/anyone/everyone else.

Don't say you're sorry unless you have a genuine cause.

Don't take the weight of the rude world on your shoulders.

Live your own life. Do not live the life I might desire for you (although I try not to desire things for you and push you towards some goal that I desire). Do your own thing. The thing you have to do.

And don't apologise for doing it or being successful at doing it.

For the world is jealous and will be spiteful.

And it won't apologise because it doesn't care if it hurts you while attempting to remake you in the shape of everyone else.

My little ones, sing when you want.

Fly when you can.

Dance if it's in you.

And never apologise for your song, your flight or your dancing.

Thought you might like...

2010-07-09T19:52:00.006+01:00

Some John Taylor Gatto.

From my friend's kindly lent book, 'Weapons of Mass Instruction'. Thank you, I, for parting with it, entrusting it to me and letting me read it.

'Weapons of Mass Instruction' will blow your mind while making you cry. It is such a relief to read John Taylor Gatto's complete and utter understanding of what school is and what it is meant to do and the damage it can cause.

"School is about learning to wait your turn, however long it takes to come, if ever. And how to submit with a show of enthusiasm to the judgment of strangers, even if they are wrong, even if your enthusiasm is phony." p. 62

We're so well-mannered, aren't we? Waiting, just waiting to have our ship come in, to hop on the show boat of life, bolstered up by the Cheryl Coles of this world who happen to hit big paydirt. Yet not everyone can hit the bigtime. There isn't enough big time to go around. It's a falseness like the enthusiasm with which you fooled your teachers that you felt for their classes (if you bothered).

School teaches you to wait in line for something you're told will happen if you're good, if you behave, if you toe the line. Something that doesn't happen for most people, can never happen because there is no something to drop into the palm of your hand, even if you've laboured all your life.

You wait because that's how you were taught. We are all Englishmen and women here. We don't push to the head of the queue. We don't grab opportunities or chances because we are silently standing waiting for the right time to be told to start. The opportune moment.

We'll always be waiting.

It's a farce.

Those who refuse to wait, who go and do, who dive in; the ones who get in are the ones who get on.

Entrepreneurial. Business-like. Positive. Thrusting. Puissant. Go-getters. High flyers.

School teaches you to wait.

Home education teaches you to carpe diem, seize the moment, grab the big fish with both your outstretched hands. It instructs you in doing because you do for yourself and, in doing for yourself, it causes you to verify that your enthusiasm is genuine.

At the Hampton Court Palace Flower Show 2010, fifteen year old James Callicott is the youngest designer to participate. He's already designed gardens for family and friends. James is home educated, and he is seizing the day.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/hampton-court-flower-show/7872531/Hampton-Palace-Court-Flower-Show-2010-James-Callicott-a-bright-young-thing.html

James is a bright, young thing according to the Telegraph. An escapee from school, he has the time to concentrate on his designs and sees himself 'doing questioning gardens'. Severely dyslexic, he learned to read gardening magazines because he was interested, and otherwise he watered the strawberries in his own garden and, generally, pottered around.

I can't see James waiting in line for permission to start his life and no one is forcing him down a road he finds dusty, empty and barren.

Home education - seizing the day.

Maiden voyage

2010-07-02T18:38:00.005+01:00

Today is going to be a blog full of pain.

Today is a blog of screaming anguish.

Today is a blog of anger. Real gut-churning rage.

Today, H met an old friend from council days.

O is a man who has conducted himself always with dignity and extended friendship and kindness to everyone. He is a good man, an ordinary man.

He was made redundant today.

He wasn't given much for so many years of service. He wasn't given anything actually. He was told to leave after a meeting, all of his work is in places he knows, but nobody has asked him where his files are.

We know from this that his projects - seeming so important at the time - are to be abandoned. So he cannot even congratulate himself that he left with a loincloth of dignity, that he left with the thought that something he had given to others will help them. He cannot think that what he ever did there mattered to anyone.

His manager has gone too, having been promised a new job in the new stream-lined council - a more monied post - in the poor new council. The hit squad of bullies who were managers of people who had worked for that council are chortling today because they are accomplishing their most cherished dreams. They are getting rid of the folk who had grafted there for years. Getting rid of the 'old'. The 'old' who worked, who knew the value of a day's work for a day's wage, who cared about the people in the borough that they served.

No golden handshakes for O. No ugly clock to stand on his mantel. No fond farewells from colleagues. Nothing but emptiness for him. Shock in his kind eyes. Bewilderment. Hurt. A deep, deep pain that won't be soothed any time soon.

The ex-manager has been trying to rid the department of the 'underlings' and now he's done it. Thanks to the Coalition government.

Thanks to them, the bullies have got their way; they are happy tonight, secure in the knowledge that they have hurt a decent man, decent men and ordinary women. Families. Folk.

In the days of work, the manager-bully would never have a meeting with his underlings. He'd email them. Even though he sat five yards away. He'd use technology to distance himself from the people he was supposed to guide. Why was he a manager? Someone so useless at managing.

Why was he a manager?

Why has he been promised a job after the re-structuring?

Why are the senior staff with the big salaries staying? Why are they allowed to stay on? Haven't they done enough? Isn't it time to let them go with shock in their eyes? With no handshake, no provision for the future, no hope of another job when you're half way through your fifties because there are millions of young ones to do what needs doing and you're scrappage.

Is it all starting again? Those who are privileged ridding themselves of others who are not. Those who have much starting to kick to death - and they will cause death - those who have little.

Do we have to endure this kind of world?

Do we have to put up with it?

Do our children?

Today in Parliament, all those new people who were elected recently have been giving their maiden speeches. What they said is largely irrelevant. For what will they do to stem the pain? Will they speak for the ordinary people? The ones in shock from being scythed away from something they have known for so long, that gave them an importance of a small type? Will they change anything? In that most indifferent of chambers.

'"On reducing the deficit, Mr Dromey, a former deputy general secretary of the Unite Union, declared: "I will resist any notion of asking those who are least able to bear the burden to pay the price of the misdeeds of the bankers."
He also warned that cuts to university funding would deprive "young working-class kids" from his constituency "of the chance to become the first in their family to go to university". '

How strange it is that Harriet Harmon's husband has to be the one to say what we little people are thinking, to care what we ordinary folk are feeling, the dread we are experiencing, the bleak, black pain...

The quote is from http://news.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/hi/comment/newsid_8734000/8734105.stm

A website called democracy live. Ironic.

'I will resist any notion of asking those who are least able to bear the burden to pay the price of the misdeeds of the bankers.'

We have to band together - we have to commune - we have to protect not just our children, but each other - we have to stop punishing the innocents for the guilty - we have to open our sleeping eyes WIDE - we have to think of money as serving US not US serving money - we have to ask if men who are staggeringly rich SHOULD have the job of 'rescuing' this silly country - we have to think, and grow, and know, and change and wake up and never ever ever be fooled again.

Are we awake yet?

QUIET, PLEASE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2010-06-26T10:30:00.004+01:00

People have commented to me on my children. They usually don't say "What erudite youngsters you have given birth to, and how intelligent they are." Equally, they don't say "Oh, my, how attractive these young people are. Of course, they take after you, Danae."

Those comments would, of course, be true. Valid. Positive. Uplifting. Pleasant to listen to.

No, what has been said is this: "Your children are so quiet."

Being fond of analysis, my mind goes into overdrive when something like the above statement is uttered. I think, "Oh, sweet cauliflowers, my children are quiet. They are not noisy. They do not yell, swear, scream at earth-shattering levels of decibels, they do not feel the need to communicate with people five kilometres away by shouting full-out at them. They do not grab every opportunity to have every stranger stare malevolently at them because they are inappropriately LOUD and riotous. They take after me. I talk when I have something to say; although I have been known to rattle along or indulge in a hefty rant. I listen. I use inner and outer ears to listen.

My children have moments when they talk and it's when they want to talk. I applaud the fact that they aren't like our neighbours - thankfully, they're moving - whose (large) garden abuts onto ours and who have raised two children to scream unmercifully at the top of their capacious lungs at any and all stimuli, bang bin lids and any other intensely loud objects together, and act as the local drop-off point for what seems like thousands of other immoderate kids who are overpoweringly, head-thumpingly, gratuitously and achingly and consistently noisy.

We are generally quiet people. The world does not like quiet people. It respects listeners, but not much. It reveres shriekers and yellers and dinners (those who make a din). A favourite saying in my part of the world is 'Shy bairns get nowt' and, by the sound of it, there aren't many shy bairns around now.

When some woman says "Your children are so quiet" I know that she is making some kind of complaint. Why? What is to do with you if my children don't sound and act like yours, Mrs? I don't complain that your children are vying with the local busy airport to pollute the world with more racket so why comment on my children's peacefulness?

Really, we'd be better off living in another part of the world. Somewhere where thinking is respected and peace is encouraged. Where you yourself are valued, not for how much clamour and uproar you can funnel into other people's ringing ears.

I'll tell you a little secret. In school reports, my child was said to be quiet. I reacted with annoyance but I should have held my peace. I should have said, "Yes, I'm sure you are thankful for the thoughtful ones. They are models of good behaviour for your inconsiderate, annoying, abrasive other pupils, aren't they? Be glad that they are in your class."

Cherish the tranquil non-screamers for they will inherit the world because the government, sooner or later, will find a way to bring in a noise tax.

Until then, if you, Mrs, are tempted to criticise my children because they don't sound as cacophonous as a henyard, I say one thing to you and that is "BE QUIET!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

OFSTEDing

2010-06-19T16:03:00.006+01:00

You'll have heard about the OFSTED report on how LAs deal with home edders. That was its supposed aim; however, it said very little about how LAs deal with home edders and some LAs are just dreadful.

They want you to let them know what your child is doing. They want you to know what your child has done. They want to know how you are implementing your educational philosophy. They want to see your child to catechize him or her as he or she takes a test in English, Trigonometry and Ancient Botswanan while writing an essay on the recent lessons learned by the three main political parties on the hung Parliament, and, at the same time, signing copies of his or her new book (one of a trilogy) for a fervent and grateful public.

They don't notice the flush of health on your child's glowing cheeks. They don't see your baby's twinkling eyes as your little one realises that she can go to the toilet when she needs to (no matter if inspector is 'monitoring' or not). They don't understand the liberation that comes from no pressure and no stress when you are programmed to learn and someone forces you to learn something that you wouldn't have chosen to look at. They think that punishment drives children to receive an education when, actually, enjoyment and interest engender education in a child who chooses to educate him or herself.

Really, I can't get over the nerve of it. The LAs don't suffer any form of punishment for allowing any number of children who sit in class (or don't) and exhibit not a jot or a tittle of learning through ten-fifteen years of various teacher information-donation or other type of schooling. Yet, they demand to come into our houses and see everything that is wrong with what we do which they will then put right by returning your child to the one education - the schooling.

Where is their commentary on how badly some home educating families are treated by LAs? Where is their report on how people have had to flee the country because of the absolutely diabolical demands and bullying from the LA? Where is their acknowledgement that LAs generally have no clue about laws in place around home education? Where is their lambasting for representatives of a public body who repeatedly harass and upset families whose only fault is that they have chosen to act responsibly and take their children away from failing schools or the torment dealt out by bullies, child or adult?

OFSTED had the opportunity to tell some truth. They failed.

OFSTED had the chance to rebuke and reform the LAs. They failed.

OFSTED had an occasion to shed some light on the dark corners of LA bullying and misunderstanding of home education. They failed.

That's an 'F' from me then.

Further reading:

http://maire-staffordshire.blogspot.com/
OFSTED report link and MP Graham Stuart's blistering response

Thanks to Maire whose timely blogging in a wonderful way helps to keep me connected and calm.

And please check out this excellent expose from
http://northshropshe.wordpress.com/2010/06/19/ofsted-survey/

Tell me

2010-06-13T14:46:00.002+01:00

Tell me stories.

Tell me stories.

Tell me of the brave and true.

Tell me stories.

Exciting stories.

Tell me stories.

Tell me stories to let me find you.

Do you tell your children stories? Do you explain yourself through tales? Do you sit with a book at bedtime, making sense of the world through the dramas inscribed inside the covers?

Are your children yawning when you tell them, again and again, how you met their father or their mother?

Do they turn away when you ramble on about Grandpa's habits and little old dog that followed him everywhere? Do they listen politely when you tell them about your mother's jig in the front garden when she saw you taking a quick, sneaky photograph of her. Tell them about your triumphs, your failures, your happy times, your grey days, yourself.

Do they know where you went to school, how you felt walking up to the entrance, what you did there, who greeted you, who ignored you, what you learned?

What can the young know about you from your stories?

You give of yourself - your very deepest self - in your stories. You tell your children who you are, who you know, who you love, despise, respect, find attractive, see as humorous... You tell them more than your stories, and those stories will illuminate the love you bear them and crowd out the boring, silly, mediocre times for them.

You will be illustrated in story-form. You will pass into fable as your children tell their children the stories about you, and the stories you told them.

Wouldn't you like to be remembered in this most powerful way?

Tell them stories. Fill their ears and imagination with your stories.

Tell them stories.

Tell them stories.

Tell them about the brave and true.

Tell them stories, powerful stories.

Tell them stories to illuminate you.

The decision

2010-06-04T15:38:00.007+01:00

Phew! Hot it is outside, but, with our sort of upside down house, it's quite cool in the dining/sitting/Danae's office room.

The dog is plastered over my right foot keeping it at a reasonable temperature.

Oh, and you can tell it's half-term because it's so noisy out there.

If it were not half-term I would be feeling desperately sorry for all the poor little boiled people sat on their hard seats, taking in scorching air, attempting to stay awake because extreme heat makes one a bit sleepy.

I remember my two emerging from school wilted. Properly drooping from a place where the paint-caked windows were nailed shut against potential vandals. (Where was 'elf an' safety then, I wonder?)

I recall a friend saying that her small pre-school son slept all afternoon and that the beginning- school deadline was racing towards her and him and she didn't know what to do to keep him awake in the afternoons because he needed so much sleep every day as well as every night.

Now, of course, I'd casually suggest home education and listen to the protests and keep schtum. We'd part until the next time when she'd ask me if it was legal, how was he to be socialised, did I get any time for myself, how could she do it because she hadn't had the best education and was rubbish at Maths, and you needed to be a teacher or have a degree or... don't you?

I'd answer patiently as if it was just an ordinary conversation.

She would go away again.

Then she'd come back and say that she was considering it but what about...?

More questions and answers. A few suggestions on my part of blogs to read. A time to join a home educators' meeting. No pressure. No hard sell from me.

I don't know if E ever did think of home education for her little sleepyhead. I may have thought of it wistfully on the odd hot afternoon for my daughters. Little did I know that I'd lose friends, acquaintances, respectability, the tacit approval of authorities, the seamless flow of an average life, time to myself when we did go for it. Little did I know how a single person, with totally committed people around her, can flourish and thrive and become more, and morph into selfhood.

I knew little then.

Luke Skywalker knew he wanted to leave his home planet. He hadn't realised that he'd lose his family, friends, daily life and gain notoriety as someone different. He didn't cotton on to the fact that the authorities would endlessly mark him as a rebel and have him on one of their lists as enemy.

Would you have made that choice again, Luke Skywalker, had you known the cost?

Would I? On one of those hot afternoons, when sticky, furnace-cheeked girls slowly ambled towards me on baking asphalt and heaving little doses of intense wavy air into their lungs did the switch lie deep in my brain ready to flip?

Was I ready then to step out of 'normality'? To face down LAs? To argue with politicians for the basic liberty to educate as one sees fit? To remove my family from the flow of the average?

Yes, I was. But not quite then. It wasn't just one thing that was the decider. It was a thousand.

The decision to home educate is not usually made in a twinkling of a petulant eye but it is a long complicated process.

I'm glad we made that decision. Despite everything, I'm glad.

The fight be over

2010-05-30T13:46:00.002+01:00

That night I celebrated. I really did. I raised an imaginary glass to everyone who had fought so effectively and so brilliantly, and I toasted them. I stopped shouting, "Let me at 'em!" Then I cried. Not a sobbing outburst, but a few tears made their way up from the ducts in my eyes and rolled over the barricade of my lower lids to thread down my cheeks.

Mixed in with exhilaration was - what? - a little disgruntlement. A little more disbelief. A slight case of why doesn't someone come along to give us a medal, even a tiny medal? Why doesn't someone acknowledge that we've fought back the powers of would-be darkness? I expect poor old Gandalf, Aragorn, and the hobbits felt much the same when they arrived home from their journey. And everything inside them was changed, and everything around them was changed.

I'm talking about a bitty while ago when the CSF Bill that we, home educators, would pay heavily for was washed-up and swirled away after ALL THAT STUFF we did and said and wrote and read and felt and struggled for and protested against.

And now I feel... aged... betrayed... tired... colder... more determined NOT to let stuff like this keep happening.

If Lord Lucas is right, at some time in the - hopefully - distant future, like Dracula the same blood-drained arguments will arise from their washed-up coffin and, like the poor brutalised humans in True Blood, we'll be having our necks forcibly bared to accommodate the bureaucratic fangs again.

We will be advised to wear collars of invincible arguments; we will be polishing our children's fine minds faster than ever, including studs of law, politics and how to win an argument arguments in their customary neckware.

It may be sooner. It may be later. But it will come. Because people are just like that. Because orcs never quite die out. Because, although they don't mind freedom for themselves, a lot of bureaucrats and sinister movers and shakers in the power circle don't want it for other people, let alone other people's children.

It's a lot harder to fight evil that is unrecognised as vile.

It's a lot harder to fight the failings and leanings of society towards totalitarianism.

It's lovely when the fight is, for this moment, over.

But you still miss it. It has changed you. You can't go back. You reflect. You think on it. You recall when. You shiver at what if it had.

Be good if I could go down to the Grey Havens and potter aboard one of the ships with the white sails and set out for the West.

But life isn't like that, and there is subtle evil still to identify and counter.

"Let me at 'em!"

Kinder

2010-05-23T19:51:00.004+01:00

Strange how the US and Britain are so coterminous these days.

What the Americans do we seem to copy or amend. "No Child Left Behind" shout the Americans. "Every Child Matters," we reply, nodding in agreement.

From
http://www.newhorizons.org/trans/jaekel.htm

"Our nation is at risk," the report stated. "The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people."

After hearing from President Reagan's blue ribbon commission in "A Nation at Risk" I had an epiphany:

Alternative education could end the rising tide of mediocrity if it was available on a large scale. Alternative education contains the nutrients children and youth need to excel: an understanding for the way childhood works, intimacy and close-knit community ties, and a well-rounded curriculum with arts and social-emotional learning in the core curriculum. "

Yes, pet, we've been stating that for some time. How can you fit an generic education to each individual child? You can't.

Joan Jaekel goes on:

"I am a systems thinker, and understand that when a system senses the need to self-correct, it tends to first swing to the opposite extreme. You decide to go on a diet and pig out on pork chops. It wasn't surprising, therefore, that "A Nation At Risk" resulted in the federal government taking over with high-stakes standardized testing, scripted teaching, the narrowest possible curriculum, and sanctions and rewards, not only for the child but for the teachers, the whole school, and, eventually, entire districts. "

We've experienced that too. Here, the SATS are under fire from those who are required to administer them, but really one test more or less in a constant stream of assessment... what difference does ONE test make when they are legion. Danae shrugs.

"Our efforts to 'reform' public education out of its mediocrity by imposing strict centralized rules has resulted in even greater mediocrity and our goal to "leave no child behind" is as elusive as before. "

Indeed, Joan Jaekel. The goal of not leaving any child behind or stating that every child matters is as elusive as ever because it is an undefined goal. What does it mean? Where do you even start defining such blatantly ridiculous rhetoric? How can you want to sweep every child along on a tide of achievement when a) you haven't defined achievement and b) society is a pyramid with the majority of its citizens being a platform for the lucky minority who are maintained in their place at the summit by the labour of the rest.

But it's all words, isn't it?

Back to Ms. Jaekel:

"Mediocrity is the inevitable result of a system that is too closely controlled and micromanaged from the top. Ironically we, as a compassionate society, send 'at-risk' children to schools that eliminate all forms of 'competition' so that it will be 'fair' to everyone, but because of these traits, they tend to be 'fair' but mediocre.

Excellence happens when a system has room to self-organize and self-correct. The anti-individualistic, un-personalized design of the system itself undermines a sense of craftsmanship and personal commitment that results in excellence."

Yippee! Precisely, Joan. What we home educators are saying is leave them alone to get on with it - not as a lax parent would by providing minimal childcare (a neat and minging insult from Mr. Badman to autonomous education) but by parents being there, available, involved, engaged, helpful, supportive, interested in and encouraging of the youngsters' learning.

Sheesh. It's so simple. Mass produced isn't good enough any more. Individually crafted people, that's in vogue now and forever more.

" We have to look at the challenge to fund every individual child's education as a necessary commitment by citizens towards our collective, healthy future. This needs to not just be an ideal, but a practical reality. As Terry Mollner, co-founder of the Calvert Family of Socially Responsible Mutual Funds and one of the earliest pioneers of socially responsible investing suggests, capitalism, unrestrained, inevitably leads to poverty for some just as socialism, unrestrained, inevitably leads to mediocrity."

We've consumed under capitalism for some time. It doesn't work. It doesn't. If you wish to stay human and believe that every soul has the right to be the best it can be, then capitalism isn't the way.

The film-maker Michael Moore's excellent documentary - Capitalism: A Love Story (I hope you saw it last night or video-taped it or will buy the DVD) - points this out.

"Michael Moore's "Capitalism: A Love Story" comes home to the issue he's been examining throughout his career: the disastrous impact of corporate dominance on the everyday lives of Americans. But this time the culprit is much bigger than General Motors, and the crime scene is far wider than Flint, Michigan."

As one interviewee said she doesn't know how they sleep at night. I always think how many millions do you need to have a 'good' life? Don't they know that public service - to give of yourself to help another human being - is that which makes us happy?

As for socialism, we've seen Mr. Balls (how's your new campaign going, Ed?) as proponent of socialism and he would force children back or into schools to cleanse them of their unique qualities and roll them out as dough under the cookie-cutting National Curriculum.

What we have now in schools doesn't suit PEOPLE.

I'll be watching the US for more encouraging signs like the poor folk who were evicted returning to squat in their own houses and the ex-workers in a factory staging a sit-in to get their company benefits restored (cheered on by President Obama).

The banks have had enough out of us. The meddling politicians have sculpted and resculpted the system enough. The likes of BECTA and Ed Balls have told us what to do with our children's education enough.

We're tired of being poor and we're weary of being mediocre.

And, Lord knows, we've had enough of it all.

Identity

2010-05-16T15:09:00.005+01:00

A.C. Grayling today solidified some vague feelings I've had slumbering in my breast.

I'll tell you what I've been mulling over. You might guess from the title of this blog entry. It's identity.

In his book Liberty in the Age of Terror, Grayling points out - as, of course, is plain when you give it some thought - that we are all layered identities. I am not just my name, address, phone number, eye pupil measurements and fingerprints: I am, amongst other things, a mother, a partner, a daughter, a citizen, an enfranchised member of society, a political activist (thanks to the Labour Party), a sometime reader of New Scientist, a one-time (poor) guitar player, a listener, a dog owner and dog walker, an irate writer of letters to various newspapers, a chocolate lover, a home educator and a non-car owner.

That's to mention a few.

So I'm not just a collection of dubious and soulless statistics in the land of plastic cards. I have standing in other ways in this world, and I have various identities to cloak myself in when I deal with miscellaneous and sundry facets, individuals, groups or institutions. The more identities I have the more layered and interesting I become as a person and the more I can draw from the identities to both support me and present me to the outer reality.

To choose to box me into one area, for example, to call me a home educator (and nothing else) is to deny me a wholeness. To corral me into one enclosure is to make me less of a human. It may help you to define me, but it doesn't help me to be myself in all my complicated glory.

More complex human beings are interesting and they expand human consciousness. Shallow and simplistic identities restrict our reach, and reduce the holistic view of a person to the parts that person plays in the dance with the outer world. To see a being as only one thing is to lessen
him or her.

Thanks A.C. Grayling for helping me to condense my misgivings at the idea of identity cards. Not only do they fail in their stated function of reducing terrorism, but they increase the already intrinsic tendency of people in society to regard me as a mechanistic unit.

Identity is not catered for in schools, it is denigrated and denied. All pupils must function as one or conform to the expected. Only in home education are the various layers of identities in one person nourished and encouraged. Yet another reason that home education is better for the young than schooling: it empowers them, and allows them time and space to grow their identities.

Home-grown identities and complex, intriguing human beings – compliments of education outside school.

Dandelion - thoughts of Spring

2010-05-10T15:25:00.007+01:00

Dents-de-lion.

Teeth of the lion.

All over the gardens, the grass verges and the patches of spare ground.

Heartily disliked by some people.

Pretty little things, the yellow flowers, aren't they?

Cheerful, gorgeous yellow.

You can see why they were called the teeth of the lion when you study the serrated-edged leaves.

Even the seeds are rather attractive - light and feathery. They float free on the slimmest breeze.

Dandelions.

All over. Everywhere.

Can't tell them apart.

I can't.

They all look the same and act the same.

I'm wondering if they have a pecking order? If the biggest flowered ones are the bosses? If the palest green-stemmed ones are subject to cyberattacks?

I wonder if you're a dandelion, and you don't grow up in the 'right' neighbourhood, you're shunned and shamed and called nasty names or ignored.

They're clones, of course, are dandelions.

Essentially, they're all the same. Generally speaking, they're identical. All one. Alike to the very DNA.

One day microbial predators - because the dandelions are clones - will unlock the door to their DNA, and move in for a takeover. The dandelions will be helpless. They'll be wiped out. No more pretty yellow flowers perking up near the shed or making themselves at home amongst the vegetables in the allotment.

So, in the flowering plant world, you're better off being a lily or a thistle etc.

Individual, different.

Schools remind me of dandelions. All uniform, all behaving the same way. Feeding off the same mind food.

If something were to go wrong, schools might have churned out dandelions - er - students who were unable to do anything about the wrongness. Schools might be taken over and disappear. Denizens of the schools could be paralyzed by non-thinking, by disjointed, unconnected gobbets of meaningless 'knowledge' and incapable of organising blobs of knowledge into one whole that provides a solution to a threat.

The graduates of schools might be so demoralised and disorganised that they would fail. I believe you can see these things in the political system at the moment. Confident people are not welded to the past (glorified as 'tradition'), but duck and dive to accommodate the present and are adept at predicting the most rewarding path into the future.

However, back to dandelions. Get rid of them and the world will probably not end. Get rid of all flowering plants and the planet will be in trouble, I think.

So let's accept flowers in all their glorious clothing and colours. You never know when the humble thistle will colonise an empty niche and conquer its particular part of the world.

You never know when you'll need a good thistle or a good alternative method of education like HE.

The teacher trap

2010-05-02T22:10:00.003+01:00

Condemned out of their own mouths:

"In July, MPs on the cross-party schools select committee argued for teachers who are the victims of malicious allegations to have their records wiped clean to stop the claims permanently spoiling their reputations. The presumption of innocence until proven guilty was at risk, they warned."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/may/02/headteachers-parents-fines-false-complaints

A few malicious parents are making false claims, are they?

So let's fine 'em.

The poor teachers can't hack being falsely accused, it seems.

They should come to home educators to find out how to deal with it. Home edders can tell them how to suffer all the slings and arrows with style and grace.

Now, dear teacher, have you been accused of something by that 'delinquent' kid and his family? Did the accusation go on your record? Are you madder than hell? Hot under the collar as Hades? Feel despoiled and trampled on?

Will you now shout that you have a right to the presumption of innocence?

The right that you didn't mind denying all home educators recently. You didn't shout about it then, did you? Weren't too bothered if EVERY home educating family was checked for abuse, eh? Stuff the presumption of innocence - they're all guilty!

Maybe we will extend you the same courtesy. Maybe we will say:

NO SMOKE WITHOUT FIRE!

IF YOU'VE NOTHING TO HIDE YOU'VE NOTHING TO FEAR!

Remember all that?

Perhaps not because it wasn't YOUR reputation that time, was it, teacher?

Didn't matter so long as YOU retain your basic right to one of the basic rights our law gives us.

I'm all right, Jack, you mutter. You can go hang.

And teachers' reputations. Well, well, we must preserve them, mustn't we? Can't go accusing someone without any reason, just for the devil of it, can we? THAT might destroy their credibility and land them in a heapin' helpin' of trouble. It might even hurt their feelings and damage their peace of mind. Could put the kibosh on their careers too.

Such a pity.

You can dish it out, but you can't take it.

Hypocrisy is alive and well in Britain.

What am I? What do I learn?

2010-04-30T15:14:00.007+01:00

Children with Asperger's Syndrome often have trouble at school.

I know of one in particular.

He attempts to be himself which is a perfectly reasonable stance to take; however, through being himself he does not conform to what school wishes him to be and that is a malleable, biddable pupil.

Witness the word pupil.

Pupil, student, schoolchild, class, sixth former, kindergarten, freshman, graduate

All words for children or collections of children or young people.

A boy with Asperger's, R, doesn't like school.

He shows signs of physical stress and anxiety, and stays off a lot.

When he is there, the school responds with warnings about behaviour then detentions.

Detention. Word for imprisonment, punishment.

The medium is the message.

"...the most important impressions made on a human nervous system come from the character and structure of the environment within which the nervous system functions; that environment itself conveys the critical and dominant messages by controlling the perceptions and dominant messages of those who participate in it. Dewey stressed that the role an individual is assigned is an environment - what he is permitted to do - is what the individual learns. In other words, the medium itself, i.e., the environment is the message. 'Message' here means the perceptions you are allowed to build, the attitudes you are enticed to assume, the sensitivities you are encouraged to develop - almost all of the things you learn to see and feel and value. You learn them because your environment is organised in such a way that it permits or encourages or insists that you learn them."

From Teaching As a Subversive Activity, p. 28-29, talking about Marshall McLuhan's 'the medium is the message'.

So what does the boy learn?

R learns that he cannot be himself. His 'I' is unacceptable and it is unacceptable to him to substitute a mask for the 'I' which he expresses. He learns that he is 'outside' the zone of approval. Many other children are 'inside' the zone and so receive positive reinforcement for their non-'I'/conforming behaviour.

R cannot do that. He sees no need to conform. He is true to 'I'.

Is this boy learning to be accepted?

Since he is frequently punished, no.

Is he learning to conform?

Quite the opposite.

Is he learning that the 'I' of him is OK?

No, anything but.

What is he learning?

R is learning that people who are supposed to guide and look after him in the school do not. He learns that it is OK for those who have a duty of care towards him not only to fail him but to actively seek to undermine him, abuse him and bully him. R knows now that it is fine for another human being to abuse him, and he realises that he has no power to fight back or protest against the maiming of 'I'.

All that the teachers are teaching in the way of useful knowledge is being lost for R because the boy is employing all his psychic energy in the constant battle to try to keep himself safe.

The battleground is his soul. His very being.

Anything extra is draining away. Maths, English, Science, all going to waste.

When will the school realise?

Schools do not realise. They are set up to induce conformity. They will seek to punish those who retain 'I'. They will bring in educational psychologists/counsellors to label the boy in order to shift the blame from school to boy and boy's parents/home. They will muster their weapons: other children, social workers, teaching assistants, even police.

The school will continue to fail the boy.

The parent will revolt at some stage of the closing of professional ranks and seek to home educate the boy.

That day cannot come soon enough.

During the non-coercive education process inside and outside the home base the child will receive reinforcement for 'I'. The 'I' will strengthen and recover. This process may take years - post traumatic stress syndrome is not easy to alleviate.

One day the boy will see he is 'I' and 'I' is worthy and strong and has its own place in the world.

Home education - putting the 'I' in CHILD

Understanding home education

2010-04-21T20:40:00.003+01:00

I always have trouble understanding people who say that they don't understand home education.

What don't you understand?

It is the UNHERD alternative to HERD schooling.

It is the choice of children who are given a choice.

It is the unfettered voice of children who are respected.

It is the fun in learning.

It is the chance to have enough time to develop expertise in something you like to do, and are good at to start with.

It is the opportunity to do nothing on days when anything you do goes badly because you are too ill or tired to do anything.

It is the route whereby life can throw unexpected bonuses in your path and you are there to pick them up.

It is the way to mature.

It is freedom from coercion.

It is saving your hearing from the countless incidences of ear-bashing racket in a classroom.

It is the imbibing of nature in all its beauty and seasons and changes and subleties.

It is really getting to know your environment.

It is stretching and growing in safety.

It is life and aliveness.

It is learning to know the wonders of the universe in reality rather than through the medium of another's mind or books.

It is the way of the future.

Home education.

You can't beat it - so join it.

Religion

2010-04-13T00:32:00.004+01:00

Labour needles religion and those who practice it.

Have you noticed?

Faith schools are attacked:

"That Mr Brown has been willing to tolerate a campaign against faith schools in England that he would not countenance in his own country is another reason for deploring what has been done since June 2007, when Mr Balls was given charge of the English education system. This newspaper published striking evidence earlier this week of the extent to which faith schools are suffering under the admissions rules he introduced in 2008. Over the past six months, more than 30 have been investigated by the Government's admissions adjudicator, and censured for doing what you would expect them to do: ensuring that their intake represents the faith they were founded to serve. "

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/benedict-brogan/6983794/The-crusade-against-faith-schools-is-an-attack-on-our-freedom.html

You would expect a faith school to accept children of the same faith into their fold. To expect anything else is a nonsense.

"With his witch hunt Balls hopes to appeal to an influential constituency that lies beyond his party stalwarts. The secular establishment views religion as a wilful rejection of social liberalism and science. They joyfully report any incident that seems to support their thesis, and conveniently ignore any counter-argument. "
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/6969468/Why-does-Labour-hate-faith-schools.html

And again from the above:

"The fight for our faith schools goes to the heart of our society. At stake is our understanding of education. Should it be a tool for social engineering or a consumer service? Should it ensure equality or fairness? Government policy promotes neither.

Ed Balls thinks nothing of stomping on the rights of Christian, Jewish or Muslim parents to raise their child in a school environment that matches the morals-based approach of the home. He so loathes the notion of religious-based education that he prefers to tolerate Britain's increasing social inequality, which leaves the well-connected to flourish and the children of the humble and disadvantaged ill-equipped to hold down any but the most menial jobs."

Is this the motivation behind the animus against home educators? Is Ed Balls really afraid that home edders all over England and Wales are busily inculcating decency and morality into their young via the teaching of religious principles?

Is it his business?

Well, no, not one bit. When did government start to dictate religious instruction or belief? Isn't that a free choice for every man, woman and child? Can't you be allowed to make up your own mind which religion to follow or whether, indeed, to follow a religion at all?

Or is it even more sinister a move to alienate people from their humanity, their acts of kindness motivated by a belief in a God, their togetherness fostered by the knowledge that they are all one?

Does it make sense to slice apart a deep feeling that God cares about you and knows you? Will it improve anyone's life to be torn from the body that they have chosen to join?

Belief in God restricts the worst of human impulses, to maim and hate, to conquer and degrade other human beings.

By separating people from their choice to believe in whatsoever they choose, a government can fracture lives and disorder behaviour.

But maybe that creates better consumers because if you empty a person of religion or, at least, the ability to believe in something bigger and better than himself, you create a black hole of discontent to be filled with consumables. That is really what government wants. A race of slaves to the machine they make themselves slave to buy.

God help them.

A hit! A palpable hit!

2010-04-07T20:28:00.005+01:00

I wasn't going to sneer.

I wasn't going to sneer at Mr. Balls, at the DCSF, at the ECM crazed loons, at the numpties on tv and radio, at the parents who thought it was all right if their fellow citizens had their homes invaded by a bunch of lame-brained LA officials.

I wasn't.

But I've changed my mind.

You're all washed-up.

I knew it wouldn't pass.

Because we, collectively, WE, everyone who fought, who racked their brains, who wrote to their MPs, who emailed and put pen to paper to write letters and talked to Lords and Ladies, to statisticians, to stars, to friends and to foes, everyone who fought made one huge GANDALF and shouted with a mighty voice:

"YOU SHALL NOT PASS!"

So it hasn't.

Celebrate the victory. Today, celebrate.

You're the first people to really fight for freedom in a long while in this country. You're the first to know that freedom is in jeopardy and, these days, the danger comes from the quiet whisperers of Children's Services, of safeguarding, of aims and visions from Councils, of the terrifying tyranny of schools, and from the deadened souls of bureaucrats.

We live to fight on. We fight on to live and breathe the breath of freedom into our daughters and our sons so that they, in their turn, will know how to fight for what matters most.

LONG LIVE HOME EDUCATION - the way of the future.

LONG LIVE HOME EDUCATION - to each child, his own.

LONG LIVE FREEDOM OF CHOICE IN EDUCATION - the world is your oyster, children.

Bally fine job, chaps.

Carry on.

Conversation as we know it

2010-04-04T10:56:00.010+01:00

For the last few days I have been off the netwaves because a flood in a BT exchange knocked off our internet.

It's amazing what happens.

We talk more. We all talk more. To each other.

Y and I discussed the shortcomings of Dr. Who and, why oh why, don't they get to interesting other planets but seem to end up in London or Cardiff each episode. She read a Dr. Who book and was seriously absorbed. We talked of many things after that... cabbages and kings...

E and I went over her second marked assignment for her Open University Law course (she got a high A on this and on the first assignment, and the tutor said some very complimentary things about her writing style).

We all hung out together. We did housework, and we talked about the changes we are making to our world and those we wish to make. Y scraped walls because the painter and decorator is in next week, and we spoke about religion (well, it is Easter). She went with me to my mother's who was in a questioning mood about 'where we go when we die' and 'what is the soul and where is it?'

The girls played some games, learning Chinese history from those games during their fun breaks. They stopped for more chats.

It's called 'purposive conversation' - the art of talking, well respected in our society. We reward everyone who can talk - even if they don't do it that effectively. This is a deeper kind of talking, though, it develops your thought processes, it extends your knowledge, it deepens your feeling for others and helps you to see 'where they are coming from'.

"... research that shows that high achieving 'genius' children have a background of both individualised attention and purposive conversational learning, which are found to be major factors in their accelerated intellectual development."

http://edheretics.gn.apc.org/EHT010.htm

Not that I particularly want to have given birth to genius children, but I get a warm feeling when I realise that I am doing my best for my young while talking to them. And enjoying myself too because they are really interesting people and I learn a lot from them.

Do you think it's too late for me to turn into a high achieving genius?

A topic for another discussion perhaps.

What's wrong with Children's Rights?

2010-03-26T20:07:00.010Z

Laudable idea, children's rights, isn't it?

Really, without children having rights, I wouldn't be allowing my two to stay up late or to buy what they want with their own money. I would be tempted to sell them into slavery to fund my world cruise.

Badman, of course, defends our children's rights to, well, be talked to by strangers in their own homes. He defends their right to go to school, whether or not the children actually wish to. He wishes to bypass a parent's right to speak for his or her own child - and it is ridiculous to expect that any parent should be cognizant of his or her child's ideas, thoughts and feelings - to manipulate the gift of children's rights to - er - exploit children's inability to reason out an ulterior motive on the part of an 'authority'.

Children's rights are a part of this government's desire to 'safeguard' children. Not all children apparently though.

The Children's Rights Alliance for England (CRAE's) legal director, Katy Swaine said:

"The UK’s readiness to lock up children and keep them in unsafe conditions – whether in prison or immigration detention - is a national scandal of which we should all feel deeply ashamed. Unless the present Government takes urgent action, its legacy will be to leave us with thousands of vulnerable children locked up unnecessarily in unsafe conditions, with still no public inquiry into any child death in custody nor into the unlawful use of physical force on children. How long must children wait before the Government finds the courage to stand up for them and meet its legal obligations?

High aspirations – for all children?

All the main political parties express high aspirations for the nation’s children. However, these aspirations do not always extend to all children. In his 2007 Children’s Plan, the UK’s first Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families set out a ten-year strategy for making England the ‘best place in the world for children and young people to grow up’. This cannot be achieved until the challenge of reforming the juvenile justice system is wholeheartedly taken on by Government at the highest level, and until children’s best interests are truly prioritised in the immigration system.

Following the tragic death of Baby Peter, the Government has again keenly focused attention on improvements to the child protection system, recognising that the best way to keep children safe is to respect their rights – including their right to be heard. However, despite 30 child deaths in custody since 1990 and overwhelming evidence of the harm caused to children by immigration detention, we have so far seen nothing like the same strong leadership from Government Ministers on behalf of children deprived of their liberty.

Immigration detention of children – a national scandal

They pushed me on the floor and got my hands behind me… then they took me to the van. I was on my own in the van and I didn’t know what was happening to my family. (11 year-old child, UK, 2009)

In 2008 the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child criticised the UK for its continued detention of children and young people for immigration purposes. Yet despite heavy criticism and clear evidence that detaining children and their families is deeply damaging for children and young people, the Government’s policy remains unchanged. "

http://www.crae.org.uk/news-and-events/news/why-do-they-have-to-put-us-in-cages-girl-aged-11-uk-2009.html

Once again, it is only SOME children who have rights or whose rights are respected. Those of home educators'. Our children are in a privileged position indeed.

And, again:

"Official figures show that children are restrained an average of 656 times a month in the English and Welsh juvenile secure estate. Two inspectorate reports published this year reveal that shocking restraint practices continue in child prisons. In relation to HMYOI Cookham Wood, inspectors describe ‘an unsafe and poorly controlled environment’ with high levels of use of force and a ‘safeguarding policy’ which remains ‘largely unimplemented.’

Every Child Matters? Well, only when they are being used as political footballs.

Leaving aside the fact that the average evolved state finds it abhorrent in the extreme to maltreat children in any way, even when the children are being punished, does the fact that home educated children would, under another Labour government, be regimented and overlooked add anything to the home educated child's life. Apparently not, says American research (obtained from super-blogger Kelly Green and Gold):

" The authors of this study find no evidence from their analysis that supports the claim that states should exercise more regulation of homeschool families and students in order to assure better academic success in general or improved higher-education success in particular. On the contrary, the findings of this study are consistent with other research findings that homeschool students perform well academically – typically above national averages on standardized achievement tests and at least on par with others on college-admissions tests – and do so regardless of whether they live in a state that applies low, moderate, or high governmental regulation of homeschooling.”

http://www.academicleadership.org/emprical_research/State_Regulation_of_Homeschooling_and_Homeschoolers_SAT_Scores.shtm

So, given five minutes or so of touring the internet, Mr. Badman, there is evidence to suggest that bug-eyed inspectors make not a jot or a tittle worth of difference to the process of home education. Isn't that evidence that it should be dropped? The whole idea should be kicked into the long grass and forgotten, along with manicuring all our green spaces, thereby contaminating eco-systems, and removing benches near beauty spots where elderly people are happy to spend some time enjoying the views.

Even this - the European Convention on the Exercise of Children's Rights - says that the child, after expressing his or her views has the right to be informed of the possible consequences of compliance with these views and the possible consequences of any decision, not just to be consulted or to express his or her views (and then be ignored) :

A. Procedural rights of a child
Article 3 – Right to be informed and to express his or her views in proceedings
A child considered by internal law as having sufficient understanding, in the case of proceedings before a judicial authority affecting him or her, shall be granted, and shall be entitled to request, the following rights:
to receive all relevant information;
to be consulted and express his or her views;
to be informed of the possible consequences of compliance with these views and the possible consequences of any decision. "

http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/EN/Treaties/html/160.htm

The intention of this convention is quite clearly to be informed and instructed by the child's opinions, not just to manoevre a child into saying what you wish the child to say.

From the magnificent book, What's Wrong with Children's Rights:

"... the law should refrain from intruding on the ordinary practices of adults responsible for children."

I believe it can be argued that many children in many countries need the protection of the United Nations Rights of the Child. I think it can also be said that the United Kingdom, other than for incarcerated children, does not need the protection of the UNCRC. In elevating children's rights above parental duties, we run the risk of losing the cohesion that a family gives and the circle of protection and safety that the majority of familes afford their young, especially from the overzealous depradations of the state.

One law to rule us all

2010-03-20T20:18:00.008Z

We are supposed to follow the law. Be ruled by it, as it were.

Home educators generally do follow it. They usually are ruled by it. They stand on the law. They know it, memorise it, recite it, cling to it. Their bulwark, their friend, their line-in-the-sand, the law.

Local authorities do not. They regularly flout the law. They lie. They demand what is not in their legal duty to demand. They harass and they harry. They treat caring parents like criminals.

In this, they are aided and abetted by everyone who tacitly allows them to harass and harry home educators: everyone who knows and chooses not to react, everyone who encourages them by not speaking out, everyone who allows them to bully and harass and harry and lie to home edders.

So why is it one rule for home educators and another for local authorities?

And, why, if the law should change according to the Children Schools and Families Bill, for example, will local authorities be rewarded for regularly harassing, lying to and harrying a segment of the law-abiding population?

And why should a segment of the population follow the law when the local authorities do not?

What profit is there in following the law if local authorities' representatives, who are also supposed to follow the law as we do, regularly break it?

They break the law and are rewarded by the promise of more powers.

We keep to the law and are punished by the law-breakers who incur more powers to harass and harry us.

It's enough to make you think that crime does pay, that breaking the law will result in someone being rewarded, not punished, not stopped....

It's enough to make you say NO, isn't it?

With apologies to J.R.R. Tolkien, here is a mangled quotation from 'The Fellowship of the Ring':

One law to rule us all
One law to find them
One law to bring them all
And in the darkness bind them

Butchers to investigate vegetarianism

2010-03-18T16:39:00.004Z

The Daily Grind, March 18th, 2010

Reporter: John Winston

'The government award-winning butcher, Mr. Gordon Gristle, is to head up a study of vegetarianism announced the Department of Scraps, Chops and Fillets today.

"We are particularly concerned about the increasing number of children who cannot even drink milk at school because their parents won't allow them to," said Mr. Gristle, a long time member of the British Butchers' Association. "We believe that local butchers' and dairies' representatives should visit every home to ask mothers whether or not they serve meat and milk to their children. Perhaps we should be consulting the children privately on whether they wish to continue their lives as vegetarians."

A British Butchers' Association (BB Ass.) spokesperson said: "We are delighted that the government is finally taking a proactive stance on this issue. Children are being denied good protein and animal fats in their meals at home, and we are determined to make sure that young people are receiving the best nutrition to keep them healthy and achieving."

A member of the BB Ass., Mrs June Carver, said today: "My neighbours are vegetarians, and their six kids are constantly roaming the streets as pasty-faced as poverty-stricken waifs. I invited them in for a good roast on Sunday, but they said they weren't supposed to eat meat. Never mind the parents' rights - it's the nippers I'm concerned about. Someone should ask them if they want to eat meat. I'm all for freedom of choice but forcing children not to do something as natural and wholesome as enjoying a good, healthy, tasty dinner of beef and potatoes with lashings of gravy is wrong."

The Secretary of State for the Department of Scraps, Chops and Fillets, Emmett Hamm, has announced a review into vegetarianism to report in two months. "I am delighted that Mr. Gristle has agreed to chair the review into vegetarianism. The government believes that all children should have a safe and healthy diet to ensure that they grow up strong enough to undertake their economic duties to the state. Of course, vegetarianism is an important part of the lives of a minority of families, and we support it, but we are concerned about the small number of families in which the children have rickets - which can occur when children consume no milk - in a number of serious review cases. We believe that meat-eating is a robust and family-friendly way for parents to deliver nutritious food and to bond with their children, and to help them to meet the five government objectives as detailed in the 'Five Governmental Objectives to Help Children Live Healthy Lives' white paper."

The Vegan Society's press officer, Mr. Joel Green, said: "There are plenty of alternatives to meat that can deliver a healthy and balanced diet. The review will cost the taxpayer approximately £250,000 at a time when this country cannot afford spurious investigations into non-problems.
Perhaps the government will reconsider this course of action as it is clearly not in the public interest to pursue it."

Mini-blog 4: Now the DCSF are going to research

2010-03-17T11:41:00.003Z

Well, now, the DCSF are going to research home education, are they?

A difficult task since probably very few home edding families want to be researched. A lot of families won't participate which may lead to a skewed sample.

And an impossible one when you know that the people researching you actually are plotting to kill your way of life.

And I won't co-operate because I know you won't do it properly. You'll have a strong case of confirmation bias and that means that whatever you think about home education at the beginning of the 'study' is what you'll miraculously find at the end.

And what is the point since you intend to stamp out home education anyway?

The whole thing looks like a) shutting the barn door after the horse has been sighted six miles down the road in another farmer's field and b) a vendetta against home educators and c) a huge and unnecessary burden on the already-plundered and anaemic public purse.

The law of the institution

2010-03-10T19:11:00.013Z

It came like a flash of a bolt from the blue this evening.

Institutions always protect themselves.

Every institution behaves like an organism, and what an organism does is struggle to stay alive.

Every institution wants to stay alive; more than that, it wants to grow and acquire more power, more reach.

Schools are institutions. When you challenge them, they recoil from you. They argue the toss. They subvert your power. They deny culpability. They seek to extend themselves into your personal lives, your home territory.

According to the Office for National Statistics, in December 2008, in the UK, the average person worked 37.0 hours full time. The average five year old in school is supposed to put in ten minutes of homework time each evening so he or she works 32.5 hours (9 am to 3:30) in school and has 50 minutes of homework in a week. That's 33.3 hours an average five year old spends working a week. I've not allowed for breaks because those can be as stressful for some children as the actual schooling part can.

It's even worse for older children. At 15 or 16 the student can expect to devote at least 2.5 hours a day to home work. Therefore a young person works 45.0 hours per week, longer than his dad or mum spends grafting for mortgage money.

The institution of school not only controls with homework, it demands that your child's attendance record is perfect, unmarked by days off sick or visits to the dentist. Parents are now fined, or threatened with fines, if they decide to give their toiling young a holiday in off-peak time.

I recall the ferocity of attacks delivered by two representatives of my daughter's first middle school. The battery was swingeing and nasty, hitting below the belt, nearly reducing me to a state of impotent ire. These bombardments were directed at me because one of the teachers misheard me saying that I would sue the school (which now I would do) for failing their duty of care. What I actually had said was that I was considering suing the parents of my daughter's tormentors.

The institution took exception to my attitude. In a classroom, two teachers stood in front of me and slandered my daughter and myself after luring me in by telling me we were going to 'discuss the bullies.' The bullies were never discussed. They weren't the problem. My daughter was for being bullied. I was for defending her and righteously demanding a swift end to the abuse because bullying is abuse.

Institutions defend themselves. They don't care about your child. They don't care for your child. They don't defend your child's rights; they are only interested in protecting themselves and acquiring more power. They grow. They are aided in this growth by funding from the government which is ultimately our money.

The thought 'Throwing good money after bad' comes to my mind as I think about the institution of school. The thief of time. The robber that steals a child's joy and freedom. A place that is defended and congratulated on socialising many children into the habit of bullying.

What kind of society cheats a young creature of its play? Animals play. Our young do homework.

In return for what?

What kind of bargain have we made to sell our children's youth?

Mini-blog 3: Crazy old ladies

2010-03-09T19:38:00.008Z

I watched a daffy older lady today.

She sounded off her trolley. Her eyes looked mad. Her voice rose. Her points were ludicrous.

The poor old woman had a total lack of regard for common sense, and threw around words that made it seem as if she wants ALL people of a certain kind to submit to extreme measures proposed by an increasing totalitarian government.

Like the government, she jabbered wildly, chattering about things she knows nothing of, and repeating a pathetic creed that she had learned from someone else. Also, like the government, she parroted the same exhausted excuses for her actions or actions that she demanded that someone else should implement.

Poor old woman.

My mother.

Bet you thought it was Baroness Deech I was talking about, didn't you?

How to damage a person without really trying

2010-03-06T16:31:00.008Z

"Personal identity was perceived as being challenged through experiences which were felt to be disempowering, dehumanising and devaluing. Gender, class and race differences also emerged in respondents' perceptions of identity threat."

From
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119070406/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

Everyone has a Personal Identity made up of thousands of little pieces. Things like your beliefs, your genes, your gender, your sexual orientation, your political stance, your age, your educational background, your cultural background...

I'm sure you can think of a few more.

All of the parts add up to the magnificent whole which is YOU.

The You then fits into some sort of Social role. For example, a social role can be created when you join a group or become part of a group. Like I became a home educator - tentatively at first and then joyfully and whole-heartedly.

I am also a baby boomer, and a political wanderer in the mix: I don't know where I belong except, because of the events of the last few years and the harassment that I've seen home educators face, I'm inclining toward anarchism as an ethos!

You get the picture I'm sure.

Then come the insults. The You of you is insulted because you know You are an expert (in the truest sense of that word) on your children which then extends to finding out more about the new group you have joined, the home educators. In the past, generally, no one reasonable has ever challenged your beliefs about your children or your role as your children's mentor and guide. You give opinions and dispense rules and justice to your family, and proceed to raise your own offspring.

Until the 'experts' come along, see your child once, and think that they can pronounce on your child and your parenting with impunity. What they say shocks YOU. That is a personal identity shock. They insult You. They exterminate You. They indicate that You are not the power in your child's life and that They are.

The LA inspector tootles along, and you accept a visit. It seems to go all right. Your child talks to the inspector, and the inspector is polite and friendly enough, except he never quite catches your gaze and you see his eyes wandering all over the DVD and video collection in the corner and the fine collection of spiders' homes in the corner where you keep forgetting to clean. Where you live is part of who You are, and where you dwell is being judged. This, then, is another personal identity threat.

Your social self is bound up in the home educating community. Not many friends stay the course when they cannot moan about how horrible their child's school is and have you sympathise because, these days, you're likely to tell them to get their babies out NOW and point them towards an example of a deregistration letter. That puts them into a slight tizzy. They just wanted a bonding bitch, and you confront them with the truth that school is not healthy for their child.

Your old friends dwindle away. You become a card-carrying member of that wild bunch of people called home educators.

The government spreads bull about home educators abusing their children. That leads to social identity shocks as we all absorb the fact that we are being attacked and lied about. We stick close together. We email. We band. We listen to each other. We become politically active.
The shocks don't end. A man reviews home education and calls us names and slings mud which sticks and stones us.

His boss does the same, diverting attention from where attention should be which is squarely on the overworked, underfunded and inadequate social services.

Every time someone tells us that we are not parenting properly, we are being less than our best as parents, we encounter more personal identity shocks and more social identity threats.

It continues....

On and on it goes...

Little wonder that we are tired. Small wonder that we seethe and rage.

Our very selves are at risk in the onslaughts. Our personal selves and our social selves.

And the government, it's tame charities, it's favoured 'experts' and 'inspectors,' BBC cronies and thickly ignorant members of the public keep on and on taking the PIS.

It's completely shocking.

Mini-blog 2: How to learn Chemistry without blowing up

2010-03-05T20:06:00.006Z

I understand from the APPG meeting on March 2nd that Baroness Deech thinks that a home educating youngster cannot learn Chemistry.

I suppose I can comprehend the problem. I learned a lot of Chemistry in High School in a course cunningly called Industrial Chemistry. It was brilliant. The course consisted of a manual, a lab and chemicals. We had a few moments of instruction about blazingly obvious things like 'You shouldn't run in a lab' and 'Please don't sniff the amonia or we might have to rush you to hospital' and the rest was an hour or so a week of doing the experiments and analysing the results which were then written up in the manual.

I got 100% for my term work. I loved it. Wonderful. No sitting taking boring old notes while waiting to start the real stuff. That was learning; that was exciting. I can still remember the buzz of experiments and the flutter of finding out which residue was on the filter paper.

Excellent.

Eldest has expressed an interest in the subject. So we got some books out of the library, we amassed some great websites, we bought a Chemistry kit and we're all ready to go. Now, if I can just wrestle her away some time from Law and Japanese and music and Chinese History that consume her at the moment, thunderbirds will be a go.

Can't wait!

That's how you learn Chemistry, Baroness Deech. When you're interested, you'll find a way because you want to. If it doesn't ring your particular chimes, then nothing anyone can do will light the Bunsen Burner of passion for Chemistry.

I'm off to do some Chemie now. Where's that GCSE Chemistry book that I got from another lovely home educating Mum? Ah, yes, just where it should be - next to the Chemistry set.

All set now.

Atoms away!

Note to Insoi: Burning wood or leaves is indeed a chemical reaction. One of my brightest memories was a day in summer when our family went outside on the driveway to use a magnifying glass and hold it over some twigs/leaves. Y evidenced great joy in the transformation. It was a delight to behold.

http://www.howstuffworks.com/fire1.htm

Advice to a possible home educator

2010-03-03T19:35:00.004Z

I gave this advice on a home education forum to a prospective home educator. I'd like to share it with you although it probably doesn't qualify as a mini-blog. Whatever, I like the sound of my own vice (er, that should be voice!)

"You are your baby's mother. Not one person in the world knows her better or what is best for her than you. Do not take the parc from other people. Tell them that school is an institution that dominates human beings, squeezes out their natural life and joy and turns them into slaves who are seen as economic units by a wealthy elite. Buy them books by John Taylor Gatto. I can recommend Dumbing Us Down.

There is nothing wrong with home education. It is a superior way of educating the 'whole' person, unlike school which creates fear, terror and doesn't even see a child as a person (they can't even go to the toilet when they need to which can cause health problems later on). If your child has a will of her own, that's terrific. She will turn her attention to what interests her and will study it for as long as she needs to.

People are brainwashed. There is nothing normal or sane about school. Nothing. We are not Prussians to be trained up as an army nor are we all destined to work in factories (hence the bells at school) and that is where school originated. It is merely warehousing for children.

It's hard doing the right thing for your child when society would have you do what everyone else does, but you will get so strong that you'll be able to twizzle people around on their stupid and illogical arguments. Education has been made a big business so millions of people can be employed by the education business. Tell those who would direct you to 'normality' to do some educating themselves and look into it further. They may learn something. They may become supporters. If not, it's their loss. Your child's future is non-negotiable."

New series - mini blogs

2010-03-01T20:00:00.002Z

I'm beginning a series of small, snack-like blog entries because I want to.

No one is forcing, coercing, telling me or promising me either money or qualifications if I behave in a certain way at the correct time.

Today's mini blog is Mini blog 1.

Catchy title, eh? I thought it up myself without help from a co-worker or reference to a - well, a reference book.

It's this:

If home education is part of the educational system, like Mr. Balls insists, why don't we get the pupil money?

If home education is not part of the educational system, why do they want to monitor something which is none of their business?

End of mini-blog 1.

Invasion

2010-02-27T22:51:00.003Z

Funny how this home educating business gets a hold of you.

Odd how you can wake up in the dead of night/middle of dawn/early morning and feel totally violated and see your abuser parading around London in a ministerial car (guzzling your money down its engine).

It feels like an invasion.

Then, that's what this government is good at. Invading.

They invade our streets with cameras watching every move we make, and targeting young women's behinds in their own homes.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/merseyside/4609746.stm

"You only have to read the impact statements of the lady to realise the harrowing effect that this had on her. Her life has almost been ruined, her self-confidence entirely destroyed by the thought that prying male eyes have entered her flat."

I can imagine. In her own flat. Her privacy invaded.

Then, there's the banking system. The 'light touch changes' (oh, and we know that stupid phrase so well) proposed by Brown and his glove puppet Balls.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/gordon-brown/4949859/Gordon-Brown-calls-for-morality-in-financial-system.html

"Ministers including Alistair Darling, the current Chancellor, and Ed Balls, Mr Brown's former economic adviser, have admitted that Labour made mistakes regulating the banks before the current crisis.
But Mr Brown has refused to concede any errors or apologise."

Invaders love to take over your language and debase it. Like they take you and your family over and debase them.

"Gordon Brown calls for morality in financial system."

And that from the moral wizard who sold off Britain's gold at its lowest price, who stripped the country's savers of £100 billion. Morality. A sweet word you can swing around shedding incense from. Not one you can bite for authenticity. Not a coin that rings true when invaders shout it at you. When they are standing on the moral high ground screaming 'abuse' at you.

Meanwhile, there are so many comments and outpourings of hatred from our invaded land for the glove puppet. Here's one round up. There are many more.
http://johnrentoul.independentminds.livejournal.com/21314.html

"Blair’s relationship with Balls was not usually so fruitful, and it got worse. One aide who worked for Blair at Number Ten said: “I respect him but I don’t like him.” Just in case I missed it: “I really did dislike him.” Why? “Fundamentally he is an intellectual bully. The tone was hectoring.” Yes, but, I asked naively, was he personally offensive? Hollow laughter. I was told how he would belittle civil servants, for example, when they came to the Treasury asking for more money. “You are complete tossers,” he would say. “You haven’t got a grip.” I have lost count of the number of Blair’s former advisors who have said that there were times when they could not bear to be in the same room as Balls. His rudeness and his bearing of grudges were said to “reflect and reinforce the worst aspects of Gordon”. One MP who came to the House with a reputation as a Blairite told me that Balls has never said hello when their paths cross. This is, you will observe, the one known exception to the rule that everything about him can be explained by the requirements of the next Labour leadership election. "

The glove puppet wants more:
"Despite that, Balls is now well placed to contest the leadership of his party when the chance comes. There is no question that he will try to seize his chance. He has moved beyond being his patron’s creature to being a big beast in his own right. The ruthlessness and determination that for years was deployed for Brown is now pressing his own cause. He always said that Brown’s advancement was a means to a Labour end; just as his own ambition is now."

Ruthless and determined? Oh, yes, we can believe that. That's what invaders are, isn't it?

Remember the stories about Genghis Khan? He was no patsy. No Mr. Nice Guy.

Balls has invaded schools like some kind of evil fungus. Cookery classes? Certainly. Academy schools? No problem. Independent schools? Don't like 'em, can't control 'em so invade them and take over. Sex education? Oh, you WILL learn how to put condoms on bananas, children, and no matter if you're too young to realise what bananas are.

That's what invaders do. Take over your duties. Take over your children (because they can treat them so much better than you do). Take over your lives (because local authority sock puppets are SO much better at educating than parents are).

Then there's the ultimate invasion: IRAN which equalled WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION.

Send in the investigators. Find those nuclear bunkers. I wonder they didn't PLANT some. A few courageous souls said: "Oh, we went to look for those weapons - but, whaddya know? - there weren't any. Anywhere."

IRAN= WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

HOME EDUCATORS = ABUSERS + NON-EDUCATORS

Yeah, right!

INVADERS.

The Year of the Tiger

2010-02-19T12:01:00.004Z

I'm sitting here in my jarmies – yeah, I know I SHOULD be all ready but we eccentrics are allowed a bit of different behaviour occasionally.

Anyway, I don't know what I'm going to come out with... I seldom do when I start to blog... So here it is. A tumble of thoughts.

Of course, it's different in the middle of the night. Then, I could blog among the masters – or should I say the mistresses – of all blogdom. I'm on fire in the wee sma' hours. Alight with words, stinging with injustice, ripe with acid and sarcasm. Of course I've forgotten it all in the morning.

Or most of it.

Quite annoying it is, really, because everyone keeps pinching my post threads. I was going to post about what Kelly green and gold posts about. I often am going to post about what Kelly does so wonderfully. She quite puts me off. I feel disgruntled that I can't post about what Kelly and all the other fantastic and wonderful home educator bloggers write about because I'll just look like I've swiped their ideas and am too lame to think up my own.

You naughty amazing people.

You really real people.

Ordinary, one might say. Average, perhaps.

Yeah, I'm laughing right now.

Their words dance, sing and do a little miming as they launch into their routines. Their logic whizzes past my ears making me hear a bit better. Their points enlarge my travailling brain so I can see their thoughts and their thoughts are good.

Ah, me. I need a little Year of the Tiger in me.

So what is my blog entrytoday?

It's simply this. I've been dipping in and out of Flip, a book about business. And the author says something quite interesting and important which is, boiled down in a kale pot, is that we must take our weak points and make them our strengths. See them as our finest qualities.

So, on the fear prospect, yes, society – meaning we, the people – is kept down by fear.

Yes, BIG BROTHER is out there.

BUT, when you flip it, WE ARE BIG BROTHER.

We watch each other. We report. We gather intelligence. We fashion armies. We wield power. Fear is just the method THEY use to make you think you're powerless.

We are not impotent.

We, in fact, are the whole cannoli, the big cheese.

We pay for everything.

We 'support' everything. None of these individuals in power could be in power if we didn't maintain them in power. They'd have to go away and get jobs.

In the past, we did away with the monarchy. Yes, the royals were important and people really did lose their heads over them. But now they're just people with other people maintaining them in the lifestyle and all that.

We are the people. We have the power.

We are BIG BROTHER. There are more of us. We have the POWER.

We co-operate in our own subservience, or we don't.

We agree to abide by their rules, or we won't.

"Tyger, tyger, burning bright
in the forests of the night"

The people are the tigers (or tygers) in the forests of the night, and the day and the whole year round.

No wonder the elite are frightened.

It's The Year of the Tiger.

The year of the natural force of tigerhood. The silent and purposeful gaze from yellow eyes. The slope towards predictable and controlled mastery. The movement of the huge shoulders. The majesty of the great cat.

It's time to come out, tigers. It's time to stalk our power.

It's The Year of the Metal/White Tiger.

Motto: I win!