Thoughts on a good education

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.

Thought you might like...

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.

Dare to tell me...

If you dare to tell me that school is good for most (all?) children, I will spit feathers and turn purple, green, orange and blue like a demented chameleon on a multi-coloured tablecloth.

This mother's story about her lovely artistic son is worth reading:

http://redmummyrambleson.blogspot.com/2009/11/lunatics-are-running-asylum.html

It has brought back to me all the essential wrongness that I remember about schools.

The twenty-seven Year 5 kids pushing one way out of a set of doors and the thirty pushing the other way. The doors bulging and twisting under the force. No teacher in sight. Me, with my hand to my mouth, across the playground, watching frozen in horror and waiting for one or more of them to be knocked to the ground and trampled upon. Waiting for the blood. Waiting for the death.

CHILDREN DESERVE BETTER.

School is safe? School teaches you? Teaches you how to be a barbarian maybe.

School is a place of no choice. School is where you dread to go and hate to be. OK, not all children (maybe in a tiny few cases, school is actually a step up from home) but to young'uns who are loved and respected in their homes?

Is it really what we want for our children?

Having to hide in the toilets away from the three mean and radgy girls who always make you miserable?

Being told you should 'stand up' to them while knowing they'll beat you to pulp if you say A WHISPER to them?

Adults do not know or they conveniently forget how damn dreadful it is being powerless and humiliated and shamed and laughed at and ignored and hit and punched and poked and having your favourite gel pens nicked on your first day at a new school and seeing your best jacket on the floor having been trampled all over with muddy boots.

CHILDREN DESERVE PROTECTION.

My children, and yours, deserve to feel safe every day, not just the day when they have to go to the dentist and so not to school. They deserve to feel secure, not to have their little hearts pumping so fast they can feel sick and dizzy because they see some big kid in the schoolyard who stole the lunch money Mum paid for out of her crap job and who is coming THEIR WAY.

THEN YOU GO TO SCHOOL AND THEY FINGERPRINT YOU.

They steal your fingerprints. You don't give consent because who tells a big tall hard-faced teacher, "No, this is something I do NOT CONSENT to" because it's all "do what teacher says now". But fingerprints - you must have done something pretty bad to be fingerprinted like a criminal but what was it? No one tells you which adds to the confusion and hurting stomach and sick feelings and lightheadness.

Every night you try to sleep to escape the deathliness of your days but you stay awake because you don't want to sleep because that will mean you wake up and it's SCHOOL again and you've just got away from the torture and the hell and the noise and those kids following you around and giggling at something behind your back, but it's not at something else it's at YOU.

God help us. We are spirit-murderers.

God help us. We think this is normal.

In the future, we will look back and cry for what we have done to children.

God help us, but God help the little children first.

Sell your children's freedom for a shamisen lesson

Sorry, I just cannot keep quiet about this.

I am completely shocked. Knocked sideways.

I guess I have realised today how naive I really am.

It's about this. Some home educators are glad to have the 'extras' that the LA and government have promised that they will provide once our children's names are on a register and we have handed in and had approved the plans for the year's education.

As my savvy little Y would say, "This is all kinds of wrong".

For a start, although the money that the LAs will receive for monitoring home educators and nodding and shaking their heads over various plans and progress made or not made will undoubtedly appear, it seems a fair bet to me that the money for all the juicy lovely bits will be lacking.

Why is that? Well, I think that because the government is riding rough-shod over a group of innocent people - nay, not innocent people - innocent children in the name of caring for them.
And they have been known to lie. Yes, tell untruths. Twist the facts. Their pants are well and truly on fire. In flames of the most shocking orange.

They lie. They lie because they can. They lie because they are allowed to. They lie because - thus far - no one has challenged them (and now home educators are challenging them, by God, they are). We let them get on with their little politician things until a huge great stink arises from their corporate pan and then we jump up and hit them with a jet of cooling, refreshing water.

But because no one has taken any notice of the awful things they have been doing as they chew the fat and smoke the peace pipe, they aren't used to this kind of - er -anarchy. They are losing face. Face it, they are losing lots of faces. Faces and jaws are dropping all over Westminster and Whitehall and, probably, Buckingham Palace.

So, apparently one thing they haven't been lying about is that some home educators are dying to get their hands on the trifles and pretties that the LAs are about to donate to them. Little Ethel will go to the school library. Tiny George can toot away on the shamisen at the local music lessons.

The fact that these lessons will appear for home educators, if they do at all, with hosts of strings attached and some of those strings will be likely used to cut the throats of home educators seems to have escaped them.

But, hey, if you are structured and you have a good relationship with the really sweet lady at the LA, what do you care? It's all good, isn't it? I mean, you'll be fine. Your children are doing what they are supposed to and no LA officials would dream of assaulting your throat with the strings attached to the presents? Would they?

Then, the nice lady disappears to another country where she can breathe free air, and you're left with Graham Badman for an inspector and Graham loves school. He loves it so much he desires that everyone shall experience it, just the way he did. He demands that your child recites the meaning of carbon sequestration (and, oops, you didn't cover that particular subject) and then he turns to the test about Chinese History. What? Only scored four points and that was for spelling Chinese correctly.

Well, so sorry (not really sorry, but that's what people say sometimes when they're not sorry), but Ethel and George will be going back to school.

When you protest, you say it isn't fair. You say school doesn't fit all. My children won't like school, they won't thrive.

He'll just laugh. He will turn on you a huge laughing triumphant grin, and he'll tell you that music lessons cost money and the cash for the school library books must be paid for.

With the souls of your children.

I hope you'll agree it was a good bargain then.

But I doubt it.

Fine the breeder of a naughty dog

It's the turn of Mr. Balls to give me another good laugh today.

"Tomorrow, Schools Secretary Ed Balls will release guidelines urging teachers to use the full range of powers at their disposal. Under the guidelines parents can be handed £50 fines and even face court action if they fail to take responsibility for their children's bad behaviour in school."

From http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23675749-details/Action+to+curb+unruly+pupils+as+teachers+blame+parents/article.do

On the same principle, I could say that my dog misbehaved today while in my care so I'm going to sue the woman who bred him. She wasn't present, hasn't seen the dog, doesn't know how I handle the dear naughty mutt, but SHE is responsible because she bred it. Fine her. Heck, hang her.

How exactly do you take responsibility for your child's action when your child is in school? Doesn't the child take responsibility? I can't recall ever doing anything particularly heinous in school, but, if I had, I would've owned up and accepted my punishment. I certainly wouldn't have expected my MOTHER to cough up 50 quid for MY mistake.

If children misbehave in school, maybe it's because they don't want to be there at all.

Maybe they can't be there. Maybe it doesn't suit them at all. Maybe, just maybe, it's not good for them.

They don't want to be there. Perhaps, just perhaps, school isn't a place for children. It's a big business, is school, many thousands of people make their living out of it. But have we ever asked children if they want to go to school? If school fills their deepest needs, if it makes them happy?

Thought not.

My children aren't in school. Put me in gaol now.

But leave my children in the gaol we call school.

I used to think that children who misbehaved were really bad. Now I think that they're the ones we haven't tamed; the ones who haven't given up and begun to conform just to keep other people happy. That is the trick, isn't it? We don't care about their happiness. So long as they are contained in school-gaol.

And I bet the Treasury is having a great time counting those fines.