Invasion

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

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!

Lords and tainted ladies

I suppose you'll have noticed that Lord Soley and Baroness Deech are demonstrating their total ignorance and complete disgust for honest and ordinary people in Britain.

Dear Lord and Lady, congratulations on being Labour or Lieboor stooges. Congratulations on falling for the utter and contemptible balls uttered by, er, Balls.

Since you subscribe to the principle that, to be one of a group containing a criminal indicts and condemns you, perhaps you will consider the implications of that thought.

Lord Taylor of Warwick is being investigated for fraud.

"POLICE have begun a fraud inquiry after a Conservative peer received more than £70,000 in expenses by claiming to live in his mother’s home, which had been sold off when she died.
The move follows a Sunday Times investigation last month which raised serious questions about the probity of Lord Taylor of Warwick’s expense claims.
Taylor, a former barrister, part-time judge and university chancellor, was claiming allowances for peers living outside London when his home has been based in the capital for 18 years.
He attempted to claim his main address was in Solihull, West Midlands, between 2001 and 2007 because he was looking after his sick mother. However, she died in 2001 and her house was sold at the time.
Peer claims £70k for home that does not exist
Labour peer claims £100,000 for empty flat
He said later that he had lived in “a number of homes in the Midlands over the years” but would not say where they were. However, a close family member said Taylor had not had a home outside London since he moved to Ealing in 1995.
Following the Sunday Times article, the police and Crown Prosecution Service decided there should be a formal fraud investigation.
Taylor stopped claiming expenses in November 2007. There had been a Freedom of Information inquiry that month about his declared principal home.
Baroness Uddin and Lord Clarke of Hampstead are also facing criminal investigation over their expenses after reports in this newspaper."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6832360.ece

So, if Lord Taylor, Baroness Uddin and Lord Clarke are found guilty, you will be guilty of fraud also.

What? you shriek. You're innocent, you say? You've never pinched as much as a postage stamp? Why should you be punished because other people 'might' be guilty of crimes?

Heh, heh. Does that matter to me? You're a lord (or a lady) and you're tarnished with the same tar as the Lords and Ladies who might be lying and cheating the public purse (which is, of course, jingling with money conned out of ordinary folks). Yep, sirree, you come from the same stable so you must be the same as them.

You're not innocent because you belong to a group containing felons. You, personally, may be a pure-living chappie, but your colleagues in the top house 'could' be fraudsters. They 'might' be criminals.

If you're innocent - which of course is possibly true - I'll give you a break. I'll let you prove you're innocent...

Go on, then, hire the legal aid and prove to this country that you haven't been salting away our money behind our backs. What are you waiting for? I cut you a break.

Prove your innocence. Do it. Now.

No can do? Okey doke, I'll give you another break. Instead of just imprisoning you on suspicion of being a criminal, I'll impound your bank accounts, and I'll send a representative along from the local authority to look under your own private bed for the cash and check the mattress for lumps (potentially betraying the whereabouts of more filched loot). Then I'll question the servants to find out how many houses you have.

That's not right, you cry. How can I prove I haven't swindled? How can I prove that I'm as white as the driven snow...?

Don't ask me. I'm busy wondering how many children will be sent back into a hell-hole of a school and commit suicide because you condone 'checking' their homes and some off-his-nut-with-power local authority prat decides the child will be better off in school. You imply that any home educator can be an abuser, and they have to darn well provide evidence to brainless power-addicted automatons that they, home educating parents, aren't bad for their kids.

Oh, lord, what's good for the goose etc.

Give a thought to what you sow now because you're darn tootin' the whirlwind will be swerving your way soon.

Personal autonomy

I'm still here, trying to navigate the unfamiliar laptop keyboard. My own dear computer stack returns tomorrow having been purged of its dastardly viruses.

E went to a tutorial yesterday. For a long time, E didn't do tutorials because she had such a dreadful time in school that anything school-like was awful for her. She sailed into her tutorial, then came out after two hours looking all serene and confident. "It was good," she commented.

This week has been a bit odd. Braces meant a whole new way of chewing and eating and swallowing and cleaning and rinsing. A law tutorial was nothing to it.

E has an extremely elegant, interesting and logical mind. She is also very funny with a dry spicy humour that hits you just when you don't expect it.

I love her so devotedly. I admire her for overcoming the inhibiting background of school to follow her interests. I followed her into a bookshop yesterday.

She picked up a beginning book on Chemistry. "I really want to get into this subject," she said. "So interesting."

Ah, the unboring life of an autonomous home educating person.

Y, meanwhile, has passed her fancy for gobbling any information she could possibly dig up upon spleens and was enquiring if one could swallow one's tongue.

Er, yes, I think so. Dad, who is a trained nurse, took over the discussion.

Unbridled learning. Curious children. Engendered autonomy. Personal autonomy.

Can't beat it. You won't ever beat it.

There is nothing like the joy of learning. It is a breath of spring in the deepest and longest midwinter. It is a shout of elation from an excited child. It is bread to a starving pigeon. It is the smooth squish of clay through your creative fingers.

A couple of days ago I met a friendly acquaintance I haven't seen for five years at the local store. After the usual chat I was asked which GCSEs the girls were doing and, having been primed by clear-thinking Y, I said: "GCSEs are just for schools to show how 'good' they are."

"Yes, I know," said friendly aquaintance.

Why are you putting your youngsters through them then? said my internal voice.

"R is going through a lot of pressure because of GCSEs," said FA. "The school is making her quite stressed."

The same question presented itself to me.

"She's left two chips in the packet so I had to come around and buy some more for dinner, and now she's gone off to town without telling me she was going."

FA sighed. "Teenagers."

School, I thought. School makes them dead inside. Dead to manners and the lubrication that everyone needs to make themselves a part of society. R protests by being rude. I suppose FA should be glad that R has chosen only to be rude and not to join a gang or to vent her frustration through violence on other children.

It's not teens. It's not being teenaged. It's some schooled teens who see that their parents think work is MORE important than they are. Teens who seek other lost teens because they are the only ones around who actually have time or the inclination to listen to them. It's the lost leading the lost.

With our young we are reaping what we have sown. We are gathering the whirlwind. We cannot see that whatever school gives or, in actuality, fails to give our children is what they are missing in their personalities and their lives. School, no matter how you dress it up or tell people how marvellous it is, cannot provide what children need.

Loving kindness. Interest. Encouragement. A watchful eye. A listening devoted ear. Discussions about spleens and tongue-swallowing.

I will say something that I can never say enough.

Thanks for being you, my beloved daughters. Thanks for teaching me how to love and how to argue and debate and how to think. Thanks for reminding me how it is to be young and fresh and magnificent. Thanks for offering me some of your giant chocolate buttons, Y. Thanks for expressing your delight at your new book - a Japanese dictionary - E.

Thanks for helping me to understand that I am a mother and what that means.

Thanks for explaining things I don't understand so patiently.

Thanks for the loving smiles.

Thanks for crafting the beautiful hand-made cards.

Thanks for the tremendously tight hugs.

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to learn and grow with you, and share your sheer delight in your freedom to learn what intrigues you.

Just thank you.

Ever lovingly yours,
Mum

The Economist says...

We happened to pick up a copy of The Economist this week. It was fate. Nothing to do with 'Leviathan stirs again', the briefing on the growth of the state. The article talks about cutting back in the public sector.

"...pruning will be more difficult than it has ever been before. Getting the public sector to do 'more with less' is harder after two decade of public sector reforms. Across the OECD more than 40% of public goods are provided by the private sector (thanks to privatisation and contracting out) and 75% of public officials are on some sort of pay-for-performance scheme."

This is where we see the rise of LAs administered by private companies who then have none of the checks and controls of public bodies to control their headlong rush towards their performance-related pay.

Three quarters of public officials are on some sort of pay-for-performance scheme. What can you imagine passes for 'performance' in the local authorities? Is it perhaps sending home educating children back to (or to) school? Is this what will count as their pay-enhancing performance? Are we due to see an avalanche of School Attendance Orders being handed out as the happy little public servants count the extra money in their bank accounts?

Surely this would be deemed an illegal practice? Surely they care for the child in all this? But I suspect that the child's best interest probably won't feature in the performance that will be recompensed by an increase in salary. It is not an award to be rewarded.

"The public sector is subjected to all sorts of perverse incentives."

Like a man recommending the National Curriculum for home educators, and - coincidentally - being the head of Becta: "Becta is the government agency leading the national drive to ensure the effective and innovative use of technology throughout learning."

And here from Becta:
"Exploiting technologies to support parental engagement, including online reporting"

"The evidence is clear that parents can have a greater impact upon their child's education than schools do. In the 21st century schools are transforming to take advantage of the benefits that technology offers in communicating between home and school to both inform and involve parents in their children's learning and life at school."

Home educators KNOW, Mr. Head of Becta who just happened to conduct a review of home education, that PARENTS CAN HAVE A GREATER IMPACT UPON THEIR CHILD'S EDUCATION THAN SCHOOLS DO. That's because we parents who have a duty to provide education for their children take it goldurn seriously, and we home educators do it up close and personal. We're on the spot, we can step in where and when the children need help and the youngsters aren't just left floundering in a hot, noisy, busy classroom where a host of other kids are demanding attention too.

I would call seeking to extend the school 'education' into homes a perverse incentive for a school-advocate to recommend so many startling and demanding changes for home educators, wouldn't you?

Picking up the theme of perverse incentives, we have the comment from The Economist that "These perverse incentives mean that governments spend lots of money without producing any improvements in public services. Britain's government doubled spending on education between fiscal 1999 and fiscal 2007, but the spending splurge coincided with a dramatic decline in Britain's position in the OECD's ranking of educational performance."

Ah, I see it all now. THAT'S why they want home educating children. To elevate their position in the OECD's ranking of educational performance!

Two more sentences from the article sprang off the page at me:
1) Government departments are good at expanding their empires, and
2) Government workers are also good at protecting their own interests.

None of it is really news to home educators as we've suffered through the last year, watching disbelievingly the process of dismantling the freedom in education we have enjoyed in the UK. We've lost hours of sleep and we've chewed our nails up to our armpits while skipping lunch in order to follow debates in Parliament or fine-tooth comb Hansard.

Meanwhile from the Schumpeter part of The Economist: "Civil services are congenitally inward-looking organisations, led by people who are plucked from elite universities and shielded from the rest of the world in governmental palaces."

We'll make sure that they aren't shielded from our growling stomachs and our blood-shot eyes any more. Civil servants, look out of your palace windows, we're coming to give you an education.

Who owns a child?

I know that there are all kinds of political committees, and cloak and dagger doings going on in the world of Westminster with various people looking forward to dining on the bones of home educators. I know, but I thought I'd leave it to other people to discuss the circus of lies, spin, counterfeit claims and sheer stupidity and chat about something else.

The something else is a question: who owns a child?

I suppose it's a bit rich starting the thoughts off with a bald statement like that; however, I woke up thinking that it is the nub of the matter.

Who should direct the child?

Who is responsible for the child?

This is a bit like a Biology lesson. Children are the result of an egg in a human female and a sperm from a human male meeting and joining. At least, the genetic components called the chromosomes - mainly the bodily blueprints - meet and bingo! a human embryo starts to grow some little time later. If all goes well, nine or ten months later, a human infant emerges from it's mother's body and there is another individual in the world.

So, it seems quite pertinent to me to ask could there be an infant without a father or, in some cases, a donator of sperm. Astonishingly, there could. There is probably nothing stopping us in the scientific line from removing the bare and basic packet of genetic information from one egg and injecting it into another. The resulting child would be female (since the sperm carrying the Y or male-making chromosome would not be involved) and the baby girl would have all the genetic blueprints she might ever need to live and grow successfully.

Unfortunately, that line of thinking appears to rule out men. Men, basically, are unnecessary. Their sperm are stripped down and carry virtually nothing beyond a pack of blueprints. Some men, of course, prefer to stick around to help raise their children, but very many do not and they are expendable. So many children are living in one parent families where they have no father that they know, no resident father or an absent and sometimes unmourned male parent.

This is not to trivialise men's importance in their children's lives at all. I believe that men can contribute greatly to their children. It is a mere speculation upon who should be the ultimate arbiter of the fate of a child.

We're left with the woman who is the bed and nourisher of the developing human being. Blood from the mother swishes around next to the baby's blood both removing toxins and delivering oxygen and other nutrients. The woman maintains the child. We cannot grow an infant in an embryonium in a lab. For there to be a new baby in the world a human female must secrete it in her uterus, nurture it beneath her heart and birth it in due course.

Women are vital in the lives of children.

Now we have the state...

In some outlying cases a mother may not be able to care for her child, and the state should, in that case, failing any other relative ready, willing and able to take over, step in to assume the maternal role.

The state, whatever the denizens of the state think, is not responsible for conceiving, nurturing, maintaining and growing a human being in its first stages of life. The state is irrelevant to the support system that a mother develops for the benefit of her offspring.

The mother - the woman who holds an embryo and then a foetus inside herself - is the true right and absolute judge of what is good for and that will maintain and elevate her child.

Mothers are the very force of creation.

They are the goddesses of production and fecund power.

They are the growth of the human race and the source of its power.

You cannot replace a mother with a state official. You cannot get rid of mothers in the headlong race to zombify children.

A woman who bears and raises a child is the right person to interpret and realise the needs and wants of that child. She is the child's representative and guardian. She is the 'owner' of the seed of her body.

No matter what the state may think or say.

The social respectability of the home educating parent

I lost a friend recently. At least, a friendly acquaintance who had known me and my children from when our youngsters were quite small.

We ran into each other, had a brief chat, and arranged to meet for a comfortable cup of tea and cosy catch-up natter.

She works and her children have had all hell break loose at school. The eldest is a fine young man (they are both lovely young men) and is a strong individualist. Naturally, school did not suit him nor, naturally, did he suit school.

There were ructions.

Friend, L, works. She and her husband both work. This is relevant, I think.

L and I ran into interpersonal ructions over working and motherhood and responsibility to one's children. Frankly, I think I was put on this earth to mother my children, that they come first because they are not adult and, putatively, able to look after themselves, and when they encountered a surfeit of stress, anxiety and strain at school, after trying quite a lot of strategies, I took them out of that place.

They didn't suit it and it didn't suit them. I was more bothered about school not suiting my children than the opposite. My children are not in existence to please a shoal of misguided bureaucrats and an outmoded, damaging institution.

L started off by polishing her children's achievements in front of me, especially those of her younger son because he had more GCSEs. That got me a little narked. I mean it's hard not to say what a bunch of useless accomplishments your child has been conned into, but I bit my tongue.

I wanted to tell her that she had better have used her time keeping her young at home and joying with them as they journeyed into true learning. More tongue biting. Once or twice my poor tongue was raw (and painful).

Eventually, L went off in a fine huff. She doesn't care for non-working women who spend her tax pounds. That I am not a woman spending her tax pounds didn't seem to matter. I have been thinking over the whole situation and have come up with this:

I am no longer a person with social respectability. I'm not socially respectable. I don't do respectable any more because I don't do what I'm expected to do (sail out to a useless, meaningless, soul-destroying job every day rain or shine, heaps of snow or ice). My respectable position as a wife/mother/partner/worker/bitcher about what-my-children-don't-do-that-they-should-do has disintegrated.

I cannot face L because she disapproves of me. I cannot face her because I disapprove of her. Now we have nothing in common but the brief time of a shared past and that is, apparently, not enough. Her prejudices have conquered her. My prejudices have conquered me.

This is the second time I've lost a 'friend' that way. R was a friend I thought I'd have for life. Same deal. Working. Child bullied. Wouldn't give up work to protect child. End of story. Except that I told her what I thought. Goodbye, R.

I really do attempt to understand them. I do. Even more, I attempt not to judge them. I do.

Christmas 2009 I sent and received fewer cards.

No loss there then.