home education

The bottom inspectors are coming. Some of you will remember the hilarious strip of that name in Viz, a parody of the tendency of state bureaucrats to extend their clipboard-wielding tentacles into ever more areas of human life.
The latest threat is to home education. Government busybodies, under the guise of showing concern about child abuse, are proposing to give themselves more power to interfere with those families who choose to take the completely legal, very sensible and extremely efficient path of home education.
A man going by the wonderfully Bunyanesque name of Graham Badman has prepared a report on home education and – surprise, surprise – it recommends more meddling.
The main point is to impose a "compulsory registration scheme" on home educating parents. The tax-eating time wasters also want to see your plan: "At the time of registration parents/carers/guardians must provide a clear statement of their educational approach, intent and desired/planned outcomes for the child over the following 12 months."
If the education legislators cannot write good English, what hope is there for those they are attempting to police?
Another bureaucrat, John Dunford, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, voices the mainstream view: "For the vast majority of children, being in a school with their peers gives them the best opportunity to develop into well-rounded adults." But this is claptrap: schools do not generally send out well-rounded adults. All too often they send out depressed, anxious and fearful weaklings.
I am in touch with a number of readers who either home educate or are planning to do so, and they all speak of the sense of liberation. State schools are a testing ground for state-conceived educational theories, for example, stats.
With home education, you can give your children a flexible and enjoyable education that you control. The other paradox about home ed is that the kids seem to be rarely at home. Says Idler reader Barry, who plans on home educating his son: "They are all out at museums, galleries, parks and libraries, and getting involved with the local community." Barry adds: "The home-educated kids I know are free-spirited, curious, inventive, make things, dance and sing, read lots, bake bread."
Angie, an Idler reader who home educates, rhapsodises about the fun and freedom that the children experience. And what of the results? Well, a teacher at a sixth form college in Exeter recently told me that the home-educated kids who come into the college are more, not less, confident than the state-trained teens. And it is a myth that home schooling separates kids from other kids: in Angie's group, there are 20 kids, and they move from house to house.
Conventional school is an extraordinarily inefficient method of educating children. Most supposedly well-educated young people I meet do not know the difference between "it's" and "its", which would take about 10 minutes of explanation. What have they been doing for 12 years?
With rising private school fees and crunched-out parents, and with an ideology-bound state education system that demands teachers carry out a government plan rather than bring any of their own ideas to the job, we need to explore cheaper and better alternatives. The report is spectacularly ill-timed.
However, all hope is not lost. Government schemes tend to produce the opposite effect to the one intended. An example is the ban on foxhunting: it only made it more popular. I hope the same will be true with this new government interference in the noble pursuit of home education, and that you.