| |
| |
You are here: Frontpage > Issues > 2496 >
|
|
A leading practictioner's new research on the unsettling effect of home education
What about the parents?
Leslie SafranBarson – interviewed by Milan Ra
When my son was
coming up to
school age, a friend
introduced me to John Holt's
book Teach Your Own, which I
liked very much. I wouldn't
have had the courage to home
educate if it wasn't for the
fact that my son also taught
himself to read without help
from me. (I'd started teaching
him, and he said: "Eugh ,
reading is boring." So I pulled
right back.)
Home education was very
nerve –wracking at first. We tried
to replicate school at home. Very
quickly I found that didn't work
for us because I would wind up
screaming and he would wind
up crying. So I pulled right back
again.
With violin practice, I
stopped practicing with him
entirely for a month. His teacher
didn't say anything, and Louis
very rarely practiced, but he got
better.
That dramatically changed
my ideas about how people learn
(and the role of practice in learning a musical instrument).
Home education was actually
much more of a struggle and a
leap for me than it was for my
children. They just knew how to
learn. It was me who was having
to struggle with:"When are we
going to do writing? When are
we going to do maths?"
Often I speak to parents now
who are standing on the edge of
that diving board – of taking
their children out of school –
and jumping off feels like the
most frightening thing that you
can do.
Once people have done it,
they often say a year later:"Why
didn't I do it earlier? It's been so
wonderful"
Autonomous learning
For me personally, home education in itself is not as interesting
as informal learning or
autonomous learning, where the
child follows their own method.
Home education is a great vehicle for that style of education,
but home education by itself
doesn't necessitate that you follow autonomous education.
It is that "following the child"
that is incredibly revolutionary
and important in educational
theory: the move from a structured, outside –dominated system of education to a more
inner–driven, self–motivating
approach.
Parental identity
For the last nine years I've been
doing a part–time PhD on the
effects of home education on
parents' sense of identity. The
most surprising finding at first
was how varied the people who
home educate are.
There are really all sorts of
people with all sorts of ideas,
economic and educational backgrounds and so on.
The second most surprising
thing was the enormous variety
of experiences and reactions people had in relation to the big
questions: "How will I have
time to myself? How will we
manage financially? Will I lose
all my friends?"
On the financial side of
things, some of the people I
interviewed were better off after
home educating (not having to
buy uniforms, books, or have 30
people to birthday parties).
On the other hand, one person
I met stopped home educating
because of money worries (after a
marital break –up).
Some people said: "Yes, we are
poorer because we home educate, but we like that, because it
enables us to teach our children
the value of money, and not to
be so commercial."
There was no generalisable
result from any of the three
main issues – time for yourself,
finances and careers, and relationships.
The third big finding was
that in general people saw being
a home educator as a major part
of their identity. They had had
to become educators, and negotiate the meaning of education
for their families, what it looks
like and how it's done.
Growing confidence
Especially because home education is a marginal activity, society is continually asking you to
defend yourself. This forces people into finding refuge in home
education groups where they can
relax and assume a basis of similar understanding. It also forces
them to be articulate when they
do go out into the world and
explain what education means to
their families.
As part of my research I also
looked into other marginal
groups like lesbian mothers, or
the miners' wives during the
miners' strike, or parents of children with special needs, who
have to fight for what their children need.
Through these articulations
about what their children need,
and their constant defence of
what they're doing in the face of
the outside world, they – just
like home educating parents –
become more confident in their
own abilities. They start to
question other areas in their
lives, for example, medicine, or
work structure. They question
the powers that be, the standard
social structures, and often end
up living in a different way.
Leslie SafranBarson is the founder
and coordinator of The Otherwise
Club, a home education group in
north–west London (which recently
marked its 15th birthday). She submitted her PhD thesis days after
this interview. Her son gained a
First in Philosophy at King's College, London and her daughter is at
art school.
Milan Rai is a home
educating parent in Hastings.
|
|
|
|
