Dr. Jan Fortune-Wood is a freelance writer and home educator. She is a supporter of Taking Children Seriously and writes on home education, autonomous education and non-coercive parenting from a libertarian perspective.
In both the United States and Britain home education is on the increase. Roland Meighan, formerly special professor of education at Nottingham university estimates that at least 1% of school aged children are home educated in Britain. In the United States the figure is 5% with a growth rate of 20% each year and rising. In both the United States and Britain home education is increasingly a step taken by families disillusioned by the provision of mainstream education.
However, the content of this disillusionment seems to vary enormously. In the States, despite a growing number of secular home educators, the religious reason continues to dominate. In a society that separates religion and state, religious parents, especially those on the fundamentalist right are likely to withdraw their children from schooling. In contrast, Britain has no such separation of religion and state. Religious education and a daily act of worship are mandatory in state schools and the government is set to forge ahead with plans to increase the number of state funded schools with an explicitly religious foundation despite the protests of the National Secular Society. Of course, for some religious families this weak inoculation of school based religion is insufficient, especially when evolution is taught routinely in biology classes, but those who withdraw their children for religious reasons are very much in the minority of British home educators.
In the United States, Ronald Presitto1 tells us that the right of parents to raise their children according to their religious convictions is at the heart of the divergence between ‘home schooling’ and the educational establishment. In contrast, most British home educators begin with pragmatic concerns – children are withdrawn when severe bullying incidents fail to be resolved, when they are too bored to tolerate the standardised national curriculum, when their special needs are not taken into account or when the only school place offered is at some dismal, failing institution where you wouldn’t leave a dog. Some do start out with convictions about individualised education or religion, but these are the minority.
What American home schoolers and British home educators have in common is the reaction of their ‘authorities’ to their presence. From local officials to policy makers to government ministers there is a swathe of opinion that believes that parents are not to be trusted with their children and that the State, whether it is secular, socialist or broadly Judaeo-Christian, represents safer hands and inculcates more objective values. Recently in Britain the host of a prestigious legal radio programme (Radio 4 ‘Law in Action’) opined exactly that in his weekly Guardian column – teachers are trained, accredited and hand down the official package to children, but heaven (or not) only knows what parents might be doing to their children. In America, Presitto traces these attitudes to modern American liberalism, to progressives who rated common enterprise above the interests of the individual, giving rise to increased state powers and justifying this expansion as being in the people’s best interests – secular and scientific. Parents, on the other hand, were suspect – they might infect and instill their young with dogma. In Britain education was first provided by the church and continues to be apparently ‘Christian’, but it is a mild, perhaps peculiarly British, strain of Christianity that goes hand in hand with socialist fears that parents might exploit or abuse children or that individualism might run rampant against the idol of communitarianism. In both countries, Marx’s scorn for “the bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child” is alive and well in educational and political arenas near you right now.
Despite Britain’s recent adoption of the convention on human rights, which protects a right to a family life, this scorn is made all too evident in recent British politics. The Blairite government has introduced Connexions an iniquitous Orwellian electronic card issued to young people to enable them to access educational and other services, but only after they have gone through detailed interviews revealing every scrap of their own and their parents private lives. More recently a Bill which makes compulsory the drugging of children deemed to have ‘ADHD’ and which will criminalise parents who try to stand in the state’s way has been introduced.
In Britain, despite having stepped out of the state provision of education, many home educators come from left wing backgrounds and have a great deal of sympathy with the view that if they have nothing to hide then they should be willing to let the authorities into their homes or produce their children on request – often in the name of saving other children from supposed exploitation or abuse. In Britain it often takes a first hand encounter with an intrusive and bullying local education authority inspector to make people reconsider their stance and ideology is usually something that develops along the way. Without the lobbying numbers of their American counterparts, many British home educators are fearful of putting their heads over the political parapet at all and though there are an increasing number of activists and signs of mature political thinking, there is also a great deal of suspicion of making any kind of stand. Behind the scenes in British home education there is certainly disillusionment with state provision, but the fight is not a religious one and, for many, not even an ideological one. Instead there is a confused picture – astute thinking and activism jostle alongside the concerns of down shifters, eco-worriers and socialists who just can’t quite stomach the system when it comes to their own children.
In the States parents have won battles to protect the ‘traditional interests of parents’. In Britain, home educators are holding their breath – they have watched French and Irish home educators loose rights and, within their own community, are witnessing an ongoing and protracted attack on the rights of Scottish home educators (where a separate law to that of England and Wales operates). British home educators have the advantage of being broad based, largely secular, not easily dismissed as wild dogmatists, but for all that they are living in interesting times in the face of Blairite infractions into liberty and need to galvanise before the fence they are sitting on is bulldozed for
their own good.
Dr. Jan Fortune-Wood
1 = What’s Behind Home Schooling? by Ronald J. Pestritto in 2002 edition of the San Diego Union-Tribune,Thursday, October 3. This
article is archived at The Claremont Institute.
