Too Precious for School?

Not that I've let this Sarler woman get to me, you understand, (she was admirably dealt with afterall by the cool-as-cucumber, home educating dad, Mike Fortune Wood), but another thing she claimed on the Radio 2 Jeremy Vine show the other day was that in choosing to home educate, we are sending the message to our little darlings that they are somehow unique, way too precious and too superior to mix with the hoi polloi at school.

This must have struck most of us in the HE community as absolutely hilarious. Sarler has clearly either never met any of us, or has only ever met an incredibly small, select group of HEers who have actually never, ever met any of the rest of us.

Those of us who have HEed our children from birth and who meet with loads of other HE children, actually often have quite some considerable difficulty conveying the idea to our HE children that they are not the utterly normal ones and schooled children somehow the select oddities. And I don't think this is simply a matter of numbers of HE versus schooled children they meet. It is also that HEing from birth just seems utterly sensible, completely unsurprising, a sort of natural progression through the ages.

The other group of HEers who come later to HE after a period in school, usually get there
because they are deeply disillusioned with the school system for one reason or another. This is not to say that these families see their children as being too good for the system. Rather it is to see the system for the genuinely corrupt and corrupting thing it really is.

It doesn't seem to occur to HE children to think of themselves as somehow precious and superior. Instead such narcissism is far more likely to be bred in circumstances where children's needs are not listened to, their questions not answered, their energies not harnessed constructively, (ie: enforced schooling), where the only hope for a sense of well-being, a sense of being respected, genuinely liked and listened to can only be derived from the construction of a false persona with a fake reality and a false heightened sense of superiority without any genuine commensurate achievement.

Besides our kids ARE wonderful! We love 'em.