Tuesday, August 09, 2005

Guardian Home Education Story

Yet another standard introduction-to-HE article in a mainstream paper, this time in the Guardian: "Bullying Main Reason for Home Educating, Says Survey."

Whilst we can only be pleased that Home Education is getting such a continous flow of relatively favorable, if utterly predictable press, (since you never know who may suddenly see the light and rescue their kids), there are always gripes with these articles.

There are the usual assortment of questionable assertions and slightly dubious inferences. The assertion in the title, for example, isn't necessarily supported by the argument in the text: whilst bullying may be the main reason why children are withdrawn from school to be HEd, I doubt whether this is the main reason why families who have never gone to school decide to HE and since this group make up a large proportion of the HE population, the title suddenly starts to look rather dubious.

At least around here, most of us choose to Home Educate because we believe, and can argue the case that HE provides the opportunity for a much better education (and that includes socialisation issues).

Not really sold on the Wit's End company name either, come to that.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I suppose it is possible that people who choose home education for their children from the start might do so because they, at least partially, fear their children being bullied.

It is always annoying, though, how often such articles are conducted on surveys based on, say, ten participants.