More from The School Gate

Well I'm impressed. Sarah Ebner (only recently a strong critic of Home Education), gives HEing author Ross Mountney space to explain what it's really like.

How Many Times Has Your Data been Lost?

If you're in the UK, you can find out here.

Transgenic Flies

Certain things have the capacity to make both me and my daughter apparently disproportionately happy. Making simulated transgenic flies is one of these.

I mean really, why go to school?

Schools Break SEN Laws

Finally, someone telling it as it is.

No wonder so many are turning to home education.

IKEA Now Home Education Friendly

....thanks to Shoshana. We hear that IKEA are even arranging some fun sessions for the HEks. From the Milton Keynes Citizen.

Other companies might think of following suit. This could be a good money-spinner in these hard times. Home educating families can get to you off-peak when your services are idling. Other companies have done it before and we've had a great time eg: Pizza Express have done some great pizza making sessions for HEks in off-peak hours.

What Home Educators Can Add

From Howard Gardner (HT: DD).

"The time has come to broaden our notion of the spectrum of talents. The single most important contribution education can make to a child's development is to help him toward a field where his talents best suit him, where he will be satisfied and competent. We've completely lost sight of that. Instead we subject everyone to an education where, if you succeed, you will be best suited to a college professor. And we evaluate everything along the way according to whether they meet that narrow standard of success. We should spend less time ranking children and more time helping them identify their natural competencies and gifts, and cultivate those. There are hundreds and hundreds of ways to succeed, and many different abilities that will get you there."

Autonomous home educators can add to this. They know that you don't have to HELP SO MUCH. You don't have to peddle stuff all the time. You don't have to run about creating a schoolie curriculum that could appeal to any one of seven intelligences. You just have to lay the world open to your child and listen to what grabs their interest. If the child can't access their area of interest for themselves, you help them get at it somehow. Your work then is usually done and you are only likely to know more about the subject than you child after a couple of months if it happens to be your own area of interest.

Lord Brougham and Vaux on Compulsory Education

In 1834 the Lord Chancellor, Lord Brougham and Vaux, was asked "Do you consider that a compulsory education would be justified, either on principles of public utility or expediency?" to which he replied "I am decidedly of opinion that it is justifiable on neither; but, above all, I should regard anything of the kind as utterly destructive of the end it has in view. Suppose the people of England were taught to bear it, and to be forced to educate their children by means of penalties, education would be made absolutely hateful in their eyes, and would speedily cease to be endured. They who have argued in favour of such a scheme from the example of a military government like that of Prussia have betrayed, in my opinion, great ignorance of the nature of Englishmen."

(Report of the Parliamentary Committee on the State of Education. 1834)

100% Positive

Wow...thank you for the link, Ruth! No ifs or buts - an article that's 100% positive for once.

Home Educating Because of Bullying

Actually most home educators we know, including those who withdrew their child from school principally because of bullying, home educate for a large number of reasons, not least because home education works and works well.