Bye for Now

Yep...we've done it...well OK, Dh, kids, friends and yet more family have done it whilst I've sat round giving orders (crushed fingers can be good!): we are actually leaving for Paris.

Housesitters are here, car is packed, tickets, passport, money, those things that aren't an E111 anymore...

See you on 24th June.

The Old Schoolhouse Sales are Down

Doc reports that sales of The Old Schoolhouse Magazine, (with it's strong connections to the infant-whipping Pearl family) are down. Some serious good can come of blogging, it seems. Congratulations to all those who supported and continue to support the action.

(If you happen to need more information on why bloggers are taking this stance, scroll to the bottom of the list of boycotters as linked above.)

The new logo comes thanks to the Lost Camel at Creating an Oasis

New Plan

After an interesting experience with a sack truck, (crushing all of one's fingers bar two is actually surprisingly instructive in terms of getting to see how everyone can cope with a mother without functioning hands, - very well it seems - may have to do this more often) - we are back on track with a revised plan: we are definitely going to get to Paris come what may and Portugal still on, though the camping all rather depends on a fuller recovery of ribs and fingers!

But overall...great news...I can now type...one handedly admittedly but am pretty pleased with this, given the circumstances.

Big Blogging Break

We're off round Europe in the near future...Paris in the springtime and all that. Am not lugging the laptop up the six flights of stairs to the garret apartment, then on down to Portugal, then into a tent in virtually the farthest point of west Wales, so this must stand as notice of over a month long blogging break. (The house-sitters are wonderful and will do virtually everything, but they won't blog...sadly, since their perspective on the school system would be fascinating!)

Back 24th June.

Co-Sleeping in the News

I personally couldn't have done it any other way but apparently there are people out there who breast feed their kids but don't share a bed with them! Whoa...I genuinely don't understand how they do it; but yes, it does indeed seem that there are some peeps who haven't realised that you can breast feed your children, get a good nights sleep, manage a love life and not suffocate your kids all with one simple manoeuvre...get a big enough bed.

Apropos the article above, am not quite sure why you have to turf them out at age five, but horses for courses. Some kids will be ready for their own space well before this.

(INcidentally - eugh! You can probably tell that I don't usually get round to spell checking - but I may be even less likely to from now on. What is this "maneuver" thing?)

Liberty in Education

Here's one for any tired souls out there... a veritable rallying cry for freedom in education which comes as a story of a school board member's moment of revelation: he'd read his Hayek, his von Mises and his Rothbard...all he had to do was live it.

Thanks Izzy

"Fundamental" Human Rights

I haven't managed to visit Norm's place for a bit which means it stacks up in my Bloglines, but the first thing I do read when I finally click on Normblog is this: an argument so clearly put and so badly needed in the sort of conversations I seem to get involved in recently, that you can only but give thanks and refer people on.

Intellectual Property

With all this talk of open source material, see here, here, here and even here, it's hard to avoid experiencing a twinge of conscience about the issue of intellectual property rights. The premises and arguments for and against the protection of such rights are summed up pretty neatly here, though I still find myself sitting on this particular fence. What do you think?

Something to be Proud Of

Britain comes top when it comes to googling for spanking. (Click on the Regions option.) I'd like to think I've contributed to this.

The Country Fair, No: 2

I'm determined to get there in the end - only a couple of days late and you probably do know already...but anyhow, here's notice that the second installment of The Country Fair is up at Doc's. Billed as The Carnival of Non-Violent Homeschoolers, it is definitively HSB free. Enjoy!

Fourth Wave

Alvin Toffler was clear on the subject of the de-synchronisation between the business world and education, with businesses adapting under pressure from competition far quicker than the school system. We reckon we can solve the educational problem of Alvin's Third Wave - the information age - pretty easily with good internet connections and some well-conceived educational software, but what about the Fourth Wave?

Toffler talks about his conception of this next shift in human affairs in the podcast here, (from the 31st minute). He reckons the next big change, if it isn't our leap into space, will be the fusion of biology and IT. And whose to say he's wrong since it's already happening and the increasing pace of change will doubtless speed up the arrival of many more possibilities.

From the New Scientist, (sadly under sub):

"Exponential growth in computing power drives growth in other technologies. For example, the cost of sequencing a single letter of DNA, a task requiring immense amounts of processing power, has halved every 23 months since 1990. It took 15 years to sequence the genome of HIV; SARS was done in 31 days. The resolution of brain scanners is doubling every 18 months. The number of nanotechnoology patents filed in the US has doubled every two years or so since 1990. And so on. According to the NSF, nano-bio-info-cogno all have the capacity to grow exponentially for decades to come."

So what could this mean for education? There will, in all probability, be some tough questions. Would we, for example, be prepared to dose our kids up on smart drugs? In fact, this is already a question: take Modafinil, a drug developed to treat narcolepsy, which has been shown to improve problem solving by significant amounts, with apparently few serious side-effects. But this is just for starters. There are currently at least 15 molecular pathways in the brain that are under active investigation as targets for cognitive enhancement.

Of course this issue isn't limited to questions about pharmaceutical interventions. What will we make, for example, of "brain implants that allow direct mind-to-mind communication; memory chips that let you upload new knowledge directly into your brain; genetic upgrades that can be reversibly slotted into all the cells in your body..."? (New Scientist again).

Oh well. Must ponder at a later date. In the meantime the Nick Jr website is calling.

Home Education in the US Today

Daryl has a typically annoyingly good post up at Edspresso, this time taking a broad view of the current state of Home Education in the US.

Things are slightly different over there it seems, so I quibbled pedantically in the comment section. (Jealousy with regards to my own favorite HE blogs knows no bounds!)

A Day's Work

I think I'm getting better at this switching between lives. OK so after work I did attempt to pick up the kids from HE friends in a professional- mum-with-efficient-agenda sort of way, and this didn't actually pan out since I was quickly over-ruled and we all went to the park, HE style, ie: with no regard for the time of day, for bankrolling of the kiddie variety.

I do see, from what I've just said, that it might not look so good but the thing is, I took it much better than last time - which was the occasion when I started shouting about raspberries in library books fairly soon after I walked through the front door.

This was a first day in a kind of work that is entirely new to me. It dawned on me rather quickly that I haven't done work with which I am not mostly familiar for at least a decade. It's quite likely that it is useful to be reminded how it feels to learn a ton of new stuff very rapidly. It most reminded me of my first driving lesson: the same intensity of learning a bundle of individually straight-forward skills which somehow become highly complex because you have to put them all together in rapid succession, straight away, without making any mistakes and without killing anyone. I suppose it would have been quite hard to actually kill anybody doing what I was doing today, but the stakes felt high.

Not so incidentally, thanks so much to the person who helped me out. Honestly, I'm really not a complete klutz, I swear. Please give me another chance!

Floam

That's a happy happenstance! Only an hour ago or so we were discussing how we could make our own floam in preference to shelling out for the enormously expensive stuff on TV; we get back to the PC to discover someone has provided us with the very link we need, with the added bonus of telling us that Borax isn't toxic. Good ole Home Education lists.

Summary So Far

Below is a summary of the new problems faced by home educators that result either from the Children Act, 2004 or from the up-and-coming Education and Inspections Bill. The list is very probably not all-inclusive. Do let me know what I've left off. I'll be bracing myself.

1. The Children's Database ( see The Database Masterclass) will result in de-facto registration, which will increase the opportunities for more of the type of abuse from local authorities that we read about yesterday.

2. The Children Missing from Education initiative will result in further chasing by the authorities in order to check that a home educated child is in receipt of whatever happens to be their perception of an education on that particular day.

3. There is a creeping change in the definition of children "at risk" to now include children who are in danger of not receiving services. This means that home educated kids are increasingly likely to find themselves flagged on the database. (See The Database Masterclass again.)

4. And then there is the problem of the minimum two day delay in de-registration from schools which will almost certainly result in more of the type of hassle from educrats as mentioned in the post below. The delay also carries a symbolic implication since in those minumum two days, parents can no longer decide the place of education for their children and are therefore no longer responsible for it.

Google: the Great Educator

Great, somebody else gets it and it'll save me buying Alvin's book since the more I hear and think about it, the more confident I feel of the answer to the question of the proper future of education: the revolution is only a click away, and well OK, yes, throw in some other imaginative bits of software just for good measure. From an edublog we shall clearly be re-visiting.

Thanks Daryl

From an LEA with a Good Reputation!

There's worrying news from a nominally reputable LEA: we hear today from a newish home educator who was recently contacted by the Education Welfare Officer in her area and informed that she was under an obligation to tell the authorities about her home educating 5 year old who has never been to school. HE mum quite rightly said that she was under no such obligation and was even good enough to provide a number of links and legal references in support of her point, but the EWO was so angry and forceful that HE mum (despite being pretty smart and relatively well-informed), started to lose her nerve.

The EWO went on to insist that HE mum must conform to something very similar to the National Curriculum and that she would be prosecuted if she didn't. Again HE mum protested, saying that this is not prescribed by law, but all to no avail.

Things did look up when the EWO passed the case on to the LEA officer, but one wonders how many new HEors would have been put off their stride by such an aggressive intrusiveness; and this is under current regulations where it is clear that the LEAs have no duty at all to find children missing from education. It will undoubtedly be much harder to argue our case against such interference in the very near future.

(JB are you out there...this was one of yours!)

Alvin Toffler on The Future of Education?

Oh dear...this book thing is getting costly. It rather looks as if I might have to buy this one as well, for whilst the blurb on Alvin Toffler's new book tantalizingly tells us he estimates that innovative businesses are improving at 100 mph, civil collective groups at 90 mph, the US family at 60 mph, labor unions at 30 mph and even government bureaucracies at 25 mph, by way of a very poor report he puts education very near the bottom (along with NGOs such as the UN), grinding along at about 10 mph; however for all this coverage, we don't get to hear what he actually proposes either for speeding up the rate of change in education, or for actually improving it.

He is equally tantalizing in the podcast at TCS Daily. The bit on education starts at the 27th minute, (with his view on blogging as part of the 'prosumer economy' coming in just before that).

It would be nice to think that home education groups could fit into the category of civil collective groups - ie: improving at 90mph, and perhaps it's not a stretch of the imagination to think of the technology-driven personalised style of home education as an effective way of keeping up with the rate of change in the rest of the world.

Open to All

And now for the good news:

"The Open University today announced a GBP £5.65 million (US $9.9 million) project to make a selection of its learning materials available free of charge to educators and learners around the world. Supported by a grant of US $4.45 million from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the University will launch the website in October 2006. "

So we can forget the funding problems for under 16 year old HEKs. We'll skip straight to university thanks, (given that the project lasts for the next 12 years or so, of course.)

Why?

Further on the instinct for authoritarianism and it's logical connection to violence: an imam knocks out a six year old girl for the crime of walking on his prayer mat.

"it wasn’t Moustafa LAZRAK’s first violence against children. He used to beat them a lot"