1984

If anything was going to make me deeply sociopathic, prone to drug and alcohol problems, violent reactions, depression, unwanted pregnancies, (you know, the works), Mr Blair's suggestions contained herein, would probably do it.

Good One, Mike.

Mike was just SO RIGHT and the German Prof. approximately 95% wrong in this piece from the BBC World Service. Mike successfully tied the Prof. up in knots, despite an HE sceptical interviewer. Annoyingly and nonsensically, however, the Prof. was allowed to conclude that compulsory schooling was the best possible mode of education for a democratic society. Whaa?

Honey, I Suckle the Kids

There's an interesting discussion on the merits or otherwise of the Channel 5's Attachment Parenting Programme over at Playing it by Ear. Liz, who was featured, has contributed to it.

My feeling: that the essential goodness of the British family did indeed shine through, despite heavy attempts by the editors to make them look peculiar. I also agree with Clare that there was some strange goings-on in the single child American family - the child will in all probability suffer terribly from the mother's narcissistic investment. The other American family struck me as potentially suffering from a similar problem, the mother appearing so extremely zealous that the children run the risk of seeing themselves as products of her ideas, and not individuals in their own right, but I may be wrong here. This could well have been another problem of the editing, with the editor prompting mum to proselytize about AP instead of relaxing and just getting on with it.

The Down Side

Ouch, Owwww...ow and general twisting and turning and moither. This is definitely one of the downsides of Home Education!

The problem is you have the opportunity to fall in love with other HE people and their families. You spend so much time with them. Your kids love their kids. You learn so much from them. You get to know them so well. You're in and out of their lives and homes. It becomes a part of one's own life. Then sometimes, for very good reason, they have to go.

You twist and turn. The move would be great for them. It is the right thing, clearly. It would solve problems that could not otherwise easily be solved. They will be happy in the new place. It will provide them with exactly the right opportunities. And yet....Whaa...Sorrry, I am crying.

JFT...DOOOOONNNNNNTT GOOOOO...and that applies to you too...SP and family. New Zealand is a lucky country.

The CAF - Why We Should be Scared

Here's Spy Blog detailing some of the problems (technological and otherwise) with one of the most sensitive areas in the children's database fiasco. The list is long enough already, and that's without touching upon such major issues as whether lives so micro-managed can possibly be considered free.

Detachment Parenting and the Ezzos

Of course it isn't just the Pearls who advocate an utterly unnecessarily cruel approach to child rearing. Here's Hailey on the Ezzos with their arguments for detachment parenting.

Attachment Parenting & Home Education in the Independent

The Independent has a piece on attachment parenting from a home educator. Rings a lot of bells.

Home Education and Exam Results

The Home Education GCSE list has contained a good number of success stories. We hear of people who were miserable at school and not doing as well as it seemed they should, who at home have achieved results well beyond that which was predicted for them at school. MANY CONGRATULATIONS!

For anyone who did struggle and does still need these exams, there is always the option to try again.

Diary

Blogging life is getting easier all the time, for not only does the ARCH Rights blog cover more or less everything that I would feel obliged to write about if I had the time and the general clarity of thought, but bf Georgia (no relation) has now also taken to blogging.

She accounts for some of what we got up to yesterday, and I would agree with her assessment of the goings on in the philosophy circle, though the problem that I took away with me was that of the common perception in the group of the free market being a coercive or perhaps simply an ethically or aesthetically unpleasant environment. Whilst this doesn't come as much of a surprise, I was slightly taken aback by the misunderstandings that underpinned or informed or even inflamed these opinions. For example, Ayn Rand's perception of humans as consumers who are responsible for the perpetuation of their own existence, having made a free decision that this is the way they want to go, was translated entirely pejoratively into "Ayn Rand thinks that humans should be allowed to be selfish". (The philosophy lecturer).

Ho hum. I think Georgia and I both left with the overall feeling that the general notion of personal liberty was well received but that the economic and political structures that would allow for such an existence were either not well received or perhaps not well understood.

Cheered up afterwards due to b-i-l (a free marketeer if ever there was one) listening attentively over supper as I got a sort of debriefing lecture on Milton Friedman out of my system. (Thanks, W!)

I then got an A minus on Big Brain Academy - the first one I have managed when fully sober. I think I can hear my liver offering up a thanksgiving prayer. Ds now concedes that I am better at it than him...but only for the moment. He is improving all the time and I will have to work to keep ahead.

Children's Databases on Air

We're set to record this one: next Friday September 1st at 7.30pm, Channel 4 "30 Minutes" programme is on children’s databases.

People at Action on the Rights for Children have been working with the documentary team.

They say:

"As it is a 30-minute documentary, it can only outline the problems but we hope there will be more programmes to follow. "

Goodbye Data Protection

Despite risking becoming just a referral site for ARCH blog, I feel compelled to point people in the direction of this one.

Here's a taster, as quoted by them from the Guardian:

"Ministers are preparing to overturn a fundamental principle of data protection in government, the Guardian has learned. They will announce next month that public bodies can assume they are free to share citizens' personal data with other arms of the state, so long as it is in the public interest.

The policy was agreed upon by a cabinet committee set up by the prime minister, and reverses the current default position - which requires public bodies to find a legal justification each time they want to share data about individuals."

If this really is all in the public interest, what is the problem?

The problem with this proposal, apart from the complete destruction of privacy, the likelihood of a massive increase in data sharing - most of which will be unnecessary, the probable abuses of the system and high chance of errors, increased state expenditure, and the assumption of statist rights to intrusion and by implication to exist as if by divine right, is that the public interest is decided centrally. A state-decided "public interest" may not actually be in the interest of the public, or it may be in the interests of some and not other members of the public.

By way of an example, it is now assumed that it is in the interests of the public to know where children are being educated. Whilst this may be in the interests of a section of the population, such as those children who are being educationally neglected, it contravenes the inclinations of home educating parents who want to be left alone by the state to educate their children as they see fit and without an LEA officer with their unsupported assumptions that they know best, telling parents how to do it.

There are no obvious and established answers to the question of public interest and the current precedent should therefore remain.

Not a Surprise

ARCH Blog has more on the problems with the NHS records system computer upgrade. Guess what - it isn't working out too well.

And what is it with having problems with getting software developed in India? Everyone I know who has tried this says that they wouldn't do it again.

The Meme of Three

Jonathan from Liberal England sent this meme this way. Thanks Jonathan.

1.Things that scare me:
Iran
Asteroids
Skiing holidays

2. People who make me laugh:
Bill Bailey
Peter Cook
People who've decided to go on skiing holidays

3. Things I hate the most:
Tyrannies of any variety (including parental and schooling)
Infallibilism
Wasps

4. Things I don't understand:
Why so many parents think school the answer
How the BBC gets away with it.
Why Kate Moss?

5. Things I'm doing right now:
Ignoring Ds as he straps water balloons to his trousers. I don't 'think' it is an extremely sick joke. (Oh bother. It is).
Ruffling fur on wolfhound with my left foot.
And yes, fairly predictably, I've just been told to be quiet, even though I was only making a very soft tapping sound. Apparently this is enough to wake up dollies.

6. Things I want to do before I die:
Be around when someone works out a way not to.
Be able to go to Israel and feel safe.
Find Dd's other shoe

7. Things I can do:
Ummm...be very uncertain about how to answer this question.
Let's get back to basics. I clearly can turn on my computer.
Access the internet.

8. Ways to describe my personality:
Anxious
Irritable
Scatterbrained

9. Things I can't do:
Solve the energy crisis
Stop worrying about asteroids
Find Dd's other shoe

10. Things I think you should listen to:
Anything you fancy
Elgar's Cello Concerto, 3rd movement, but only in the English countryside on a sunlit evening.
Me

11. Things you should never listen to:
The Archers
Homeopaths
The UN

12. Things I'd like to learn:
More maths
Some chemistry
How to put a functioning lock on the bathroom door.

13. Favorite foods:
More or less anything cooked by somebody else
Coriander
Tsatsiki


14. Beverages I drink regularly:
Tea
Wines
Diet Coke

15. Shows I watched as a kid:
Blue Peter
The Dam Busters
The Longest Day (ie: only anything very, very earnest)

16. People I'm tagging to do this meme:
Clare at Playing it by Ear
Jax at Making it Up
Dawniy at Our Learning Together

To Do

Oh joy! Top of my "to do" list this lovely am: *Fill in tax return and *Find the hornets' nest.

The hornets demonstrate qualities of intelligence and evil in equal measure, pursuing the children out of the garden and into house with an appearance of such malign intent that it is truly chilling. They terrify the horses in similar fashion. A normally sanguine friend, recently stung, reports that it felt as if someone were pressing a cigar to his forehead for a whole week. There is good reason to believe that I am allergic to wasp-type stings. Hornets are truly gross, yet somehow I still feel drawn to this issue.

Random School Allocation

Dr Eamonn Butler has yet another prospective reason to choose home education.

Studying Arabic

...after doing maths, biology and art. Think we can see where government priorities are pushing things at the mo!

Databased USA

Oh dear...it looks as if there is nowhere to run if Spunky has it right.

The Side Effects of Testing

With all this talk of A-levels, and the general all round jollity that the latest batch of best-ever results has inspired, I can't help thinking back to my own experience of that time.

Whilst we hear from many academic sources that various types of testing are beneficial to learning...eg: see the discussion in this piece from the Digital Library, I personally found that almost every lesson that I derived from this kind of testing had very little to do with anything constructive.

Ann Lahrson Fisher from the National Home Education Network sums up my experience very neatly and it is worth adding another one which is that over the long term, I have retained very, very little knowledge about the actual subject content of my A-levels. B-I-L confirms that despite only just having got a very good degree, he already remembers diddly-squat about huge chunks of it.

Side Effect Lessons:

Someone else knows what you should know better than you do.

Learning is an absolute that can be measured.

Your interests are not important.

The subject areas being evaluated on the test are the only things that are important to know.

Thinking is not valued; getting the 'right' answer is the only goal.

The answer (to any question) is readily available, indisputable, and it's one of these four or five answers here; there's no need to look deeper or dwell on the question.

Your worth can be summarized by a single mark on a paper.

The purpose of learning is to get a high score. High test scores are the only purpose of testing.

If you score very well, you are better than other people who do not score as well.

Poor test scores mean that you are a failure.

If you score poorly, there is nothing you can do to change it. Why try?

I haven't learned to read yet. I am not smart.

Since we are tested once a year, we have to spend the rest of the year preparing for the test.

The test was too hard. I am not smart.

The test was easy. I don't have to learn any more.

The test was easy [hard]. Public [home] [private] school kids are dumber [smarter] than I am.

The questions on the test are what is important. What I have been studying is not important.

I have to get a higher score next year to show that I am learning.

Fisher notes that there are indeed some anxieties in academic departments about the effects of testing. Here are some:

Standardized tests cannot measure creativity.

Test scores reward children who have one style of learning, and penalize all other children for having a different style of learning.

Standardized tests cannot measure the ability to think, and actually teach children bad thinking habits, such as trying to outguess the test makers, rather than thinking for themselves.

Standardized tests result in a type of evaluation that is easy to manage (true/false, multiple choice).

Thinking skills are very difficult and time consuming to evaluate.

Standardized tests are designed not to test individual progress, but to compare a child's progress to the progress of other children. Thus, tests promote competition, not cooperation.

Poor test scores decrease self esteem, possibly leading to social and discipline problems.

Testing can damage the trust relationship between teacher and student.

Test scores and grading are a divisive force in families, separating parents from their natural position as the child's first and most committed teacher. (Wow! Some educators know this! Dare I hope for a positive future?)

Reliance on standardized test scores reduces initiative, independence, creativity, and willingness to take risks in learning situations.

Test scores become the goal of student work (extrinsic reward) rather than the sense of satisfaction and wonder that naturally follows discovery of something new (intrinsic reward).

The drive for high test scores creates unnecessary, unproductive stress.

Standardized tests promote under achievement.

Test makers assume that all children have equal readiness for all subjects at the same age.

Tests focus on a narrow band of learning, emphasizing memorization skills.

Reliance on test scores and grades causes students to drop courses of study.

It is worth noting that standardized tests, in addition to being narrowly focused and frequently misused comparative measurements of academic progress, are powerful teachers in their own right. Only when these instruments have been imposed on huge populations of students for many years can we begin to see that the tests take on a teaching life of their own, quite apart from the intentions of their creators.


None of which applies to my recent self-imposed testing, which resulted in the over-riding lesson of remembering to make sure that our wine cellar is well-stocked. Hmm.


UPDATE:

Actually, I think testing is great. (Have just come third and then second in this. Na na na naa na. And I was stone cold sober.)

Performance Enhancing?

It is the case that most of us discover just how insightful and generally all round brilliant we really are after a couple of glasses of something or other. And yes, it turns out to be completely true...for yesterday night, in the interests of science, and after about four units of red wine, I increased my score on Big Brain Academy by a whopping three whole notches - which may not be good news for my liver, since the next day, I was back to my previous sober best.

Perhaps this is why I find the news from Future Pundit that human brain cells can replictate in culture so very inspiring. Brain cells or liver cells, either would be good enough for me.

Costs/Benefits

By way of consoling myself as regards the expense of home education, I regularly compare costs with private schooling. A recent estimate from Charles Moore of the Spectator set the price of putting a child through private school at approximately £250k, so there aren't too many worries there.

However we do have to concede the case with regard to state schooling, with current parental expenditure estimated at £14,000 for a school-life. But of course when you take value for your money into account, home education wins hands down.