HOME-EDUCATION 

When I was growing up I never once thought of home-educating my future children. I didn't even know the option existed.

But once Tadhg was born I got involved with the breastfeeding support group La Leche League.  Now, Ireland is very much a bottle-feeding culture and so the women who choose to breastfeed here tend to do other things that are a bit different. Including home-educating their children.

Peter and I were very taken with this idea. Neither of us had been happy in our own school experiences, his in England and mine in Ireland. Neither of us was bullied. Both of us had good - and in several cases, great - teachers. But we both experienced that traditional schooling was very limiting.

This is absolutely not a criticism of teachers. On the contrary, the more I learn about education and learning, the more in awe I am of how good a job teachers do. It’s the very concept of formal schooling which I question, and the fact that (what I believe) is an inherently flawed system works as well as it does is entirely to the credit of dedicated teachers and the children.

But in this page I’m going to give you a bit of an overview about why, and how, we home-educate. You’ll see that I’ve done it as a question-and-answer format, reflecting the questions we usually get asked.

Note that the Q&A below was written in 2004 when Tadhg was 9. I have left it as it is, as it provides a very valid snapshot, and would still be relevant to parents of younger children. Below, however, I provide an update on how our home-education is working now.

Q: Why are you home-educating?
A: There’s a number of answers to that, depending on how much detail you want. The short answer is that home-education is a tailor-made education, rather than the one-size-fits all which school has to be. Everybody has different learning styles (aural, visual or kinaesthetic, i.e. hearing, seeing or doing), different strengths and weaknesses (it’s now accepted that instead of someone being intelligent or not, there are actually seven [or eight, depending on the theory] intelligences and all of us score better in some and worse in others), but traditional schooling does not take these into account. (I don’t see how they can.)

A longer answer, and perhaps a more provocative one, is that we believe, as Plutarch is reputed to have said, a [child’s] mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be lit. Schooling is very concerned with children learning facts. Nowadays there is so much information that nobody can know it all. Apart from the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic, there is no one body of information which everybody has to know. Far more important skills are those of being able to find information rather than know it, and creativity and problem-solving skills. School is very left-brain while we try to offer a much more balanced education.

It's my absolute understanding that successful people view mistakes as learning curves rather than dreadful experiences. They view mistakes as an inevitable part of the process of learning how to do something right or better. They definitely view making mistakes as an essential part of developing something new. They aren’t nervous about making mistakes.

Our school system, on the other hand, is set up so that mistakes are things to be avoided (getting less than 10/10 in a test, for example. Or, if you mispronounce something everybody laughs). If mistakes are an essential part of success (and they are, I try to be dogmatic about very little, but I’m sure on this point), then school taught us, and is teaching our children, to avoid one of the essential ingredients of success. (Robert Kiyosaki, inventor of the incredible Rich Dad, Poor Dad franchise, is of this opinion also).

A huge perk of home-educating is that home-educated children are much less likely to encounter bullying. In fact, about half of home-educators never send their child to school and come to it via a philosophical route. But the other half come to it by removing children from school who have been so desperately unhappy – usually due to bullying – that this is the only possible route for them. We didn’t decide to home-educate to prevent Tadhg being subjected to bullying – that would have been a very fear-based, negative way of looking at things. But it’s certainly a relief that it’s not an issue. (Sure, he might encounter bullying with other children in other circumstances, but at least he can remove himself from whatever situation he’s in.)

Q: Is it legal?
A: Not everywhere, but here in Ireland we are lucky that it’s not only legal, it’s a constitutional right. The Constitution states that the parent is the primary educator of the child. Of course, the Constitution also guarantees the right of every child to ‘a certain minimum education.’ Which we have no objection to, needless to say, we’re doing this because we want to give our children what we believe is the best education we can offer. The only problem is the fact that what exactly is ‘a certain minimum education’ has never been defined, which makes it … interesting.

Recently the Department of Education have started implementing the Education Welfare Act, which covers all children not in State schools: i.e. truants, home-educators and those children in independent, parent-run schools such as Montessori or Steiner. Home-educators now have to apply to register formally, and have to satisfy the State (in the form of the Education Welfare Board assessors) that they are indeed providing this ‘certain minimum education’. So, we don’t know what this ‘certain minimum education’ is, and no agent of the State has defined it for us, but we still have to satisfy them that we’re achieving it.

In practice, however, it’s not likely to be an issue for most people. Particularly, I’m sorry to say, if you’re middle-class and articulate and have lots of maps and books and art materials and software around the place. I genuinely don’t know how it will work if you’re perhaps clearly alternative in your lifestyle choices. I don’t mean alternative as euphemism for drugs or anything, I genuinely mean that if you dress like a hippy and maybe are intimidated by the agents of the State and your children don’t even have a computer but they are fabulous horse-riders and could grow fabulous vegetables in concrete.

Do I sound cynical? Maybe I am.

Q: How long will you do it?
A: People often have this idea of home-educators as being these uber-parents, always serene and never, ever a row to be had as we all float gently through life together with our children. And I suppose, to be fair, given that we spend so much time together, we all get on remarkably well. But certainly in my family there are days when I think that I have made a huge mistake, that there’s no way this is working, I’m tearing my hair out, the dog is cowering at my raised voice even though she’s being no trouble (she only ever cowers when I shout at others, never when I shout at her), Tadhg is being stubborn and intransigent, the house has degenerated from being a just-about-tolerable mess into looks-like-it-should-be-condemned mess, I’ve a novel-deadline to meet and I CAN’T COPE ANY MORE. On those days the answer to the question, ‘how long will you do it?’ is: ‘Till next Friday.’ Given through gritted teeth.

But the real answer is: ‘We don’t know.’ A lot will depend on what Tadhg wants as he gets older. But put it this way … we aren’t setting any deadline in our own minds, we’re quite happy if he never goes to school and goes the whole way with us, and as he gets older, he himself, responsible for his education.

Q: But what about a job?
How will he get a job without an education?
Or what if he wants to go to university?
A: First of all, he will have an education. A bloody good one too. Just not a formal one. And he will probably have to use a little bit of creativity to demonstrate that education to a potential employer … but then, employers tend to like creativity. They also like people who can work independently (which is a feature of home-ed, but not of school), who are good at problem-solving, who are experienced at mixing with all sorts of people.

As for university, there are a number of options: he can go to school for the last two years and sit our school-leaving exams (the Leaving Certificate), the results of which determine which university courses you can get. Or he can just study for the Leaving Certificate himself at home.

Or he can do something else until he is 23 and then go to university as a mature student, which is what the rules at the moment say.

Or he could apply to university using his home-ed experiences such as projects or work experience he has completed. There is no precedent for this, and we certainly can’t guarantee that they will accept this, but it would be worth looking into nearer the time.

I know the prestigious Stanford University in the U.S. takes a higher proportion of home-ed students than schooled ones, and that a lot of colleges say that they find home-ed students make the transition to university much more easily. (Again, because they are already used to the way university/college works, i.e. you are responsible for yourself and your own education. The college offers resources such as tutors and classes, but nobody’s chasing you to make you go.)

Another option we have is that he can do an Open University degree with no pre-qualifications at all. (The Open University is a British organisation, but which is available in Ireland also, which offers qualifications right up to degree level by correspondence course).

Something else we would like to pursue with him, in his teens, is entrepreneurship. We would encourage him to start small businesses (even lawn-mowing ones, it doesn’t have to be a huge corporate conglomerate, although, why not?), to learn how that all works. What a cheap learning curve! Especially at a time when he has no responsibilities, certainly not to a wife and family, but not even to himself. That’s the time to make your business mistakes and learn from them.

Q: How long a day does home-education take?
A: Depends on how you define it. Less than you might suppose. Certainly way less than school. Because the work is directed to where he’s at at the moment, and dealing with things he is interested in, and because we don’t have to spend time in roll-calling (50 mins per week is budgeted by the Dept of Education for this alone!) or discipline or organising queues in and out after small-break and lunch-break.

There is a spectrum of approaches to home-education: at one end is the totally structured approach. People who follow this approach either design or buy a curriculum (there are many for sale from the U.S. over the internet), and follow it religiously.

At the other end of the spectrum is a philosophy known as ‘unschooling’ where parents do absolutely no formal work whatsoever. They do, however, provide an education- and resource-rich environment, and are on hand to answer questions as they arise, relying on the child’s own curiosity to provide the curriculum.

This is less bizarre than it might seem – we have a belief that children are inherently lazy and inherently resistant to learning stuff … but you know, those same children were the ones who two or three years previous were driving us mad asking ‘why?’ about everything.

Perhaps it is something about the structure of school which turns them off from learning, rather than something inherent in the children themselves. And sure enough, in unschooled and not-very-schooled children we do find a bright curiosity about the world, about how it works and their place in it. This is not, I must stress, a lack of education. But it is totally child-led education. The parents are always reactive to the child rather than proactive. (In our culture ‘reactive’ is always seen as somehow less than ‘proactive’ but there is sometimes a place for it.)

Most people in Ireland seem to fall somewhere between these two extremes. One friend, for example, does purchase and use a curriculum, but instead of being a slave to it, uses it when she is not doing anything else such as going to a home-ed get-together, or bringing her children to a museum and so on.

We tend to do perhaps half an hour a day in formal education. Mostly this involves hand-writing practice, and we used to do maths worksheets a lot. Actually, the maths worksheets is a classic example of how it all works. We believe that Tadhg needs to know his tables, so we asked him to learn them, and he showed huge resistance. Which we could understand, it’s pretty boring after all. So we used to give him worksheets each day, on the basis that eventually, after a certain number of times of actually calculating what 7+6 is, he would just know it. And so it proved. So he learned his tables, but in no particular order. But we got a side benefit of this: he worked out for himself the relationships between numbers. So not only does he know that 8x6=48, he knows why, or how it comes about. He knows that that is double 8x3, and likewise double 4x6. He was quite young when I asked him what 6+5 was, and he said, ‘that’s easy, it’s 11, because 5+5 is 10, and 6 is one bigger’.

So on one level we only do about half an hour a day of work. But at another, we’re always home-educating. We play Scrabble, and maths games, and jigsaws of Europe, and a brilliant board game called Discovering Europe which is great for learning the map of this continent. We chat about Japan in the car, we go to astronomy functions when there’s something spectacular happening. We have the Atlas in the sitting room and will show him where in the world the country we’re learning about on the television is located, where it is in relation to Ireland and its size in relation to Ireland (usually much bigger!).

One time something came up about the Dead Sea. He asked how could a sea be dead? I explained about the salt content, showed him on the Atlas where it was, told him that was where Jesus had come from, showed him a photo of me floating on the Dead Sea, and then brought him into the kitchen and showed him how much better an identical weight floated in a bowl of salted water than in a bowl of plain water. All this took only about 20 minutes, but he was interested, and remembered it well. (Not necessarily perfectly, but then we don’t get cross with an infant when we have to say the word ‘doggy’ a hundred times before they get the association between that sound and the actual dog).

Sometimes he’ll mention something and we’ll say, ‘oh yes and will I tell you more about it?’ and he says, ‘no thanks,’ and we just leave it. We’re always offering, though. Or, usually always. Sometimes I think, I could tell him more about this, but I’m tired or just not in the mood and I don’t . But that’s okay, we have years, literally, for him to learn all he needs to. Sometimes if I’m trying to tell him stuff he doesn’t want to know I’ll laugh and make a siren noise and announce, ‘home-schooling alert, home-schooling alert,’ and we both laugh and pass it off.

We were on holiday in Greece when he was a few months short of his 7th birthday, and we were splashing around in the pool and he said out of the blue, ‘do you know, I’ve just realised that when you add two odd numbers, you always get an even number.’ And this was on his holidays! He doesn’t realise, you see, that maths should be boring, or work.

Q: Ah yes, but what about socialisation?
A: I’m surprised it took you till now to ask that! It’s often people’s first question.

For a start, if socialisation were the only/main reason to have children in school, why not let them stay out of school and socialise elsewhere. Or, why not let them go to school and just play.

In truth, how much socialisation do children get to do at school? Most of their time seems to be spent paying attention to the teacher rather than each other (or it should be!).

Also, what quality of socialisation goes on in schools? Bullying is rampant. More and more pupils at younger and younger ages are being offered drugs. Children are becoming more and more sophisticated about sexual matters too, at younger ages, and sharing that information. Not that this makes us keep Tadhg out of school, as I said, that would be a very fear-based attitude. But inherent in the question to us, ‘what about socialisation for home-educated children,’ is the assumption that school has a great quality of socialisation which he is missing out on, and I’m asking whether that assumption holds up.

There are days when it’s just Tadhg and me at home and we see nobody and speak to nobody. But they are so rare as to be very pleasant as we can socialise with each other then. Tadhg, as is common with home-educated children, tends to come most places with me and so he gets to talk to a lot of adults. Obviously every home-educated child has their own personality, and some are quieter and shyer, but it is certainly my experience that, as a group, they tend to be very self-confident and able to talk to anybody – because they’ve had the practice.

But what about children – when does he meet them? Okay, he goes to an after-schools club two days a week, he does karate once a week, we usually get to a formal home-educating get-together about once a week, and mix informally more often than that. He plays with the children in our village after school and during the holidays. We mix with friends with children. Tadhg would like to have non-stop company, and he doesn’t, and sometimes that’s not ideal for him. But he does pretty well.

Q: You’re very brave!
A: The brave thing we did was to have a child at all, and every parent by definition is that brave. The decisions we make as a consequence of that are fulfilling the responsibility we took on when he was born. But still, I know what the questioner means by that question. The fact is that the buck stops here. If Tadhg’s education is messed up it’s totally our fault, there’s nobody else to blame. But that’s okay. Given that he’s our son and we love him and are vested in him, we’ve got a greater incentive than people to whom it’s just a job. It doesn’t seem brave to us.

Update in December 2008

Tadhg has just turned 13. We are still home-educating him and are planning to continue doing so. He is adamant that he doesn't want to go to school, and is still enjoying learning at home.

What we're doing has evolved though. We no longer doing so much formal work. We still do some though. Each day we do the challenge on www.geographyzone.com - and we're both learning every country in the world from that. (Although the Caribbean Islands and the South Pacific Islands remain a huge challenge to us.)

Every so often we'll pick a country and do a quick explore of it. It might be a country that's in the news for some reason, or one that a friend has just visited, or one that just piques our interest. We did a fascinating project on Panama and the Panama Canal the other day, including following the length of the Panama Canal on Google Earth.

We also try to do some of the algebra on www.coolmath.com each day. This wonderful site explains the concepts very well and also gives endless relevant problems to try.

We've been learning German off the BBC website.

However, Tadhg is now much more integrated into our work lives. Peter is teaching him computers and bringing him to house-calls with him as he fixes computers. He's also teaching him programming. I'm in the process of studying internet marketing and copywriting and website design - and Tadhg is learning that alongside me.

I have come to realise that marketing is a skill which he'll always be able to use - whether for his own business in time, or as his own business to help others get customers. And I am confident that if we can give him skills that will earn him a living, he's sorted. If he decides he wants to be something like an actor or artist (or even a writer!) that doesn't give much security, well, we'll be able to encourage him totally in that, knowing that he has skills which will keep him while he's pursuing his dream.

For more information on home-educating in Ireland visit www.hen-ireland.org.