My Personal Experience of Home-Education

I have made the following notes in response to enquiries from people asking me what my own philosophy is with regards to home-education. I am pretty sure that I don't have one but you can judge for yourself...

My wife and I have home-educated our three children, who are now aged 20, 16 and 15, for the past eleven years.

For me there has only been one really significant issue to contend with throughout this time - and that is the amount of time that I could make available to spend with them.

I have always found that once I give my children my undivided attention (as opposed to my just being around the house and doing other things), everything else takes care of itself i.e. we work out between us what they want to do: whether we work from books, play games, go out for the day or whatever. 

Over the years the amount of time that I have been able to spend with my children has fluctuated enormously. There have been times when I have had a full-time job: these are times during which we have enjoyed a measure of financial stability but my wife was then at home with the children all the time - which was too much - and I hardly ever seemed to see them at all - which was not enough.

Generally I have tried to be at home at least some of the time and in recent years I have made a point of being at home with them for three weekday mornings per week. This has meant me having to do part-time and temporary work and not having much of a career, and this is  the issue which I believe to be at the heart of the whole debate about education: spending time with your children nearly always conflicts with the demands of work - work just isn't  a family-friendly activity, whether you are a man or a woman. 

The compensation is that I have a better relationship with my children.

Our own children went  to a Steiner school before we started to home-educate. It was only a matter of a few days from when they definitively left school to when the atmosphere in the house returned to how it had been before any of them started having to go out every day: they began to get on with each other again.

We didn't have any pre-determined ideas about how home-education should be done but we were obviously influenced by our previous experiences. Our time at the Steiner school meant that we were not too bothered about whether or not  they were able to read at any particular age; Lin taught them to write with beautiful handwriting- when they wanted to learn - and we got a lot of books out of the library.

Our three children have always done things differently from each other - they now play different musical instruments, study different languages, have different styles of drawing, read different sorts of books and have different interests - but we  still always spend a few hours per day working together and all discussing the various things that we are doing. 

Some things come easier than others: drawing, painting, playing musical instruments, studying history, literature, geography and languages are all things that we do all the time. Using computers and modern technology also fits in well with working at home.

Maths and Science are not so straightforward. Basic arithmetic is alright because it arises in practical situations but we have never been able to really engage with advanced mathematics - I am hoping that this will come later (I have taught mathematics but my own interest in the subject did not start until I was about thirty). 

Eleven years is a long time and we haven't spent all of it reading books. A few years ago one of us (we're not sure who) came up with the idea of making puppets and touring Europe with a puppet show. We bought a book, wrote a script, made some puppets, made a stage, put on a performance - revised the script, made some more scenery, put on another performance - revised the script again etc. etc.

Eventually we did have two plays that we could take on tour - round Brittany, to Paris and round the South of France. It took about three years from having the idea to actually fulfilling it, which taught us a lot.

Eight years ago we moved to Brittany. We bought some land and thought that we could build a house together. In practice I built the house pretty much on my own - its not that the others didn't want to help but that building turned out to be something that children cannot do. The garden, on the other hand, is something that they can do and to which we dedicate more and more time. In terms of education, a garden teaches more important lessons than anything else - and can have the added advantage of looking beautiful, producing food and keeping you healthy.

I have learnt a lot since we decided to stop sending our children to school. In the early days I worried about them making friends, about whether they would cover all the subjects, about exams, about University, about the law, about money - about pretty much everything - but time passed and nothing awful happened. It's surprising how many issues resolve themselves if you just leave them alone.

I don't believe that anyone really thinks that they have been the perfect parent and this applies to people who home-educate just as much as it does to those who don't.

However, all the children that I know who have been home-educated do have an exceptionally good relationship with their parents - whether they've just been home educated for a few months or for a few years - and that does strike me as being very valuable.

In fact my experiences of the past eleven years have altered my perceptions of a lot of things: I am not too worried about my children getting qualifications and passing exams - I feel that I can trust them to do what's best for themselves; I'm not too worried about them finding careers - I'd rather they took their time and waited until they found something that they really wanted to do; and I feel that by teaching them I have acquired a lot of new skills myself and I have gained a much more optimistic view on life.

If anyone reading this article is considering educating their children at home I would recommend it without hesitation.

Gareth Lewis

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