One of the features of schools is that they try to teach children things long before they could possibly have any interest in them, with the result that by the time they are old enough be interested in the idea of education, they have already been put off it.

Up to their early or mid teens children have all sorts of things to learn and absorb from their immediate environment which are of far more pressing importance than any form of intellectual knowledge. If parents and teachers try to make them understand the theory of gravity, the name of the Prime Minister, the advantages of a democratic government, who was King of England five hundred years ago, the difference between acids and alkalis, the periodic table, why x + x = 2x, or any other piece of information that is separate from their own lives, the only result is confusion – because they simply have no framework of understanding within which to fit such ideas and information. This only changes when the young person themselves starts to take a spontaneous interest in what happened in the past, why the world is the way it is, who is responsible for all the scientific theories, and why we believe some things to be true and not others.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t read books, write stories, conduct lessons, etc. with younger children, but it means that you should try to remember that for younger children, playing is much more important than education, and that any educational work that you do with them is really a form of playing. Children’s games encompass every area of life from pretending to drive a car to pretending to be a doctor: just as you would not award a driving licence on the strength of how well a child drives a toy car, or a medical degree on the strength of how well a child cares for a doll, no particular significance should be placed upon the ‘work’ that they do in lessons. The purpose of lessons with younger children should simply be to encourage the idea that books and learning are a source of pleasure and enjoyment; they can consist of drawing, writing, story-telling, reading aloud, card games and board games, copying out poetry, sums, and quizzes, depending on the interests of any particular child – but they should never be onerous or a source of stress, because then they are no longer play, and start to defeat the object of preparing a child to approach education with enthusiasm and the expectation of success.

The time inevitably comes when a young person’s interest in playing starts to diminish and their interest in making sense of the wider world starts to increase. If they have not been already put off the idea of education by over-enthusiastic adults, they will then automatically turn to the world of books and knowledge of their own accord, and will approach learning with exactly the same enthusiasm as they approached playing when they were younger.

There are many reasons why parents and children become dissatisfied with school – the most commonly cited are bullying, learning difficulties, school-related stress, boredom, and low achievement – but few people cite the desire for a real education as their reason for leaving the system.

Once people have been home educating for a few years their motivation changes: problems relating to the peculiar nature of school become a distant memory, and both parents and children start to stress the educational aspects of learning at home – reading, writing, studying languages, being creative, and learning to think for oneself – in a way that is largely incomprehensible to anyone who has only experienced learning in a school-type environment.

In schools, children are told that they have to learn specific things in order to pass tests but they have no way of telling whether these things are right or wrong and they have no opportunity to discuss them properly with their teachers; if they fail to repeat the information that they have been taught, they are given low grades and told that they will never get a job, that they will always be poor, that they will have nowhere to live, and their parents will be ashamed of them, etc., etc. Everyone knows that real educational values cannot prosper in such a system, but it is only when you actually make the decision to step outside it that you are able to see just how far it has strayed from its original purpose.

Most people now assume that education and school are one and the same and this affects their attitude to education. If they didn’t like school when they attended it themselves, then they won’t like the things that they were made to do when they were there: although they may pay lip-service to the idea of education, it is not something for which they can feel any real enthusiasm, and this explains why both school and education have come to be seen as necessary evils which have to be endured as part of the preparation for adult life.

Consequently, it hardly seems to occur to anyone, from the government minister who is responsible for overall strategy down to the humblest teacher in the classroom, that education should be enjoyable, and that if children are not having fun, then something is wrong.

When someone is being educated at home, the degree of external coercion is vastly reduced – there may be the occasional visit from an educational advisor, and, in some countries, annual tests – but for most of the time parents and children are left to get along on their own as best they can. When one is in this situation, there is, inevitably, a tendency to concentrate upon things that you enjoy, and to neglect those things that you do not, even though you may think that you ought to be doing them. In this way school books often start to slip into disuse, and other books start to find their way into favour.

This has certainly been the case in our house: we have a lot of school textbooks – left over from my own and my wife’s school days, together with books that I had when I was a teacher, and books that we have bought or been given over the years – but they remain largely unopened from one year to the next. Other books, however, such as the works of Shakespeare, dictionaries, poetry books, art books, history books, and atlases are used almost every day.

When I realised that this was happening it occurred to me that, in many respects, we were following a course of education very similar to that described by the best teachers in previous centuries, we were studying literature, art, and music, learning languages, reading history books, and finding out about the way that people live around the world; as well as all this, we had the advantage of being able to make use of modern technology to access information.

(Of course this was not being done in isolation from the demands of earning a living, caring for younger children, looking after the house, etc. – but learning to balance different activities must surely be part of a real education and it is hard to understand where the idea has come from that children have to be isolated from the reality of everyday life in order to receive an education.)

This was not what I had in mind when I started out on the process of home education: at that time I was nominally already well educated – I had two science degrees, which, in our society, would generally be considered to place me towards the upper end of the educational scale – and I assumed that I would have little difficulty in guiding my children through an educational programme similar to the one which I had gone through at school. I soon discovered that nothing could be further from the truth, and that my schooling had not equipped me to answer even the simplest question that my children could put to me: rather than being a help, the things that I had learnt at school were a potential source of confusion and could only be aired when I had had a chance to think about them, very carefully, for myself.

Like every other home-educating parent whom I have met, I had to accept that in order to teach my own children, I also had to educate myself. The various fragments of knowledge that I had grudgingly picked up over the course of my education – largely to avoid getting into trouble with teachers – were in themselves of very little use, and the attitude towards academic work that I had developed at school, was a positive handicap. The most important thing was to discover a genuine enthusiasm for learning, I found that when I was interested in what we were doing, so were my children, and that it didn’t matter how much we knew about a subject, providing that we were actively committed to learning more.

It is probably impossible to define the nature of education, but perhaps it has something to do with being able to view the world of knowledge as a source of recreation and enjoyment. This seems to be something that is readily achievable by people who educate themselves outside the school system.

Even when convinced that schools do not offer a real education many people still ask, "Yes, but can we afford the luxury of an education?" or say "The world has moved on, and young people now need qualifications if they are going to succeed," or "It is regrettable that qualifications no longer represent educational values, but young people cannot do anything about that, they simply have to accept the situation as it is".

In response to this, parents and young people have to consider the following points:

• The nature of work is changing rapidly and it is quite likely that the training and qualifications provided by schools will not be relevant when pupils finally enter the work place. (In some cases they may not even be relevant now.)

• Attributes associated with real education – such as flexibility, self-reliance, independence, versatility, initiative, and creativity – will be in demand throughout a person’s whole life, while qualifications awarded at the end of a period of schooling are relevant only in the short term.

• It is relatively easy for a well-educated person to drop down a gear in order to pass a specific examination (if they want a specific job for example), but it is not so easy for someone who has never been encouraged to think for themselves to go up a gear and start taking the initiative in their own life.

• Real education tends to create multi-talented individuals who may be able to find new and innovative ways of dealing with traditional problems. (In the USA it is increasingly common to hear people expressing the hope that home-educated young people will be able to provide the inspired leadership that cannot seriously be hoped for from a generation that has been subjected to the mind-numbing experience of modern schooling during their formative years.)

For all these reasons everyone has to seriously consider how much of their time they can afford to give to the process of being schooled, and how much of their time they want to spend in learning about the things that interest them.

Enormous pressure is placed upon young people to go to school (and university) – but this does not mean that it is definitely the right thing to do. Conversely, (and this is simply in the nature of things) no one is ever going to force a young person to stand on their own two feet, and take responsibility for their own life – but it doesn’t follow that that isn’t the very thing that they ought to be doing. Education, in the real sense of the word, may well prove to be just as valuable today as it ever has been in the past.

Unqualified Education, A Practical Guide to Learning at Home, Age 11 – 18,
Gareth Lewis

The special pre-publication offer is still available: £10.95 including postage worldwide www.nezertbooks.net/specialoffer.htm

Hi from Tennessee
We got your book One-to-One from FUN Books. It was really enjoyable reading. I like getting a broader view and hearing from other parents.

I have just read the piece on unqualified education and found it very interesting.  I have twin boys who are home educated and am studying for My BA in Post Compulsory Education. I need to study families who have gone through the process of either getting qualifications in order to get in to college and or university, or who have gotten in on their own merit.  Could you put out a request for me in your next newsletter for people to contact me if they can help, either whitbread@onetel.com or at Rose Cottage, Redlands Lane, Ewshot, Farnham, Surrey. GU10 5AS.

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This newsletter is edited by Gareth Lewis
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