Welcome to the September edition of the Freedom-in-education e-newsletter – a little late! but I have now almost caught up with my backlog of work after falling behind over the summer.
This free newsletter now has over 1000 subscribers – having started with only thirty just a year and a half ago. Please feel free to recommend it to anyone who is interested in finding out more about the issues relating to home education and the reform of our schools. www.freedom-in-education.co.uk

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to talk about home education on Radio 5 (a nationwide news and sport station run by the BBC in the UK), with my wife, Lin, and our daughter, Wendy. Wendy dealt with the predictable questions about ‘friends’ and then the presenter turned to ask me some equally-predictable questions about qualifications: "Can home-educated children get qualifications?", "What do universities think of home-educated children?", etc. I tried to answer the questions in a straightforward way: "It is a simple matter for home-educated children to get qualifications.", "Universities jump at the chance to enrol home-educated students.", etc., but after the programme, I couldn’t stop wondering, once again, why it is that people always mention social issues and qualifications.

In the February 2003 edition of this newsletter, I wrote an article in which I suggested that perhaps home education does not represent social deprivation, and that perhaps most children are happy to spend the greater part of each day with their own family, in their own home. Of all the articles that I have written, that is the one which seems to have struck a chord with the greatest number of people. I have had messages from parents all over the world, confirming that since leaving school, their children have not missed their ‘friends’, they have shown less signs of stress, they have been sleeping better, they have found it easier to socialise with people of all ages, they are more self-assured, their communication skills have improved, they find it easier to care for younger children, and they are more responsible. In short, those people who are in the best position to make a valid assessment of the situation – parents who have put their children in the current school system, and have then taken them out of the said school system – are clear that, in terms of the social aspect, modern schools have serious problems, while modern homes are still able to do a good job of introducing children to the wider world.

The fact that the overwhelming majority of the adult population is prepared to assert that children have to be sent to school, in order to benefit from the social aspect, has alerted me to the fact that the arguments in favour of school are not based upon logic, and has led me to question the validity of that other great pillar of the school system – qualifications.

In fact, this is an issue to which I have been giving an increasing amount of thought over the past twelve months. I have been actively working, with the rest of my family, on a follow-up to One-to-One, A Practical Guide to Learning at Home, Age 0-11; at first it was going to be called Freedom-in-Education, but as the magazine and web site of that name grew in size, we realised that we would have to find a different title. After experimenting with various ideas, we came up with Unqualified Education, A Practical Guide to Learning at Home, Age 11-18. Unqualified Education seemed to capture the spirit of the book and also the ethos of the way in which most home educators work – learning about things because they are interesting and not because they are being bribed by the promise of a qualification.

What surprised me was that as we edited and worked on the book, particularly with the new title in mind, the whole question of ‘qualifications’ slipped further and further into the background and we became more and more engrossed in the idea of education for its own sake.

It became clear to us that qualifications and education were two distinct things, and that they were more or less mutually exclusive: if you want to be awarded a qualification, then you have to put the pursuit of knowledge to one side, and if you wish to really study a subject (or to master a particular skill) you have to temporarily forget about qualifications and concentrate upon the work that you are doing.

This brings us back to the education system. It is not so long ago (perhaps fifty years in the UK for example) that schools and universities were fairly focussed on education, and had relatively little interest in examinations and qualifications: the fact that someone had attended a particular school or university was more significant than the piece of paper that they were given when they left. The problem with this system was that it was elitist and excluded the majority of children because their parents were poor or because they were of the wrong sex; it is therefore undoubtedly a good thing that it was forced to change. Unfortunately, the change has been badly managed, and instead of bringing education to the masses, it has created a hybrid activity – the pursuit of qualifications – which is neither work, nor training for work, nor education; worse still, it is not even enjoyable. It involves learning material, simply so that you can repeat it to the teacher/examiner, irrespective of whether you agree with it, find it interesting, or understand it. It is a system that gives too much power to the teachers, who are able to pass and fail students on a more or less arbitrary basis, and has created a process in which compliance and lack of initiative receive the greatest rewards – with the result that the rewards themselves have become of dubious value. It is prone to becoming detached from reality because the people awarding the qualifications do not themselves earn their living in the fields for which they are examining others, and it plays upon people’s weaknesses instead of encouraging their strengths. Because children are told that unless they get various qualifications they will be unable to find work, they will be poor, they will have no status in society, etc., they become fearful and lose their belief in themselves and their ability to succeed on their own merits. They also come to believe that in some way life itself is unfair: if you simply do what you are told and learn a lot of things that not even your teachers believe to be true, then you will do well, but if you try to express things that you believe in, you will fail.

These are the worst possible ideas to instil in young people as they are about to embark upon life, and it must make anyone outside the education system, such as home-educating families, wonder what value these sort of qualifications really have, and what is the best way to approach them.

Having considered the question carefully, I have come to the conclusion that school-based qualifications do have two attributes that may make them indirectly useful to someone being educated at home. The first of these is that they give a young person a chance to measure themselves against their contemporaries and to reassure themselves that, educationally, they are not at a disadvantage compared to children who go to school, and the second is that they could enable a young person who is clear that they want to follow a particular career to attend a university which may require a specific qualification before they will admit a student on a course.

However, in terms of life in general, qualifications that you acquire when you are of school age are of no general significance or long-term use; studying for qualifications when you are too young can lead to your committing yourself to a career to which, in later life, you find yourself to be ill suited, and the increasingly flexible and changing nature of the labour market means that qualifications which you acquire when you are young are not relevant a few years later. Most adults now accept that they will have to continue acquiring new skills throughout their working lives; some of these skills may involve attending courses, and gaining qualifications, and some of them may not, but once one leaves the education system, the overall focus shifts from gaining qualifications for their own sake, towards acquiring skills that are of specific use in a specific situation. It would seem sensible for everyone to adopt this latter approach as early as possible, and to dispense with the rather pointless phase of trying to pass examinations simply so that they can be said to have done well at school.

Not surprisingly, upon investigation, the fear of not acquiring school-based qualifications is just as groundless as the fear of not having a school-based social life: in fact, just as having a school-based social life prevents one from having a normal social life, pursuing school-based qualifications prevents one from gaining a real education – which could be the very thing that qualifies one to deal with life in the real world.

 __________________________________________________________________________

Reading Age

SHARON 

The Jamboree is an online magazine for parents and children associated with the freedom in education site but written and managed by young people. It contains cartoons, recipes, stories, crafts, and gardening information and a new section called ‘You don’t have to go to school’. It puts the issue from a young person’s point of view, which is refreshingly honest: www.jamboree.freedom-in-education.co.uk

October Newsletter I plan to send out the October newsletter in about two weeks time. Please send any letters, or information for inclusion, as soon as possible.

This newsletter is edited by Gareth Lewis, author of One-to-One, A Practical Guide to Learning at Home
Questions and comments: garethlewis@freedom-in-education.co.uk
© 2003 freedom-in-education http://www.freedom-in-education.co.uk