Site Contents:
Freedom-in-Education Newsletter
January 2006
A little late this month, but here it is at last:
January's Freedom-in-Education newsletter - the first of 2006. Over the past few
days we have been reviewing the site statistics, and working out which areas of
the site are visited most often. The figures have been very encouraging, especially
for the Jamboree, and the total number of hits in a month, for both sites, is
around fifty thousand. The main article this month is about the site and our
plans for it in the future.
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Quote of the Month: "Ignorance is the
curse of God, William Shakespeare |
It has been a whole year, now, since the Contact List was begun, and we have been very pleased with how it has gone so far. New people continue to join it, and we have been able to stop the junk messages sufficiently to be able to keep the entire list accessible to everyone, without any membership required. This was our original intention, as I know for myself at least, that I hate having to get a password before I can access the most interesting parts of a site!
The Jamboree updates are particularly interesting this month. Firstly, Bethan has added the basic recipe for bread to her Cookbook. It is the recipe we regularly use, and it makes three large loaves at a time. Secondly, I have added the instructions of how to do hand-hooked rag rugging, to my craft corner - which could keep you busy for the next few months! There is also the Indian fable of the crow and the swan, which you may never have read before.
All the best for the new year,
-Wendy-
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Freedom in Education 2006
It is now almost twenty years since I started to become actively interested in a more enlightened approach to education, and four and a half years since my family and I took the step of publishing One-to-One. We hesitated for quite a while before going into the book publishing business: after hours of discussion the factor that weighed most heavily with us was that it simply did not feel right to stand aside and do nothing while so many children were having to go to schools where they were being made to feel so unhappy. In some ways what was even worse was that people were conspiring together to pretend that schools were fine, and that if any child was having difficulty then it was basically their own fault. It seemed almost incumbent on anyone who saw the situation differently to try to put the other point of view – and, hence, we took the plunge of writing a book and starting a website.
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New
to the Jamboree website:
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On the other hand, however, I would have to admit that even though a few families have found a way out of the drudgery of the current school system, for most children, life is considerably worse than it would have been twenty years ago, and worse than it was just four and a half years ago when the Freedom in Education site was started, meaning that there are certainly no grounds for complacency.
Problems stem from the fact that children are not being afforded the respect that they deserve. Somehow or other we seem to have lost touch with the natural desire to cherish children, to protect them from harm, and to make each day of their lives as happy, as carefree, and as fulfilled as possible. Instead, we consider it to be acceptable to subject them to humiliating treatment at the hands of people they hardly know, to make them endure boring routines, to sit tests and exams, and to be held in virtual incarceration. When viewed objectively, this represents a level of inhumanity that has no parallel in history, and in all probability it will be for the way that we treat our children that our civilisation is primarily remembered in the future.
One thing that I have noticed over the past few years, is the degree of importance that we have come to attach to the role of government in the education of children. For example, the questions that I am asked most often are whether home education is legal, whether one has to get official approval, whether or not one has to agree to visits from education-department officials, whether one has to agree to tests, etc. It is understandable that people ask these questions, but my personal experience has been that they are totally irrelevant to the practical realities of education. When I taught in schools, I had full government approval for what I was doing, but the result was still chaos, and a fruitless experience both for myself and for the children who I was trying to teach. When my wife and I started to teach our children at home, on the other hand, the challenge to make each day as worthwhile as possible was so demanding that we didn’t have time to worry about what people who had nothing to do with our lives might be thinking about us.
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New
to the Jamboree website:
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Looking Forward to 2006
If people rely on governments to come up with solutions to educational problems, then it seems inevitable that things will continue to get worse; but, conversely, if parents start to take responsibility for their own children, then things are bound to improve. The challenge lies in trying to get this simple message across to a large enough number of people for it to make a significant difference to the lives of ordinary children.
Our plans for 2006 include keeping up the monthly newsletters, continuing to update the Jamboree website each month, to fund another reprint of One-to-One, to produce three special issues of the Freedom in Education Magazine – in the spring, summer and winter, and to reprint our sums books first published in 2002. On a wider scale, I suspect that if things really are to get better, more co-operation is needed between people who have the true interests of today’s children at heart, and this is also an area in which we at Freedom in Education would like to play our part. If anyone would like links to their sites added to the Freedom in Education site, or if anyone has any initiatives that they would like mentioned in the newsletter, then please let us know, and we will do whatever we can to help…
Wishing everyone a happy and prosperous 2006.
Gareth Lewis
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Check out all the Jamboree updates at: |
Your letters and comments are welcome. You can send them to Gareth
Lewis at the following address, or to me at the address beneath:
gareth.lewis@freedom-in-education.co.uk
wendy@freedom-in-education.co.uk