This is not a home education blog. I read a reasonable handful of home education blogs regularly, and I know that this isn’t one. One of the reasons is that the blog predates the decision to home educate by a significant period. Another is the vast number of things that we end up blogging about that have no discernible link to education, home education, children, or indeed any other related subject. This is very much a Whatever-Was-In-My-Head-At-The-Time blog, and sometimes, home education is what’s in our heads, and therefore gets a look-in.

The other home ed blogs that I read tend to indulge in a set of fairly similar practices: this week, many of them have told me their educational plans for the New Year – what websites they’ve decided to subscribe to, what resources they’ve bought, how they plan to address various subjects, concepts and ideas. It’s January – most people get a little absorbed in planning for the future at this time of year.

Another common occurrence is a list of the educational activities that the blogger’s children have indulged in during the course of the day. I can see the value of that, to a parent – it’s rather reassuring to be able to tick off a list of things that have some form of educational merit. Since you’ve got no-one to blame for the quality of your child’s education but yourself, mechanisms for constantly checking that education is, in fact, going on, are highly useful.

I’ve never made such a list before. I’m not used to thinking about Daisy’s activity in those terms, and I therefore don’t give things the educational credit that they deserve. However, today, I think we have excelled ourselves in sneaking education into our day. So here goes:

• This morning, we walked up to the main road, put my boots in to be soled and heeled, and called in to see some friends who live up that way – physical exercise, including balance (it was very icy, and Daisy landed on her backside pretty hard at one point), followed by socialisation – talking to grown ups is a valuable skill, and socialisation doesn’t always mean other children.
• When Henry was in bed, this afternoon, we decided to play some games. Daisy got the Jitterbugs game out (fine motor skills, when she wasn’t cheating),
• then we played snakes and ladders (numeracy, and the subtle art of holding your attention span all the way to the end of a game – Mummy had to be firm, though, and it’s just as well that she got the sudden-win ladder at the end…),
• then we played pairs using the Roly Mo cards, which are sneakily hard; they have the picture of the item and the word written on one card, but the pair doesn’t have the picture, so you have to read them (literacy, observation)
• then we did jigsaws (logic, pattern matching, visual attention to detail, and a bit more finishing-what-we-started).
• After which, it was time for Gymbobs, which is the bigger-kids class of Tumble Tots, to which Daisy was just promoted (more PE, more socialisation – with kids, this time).
• After tea, she shrewdly picked on the most educational computer game we own, in a calculated bid to get me off my computer so she could play. So then we did more reading, phonics work, and IT skills with a literacy game my mum gave me ages ago.

All in all, it’s been a successful day, a fun day, and a day when I felt like home education was something I could pull off, and was, in fact, already doing. The thing with home ed, is that it all counts. Do remember being young, and occasionally stumbling across something that counted for school, or Duke of Edinburgh Awards, or something, and being delighted because you were already doing it – you were getting free credits, in effect, because something you were doing anyway could be made to count? That’s what home education is like, except you don’t get the thrill of cheating the system, because that is the system. Everything that teaches you something counts.

I don’t have a proper plan, like some of the bloggers I mentioned up at the top. That’s partly because she’s still at the pre-reception level, and all the of the really cool educational stuff that I stumble across is still beyond her (like this, for example). My plan, for now, is to keep pushing the reading, and the counting, and give her lots of opportunities – answer her questions, listen to her theories, take her to places, show her things, and just see what sinks in. If I try to plan for the next year, it all gets a bit daunting. Planning for the next step, though, and identifying where to go from here, a step at a time – that’s attainable. That we can do. Indefinitely, I think.

Since I was musing on educational philosophy, a few weeks ago, I’ve moved to thinking more about the difference between home education and school education.  And my Mum’s going to go white, again.

Schools have, I am given to understand, a legal obligation to provide what is described as “a broad and balanced curriculum”, and until quite recently I think I was assuming that I had some kind of moral responsibility to do the same. But then I started to think about WHY the school curriculum is described in those terms.  It needs to be broad and balanced, because it’s trying to cater to the needs of a large number of very different children.  It needs to offer the things a specific child can succeed at, without necessarily knowing what those things are.  So they take the scattergun approach – all children will study all subjects, covering maths, english, science, languages, humanities, art, music, whatever cookery and needlework are called now, PE, woodwork et al, and, increasingly, PHSE-type subjects (sex ed for the infants, anyone? *).

My children are going to be educated at home, in a system personally tailored to their individual educational needs.  You can do that with the sort of ratios you have at home. You don’t get thirty new bodies every September, to spend all year finding out what they’re good at, before you pass them on to someone else.  You have one or two children whom you follow throughout their academic career.  You know them intimately, and you know how to encourage what they’re good at.  If they have no interest in or talent for drawing, or geography, they don’t have to do it.  That was a light bulb moment for me.  It’s OK treat them as individuals, with individual strengths and weaknesses.

Now, in the real world, that’s unlikely to mean much.  I’m not about to decide one of them isn’t much good at counting, so we’ll never do maths with them again: partly because there are some life skills that are worth persevering over, and counting your own money is one of them; and partly because there’s no reason for them actually hate a “subject”, as long as they don’t feel like they’re being pushed harder than they can handle.  At home, there’s no power on high insisting that they reach a specific level in a specific subject by a specific date.  If maths is hard, then maths can be taken slowly.  It’s OK if they get to sixteen without getting as far as quadratic equations.  It’s OK if they get to sixteen without ever doing algebra at all – as long as they can weigh ingredients, measure for a carpet, count the money (both the real money in the purse, and the numbers on the bank statement), the rest of maths is for fun, really, isn’t it?  It’s to pursue if you like that sort of thing, if you like maths, if you want maths qualifications, etc, etc.  It doesn’t matter.

Home education is about finding their passions, their loves, their talents, and helping them to make the most of them.  I suppose it comes down to what I’ve said before – there are a tiny handful of things that are important skills for life, and the rest of education is basically general knowledge.  History, geography, literature, science – there are no real rules to which bits you should learn, or in which order.  It’s OK to know about Tudors but not Romans.  It’s OK to understand what a volcano is, but not know the capital of Uganda. It’s OK to have read Austen, but not Dickens – or Dickens, but not Austen, depending on your preference.  They’re all about broadening your understanding of the world, through exposure to information and through understanding of that information.

So I have a responsibility to make a broad range of educational opportunities available.  I have a responsibility to reintroduce things at periodic intervals, in case a child is suddenly ready for it, now.  But I don’t have a responsibility to flog dead horses.  Which is a relief.

* I don’t actually have an opinion on sex education in schools – well, I don’t mind it, so I suppose I do, just not a hostile one.  I have grave reservations about schools taking responsibility for “relationship” education though, because how can they possibly undertake to teach about something that can’t be researched empirically? The idea of the govenment, at the top level, or some teacher I don’t know, and may or may not approve of morally, setting the “moral framework” with which to underpin sex education alarms me greatly.  That’s not education.  It’s indoctrination, and indoctrination is so my job!

I’ve been thinking about this a little bit, recently, and was suprised to discover that I have one, and that it’s slightly better thought out than I’d realised (though that may not be saying much).

I think I slightly scandalised my mum, at the weekend, by telling her that I wasn’t particularly bothered about the kids doing GCSEs. The fact is, I’ve become quite hostile to the idea of certification getting in the way of education.  Myself, I’m qualified to the hilt, with no particular evidence of it having done me any good – except in the sense that I really rather enjoyed writing my MA dissertation, and I’m still quite proud of it as a piece of work.  And I think that’s the key.  There are odd essays from my undergrad and postgrad career that I feel almost as proud of – they’re the ones that I enjoyed writing, got thoroughly involved in, and which consequently included moments of utter clarity, when I could suddenly see, and better yet, articulate, what was going on. I think I’ve lost my Freud essay, which is a shame, because I was rather partial to it.

The point is, the best bits of my education were when I stopped being in it for the qualifications, and started focussing on the education. The most satisfying, fulfilling, stimulating parts of the process were about the exhilaration of learning and discovering, for the sheer satisfaction of doing so. It was about intellectual achievement, not about doing the grunt-work towards getting a certificate.

That’s what I want for my children. I want their education – at every level – to be about the joy of doing something you couldn’t do yesterday, of understanding something you didn’t understand yesterday, of making a connection you hadn’t made yesterday. I don’t want it to be about slaving away at something that doesn’t interest you, just to get to the certificate.

Now, there are exceptions to this rule; I’m not sure if that’s because I’m applying it inconsistently, or because life simply isn’t that good. I do still think that learning to read is important, that qualifications in Maths and English are expected by almost everyone you’ll meet in adult life, and that certain goals require a certain amount of grunt-work to get to them. If, for example, you decide you want to be a doctor (example rather than maternal aspiration), you have to study medicine at University, and you have to achieve the minimum requirements to access that course – probably sciencey A Levels, and probably Maths and English GCSE to boot. In order to study A levels, you may be required to take more GCSEs than that, too, and almost certainly, some of that process will be boring – however, if you’ve stepped onto that treadmill with a specific goal in mind, and done it consciously, you’re likely to be less hostile towards the boring bits, because you’re committed to achieving your goal.

A visual representation of the forest that had to be chopped down to support my educational journey, ages 4-28.

It’s not the same thing as studying as many GCSEs as you can fit into your timetable, with very few real choices as to what they are (in my day, the choice amounted, for most people, to History or Geography, and I get the impression it’s even more prescriptive, now), and then choosing the subjects you hate least to study as many A Levels as you can, so you can go to University, because everyone has told you that you simply MUST go to University.

Don’t get me wrong. University is great, not least because it’s the very first time you get a free choice of what to study, and in what depth. Sadly, most undergrads (myself included) take a long time to get out of the habit of studying because you have to, and into studying because you want to. Lots never manage it. Having got so far on doing work, to get marks, to get grades, to get qualified, to have a piece of paper to wave about saying how qualified you are, the joy of learning is so long since squashed that it’s irreparable. But, if you’re careful, if you choose your course properly, and keep your eye out for the bits that are genuinely interesting to you, University can be the place learn how to enjoy learning again – to essentially relearn what came so utterly naturally to you before you ever started school, because young children love learning; nothing gives them greater pleasure.

I coasted for most of my academic career, and actually, that’s not terribly fulfilling.  I was lucky – I was bright enough to get away with it.  My mum is convinced that in a different school, I would have gained straight As at GCSE, but that I lacked the ethos of work around me to get me to put in the effort.  I’m not convinced.  I mean, she might be right, but I’m not convinced it would have changed my life’s direction in the slightest.  Instead, I learned fairly early on how much effort was required to achieve what I need to achieve.  I didn’t get straight As, but I got C and above for all my subjects.  Since no-one ever requires a GCSE A grade, it was perfectly adequate, and since I wasn’t engaged with the process of learning for it’s own sake, I saw no reason to work any harder than I needed to.  But since my desired A level course accepted me, and my desired degree course accepted me (well, my second choice did, and there were extenuating circumstances around the time of the exams), I’m now more or less where I was always heading.  A different environment might have changed my attitude, but not my outcome.

I would much rather my children were engaged with learning, than engaged with gaining qualifications, on the off-chance that they might need them one day.  And on the day that they decide that they want to do X, and that the best way to achieve that is go through the process of Y and Z, they’ll know why they’re doing it, and hopefully be motivated by that knowledge.