Home Education Isn't All It's Cracked Up To Be, Part 1

It's been a tough couple of weeks for me. Partly, because I've been recovering from being ill and now am recovering from the cure, the antibiotics which made me so nauseous. But also, partly because a few things have happened lately which served to remind me what a hostile world I operate in as a Christian home-educator in the UK.

Home Education is still quite unusual here. And many Christians do not approve of it. None of the churches we've attended over the last 10 years have ever had other HEing families in them and there is usually more than a faint whiff of disapproval when people find out what we are doing. This is difficult for us and sometimes painful.

Within the home-education community itself, there is only a small minority who are Christians. Most are ardent atheists, some passionate pagans, a few adherents of assorted other faiths and the occasional agnostic. We ourselves fell into that last category when we first started HEing 12 years ago.

So, the church is hostile to us for HEing and the HE community is hostile to us for being Christian. And worse, the HE community also abhors any sense of HEing parents *teaching* their kids. It's thought of as 'coercive' and even by some, 'fascist'.

Most HE'ers here are libertarian families who say they believe in 'autonomous' home-education. I'm not going to even attempt to explain this philosophy now because I've seen all kinds of extremes and varieties and they'd all refer to themselves as 'autonomous'. I think it's actually very hard to pin down what Autonomous families themselves mean by that. But the thing they can all agree on is that they are NOT people who teach their kids. Ugh! Certainly not!

The Autonomous tribe insist on calling those who are actively instructing our children 'Structured'. And the term is used, generally with a sneer, as a put-down. I'm pretty sure they'd like to believe that we all stand over our poor, oppressed children with whips, forcing them to learn Latin and Greek and memorise whole books of the Bible and lock them in a cupboard except for several hours of dull church on a Sunday.

Of course, in reality, those labelled as Structured do no such thing and most reject the label as inaccurate. In fact, for long periods, our days have not had nearly enough structure, I now realise. Fear of appearing Structured though and incurring the contempt (yes, I'd use a word as strong as that) of the hostile majority keeps new home-educators in thrall to Autonomous methods which are not always the best choice for their individual families.

And yet, if we examine the FACTS, we see that most HE'ing families do actually claim to do some 'structured work' with their children for at least part of the day.

This is a chart displaying the results of Paula Rothermel's research which we actually took part in. We were right in the middle there. Along with over half the other families in the research. The responses to the research were private. Forms filled in and returned in the post. Which leads me to wonder. Do people actively teach their children in secret? Are they so afraid of the peer-group pressure which says that parent-led education is evil and damaging and that only child-led educational activity is morally acceptable that they do it in private anyway, yet deny it in public? I suspect so.

I hate not fitting in. I'm a natural conformer. {g} What can I say, I'm the eldest child from a large family. I'm destined to try to fit in and seek approval. {g} It has been enormously stressful for me to stand outside BOTH my communities (Christian and Home Education) and say,

'I know what's best for my children. And it's God who has led me to this position.'

And to take disapproval and hostility as a result. Very hard.
But, with God's help, I will complete this lonely journey.