UK Education Authorities: Homeschooling Could be a Cover for Abuse

January 25th, 2009

Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher’s Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling by John Taylor Gatto (UK):

John Taylor Gatto’s Weapons of Mass Instruction focuses on mechanisms of familiar schooling that cripple imagination, discourage critical thinking, and create a false view of learning as a by-product of rote-memorization drills. Gatto’s earlier book, Dumbing Us Down, put that now-famous expression of the title into common use worldwide. Weapons of Mass Instruction promises to add another chilling metaphor to the brief against schooling.

Here is a demonstration that the harm school inflicts is quite rational and deliberate, following high-level political theories constructed by Plato, Calvin, Spinoza, Fichte, Darwin, Wundt, and others, which contend the term “education” is meaningless because humanity is strictly limited by necessities of biology, psychology, and theology. The real function of pedagogy is to render the common population manageable.

Realizing that goal demands that the young be conditioned to rely upon experts, remain divided from natural alliances, and accept disconnections from the experiences that create self-reliance and independence.

Escaping this trap requires a different way of growing up, one Gatto calls “open source learning.” In chapters such as “A Letter to Kristina, my Granddaughter”; “Fat Stanley”; and “Walkabout:London,” this different reality is illustrated.

Via: BBC:

“Home education”, where children study at home rather than at school, is to face a review in England.

“There are concerns that some children are not receiving the education they need,” said Children’s Minister Baroness Delyth Morgan.

The government says there are no plans to remove the right to educate children at home.

But home educators’ charity, Education Otherwise, said it was “infuriated” by the proposed investigation.

There is no legal obligation for children to be sent to school – but parents have to provide a suitable education.

‘Offensive’

The review will consider how local authorities can ensure the education and well-being of children who are being taught outside school.

“Parents are able, quite rightly, to choose whether they want to educate children at home, and a very small number do. I’m sure, the vast majority do a good job,” said Baroness Morgan.

“However, there are concerns that some children are not receiving the education they need. And in some extreme cases, home education could be used as a cover for abuse.

“This review will look at whether the right systems are in place that allow local authorities and other agencies to ensure that any concerns about the safety, welfare or education of home educated children are addressed quickly and effectively,” said Baroness Morgan.

Education Otherwise says that it finds this announcement “offensive” – with its “implication… that home educated children are at risk purely because they are home educated”.

Annette Taberner, from Education Otherwise’s policy group, said: “No other community would be expected to suffer the prejudice and discrimination which our community has to endure.”

The review, headed by Graham Badman, former Director of Children’s Services at Kent County Council, will consider whether local authorities are able to safeguard home educated children, whether parents have sufficient support to home educate and “consider what evidence there is to support claims that home education could be used as a ‘cover’ for child abuse”.

Mr Badman said: “Legislation affords every parent the right to choose to educate their child at home but with those rights go responsibilities, not least being to secure a suitable education.”

Head teachers have supported the announcement of the review.

Martin Ward, deputy general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said that heads backed the right of parents to educate their children at home.

“However, there have been concerns about a small number of cases where this option has been exercised to the detriment of the child.”

There is no official figure for the number of pupils who are taught at home – but estimates have put the number at around 50,000.

Research Credit: PW

7 Responses to “UK Education Authorities: Homeschooling Could be a Cover for Abuse”

  1. pdugan says:

    Gatto’s Underground History of American Education can be read in its entirety here:

    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm

  2. Aaron says:

    Well, this gets the blood boiling doesn’t it.

    The first most obvious question will be; how does keeping a child in school for 6 hours a day, 200 days a year (a mere 13% of their time) save them from abuse in the home.

    Then, also how does it save them from the well known problem of abuse in school?

    Never mind the issue that Kevin raises via John Tyalor Gatto, this arguement can’t even stand up to it’s own logic.

    The experts won’t see it though. My father is an ex-school principal and really struggles with us un-schooling our kids. We found out recently that both my parents have been try to ‘educate’ our kids on the sly when we drop them off at their place for a visit. By which I mean making our 6 yo do spelling and sums and telling them they can’t read well enough.

    They’re so blinded to the reality of education – and so arrogant in their beliefs – that they’re prepared to jeorpardise their relationships with their own family just to serve the values of the system.

    My wife sorted them out in a peaceful way last week, If I’d been there I might have burned a lot of bridges.

    Anyway, my point is that if my own father (who is otherwise a reasonable guy (for his generation) can’t leave his ‘expertise’ out of the picture within his own family then there’s no chance that logic is going to help us.

    btw if anyone has any ideas about how I might ‘turn’ my father by all means let me know 🙂

  3. Aaron says:

    I forgot to mention. If they ban homeschooling the fallback position is freeschooling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_school
    (apologies for the anarchist theorising laced through that link)

  4. tochigi says:

    “making our 6 yo do spelling and sums and telling them they can’t read well enough.”

    holy shit. i can understand your annoyance. a 6yo doesn’t need to read and do sums. they need to explore their environment and find out how things work through curiosity–asking and trying things out. a tiny minority of 6yo (>1%) might spontaneously have the urge to read and do maths. but most kids that age who do want to do that stuff are just taking cues from the people around them.

    little kids should be running around and playing in the dirt. the most regimented stuff should be finger painting and movement/rhymes led by adults…apart from that, let them play with dolls!

  5. Loveandlight says:

    The way schooling is done in this country does make it an abusive institution, but the idea is to condition children for the world of adult jobs, in addition to providing effective daycare for the children of parents who are at work in that world of adult jobs. What education the kids actually do receive is mostly a function of those two greater goals.

    Home-schooling has a lot of positive potential, but somebody (who was pretty conservative, in fact) on an Internet forum I used to frequent said that he looked into home-schooling for his son but was rather taken aback when the home-schooling mutual support network for the area where he lived was dominated by nut-job fundy Xtians. It really does seem like we have a very difficult time striking a reasonable balance instead of being extremists about everything here in the USA.

  6. dagobaz says:

    My husband and I have homeschooled our 4 children from birth. No other option is possible for us. The nascent reason why was that I was subjected to an “elite private school” which did not serve me, at all. I was a science geek who loved languages, that wasn’t cool … besides, I was not popular, so therefore, I did not exist.

    My husband had the identical experience, at a different school.

    The people running these schools have a quite clear agenda: they seek to kill curiosity, talent, and true learning … replacing them with mediocrity, boredom, and scholasticism.

    Compulsory education in this country was brought about to deliberately condition as many as possible from being curious, wild-eyed, wondrous kids into mindless drones who are incapable of independent thought, devoid of the spark to be free, or the knowledge of what true freedom ever was. In reality, they are bots, only really useful in that they can be programmed easily for the two-minutes hate … and to shop.

    The idea of educating oneself continuing forward in life is one of the best reasons for staying alive I can think of. After all, isn’t that why we all come to electonically commune on sites like this one ?

    “Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and though
    We are not now that strength which in old days
    Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
    One equal temper of heroic hearts,
    Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
    To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” — Tennyson

  7. ltcolonelnemo says:

    Homeschooling used as a cover for abuse? Well, I suppose that it happens. I’m sure plenty of nutjobs use it as an opportunity to brainwash or molest their children. And then there would also be the parents who use it as an opportunity to turn their children into slaves, or who just don’t bother to educate their children at all.

    That being said, what about public schools being used as a cover for abuse? Let me reflect on my educational background. As I recall it, grades 6-8 were a living nightmare of daily abuse by my “peers,” a bunch of spoiled, over-sugared-, over-caffeinated, amoral brats. Bringing disputes to teachers and administrators would solve nothing, because as the victim of various abuses, I was somehow viewed as morally equivalent to the aggressor. So, I could be tormented in perpetuity, but any retaliation on my part resulted in my being punished. People who continued to retaliate were drugged, expelled, sent to reform school, where they were subjected to greater abuse, or otherwise dealt with. In other words, the middle school was the American society in a microcosm; a regimented hierarchy of abuse.

    As for reading and learning, it really comes down to teaching the child to love reading and learning. School does the opposite of this. It turns reading and learning into a prison sentence and people come to despise it. Thus, they only do it for material gain, and then put it in the minimum effort required to get the reward. If cheating will get the reward, that’s fine too.

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