Photo: Nick Cobbing

Radical Home Education

School; The Best Years of Our Lives or State-Driven Dependency? Emma Jackson, who lives in a community dedicated to home education, explains what de-schooling is all about..

Squall 12, Spring 1996, pp. 54-55.

Control, coercion, obedience, discrimination, conformity..... welcome to the world of a nineties school child.

School as an institution is crucial to maintain our current consumerist, anti-environmental, anti-community society. If you want to learn self-reliance, co-operation, community activism, direct action, don’t go to school, because these things are completely alien in a place that teaches people dependency, competition and discrimination.

School is where we are taught to conform, to carry out actions that government and powerful influential groups want us to carry out. It is also the place that yearly fails nearly 40 per cent of its users, even in its own terms. And it fails them doubly, not only do those 40 per cent who fail qualifications not have the necessary bits of paper for ‘success’ but they often have an internalised sense of failure that prevents them seeing that it is the school system that has failed and not them.

If your view of schools is that they are fairly benign places, with well-meaning teachers, which children on the whole quite enjoy going to and where, generally, these children learn enough about the world to do what they want to as adults, then what I have just written will seem extreme. But even though some people have positive experiences, I believe this is despite, rather than because of, the school system. Whether we do ‘well’ or ‘badly’ in school terms, we are all ultimately judged by school, on their terms, and this scars most people for the rest of their lives.

If we can’t pass on our visions and realities to our children, then what we do is just fashion and ultimately meaningless.

So here we are, in the caring sharing nineties, protesting about road-building, quarrying, animal rights and discrimination, while millions of children spend large portions of their lives in a place where they learn to be the consumers, polluters and capitalists of the future. Surprisingly, many people aren’t aware that there is an alternative, ie taking children out of school and ‘teaching’ them at home.

Home education is both legal and practised by many adults and children throughout the world. The ways in which people practically care for and ‘educate’ themselves/their children are incredibly varied, from a very structured ‘school at home’ with curriculum and timetables, to an unstructured life which often focuses on more practical skills, self-reliance at an early age, and living life within communities.

This last approach is the one that I feel gives children most opportunity for personal growth and self-direction, most opportunity for learning skills of flexibility and cooperation. Despite the odd “workbook” when I’m feeling the weight of my schooling breaking through, this is what I want for my children.

The biggest problem with home education is that only a small number of people do it. Inevitably children see less of other children than they would do if they were at school, but this is often compensated by the quality of relationships out of school, and also by cross-generational relationships.

As home education grows, hopefully this problem will decrease, but another way around is through the concept of flexi-schooling, which is likely to grow in the future. Flexi-schooling is a pick-and-mix attitude to schooling, ie. adults/children decide how much and what type of education they want, and negotiate this with a particular school, usually coming up with some form of part-time attendance.

This is a step towards the community resource system of learning, as proposed by many writers, and is a definite move towards reducing the autocracy of the school. Flexi-schooling is happening, but only where individual school heads are into the idea. So, if you like the concept, go and have a chat, you may be pleasantly surprised!

Another way of overcoming isolation is getting together with other home educators. I know of at least one co-housing group which sees this as a main reason for living more co-operatively. And on a smaller scale, many people living in a small housing co-op, as I do, share child care and work co-operatively (Brambles). Home education inevitably raises issues of child care and support. In a typical nuclear family, it is often the woman who home educates, the man being the traditional bread-winner. Yet with the slow breakdown of full-time work, and an increasing awareness that nuclear families and traditional gender splits are not working, more and more people are opting for part-time work, or are working and living co-operatively, giving more time to their children and less time to formal work arrangements.

Life with home education can be difficult and frustrating, but then life with children generally can be hard, especially if you have little money and support. Within DIY culture (squatting, direct action, travelling communities, co-ops, low-impact living) caring for children can come into direct conflict with what others in your immediate community want to do. An inability to be ‘politically active’ because of day-to-day responsibilities for child care can be frustrating. Also frustrating can be other people’s lack of awareness of children and children’s needs.

Creating alternative lifestyles is about learning to rely on ourselves and our communities, yet many groups show little of this, especially when it comes to children. I have been to many places where it is still the women who do the domestic work and caring for children, taking full responsibility while men get on with the ‘real work’ of direct action and ‘saving the planet’.

Ultimately, the success or failure of the lives we are trying to create stands or falls by how we treat our children. And, as we get older, there will be more and more children in our lives. It will not help our children experience cooperation, self-reliance, direct action, and living in harmony with the planet if they grow up surrounded by traditional gender splits, dependence on schools and discrimination against people responsible for children.

Caring for children is best done in a supportive environment, where they are seen as integral to the community, a positive binding together rather than a problem to be left to individual people. Some people think that if they don’t have children they have no obligation to look after other people’s children (most people I’ve met in this category are men). This is denying reality for most people and denying the potential of community between people working for a better future. If we can’t pass on our visions and realities to our children, then what we do is just fashion, and ultimately meaningless.

De-schooling ourselves is about learning to be more self-reliant, getting out there and facing our fears, learning to work cooperatively, and with our ethics rather than suspending them to earn money in the capitalist system. De-schooling our children is about fighting for a better life than we had, about starting with ideas of self-reliance and co-operation, and liberating our children so that they become adults with a good sense of who they are, what they want to do, and who they want to be. Take the plunge, take them out of school!