Recently I wrote this article and had it included in the June edition of the Education Otherwise Newsletter. I had been feeling that people were becoming very complacent and a great deal of time was spent discussing how parents educate their children and very little discussing WHY. If we don't envisage that what we are doing is, to quote Roland Meighan, creating a new learning system how will it have a wider impact on thinking. I want people to stop making playdough or filling in workbooks or whatever it is they might do, and think for a minute about why they are doing it. I want them to think about the bigger picture, of what impact it has on society. If we want a future where 'learner managed learning' (Meighan again) is the norm, where schools are just one of the resources that people of all ages can use to learn things, then we have to keep talking about and spreading the ideas that are behind it all.

EDUCATING OTHERWISE?



Over the years I have subscribed to a magazine called ‘The New Internationalist’, a political magazine focussing on global issues. They used to advertise with the slogan “If you don’t stand for something you’ll fall for anything”. As a passionately committed and long standing member I am coming to the conclusion that Education Otherwise must decide what it stands for before the upcoming government consultation tries to impose it’s definition on the whole concept of “education” and force all young people into an educational straight jacket dictated by government policy.

The roots of Education Otherwise sprang from the notion that school is not what we want for our children; that we do not want their experience of learning and growing to be dictated by the state. The school model of what education is dominates our society and most people’s way of thinking about learning. I see EO as standing in opposition to this thinking, part of a grand tradition of non-conformity. It is all very well taking your children out of the school building but how much does it really help if you don’t take your thinking out of the schooling box.

Part of EO’s role has been to challenge people’s ideas, making them consider why they do what they do and why they think what they think. If you look at EO publications or on the web site you will see everywhere the guidance that education doesn’t have to be like school; you don’t have to give formal lessons and you don’t have to take exams. And yet over the years this appears to have become just a token gesture that gets lost amid the queries about “how many hours schoolwork a week is enough?” and “how can my child do GCSEs at home?” EO started out convincing each new generation of parents that it is okay to trust their children and to guide them through their learning. What we do now is recommend maths schemes to each other and discuss the best age to start teaching reading.

In gearing up to challenge whatever new regulations the government may have planned for EOers we have to be able to say what we believe in. While EO has always stood by the notion that we do not tell parents how they should go about educating their children, that we offer support to all comers, I believe we have to take our stand on the issue that learning is a unique and uncontrollable process for each individual, and that children have a right to a unique education. Some people chose to fit what they do at home neatly within the school model of education, and I am not trying to oppose their right to do this, but EO must stand for the right to have control over all aspects of the style, content and process of learning. It is not just a matter of the choice of school or not school, we have to challenge government assumptions about education and focus the debate on the real nature of learning.

The government wants to lump us all together into a homogenous group of ‘home educators’ and impose a narrow definition of what they will allow us to do for our children. Section 7 of the Education Act does in effect recognise the unique nature of learning. In theory the act offers a personalized education to all children, and what we need is an education policy that lives up to the requirements specified there. Are we going to spend the next thirty years debating the merits of the Oxford Reading Tree or do we want to make a real impact on thinking about education?

Martine Frampton
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