For Grit – A Present

Grit, who is an excellent bloggess, and who writes about her adventures (and I use this word advisedly) in home schooling with her three girls, Tiger, Squirrel and Shark, often has cause to lament people’s ignorance over the issue of home schooling.  She has chosen a hard row to furrow.  Not because of the long hours and the relentless smell of chalk dust in her nostrils, but because of the high levels of general ignorance about what home schooling can be that bombards her on an almost daily basis.

There is a lot of negativity about home schooling and home schoolers. Particularly from main stream educators and the government, who seem to equate the words home schooling with things like:

• paedophilia
• witchcraft
• torture
• child abuse

and not with things like:

• education
• education

ummm

• education

oh

• and loving your child as an individual and choosing what is right for him/her rather than what ticks society’s boxes.

The fact is, as Grit so eloquently puts it in her blog, which I urge you to read, even if you don’t have kids or wish to home educate, just because it is beautifully written, people in the U.K. have to provide their children with an education, but that does not mean that it has to be in a school setting.  The law states that as long as your child is being educated, you can do it any way you like.

You go through nine months of bodily discomfort to give birth to your child.  You sacrifice months of sleep, your health, your sanity and your best china, so that you child has the best possible start in life. You coddle them through teething and growing pains and the thousand ailments and indignities that life heaps upon small human beings, and you love them.  You love them with a fierceness that beggars belief.  You know that should a rabid bull charge your child with the intent to gore it to death, that you would not hesitate for an instant to step between it and the child in order to save it.  You do not even have to think about it, your love is that strong, even, and this is the amazing thing, even when they are being aggravating little shits and have just made your best face cream into a magic potion and smeared it on the cat.

Then it comes time to send them to school.  And the bizarre thing is that lots of parents do not give this a second thought. They send their child to school with a Pavlovian reaction worthy of a dog treat.  They do not think,’Is this the best place for the child of my bosom, that I have shed blood to keep safe’?

Parents that do give it a second thought are usually conflicted.  Generally, unless you are very lucky, the school that suits your child is fourteen days away by pack mule, or has school fees of £20,000 per year, or only accepts girls and Kevin just won’t pass.  Unless you have bags of fight, or are very, very fortunate indeed, your child’s schooling, with the best will in the world, ends up being a lottery. And you feel guilty, and torn, and you do your best with what you have.  And sometimes what you have is just not good enough and you nurse your child through the darkest days and try to find something positive.  When you find yourself saying: ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,’ things are rough.

And sometimes they are joyous, and the school gets it right, and your kid thrives, and learns things, and usually not the things you think they’re going to learn, or that the school set out to teach them, but that doesn’t really matter, and they are eager to go to school, and things are good.

And mostly it’s a see saw between the two and the term compromise gets bandied about a lot.

But sometimes, for whatever reason, your child doesn’t fit into that pattern of doing things or the way that society has deemed life is supposed to be lived, and sometimes you don’t.  And sometimes the darkest days are too dark, and the joyous days never come, or there is too little too late.  And that’s when you have the option to home school should you so desire, or be brave enough.

Now, as regular readers will know, I did not choose to home educate.  All my three children are in some kind of mainstream educational facility (rather like prison, but with worse food).  I did  think about it though.  I was one of the parents who thought long and hard about what I wanted for my children, about what might be right for each individual child, and then reached a compromise between what I wanted in an ideal world, and what I knew I could cope with in the real world. 

I was lucky, my parents did it for me and my brother.  It never occured to me to do differently for my kids.  My brother and I went to different schools from each other at several times in our lives.  Our needs were very different and my parents wanted to make sure we went to schools which were suited for us as individuals rather than just packing us off to the nearest place that would have us.

 The two girls go to the local primary school.  We have our ups and downs with it.  I fight when I think it is appropriate.  I question everything. I interfere all the time. It drives the kids mad because they are pretty happy with school on the whole. They like going to school more than I like sending them.  Tallulah, who I thought would be problematic in main stream school, actually thrives there. She had to have the day off on Monday because she was ill. She was desperate to get well so she could go back on Tuesday, which is heartening.

With our failure to get Tilly into  the high school both she and we want for her though, I am suddenly renegotiating the idea of home schooling. 

We did not put a second choice down on our schools application form. There wasn’t one for us.  There is another school in the area which people tell us is ‘good’. It doesn’t matter. The school we have chosen is the school we want.  More importantly, after visits and thought and discussion, it is the school Tilly wants. 

When they asked us what we would do if she didn’t get in, we said ‘home school’.  There was a collective intake of breath from the panel at the appeal board. 

Jason thinks that one of the reasons we were rejected was because we said this. He thinks they thought it was us trying to back them into a corner, blackmailing them into saying ‘Yes! We’ll give her a place, but please don’t home school! Anything but that!’

He might be right.

I don’t care.

Her name remains on the school list until a place comes free, and in the meantime she and I will embark on the adventure of home schooling together. 

And the point of this long winded post?

I have received nothing but positive support from everyone I have spoken to about this decision.

It surprised me greatly.  I was expecting to have to screw my courage to the sticking post and fight the good fight.  But I haven’t even had to raise my voice.

Instead I have been inundated with offers of help, ideas and guidance from everyone from the blogosphere down.  I have been amazed to tearfulness by people’s generosity and optimism and the support they have provided.  Now it may be because at this point the home schooling choice is only a temporary one, who knows? But it is just lovely to hear people be so positive about it regardless.

In particular I have been overwhelmed by the response from the school we have chosen.  I blogged briefly about the message the deputy head sent me about giving me material to help me, so that Tilly will be learning the same things as the children whose year she would be in, well I had a proper chat with her yesterday about this.  What impressed me was that:

• She offered me the material, but said that she understood that one of the joys of home schooling was that Tilly and I could learn about what we want in the way we want, and that she knows there will be a balance between what they require and what we WANT to do, and she is totally fine with that.
• She has offered to help find me a maths tutor, because maths is our collective weakest subject and when we were planning an outline of how we would do things, the whole family agreed that a tutor, who was not emotionally involved in the trauma of mathematics would be the way forward.
• She has said that should they have after school events or weekend events where Tilly’s year is involved she will try to make sure that Tilly is invited, so that when the transition happens, she will have already had contact with her peers. She also said it might be nice for Tilly to be able to have that social, group time, given that she will be missing it, having been a part of a mainstream school environment for so long.
• She knew about local home schooling groups and their activities and had nothing but praise for them and the work they do.
• She told me that the school has had girls from a home schooled background come to them on several occasions before and that they have  always done excellently, been very well adjusted and have been a ‘credit’ to the home schooling system (her word, not mine).

It was not at all what I expected and I was completely surprised, in the nicest possible way.

Not only has it made me more confident that Tilly and I can do this together, but it has also made me more confident that when the time comes to send her to this school, that it is absolutely the right school to send her to. 

Not everyone has the energy, money, time, dedication or skill to home school, even if they think it’s a fantastic idea. When parents are in that situation it is good to know that there are still schools out there that are open minded, pro-education in the best and broadest sense of the word, and committed to the welfare of the children rather than the welfare of the government and all the little boxes that need to be ticked.  Of course, it is a shame that they aren’t all like that, but it gives a little glimmer of hope for the future.