As I said before, the war against home schooling has started, and the propaganda machine is lurching into action. Here is a piece from the Time Educational Suppliment, which is a piece of pure, vile propaganda. Lets take it to pieces line by line.

35,000 lost to schooling

Madeleine Brettingham
Published: 30 March 2007

Madeleine Brettingham has been compromised by whoever put together the press release that she has regurgitated. She obviously knows nothing about Home schooling, and has not bothered to look before ‘writing’ this article.

One in four parents who home-educate children provides little or no teaching

This is a lie, and a statistic pulled out of a hat. No one knows how many Home schoolers there are in the UK, and certainly no one knows what they are or are not being taught. This statistic is therefore completely bogus.

As many as 35,000 home-schooled children are not receiving even a basic education from their parents, according to inspectors, prompting calls for a change in the law.

This is once again, bogus. And WHO is calling for changes in the law? Inspectors have no right to examine what is being taught by home schoolers, so they cannot know that 35,000 children are not ‘are not receiving even a basic education from their parents’. What we DO know however, is that the schools that HMG are running regularly fail to properly educate children in basic literacy and numeracy; part of the cause of the increase in home schooling in the UK.

Despite the stereotype of creative middle-class parents educating their children at the kitchen table, a quarter of home-schooled children are doing little or no work, officials claimed.

This is a thinly veiled snipe by someone without any facts, or decency. That she thinks there is a stereotype of parents educating their children at the kitchen table demonstrates her utter ignorance on this subject. As for children doing little or no work, this is simply a claim, nothing more, and in fact it is irrelevant to the subject.

There are some parents out there collectively known as ‘Autonomous Educators‘ who allow their children to learn in the way that they want, following their own interests without any prompting from anyone. These people have the right to use this method and approach, which to a control addict, might look like ‘not doing any work’ but to the autonomous educators is a perfect solution to their needs. No one has the right to say that Autonomous Educators must change their methods. Period.

Tony Mooney, a home education inspector with seven years’ experience, said: “Schools are told in such fine detail what they need to teach and yet parents can get away with doing nothing at all.”

No one is ‘getting away’ with anything. Schools have to be controlled carefully because they are providing a service to parents; parents in charge of their own children do not need to be controlled by anyone. This man has a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between the citizen and the state, that is clear.

Local authority inspectors fear some families are using home education as an excuse to evade problems with bullying, poor attendance or disruptive behaviour. They are also concerned that child welfare could slip through the net because parents are not obliged to agree to home visits.

Parents can withdraw from the school system for whatever reason they like. HMG should concentrate on eliminating bullying and the disruptive pupils that turn schools into violent hell holes that have more in common with prison than what we would recognize as a school.

Now, here come the big guns:

Eunice Spry, the foster mother convicted last week of abusing her children by forcing them to drink bleach and beating them with a metal bar, had withdrawn her children from formal schooling.

This case has NOTHING to do with home schooling, and has everything to do with fostering and the failure of Gloucester council to properly run its services. Anyone and everyone can see this, and that this is being trotted out like this as a reason to control home schooling is frankly as absurd as it is sickening. Shame on you Madeleine Brettingham for not having any integrity or common sense.

Up to 150,000 children in England are estimated to be home-educated. Figures are inexact because families are under no obligation to notify their council.

and that is the way it will stay. As we have seen in the Australian Home School Rebellion, parents will not cave in to the fear-mongers, brain dead journalists and control addicts.

Although many home-educators are committed individuals who see home-schooling as a way of developing their child’s interests, inspectors estimate about a quarter of parents provide nothing.

All home schoolers are committed and individuals. That is why you denigrate them, Madeleine. They do not do it ‘as a way to develop their child’s interests’, they do it to provide a full and rich education of the type that you are against children having. They do it to ensure that their children attend the best universities. They are doing it because their families are stronger through it, their lives are enriched by it, and it’s better than being sent to useless schools. As for the ‘quarter of parents who provide nothing’ this is just a lie that you are repeating unchallenged.

Myra Robinson, an inspector with nine years’ experience, regularly sees children who have been withdrawn from school for an inadequate alternative. “All the rights are in favour of the parent,” she said. “But who is going to stand up for the rights of the child?”

Parents are not separate from their children. The rights of parents are inextricably bound to their children, they are in fact, like a composite entity. All children have rights, but these rights extend from the parents rights until they reach their majority and their rights as individuals come into being. Children who have not reached their majority have rights separate from their parents only when they have been given up by the parents, or the parents die. Relatives or the state then takes over in loco parentis, and only then (if there are no relatives) does the state have the right to ‘stand up for the rights of the child’ because in effect, the state becomes the parent in the absence of the the biological parents.

What this total idiot Myra Robinson said is nonsense. She is an inspector, and should stick to that, and not trying to redefine the relationship between citizen and state by empty headed proclamation.

The circumstances of a significant proportion of home-schooled children are “a real cause for concern”, she said. Recent cases include a boy with learning difficulties who was unable to speak coherently by the age of five, or write his name by 10, and received no visible support.

All children develop at different paces. In Scandinavian countries children do not start reading until they are eight years old. The one size fits all mania of this government fails children, and what is so appalling is that creatures like Myra Robinson seek to put all children into this meat grinder that they have created, without a care for what the child actual needs. The real cause for concern are these incompetent and igorant busy bodies who are desperate to get into the private affairs of everyone in the UK. THEY are the problem, not home education. Home education is the cure to the disease that are the Myra Robinsons and the Tony Mooneys of the world, who are anti family anti children and pro…heaven knows what.

What is certain is that if any child with special needs could get help in school a parent would rush to take advantage of it. The fact is that Myra Robinson is not able to provide what that child needed, and she cannot admit that.

Other pupils were unable to produce work samples on demand or demonstrate an understanding of basic skills, despite parents’ claims about their level of education.

If they were autonomous educators, then that would make sense. The problem these buffoons have is that they are trying to apply their own flawed standards on individuals. They are incapable of understanding that human beings have made achievements and have worth even if you cannot measure their achievement with a test. This is the fundamental disconnect that their limited world view cannot embrace, and which causes them to want to destroy anything that they cannot understand. Our philosophy is superior, because it embraces everyone as individuals, seeks to impose its will on no one, and actually produces the results in terms of better children what perform better academically right on into higher education. Myra Robinson and Tony Mooney cannot say that what they represent works, in fact, it is so hopelessly broken that parents are fleeing from it en-masse. This is not only a disconnect of philosophy, but it is a disconnect from reality because what we do works and what they do does not.

“One girl said she worked in the library but didn’t seem to know where it was,” Ms Robinson said.

Anecdotal and irrelevant garbage. We are not buying this Madeleine!

Laws on home-schooling are relaxed and parents are under no obligation to follow the national curriculum, set a timetable or agree to a local authority inspection. Inspectors would like the Government to tighten the law. But home-schooling organisations are keen to protect parents’ freedoms.

Home schooling laws are not ‘relaxed’ they are appropriate. Home schoolers should be under no obligation to follow the national curriculum, just as many private schools are not obliged to follow the national curriculum. Home schoolers do not need to set a timetable, and this further demonstrates Madeline’s complete ignorance about home schooling. It would be understandable if Madeline was just another journalist, but she is writing for the TES; you would have thought that she would have SOME idea about home schooling, working for a specialized publication whose focus is education.

Anne Newstead, a spokeswoman for the charity Education Otherwise, admitted some parents were using the home-schooling label as an excuse, but said: “We shouldn’t all be tarred with the same brush.

“We know, for example, that some schools are encouraging parents of persistent truants to register as home educators to get their attendance figures up. This sort of thing isn’t good for the majority of parents who do the right thing.”

Sadly, these words are nothing to do with the main thrust of the argument. I would imagine that Anne Newstead said alot more than this, but all of it was ignored. Its interesting how these propaganda pieces work.

The Department for Education and Skills said it had been considering proposals to change the regulation of home-schooling but had no plans to publish them in the near future.

[…]

Times Educational Suppliment

Whatever they publish it will mean nothing. No one is going to allow them to regulate home schooling. They are thinking about running a consultation on this subject; it will be like all the other consultations, online petitions and every other bogus opinion gathering exercise that HMG puts on as part of its sham democracy. They will collect the opinions and even if they are all negative, they will go ahead with what they plan to do anyway. this is what happened with the ID cards consultation and more recently the road pricing petition.

This however, is different.

Unless HMG is ready to haul people off to gaol like the Germans are doing, they had better think twice before they try and change the law. They would be far better off putting all their energy into solving the problems of the schools they are already in charge of, rather than interfering in something they know nothing about at every level and which performs better than anything they can create.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 30th, 2007 at 12:20 pm and is filed under Home Schooling, Told You So.