There are two strains of ignorance swirling around Home Education in the UK.

The ignorant people of the first strain believe mistakenly that Home Education is a ‘safeguarding issue’ and that children are ‘hidden’, ‘unaccounted for’ and so therefore need to be registered separately from children who, for example, go to school.

This is utter nonsense of course, and if you substitute ‘Home Educated Children’ for ‘Catholic Children’ you begin to unravel the illogic of this thinking. Home Education is not a means to hide children. It never has been. It is only about a type of education and nothing else, and Home Educated children are identical to all other children in every respect.

The ignorant and illogical people who falsely claim that Home Education is a safeguarding issue concede that the vast majority of children who are Home Educated receive an education that is greatly superior to that which is offered at state run schools, and there is academic research to back up this claim.

Let us now take a look at the second strain of ignorance.

Home education review sparks battle over lack of regulation

Rights to inspect children and assess lessons sought by social workers concerned about safety and standards

Social workers are calling on local authorities to increase the monitoring of home-educated children as a government review into the safety and welfare of the controversial practice gets underway.

The National Association of Social Workers in Education (NASWE) has warned that the current lack of scrutiny denies many children an effective education and often leads to them suffering harm.

Of course, this is total nonsense, and not only that, because it attacks parents who are doing nothing but the very best for their children, it is an attack of the sort that is unforgivable. The second strain of ignorance is demonstrated by people who believe that whilst Home Education is not an issue of child safety, the quality of education is something that needs to be looked into, because it may not be ‘sufficient’.

NASWE says that parents should be required to notify their local authority if they home educate and inspectors should have access to the child and their place of education.

These imbeciles do not understand that a home is not ‘a place of education’ like a school, and that how parents choose to educate their children is not the affair of the state until parents voluntarily agree that their child be educated in a state school on a temporary and conditional basis. The National Association of Social Workers in Education would be doing a greater service to the children that it claims to care so very much about if it concentrated its efforts on the army of illiterate children that are coming out of the state school system.

The right of parents to educate children should be taken away by the courts if the education being provided is not suitable, NASWE said.

This is once again the second strain of ignorance. We already know that Home Education is vastly superior to what is provided by the state schools, and anyone taking ten minutes to use the Google will find this out. These are the words of people who make a living off of the management of children. If there is a trend away from putting children into the systems that they are connected with, they will lose their jobs. That is why teachers and groups like The National Association of Social Workers in Education are so bitterly opposed to parenting and Home Education. If you eliminate parenting and everything that goes with it, these people will have jobs for life.

The National Association of Social Workers in Education is:

(An) Association and group of professionals who are committed to: The promotion of education inclusion for all children

Their principles include:

(being) fully committed to ensuring that all children and young people have access to and benefit from a wide range of educational opportunities.

and

…believes that all children and young people their parents and carers have an entitlement to be treated with dignity and respect. This includes being listened to, consulted on any decision affecting them, and giving due regard to confidentiality.

…fully supports The 1989 United Nations convention on the rights of the child.

‘The rights of the child’ which of course, translates to the ‘right’ of NASWE having unfettered, unsupervised access to your children.

…believes safeguarding should be reflected in every aspect of practice. Children and young people can best benefit from educational opportunities if they feel safe and secure from harm.

According to them, children cannot feel safe and secure from harm… in their own homes. You cant make stuff like this up. They want legally enforced power of entry into homes to interrogate children away from their parents, a violation, and yet claim that children can best benefit from feeling safe and secure from harm.

Children who are removed from school and Home Educated because the local schools are violent nests of bullies feel safe and secure at home. The very people who run the places they have escaped from then chase them right back into their own houses, and then, by force conduct an interrogation by a complete stranger without a parent being there. Why yes, this will make a child feel very secure!

These monsters are sick and deluded beyond imagining.

Here it comes….

NASWE president Andy Winton said the “majority” of home educators worked hard, but that his members were becoming “increasingly concerned” over the lack of regulation and monitoring.

He said this has “in a small but significant number of cases, led to children not just being denied their right to effective education, but to have suffered significant harm”.

“The legislation only makes it possible to consider the education on offer and this goes against all other aspects of their work with children.

“Elective home education is not in itself a safeguarding issue, but it removes the opportunity for what is a very efficient method for monitoring and surveillance through attendance at school. Consequently, the issue has become conflated with safeguarding concerns which may exist regardless of the method by which a child receives education.”

[…]

http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6011938

Pure unrefined ignorance. This very deluded person concedes that Home Education is not a safeguarding issue, but then says that it removes the opportunity for monitoring and surveillance at school. The epidemic of bullying and illiteracy at state schools proves that schools are not places where any sort of efficient surveillance is taking place. If that were not the case, then bulling would not exist in schools (for example).

They cannot have it both ways. They cannot on the one hand say that schools are the best place for children to learn and be perfectly safe when they are neither perfectly safe nor is any absolute guarantee of learning taking place.

Both of these ignorant sides are wrong. There is no problem from either the educational provision aspect, or the ‘safeguarding’ aspect. The problem with Home Education is that ignorant people with vested interests in managing children do not like it, and are threatened by it.

And finally a comment from the article:

“The association acts as the voice for those working to promote school attendance and social inclusion in education across the UK.” So come on people, how surprising is it that they want to clamp down on home ed? It’s like a national association of master butchers demanding closer monitoring of vegetarian foods!

This is very true.

The solution to this problem is simple; you make the people who believe that Home Education is a safeguarding issue but not an educational issue understand that the safeguarding case is absurd, and then you make the ones who accept that the safeguarding is not an issue but the quality of education might be a problem understand that they are gravely mislead.

There will then be no one left who has any questions about what Home Education is or what it does.

The latter group are easy to convince; there are many studies out there to show them – shut them up – as it were. The other group has to be defanged by pure logic, since they will extrapolate one case to all cases. This is the way perfectly innocent things like kitchen knives become the subject of new law; someone somewhere has an accident or a crime committed against their child and then suddenly there are normally sane people calling for kitchen knives to be banned.

It is possible to turn this perception problem around, the question is a matter of will not the task itself.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 18th, 2009 at 3:16 pm and is filed under Home Schooling, Someone Stupid Said.