No they are not! You don’t let the children who want to leave, leave.

Ronnie

Have you seen this David?
I would like to hear your views on it if you feel like sharing them

regards

Elizabeth Mills

You’ve got enough problems in your precious schools, so sort them out and leave the homeschoolers alone.

I went to a state school and they taught me next to nothing – the lesson I got was this: TEACH YOURSELF!

Well done to all. Now go and get a shower and get back to your classroom before the bell goes. No, hold on, that analogy’s not right..

I rather think you do need a metric, particularly as you are so free and easy with concepts like measurement and empiricism.

Firstly, you need to define how this supposed indoctrination ‘harms’ ‘society’, what is the cost to society of one ‘indoctrinated’ child ?

Then you need to calculate a similar cost metric giving a value of the cost to society of a massive intrusive and expensive regulatory framework for Home Educators.

Then you will need to ascertain, by asking, how many children are being ‘indoctrinated’, for whatever warped definition of ‘indoctrinated’ you are using, presumably how many children are being home educated for ‘religious’ reasons.

Then you need to show that the total cost to society of that many children being ‘indoctrinated’ outweighs, by some margin, the cost of the framework that would prevent it.

That’s what empiricism means.

At the moment, your whole argument rests on the fact that you think children are being indoctrinated by home education, for which you have exactly zero evidence of any kind. Nor do you have any way to show that such indoctrination would cause harm.

And yet you are advocating that a massively intrusive state program be set up to audit the tiny minority of children in HE just in case a tiny minority of _them_ are being educated in ways with you disagree.

Leaving aside the moral repugnancy for a moment, don’t you think that ‘society’ has better things to do with its resources than chasing a vanishingly small minority of people with whom you personally disagree ?

“So are you suggesting that precisely zero home edders are liable to abuse the privilege of home schooling their children”

I don’t think that home ed _is_ a privilege, David, I think it is a right for parents to educate their children as they see fit, whether I, or you, agree with how they do it or not. And I draw your attention to section of the Education Act 1996, which is very much in agreement with this point of view.

Describing it as a privilege, conferred, presumably, by the state, rather indicates that you think children are the chattels of the state (despite your protestations otherwise and your spurious conflation of society and state to which I have already alluded), which is why people of calling you a statist, and worse.

“or are you saying it doesn’t matter?”

Hmm, ‘have you stopped beating your wife yet ?’.

In a very real sense, I am saying it is of no consequence, yes, because while you believe that ‘indoctrinated’ children harm society, and should be persecuted, I think they ARE society.

I do not see them as some kind of threat to be pruned pre-emptively in pursuit of a ‘one size fits all’ ideological utopia.

And if I did, as you clearly do, I would not waste resources trying to find a tiny number of such children in what is possibly the least likely place for them to be, I would concentrate my ire upon the faith schools, where, one can be sure, 100% of the children in attendance are being being actively indoctrinated.

Even if I agreed with you, I would suggest that you are barking up the wrong tree.

David if I haven’t engaged fully it is purely time constraints, May I drop back in?

I agree with you on the above, neither the State nor Parents should have total authority over children, indeed both can be bad.

Have you any ideas on how we can facitiate children in using their own Authority?
It is the issue that stumps many of us and it is a central component of the issue at hand.

The reason I challenge monitoring of HE families and prescribed curricula etc is that I believe that my children’s father and I are best placed to support their autonomy, I see little evidence that children’s autonomy is supported by the wider society.

And so I suggest until the day when we evolve to be able to do that that paretnal authority over children is the lesser of two evils.

I am a parent, a citizen, I am not a politician or a philosopher.
But I think we all need to be involved in this discussion no matter our roles and experiences.

regards

Elizabeth

I assume that you expect the child to reach a reasoned decision in what they believe. You don’t sound as though you believe the child should reach an unreasoned decision.

Education is necessary to develop the critical thinking capacity to allow this to happen. The ability to handle abstract concepts is related to brain development; consequently the ability to reach well-reasoned decisions is also related to brain development.

Since young children (pre-teens, generally) haven’t reached this level of development, the law you suggest cannot be applied to young children. Not to mention the tension it creates against existing legislation, such as Article 2 of Protocol 1 of the ECHR.

You mentioned that you’re a teacher – how do you guard against indoctrinating your pupils with a secular belief system, by the way?