IT is a fact of modern life. The world around us is becoming ever more competitive in just about every area and consequently we are increasingly stressed and time poor. In theory there are ways around this, if we look hard enough, yet the majority of us stick to traditional means of gaining an education, holding down jobs, conducting family life. I guess it is about finding comfort in the familiar. Not all of us are up for the challenge of seeking new (and perhaps better) ways of doing this. Yes, we talk about it often enough, but when it comes down to it few of us can find the courage to break free. Maybe part of the reason is that we don’t wish to invite criticism from friends, acquaintances and loved ones.
So, because everyone else does it, we also undertake the three hour daily commute in cramped and smelly train carriages well past their sell-by-date only to spend the next eight or nine hours sitting in a glass box at our place of employment and communicating with people we have nothing in common with and often don’t even like. Before we’ve even started our working day we are stressed and exhausted. There are many stories of bright thirty-somethings with good degrees who are forced to reassess their lives, because they are totally burnt out from such a pointless existence.
We’d like to think that the spouses they’ve left at home looking after the kids and being homemakers are having a better time of it, but in fact they are not. There is the dreaded school run to face each morning. Persuading young offspring that it’s time to get up and trying to chivvy them along while they dawdle over breakfast and putting on their shoes and coats must be every mother’s nightmare. Once they’re safely belted up in the car it’s off to meet traffic congestion head on, joining the lines of cars heading in the same direction, all with equally disenchanted drivers at the wheel.
It won’t be long before the hand of employers will be forced further. Already many organisations have introduced flexible working conditions which previously only existed in the civil service. Between 2002 and 2005 the proportion of British fathers working from home for at least two days out of five more than doubled. There is also a growing band of women entrepreneurs starting their own businesses from home, many of them very successfully combining work with looking after the children. Plenty, who were fed up with the humdrum cycle of coffee mornings and ‘nappy talk’ report of discovering a new lease of life by being able to channel their creativity in this way.
If parents increasingly are able to free themselves from the 9 to 5 routine, which is almost always longer than that, anyway, then what about the kids. Do they really need to be held to ransom by having to endure the daily stress which their parents have chosen to escape from? In an age when it is no longer possible to send children to the school of one’s choice, when it’s all about living in the appropriate catchment area and when some regions choose to allot school places by lottery, why don’t more people decide to ‘have it all’, by foregoing all that ridiculous worry and opting to educate their children at home? Surely, this would be a ‘win win’ situation in which many could reclaim hundreds of hours lost in senselessly getting themselves and their offspring from A to B each day while also achieving the quality family life for which they yearn.
Home education is often viewed with enormous scepticism, but this is mainly due to ignorance. Anyone can home educate, no special teaching qualification is necessary and neither is the need to follow a particular curriculum or to take exams, though some feel more comfortable with having a certain structure in which to educate their children. Others choose not to have any format at all and just to let the learning process happen naturally. Basically, home education is down to individuals and can be shaped in any way which works for them and is best for a particular child. The Education Act states only that it 'expects the parent of every child of compulsory school age to cause him to receive efficient full time education suitable to his age, ability and aptitude (and any special needs), whether by regular attendance at school or otherwise’.
It is well known that children learn far better at their own pace and when they are interested in a subject than if they force-fed information they don’t care about. Forget all the rumours about home educated kids lacking social skills. School is an unnatural environment in this regard (as well as many others) in that children generally only come into contact with others of their own peer group and interests and they see teachers and adults as almost another species. In the ‘real world’ children meet and mix naturally with a great many different people from all walks of life, of different ages and interests. The friendships they form now will be their ‘real’ peer group. Home educated kids tend to become more confident and ‘rounded’ individuals earlier on than others.
Lastly, there is a huge Home Education network around the country as well as plenty of support groups. Join any of these and you’ll instantly feel welcomed and be forming new friendships – the parents as well as the children. The internet makes it particularly easy for the whole family to break free from the rat race and to get a (real) life. For anyone even remotely thinking about it, I’d wholly recommend finding a job which you can do remotely and home educate your offspring. You’ll soon wonder why you didn’t do it before.
28/03/07
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