Tim Worstall makes a robust defence of a parent's right to home educate their children, here.
Tim is responding to a piece at the Huffington Post by someone called Russell Shaw whose main objection seems to be that lots of religious people home educate, and that the children will end up being taught creationism. Shaw doesn't explain why this is worse than going to a state school and learning very little at all, but he does feel that home education isn't serving society very well.
Which is odd, because I thought that the point of education was to provide a benefit to the child, rather than to the state or "society". I'm reminded of the theories of John Taylor Gatto, the educational historian and writer, who believes that state education was designed to do just that - to provide dumbed-down workers for the factories of the upper classes, rather than educate anyone.
The comments thread on the Worstall post is also interesting, with some agreeing with the claim that home educators have mainly religious motivations. This may be true of the USA, but it's certainly not right for the UK. The main (if not the only) researcher into the UK home education movement is Paula Rothermel of the University of Durham. She has performed surveys into UK home-ed and has the following to say on why people do it:
Over half of the reasons given for home educating related to school, such as, 'unhappy with current school education', 'class sizes too large' and 'bullying'. Almost one-third of motivations listed were child-centred; 'we wanted to stimulate our child's learning', 'it is the child's choice' and 'meets out child's needs', and one in five parents describe their motivation in terms of their philosophy, referring to their' ideology', 'lifestyle', their 'faith' and the 'lack of morality in society'. When families become acquainted with other home educators, as well as related literature, they adopted a more philosophical approach to education generally, often believing that the present education system needed reform.
Clearly religion is not a significant factor, then. Most people just think that school is crap.
Another criticism given by Tim W's commenters is that home-educated children are "weirdos". Here, I'm less sure of my ground, because I can't say I've ever met a home educated child. I've seen some on the telly, and they do appear different to schooled children. The thing which has always struck me is that they seem rather polite, and very clear-eyed; they look people in the eye and say what they think. They lack the wariness around adults and the emotional ticks and affectations of your average teenager.
Whether this is enough to suggest a categorisation under "Weirdo" is a matter of personal taste.
When people think of home-educated children who have been filed under weird, they often bring up the mathematics prodigy, Ruth Lawrence, who went up to Oxford at the age of eleven, graduated at thirteen, became a fellow at Harvard at nineteen and is now a full professor. Whether she deserves to be called weird is not clear from what I've read. She is certainly gifted, but she seems to have a perfectly normal life (marriage, children and so on). I can remember a minor kerfuffle when she publicly stated some of her views at a debate and rather upset some of her fellow students who couldn't handle someone so young saying what they thought. This seems to me to be more of a criticism of the other students than of Ms Lawrence.
But historically, going to university in your mid-teens was the norm, rather than the exception. In the medieval period, someone aged fourteen was expected to be able to manage their own affairs and to be able to study independently of family. So to that extent, it's modern schooled children who delay tertiary education until the age of eighteen that are the oddballs, the exceptions, the weirdos.
Perhaps this is why teenagers can be so vile. Underneath it all, they know they should have flown the coop, but the law says they can't. On top of all the hormones, you get a prison sentence.
It's not really surprising that they can be a bit unpleasant is it?
Bishop Hill