WHEN I was eight years old, my parents chose to take me out of the state education system and teach me themselves. There were several factors behind this decision, practical, personal and ideological. My father had a year’s sabbatical from university teaching and he and my mother wanted to take the family to live in a cottage in the Scottish Highlands. Since the place was miles from the nearest school, they decided that the best way to continue my education, and that of my ten-year-old sister, would be to go it alone. I think they relished the challenge of a little didactic DIY, but another reason for opting out of the system for a while was my growing aversion to school. I wasn’t being bullied and I was not falling that far below the low standard expected at my averagely dismal middle school in England; but I was bored witless, and increasingly rebellious. The school and I were failing simultaneously.
So in April 1972, we loaded up the battered Peugeot 404 with home- teaching manuals, paper, pencils, a mini-blackboard, garlic (then unavailable north of Gretna), and a copy of Food for Free by Richard Mabey, the bible for devotees of wild mushrooms and other natural edibles. (My parents were then going through a fungal stage, and determined to live partly off the land.) Thus began a brief but intensive diet of home education and dodgy toadstools.
At the time, most friends of my parents regarded the decision to educate us in a hilltop bothy without electricity, telephone or television as eccentric, at best, and at worst downright irresponsible. Today, by contrast, home education is booming as never before: parents worried by dropping school standards, exam pressure and, above all, bullying are removing their children from mainstream schools in record numbers. According to Education Otherwise, the support group for home educators, at least 170,000 children are being taught at home, with 20,000 parents taking their children out of school in the past year alone.
The home-schooling debate is intense and complex, since so much depends on the needs of individual children, and the dedication of individual parents. Supporters insist that home education allows children and parents to bond while exploring an infinite and unfettered range of subject-matter; statistics show that home-educated children go on to do well at university and in later life. Critics point out that home-schooled children risk being cocooned from the salutary social stresses of school life and are deprived of the opportunities offered by a more traditional educational community.
My period of home education lasted less than a year and was never intended to be permanent. Although we stuck roughly to the national syllabus, other aspects of the home-school regime were idiosyncratic. Lessons began early and ended at lunchtime, the rest of the day being devoted to what my parents called “environmental studies” — to the outside world this probably looked more like “sailing”, or “beetle collecting” or simply “getting very grubby”. I built a Roman catapult and a milk churn, and dammed the burn with such success that I flooded the neighbour’s field. I learnt to knit. We invented our own amusements, such as tying my little brother to the pet sheep which then bucked until he fell off, a sport we called “mutton busting”.
With one-on-one tuition, we seemed to race through the subjects on the syllabus and set books at record speed, with the exception of mathematics, which my parents found almost as baffling as I did; the maths lessons quietly lapsed. When it stopped raining and the sun came out, which I seem to recall happened rarely, school was immediately cancelled. Lessons were also abandoned during sheep-shearing, Test matches on the radio and when my father decreed that the climatic conditions were favourable for a fishing expedition.
But being taught under a parental microscope was hard work, and sometimes fraught; the blurring of the parent-teacher distinction led to some spectacular confrontations. My parents dutifully set us end-of-term exams, which we usually refused to do, or else cheated at abominably. I was capable of throwing an all-day wobbly over the mildest criticism. Indeed, this may be where I developed the knack. With few other children to play with, I grew very close to my siblings, but we fought like ferrets in a sack. I would like to pretend that we were always absorbed in this idyllic world of mists and moorland and improving works of literature, but we were not. I felt the lack of television like a missing limb.
There were certain practical advantages to home tuition. It was only after we had studied electricity together that my father reluctantly agreed to install some in the cottage; thereafter he retained a morbid fear that the stuff was leaking out and making us all sterile, but at least we could now read in bed without fear of self-immolation from the candles.
When the time came to return to formal schooling in the autumn, my parents were exhausted: the experiment had been rewarding, they said in retrospect, but they showed no inclination to repeat it. After a semi-feral existence, I was delighted to wear a uniform again, and I gorged myself on television. But the experience had given me an interest and confidence in learning I had never had before.
Home education is not a panacea. If schools were better, and bullying less prevalent, then far fewer parents would even consider it. But for some children home education works, producing balanced, well-rounded adults who might never thrive in traditional schools. This is not some hippy fad, or the preserve of over-ambitious hot-housing parents, but a genuine alternative for those with the energy and patience to try it. American schools have introduced “home school days”, when parents are required to take a day off work and teach their own children; that scheme should be introduced here, for only by doing it themselves can parents really discover how hard, and rewarding, teaching can be.
I romanticise my foray into home education, but it has left me, more than 30 years on, with some hilarious and happy memories, and the conviction that there is more than one way to teach a child. Today I can still identify every variety of edible fungus in Scotland; on the other hand, I have never mastered my times tables, or conquered my lingering distrust of electricity.
ben.macintyre@thetimes.co.uk
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