Why home educate? (9) The Library

Despite weeing on the floor, destroying the audio tapes, fighting on the stairs, shouting, screaming and generally creating merry hell before having the effrontery to point a finger to the stairs and utter the magic words 'health and safety' to demand a children's handrail (it worked); all this, and routinely being so appalled at our own lateness in returning the library books - making it cheaper to buy the ruddy Dolphin Diaries outright and remove them from the library stock forever - I would still say, hand on heart, that the library is a very good reason to home educate. Because looky here:




All these ordinary photos could be snapped on any visit to our library these days. And I would say it is all thanks to the patience and goodwill of Linny and the many librarians who know us, and have grown older alongside us, and who weekly exclaim My! Haven't they grown!' and recall three babies at baby storytime, when really, they only saw us last week, but are just saying the equivalent of Hello! Welcome! How lovely to see you!'

And this gets us to the heart of home education in so many ways; it is community education. The resources are all outside, all around us, in the community, and only require us to ask for them, and engage with the people who can help us use them. Only a fraction of our education is done at home, or round a kitchen table. Most of our education relies on the goodwill, patience, and welcoming pleasantries of ordinary people in everyday jobs in the community around us. And this has to be integration into a community at its most practical, fulfilling and satisfactory level.

Indeed, we find so much routine acceptance of our chosen life, down the library, at the cinema, in the shops, at the community halls, in the sports halls, at the discovery park, and from all the people we meet while booking workshops and inquiring about student rates, that I have to conclude there isn't, right now, a deep social suspicion of home educators - who we are or what we do. There is simply the feeling that home education is now, something quite ordinary, and we are accepted for who we are and respected for what we do.

And that is probably something quite extraordinary. Thank you, Linny, and so many others in our community, for making that happen.