Home educators are sexy

In their various ways the NSPCC, DCSF and Badman all allowed unchallenged the media slur that home educating families are probably child abusers, delinquents and vagabonds.

Why? Because they thought they could get away with it.

And they banked on the great British public mindlessly agreeing. After all! These home educators are freaks, outcasts and hippies on the fringes of our society. They are already on the margins. Strange. Excluded. They have shunned normal society. They are alone. Kill the hippies! Persecute the paedophiles!

But what the NSPCC, DCSF and Badman failed to see is that home educators are a cross section of all society.

Home educators are not solely drawn from fringes, gutters or swamps. No. We are like a line drawn from top to bottom of all society; there are some top nob kids home educated alongside the feral squealers who once saw a comb and thought it was a medieval torture instrument.* Hey, sometimes they are both one and the same kids.

And with them is a huge swathe of kids swirling round the mouthy middle classes, whose ex-marketing manager mums are organising piano lessons on the one hand and Latin lessons on the other; doing it all in an environment safe from knives, drugs, and Jessie of 3b who will beat you to a pulp because you're wearing pink socks.

And these people from the top to the bottom of British society are attending to their children brilliantly and - dare we whisper it - sometimes better, and with more social mobility, than school.

But the NSPCC, DCSF and Badman are rather counting on that outdated old stereotype of home educators - shoeless, covered in grime, and living in a tent.

Well you don't have to travel far round the blogs to see that stereotype is changing. Bloggers who are smart, funny, thorough, determined, and wise.

Grit, who once wrote advertorial copy for a living and thus qualifies for what she's talking about, now contributes her cunning plan to help along our image change.

First, let's look at a case study: Image change and public consciousness: Fat people.

Once, fat people were as socially unacceptable as home educators. They were the objects of disdain. They were scorned.

But then the Great British Public discovered some of those fat people were having fun. More than that, some fat people were having sex. Kinky sex! They are having MORE FUN, MORE SEX and MORE KINKY SEX than thin people! What about those Fat Admirers! Feeders and Squashers! Ladies with big thighs! Men with big bellies! Yes! Yes! We all want to be fat!

Now hasn't it changed? Fat is OK. Fat is something we won't mind a bit more of round our sexy arses. The Great British Public is getting fatter just so they can have more kinky sex and more Jammie Dodgers.

Bearing this case study in mind, we home educators should be able to effect the same kind of image change.

Here is Grit's cunning plan.

We all take on that sexy mama and papa image for ourselves, because sex sells ideas.

So come on home educators! Let's change our image! Let's sex it up!

Mamas, hunt down those fuck me shoes, the sort you hobbled home in before you had the kids! Come along Papas! Splash on the Old Spice, cultivate that manly air, and come-to-bed smirk! Let's tell the Great British Public that home education is done by sexy mama and papas who pack the kids off to Latin, change from this...


to this...


...and then break out those Jammie Dodgers.

Disclaimer: Grit reserves the right to avoid any consequence of this post. Actually, she probably regrets it already.


*Please note that on some days I include Squirrel, Shark and Tiger both in the swamp-dwelling, comb-fearing brigade and in the cultivated tribe of posh kids who dine with daddy at official functions. Which just shows how socially fluid home educators can be.