Passing on life's values

The world is full of women like me. Women who are big, and I mean BIG, on family loyalty, family cooperation; but working together to find creative solutions for every individual family member blah blah blah.

With this approach, we generally produce offspring interested in the same.

Kids develop responsibilities quick. They become self-aware, cooperative, blah blah blah.

If you extend this old tie-dyed philosophy, it's possible you wander down the avenue of home education. It's a logical consequence of practical respect for the individual. Especially an individual who sobs I don't like school. To which the simple answer can be, Then let's find a path that suits you.

Even if your choice of alternative education batters the family, it's no big deal. You get to tell yourself that What won't kill it, makes it stronger. So now you win all round. You get to make moral lessons rise out of domestic chaos.

It's a slippery slope. Soon living in the desert and eating raw food won't seem quite so weird.

But there's a big problem with this approach to living. Your offspring become aware of learning. They take control over it. They see it as an individual expression. They expect you to support it, no matter where it goes. They treasure learning as a valuable resource. They take it as far as they can.

Sometimes, they want to learn from people who they perceive have particular skills to teach them. Not mamma with a book from the library. Mamma, your job now is to find these people.

Now you cannot persuade kids of any other way. They have no interest at all in sitting on some old bloke's lap in a bar for a fiver, building a lucrative page three career as the next orange girlfriend of a footballer, nor even for taking over household chores like the beer, chip and ciggie run on the way home from school. No. Now they have an idea about learning in their heads, and they won't let it go.

And the more you persuade these kids to do the decent thing and go set fire to an abandoned sofa down the back lane, the more they resist, and say no. They want to learn some craft from the seventeenth century.

Like lace making. Mamma, find me a lace maker.

Now I don't know about you, but I'm not walking down the streets, fighting off lace making teachers with big sticks.

It has taken me ten months to get hold of one. Not just any one. One who is willing to teach children this ancient finger art, comes equipped with a shed load of patience, and has a 500-page folder crammed with easy-teach patterns for fish, bracelets, bookmarks, butterflies and flowers.

And here she is. This is Granny. She's not our Granny, but I stake my claim on her for the duration of a two-hour lesson. She won't take money for her time, because she says that women and their ancient ways are important; that these skills need to be passed down from mothers to daughters, otherwise our skills will be lost, forever. And the passage of these skills is the mark of a coherent, civilized society. So what's going to happen when the world ends? Who's going to rebuild civilization then?

Lace makers, that's who.