Actually, parents know best

I'm so glad these kids are playing. I'm delighted they are not sitting at desks, being criticised for the way they hold a crayon at the age of two.

I want every nursery and pre-school, and all early years schools around the country, to make mud pies. Schools need to be bolder, more imaginative. They should do what many parents want: say that testing toddlers is shit, so they're not going to do it. While you go to work, they're off to play in the woods instead.

I'm sure many parents instinctively feel that an assessment approach to early years - instead of free-range creative imaginative play - is education in the wrong direction.

Sitting kids behind desks makes them easier to control, sure. But it's not the right way for a healthy individual to grow. And it only works in the short-term.

I want more kids to be free. Every move they make should not come with a teacher-assessor, an Ofsted inspector, and a tick box on a clipboard. That is a crap way to teach children about the role of adults in their lives. It is a destructive way to say 'this is the society you grow up in'. It destroys trust. It breaks apart every growing relationship. It says, 'your parents do not know you best. The assessor does'. It is social control, disguised as education.

How many kids were removed deliberately from this culture under the Labour years?

But here's my problem with this article. Not the nursery. Not what they are doing. That's fantastic. National coverage will be great for them, and put smiles on faces.

It's the writing. Specifically, the assumptions that creep through this article, and that I feel the writer holds about the audience. Assumptions that are implicitly endorsed by The Independent. The article merits a page, after all.

This question: 'So what if the children do splash each other with the water?'

Eh? I don't know whether to fall about laughing, or drop my head in my hands in despair.

Whose voice is that? Is it the headteacher presenting herself with a rhetorical question? Is it your voice, Richard?

And then, more, who is the question aimed at? Richard, who are you speaking to, love? Are you asking this question of intelligent readers, and people who are parents of kids?

To even think this is a worthwhile question, to ask it of us, assumes we have already absorbed, endorsed, and approved the toddler assessment culture; that we now look up in horror at this latest assault on our educational provision. Look Mabel! I have dropped my toast in shock! Have you seen the breakfast news?! Kids splash each other with water! The end of the world has come!

But Richard, maybe you're asking this question of yourself? It certainly reads like it.

Well, don't worry about that. Grit knows a thing or two about talking to herself. But she keeps a blog read by six people and a hamster. Richard, you write in a national newspaper theoretically read by thousands. Do you know your audience?

I have not, in my life either as a parent or in pre-parenthood, ever met anyone who thinks it is somehow dangerous, abnormal, regressive, alarming, a retrograde step for civilization, if nursery kids splash water at each other.

The only way I can imagine this behaviour can be thought of as alarming, is within the context of a dry classroom, possibly one in which Ofsted is reviewing behaviour. And that, Richard, is an assumption behind this question. That pre-school life is automatically institutional; the mainstream supervision is school; that child behaviour within this context necessarily must be monitored, explained, and justified.

Maybe it speaks volumes about the outlook of The Independent. Maybe the life of an educational writer is a narrow one. Maybe journalists should get out more, so they can ask sensible questions.

An article like this offers the opposite to the assumptions I have, out here, in my home ed world. That children of all ages are free to interact together, to play, take a role in supervising each other, grow with the expectation that adults are here to support them, help them realise their liberty. There should be no justification to play.

Richard, I think your question comes from a wider assumption, so often made across the educational media, about what kids should be doing and the contexts they should be found in.

It betrays that same, predictable track of many education writers: that education can only take place in school, that the words school and education are interchangeable. As if one means the other. Yet how clearly you can see, from people about you, from kids themselves, from looking at how they behave, listening to what they say, that schools and education are often worlds apart.

Yes, maybe you should just get out more.