Feeling weary

Things are stirring in the home ed 'hood. After a (relatively) long period of quiet.

Not simply the trouble-making of the NSPCC, but the Sunday Times article, conflating out-of-school children to vulnerability to abuse and exploitation. Then further debates on changing guidance on children 'missing' education and 'questions in the house'. My guess is the registration and inspection debate will be the gift to home ed for 2015.

Some proper botherers are out for us. They simply can't let us alone to get on with an education. Any link of disreputable behaviour will do. Any suggestion that we are not caring parents providing a fantastic opportunity to live a childhood, or that we are providing the time and space for our kids to grow up in their own unique ways. Nope, none of that is useful for the culture the botherers want to build. Their story is to strew fear, uncertainty, doubt. Who knows what home educators are up to? Training up mini jihadists? Abusing children physically, emotionally, sexually? The secret 'invisible' people undermining normal society?

Please, could home educators just be a bunch of mild eccentrics, gentle people, independent minded people who take on huge family responsibilities? Could we be celebrated as people following philosophies of education that reach well back beyond the Victorian schooling solution?

I'm sure the botherers need to suggest that if all home educators were monitored, then this would address every suspicion they raised for you. Then we all lose. But this isn't an educational agenda, even though that will be the message with the push for earlier and earlier engagement with outsourced learning, closer accountability of childhood, more pressure of league tables, standardised testing regardless of how unique is Tinkertop, greater surveillance of how you're interacting with your child in the home.

It all means less contact time between parents and kids, and more monitored time between parents and kids. You have to wonder what society they're trying to build.