But we Home EDUCATE and we're ATHEISTS!

Just because I now lost TWO arguments doesn't mean I'm going quietly.

Swinging punches on the way down with Argument One:
We Home EDUCATE. We do not Home SCHOOL. 

School is about training to shut up and sit quiet while knowledge is transmitted to you. It usually filters from top to bottom. To allow that process to happen, you have to accept procedures, restraints, limitations. Did you hear that bell sound? Change what you are doing. Shut up that you were 'just getting into it'. Time to do something else.

Of course we are not trying to reproduce school in a kitchen. What would be the sodding point? If we wanted schooling then we could send the kids to school, duh.

Wot we do - we swotty Ancient Classics types staring specky-eyed at our Western philosophical tradition - we like to call our stuff, Education.

Education, well, that never stops. It's not timed, it's not disciplined, nor delimited by hours, and it includes the observation of dust trickling in sunset, the way sound scatters across a marble floor, and the entire works of Shakespeare if that is your passion.

Education is free-flowing; it requires your active thinking, pursuit, and construction of knowledge. The knowledge you construct, you call your own. You, thinker, doer, expert, you find out what you like, when you like.

This wonderful segue of learning about life does not mean your learning comes without structure. As you approach anything you want to learn about, you begin to find the way the subject organises itself; you learn the language of the area you study; you discover the rationales, reasonings, labellings and semantics of the discipline.

Quickly you realise that if you're going to get far into any area, then you must bring some self-discipline to the study. You organise your time and articulate your motivations; you discover the things which facilitate your learning and the things which prohibit your learning. You learn not only the discipline you've chosen, you also learn how to learn. Welcome to our philosophy of education.

Personally I don't believe the way schools are now structured, supervised and managed allows for much of that free-ranging discovery to happen.


Chewing at anyone's ankles while flat on the floor, losing Argument Two:
Religion has nothing to do with our choice to Home Educate. We are ATHEISTS.

I now routinely face the idea that we home educate because of our religious conviction. We must be Christian / Muslims / Jews, otherwise we would send our kids to school, right?

All I'm saying, is that I'm equipping the entire family with colanders.

Yes, of course there are children who are told to believe that a virgin can conceive a child after a shadow passes over her, Gabriel speaks to some bloke holding a rock, and Moses can't find the path out a desert for 40 years, and I call this passing on your values and beliefs to the next generation.

Good luck to you. Showing your child the cultural community they are born into, what beliefs can give comfort in times of crisis, and what guides can help aspire to kindness is no bad thing. If it involves a rock, a piece of thread, or a bird that the landed gentry didn't shoot already, then so what?

But it seems to me that every parent in this land is under assault for trying to pass on their beliefs.

And if only the kids would listen to us, right? I mean, kids got Planet Internet, Wikipedia, every media resource going, the news on the TV, the shops filled with people, and the street where they live.

So the idea that a child's only source of knowledge is their parents?

Laughable.


PS. If you want the Religion of Grit, it is Do to others as you would have done to you, and From little acorns grow big trees.

Ends peacefully

Kids slept outside in the rain. I locked the door on them at 10pm and said No Way was I leaving a warm bed at 2am just because they were banging on the back door howling.

By the morning their bivouac looked like this.

Three people slept in there. Three! Well, until 1am, when I am told that a slug woke up Fizz by making sucking sounds, at which point they decided to decamp to the little wooden house at the bottom of the garden. On the minus side they get spiders, but on the plus side, it's dry.

By the way, just in case Social Services are inquiring, I didn't force the children to sleep outside. You can blame a natural madness of childhood, which my grown up rationalities simply fail to curb. Reasonings like The forecast is for it to chuck down have no impact when you have a fantasy of perfection in your mind.

But from then on, I did have things my way. I imposed a three-line whip to join the Buddhists and all their chums in the field for their multi-faith peace festival. It manages to be both anarchic but culturally affirming; fringe but mainstream; bizarre yet normal. The sort of thing that could happen if you let the Pagans take over Thought for Today.

For me, the event is as essential as sleeping in the garden under a wet plastic sheet. My year turns about such moments as these.

Can't be just a party in a field

All government officials, local authorities and makers of proper forms can be proud of us.

In the interests of community cohesion, equal opportunity, social inclusion, co-operative partnership, please tick your ethnic origin, White British White and Black Caribbean Asian or Asian British Chinese or other ethnic group, I take the education specified, School Private State Home Other, Shark, Squirrel, Tiger, and Aunty Dee to the weekend Islamic festival.

There are some bouncy balls, noisy radios and stalls selling handbags. The kids wander round a bit, wondering whether to tap Aunty Dee for a bag of onion bhajis, sesame halva, or nothing, probably not thinking that every mouthful, or absence of a mouthful, is a statement of dietary requirements please express your dietary preference as a service user Vegetarian Vegan Related to religious practice such as Kosher or Halal None specified (will eat kangaroo).

After wandering round the stalls they do become a little bored, it is true, thanks to the grass-based gentility which looks more like Which family can sit around eating the biggest picnic so I tell them to count languages for daddy Dig and see if they can hear the difference between Punjabi Urdu Bengali Gujarati Hindi French Spanish Polish Arabic Turkish Portuguese Farsi Tamil and Somali Please tick.

The music occupies everyone for a while, because it's human, so there isn't any box to tick at all but it's an opportunity for the Local Authority to shuffle off and organise their colour-coded clipboards or count their hours in order to evaluate and assess the quality and accessibility of the service and identify whether any equal opportunities issues are reported by service users accessing this provision.

Just before we leave, I head over to the Religion Table. I feel I should. Surely it has to be the whole point of this festival Please tick one Christian Church of England Catholic Protestant all other Christian denominations Buddhist Hindu Jewish Muslim Sikh Not stated. A rather dashing young man is offering a Koran for the price of an argument about organised religions, so I do that, while the rest of my tribe scarper.

And when it comes time, as it surely will, to complete the educational monitoring form which could be the delight of a government officer to compile in order to explore issues for that minority community while at the same time being able to allocate resources for comparison with local or national population data or with data from other places to ensure fair compliance procedures are followed and due recording respect is accorded to all individuals self-assigning distinct educational deliveries, they can know that we can tick the religions curriculum box having attended the Islamic Festival which, by the way, went okay.

Good Friday at King's

I tell Squirrel we're going to a sing song. She nods off anyway during Palestrina's Stabat Mater, so I never needed to explain why there wasn't also a knees up like I promised.

England, you are a strange place

I am experiencing disconnect with religion as well.

Not my inner salvatory sort. On that, I'm already lost to any cause. I don't believe anything will help get me out of the problems I get into, except my own wit and wisdom.

(Okay, I allow fortune cookies. Let not great ambition overshadow small success. From little acorns grow big trees. When you're in a hole, stop digging.)

What I'm finding strange is the expression of religion on the streets. That's what I see is different, between here and Hong Kong.

In Hong Kong I've grown used to the shrines at each shop, the smell of incense, the noise of banging drums. I've seen people make way for devotions, processions and shoe beatings. I've come to expect that the spiritual calender creates routine in the social. I can tell it's grave cleaning time - the weekend to sweep out grandma before she's covered up with dried leaves again - because we must avoid walking all mountain trails. They're far too crowded. Whole extended families trek up there, seeking pure air cleansing as they go. On deity days, moons and ghostly festivals, people flood into the restaurants, and the South China Morning Post floods with outrage about the mess of wax burning.

Religion is in Hong Kong a structural force; it shows in social ways. It's also political; expressing devotion marks a separateness from the rules of China, where there is no state religion outside the Communist Party.

But I can't tell from looking at a person in Hong Kong about their religious beliefs. There's nothing to signify how devotional they are. Not what they do, or wear. You can't tell whether they believe in anything at all. Look at them, and they could be just like me, and rely on a bag of fortune cookies.

So when I walk into the UK, one of the first things I notice is how you express your devotions. Through the buildings and the headscarf.

The buildings, they're magnificent. Not small shrines discreetly positioned at the foot of a plinth, not the small concrete temple at the side of the town, here you have these wham-bang places, grand statements of towers and arch, brick and stone. Today I walked past one local church that stands wallop in the High Street. I remembered I love to see it, because it's such a huge and uncompromising building. It's decommissioned and used by the council as a warehouse, so anyone can guess as to the long-term fate. But I find the Victorian architecture beautiful. If they try to knock it down, I shall tie myself to the railings.

The headscarf, it's inescapable, because to me it's unusual. Did I see more than one or two in the last few months? Probably not. I come into England, see a woman wearing a headscarf and wonder why anyone feels the need to show their personal belief to anyone else. Is that a naive thought? Maybe I'm used to seeing people around me who don't declare their views through dress.

While I have these stirs of thoughts, a young woman pulls up in her car, lowers the window, and asks brightly in a local, amiable voice, Which way to the Co-op Funeral Parlour? Then she smiles, a big, broad smile.

I smile back, and think, with that brilliant smile, there can't have been a death in the family, can there? Grief and happiness, they should look different. Put them together, and the contrast is disturbing. I can't ever forget the Evangelical Christian who laughed her way through her mother's funeral. That photograph stays with me in my mind. I see them side-by-side; she beaming her huge smile, her brother knocked sideways with loss.

But I stand there, confused by smiles and directions, making up routes to the dead, and I look at her porcelain complexion and her soft pink cheeks, and then I realise that her hair is pulled back under a black headscarf. That's confusing, too. Her smile, voice, face and manner, all combining to default state - local girl, probably (when pushed) would offer C-of-E or non-believer - but here tells me unequivocally, unambiguously, a personal declaration, she's firmly with Islam.

I feel wrong-footed, a little. I'm still feeling new here. In expat land we live with images of rural England and your staged national presentations overseas. Country churches, hedgerows, wobbling bicycles, Beefeaters, red telephone boxes. They exist and they don't. But they're a major part of your tourism marketing, and I think probably the right one. But once here, on the streets, it's a very different feel.

A part of me is glad for the mix. I like the ladies at the Co-op who wear the headscarf. Well, the new person at the till, anyhow. She's so very different from the last! The other one was sulky, and would scowl when I handed her my shopping! I always felt especially nervous, passing over my bottle of Fursty Ferret for the blip, anticipating sour disapproval. But this new lady, she's all smiles and How are you today? Last night when a customer asked for 20 Marlboro and she said What? she then tugged at her headscarf and said It's this, I can't hear anything when I've got this on. Everyone in the queue smiled.

I send the local motorist off to her business with the funeral parlour, probably in the wrong direction, but not intentionally. I feel I'm being made aware of religion in England, but not yet sure why. Am I being asked to take up a position or a view? But I don't know what. The usual English one is indifference, isn't it? That's the one I prefer.

But I feel there's a subtle change here. All your religions are mixed up together, yet people feel the need to mark their difference. Maybe you all got religion while we were out? Perhaps you've quietly become all determined and spiritual, veering to one way or another? Have I got to take sides, instead of do my usual, which is ignore it all? So what will happen? Do I have to decide which religion to declare myself to? That would be a shame indeed.

I can take my proper place in the order of wacko

For years I have mocked the assumption that if you home educate it must be because you are profoundly religious. And because it's just too easy to jump that step from knowing someone has a deep-seated belief to the conclusion that because they also chose home ed, they must be a religious fanatic, isolating their kids from any corrupting influence to better indoctrinate them with a single world view.

Usually, my take is to say yes, there are parents who home educate for religious motives and their kids probably attend the tennis club with everyone else. Yes, there are parents who put their child in a single focus faith school and their kids probably come out into a world to meet the non-believers. Yes, there are parents whose religion at home puts their child in direct contradiction with the culture of school - watch a child of Jehovah's Witness face the school build up to Christmas, and you'll know what I mean. Yes, there are oddballs; the ones of singular eccentricity regarding the divine - but education can't be a reliable barometer for their peculiar degree of wacko. On that, I have an extended family as evidence.

Mostly, I have felt on the outside of all those opinions. Until today. When I discover what looks to me like a makeshift shrine to a unicorn and the offering of a sacrificed cat called Bubbles.

I'll get back to you

When I have another life - the one after the life where I am a fantastic shit-hot photographer on the cover of Time magazine - and the one after the life where I am a hard drinking womanising bloke (hey, I want to know what that feels like), then I am going to come back as an anthropologist. I am going to study all this worship, fruit and incense at Wong Tai Sin, then I will be able to tell you what on earth (or elsewhere) is going on. Until then, I can only look.

Let's go to Mexico.

You see? Home education takes you everywhere. One morning our eyes open and focus on a teddy bear; another hour, the snow, clumped in great heaps against the window. And today, anticipating having our hearts ripped from our bodies, atop a step pyramid in Tenochtitlan.

For that delight, we have to walk to get there.

Mostly because I am too mean to pay the extra £2.60 for the bus from Euston to the British Museum. Anyway, it's only 20 minutes, and in this free-range world of ours we can call it nourishment for our bodies as well as our minds.

You know the exhibition for Moctezuma is over. I hope you didn't hang on for a review from Grit. Anyway, don't worry. Grab hold of the exhibition guide. The exhibition itself? Dour.

I can't write about it all. I could say lots. The use of the Reading Room as an exhibition space. The tone of the exhibition. Moctezuma's place in an ordered hierarchy of the Mexica world. The supporting materials. The dead cold sacrificial stones. The eagle. Spare me, the eagle. The arrival of the Spanish. More slaughter. The sudden story switch, from one told in carved volcanic rocks, to a shiny oil on canvas. All dealings with death.

Shark, Squirrel and Tiger pause at every exhibited item, drawing and writing obsessively. I promise to buy the exhibition guide twenty-five times over, so we can go. They force me to linger. Squirrel returns to me, time and time again, Why did they do that? Why did they kill people to make the sun rise? Did they kill the children too?

Some things, I tell Squirrel, with a cuddle, I cannot explain. I cannot explain Mexica thinking. I am on the wrong side of the world. I can try with the Conquistadors. I know the story there. God, gold, glory, girls.

But in Mexica, it's all so different to how we live today. What we see here, in this world left behind, no-one is tender, no outstretched hands in love. No fat bellied women, no domestic pictures, no ordinary chores. Men are warriors, demi-gods, offerings.

Mortal women are invisible. Except one. She's a statue, female figure, kneeling. She has breasts, says the caption. I stare at her. I can't see them. She doesn't have breasts. She's different from the male because he has shoulder blades and she doesn't. Shoulder blades? Breasts? It's an easy mistake to make I guess if you are the industrious curator to the female figure c 1325 Mexica 42x19.6x26.5cm. But by this stage, and we are only in Room 2, I want her to have real, heaving, breasts. I know I'm living in this twenty-first century implant world, but still, by now, even a couple of fried eggs would be good. Because breasts mean children. And children mean love. But there just isn't any.

I don't know whether this exhibition simply chose all the stone carvings of power and hierarchy and eagle bone, and hid all the statues of beautiful women with breasts and plump thighs, or whether the Spanish so truly destroyed any remnants of softness, that now there really aren't representations of women in Mexica culture that are not all clawed hands and bared teeth.

So we're left with Coatlicue, who hangs dismembered hands around her neck and chills my soul with her fangs and lethal stare. Or the moon goddess, Coyolxauhqui, lying dismembered, a skull under her arm.

But there must have been mortal women; women giving birth, nursing babies, shaping the land, picking corn, working cloth, smoothing garments, pressing their hands against the scrap of life in a child. Here, nothing like that. Nothing at all.

Now I could come over all feminist and say that this strikes me as a supreme example of a patriarchal society. What is it with you boys? Military conquest, sharp spears, ripped up hearts, bloodletting, war, death and corpses.

Yet it tells me other things too, like the supreme power of any ideology. Women, giving up their children, sons, brothers, husbands, ushering them on to sacrifice, because this is Wednesday, and this is how devotion is shown. Did those hands willingly guide those kin farewell on the journey to feed the sun?

Did no one say, let's not do that? asks Squirrel. Let's give the sacrifice a miss, just for today? Let's play music, and see what happens instead, tomorrow, at dawn?

I draw Squirrel close, and tell her that ideology means sometimes people do things that it's not in their best interest to do. And while individuals might question the vision, they can rarely break free alone; they need the support of many. And if we're taking home a lesson, it could be that one.

Or perhaps that we should all draw more pictures to leave behind us. Pictures of fat women and men enfolding children and laughing with love.

To God or not to God

The other day we tagged along with a large home ed kid and adult group and visited the All Saints Church.

For the church, I grit my teeth. I pull up inside the car park, and Shark, Squirrel and Tiger ease out timidly from the car, looking tense, unable to separate mind from body, probably expecting to step over into that churched world and, in their present state as non believers, cause the roof to fall in and the earth to rip open.

We will just have to risk it, I say to the little grits. We have to learn about religions, and this is as good a place as any to do that. After all, the world where you grow up might yet bomb and blast itself to atoms using someone's god as the reason why. Let's learn while we still can.

Once inside, we wait for our group to assemble, and we stare at the pulpit. Let's start with the idea of church authority, I suggest.

How is that relevant to us? I'll tell you, Shark. Say you think you have the right of access to the fireside based on the fact that you are one minute older than Squirrel. Then you assert the moral righteousness you believe comes with your authority while smacking Squirrel's face into the floor. Remember that issue?

Let's just say your job today is to look, listen, think, and we'll talk about it later. And above all, be respectful to your education. Even if you succumb to that itch to brawl in the aisles.

Reader, you can probably tell I do not trust any organised religion. Or any disorganised religion either. I think it is hocus pocus cooked up to control the masses so political powers can march about this world doing what the fuck they like. People I know are capable of listening to each other, behaving decently towards each other, and generally doing as they would be done by. They don't need religion to be human. And I don't like the way religion seeks to monopolise these human traits.

Personally, I blame the old gent who ran our primary school. Making us repeat the Lord's Prayer until we said it in the right tone of voice; forcing our dutiful hand clasping eye shutting for prayers in assembly. I spent those assemblies listening to someone in a position of power tell me I am all sinned and doomed at the age of eight and need to be good because otherwise god don't love me. Heck, all I could remember doing in the evils department was getting myself dressed in clothes I didn't want to wear, eating breakfast earlier than I wanted to, and walking to school without causing my mother to weep. Better think of a sin, quick. Like existing, Eve shaped.

But we've not come today only for Grit's bad memories and a Christian example. We're on a total faith tour. When we're done with the Church, we all head off next door to the Mosque.

I cannot say I feel any more generous to Islam than I do to Christianity. But by now I'm feeling vulnerable, and want someone to stand up for me.

Unfortunately, I don't see too much celebration of female Muslim scholars, although undoubtedly there have been strong women forging that history. Maybe those voices are all wiped away with Wahhabism. There seems to be what is described as women in 'unnatural relationships' instead. I feel this idea could, at a step, be extended to walking down the street and clapping eyes on some unfortunate bloke struggling home from the Co-op. Somehow, I suspect that type of unnatural relationship is all my female fault again. I have a vagina. It could be the undoing of us all.

So it's the next stop. The Gurdwara, or Seihk temple.

I'm a little more disposed. Any religion that holds a pair of underpants as a special garment, and follows a custom of putting a book to bed in a proper bedroom, could be given a special place in my heart. Along with the memory of an enjoyable evening in Hyderabad spent in 1994 with Dig, a Seihk gentleman, and a bottle of whisky, where that lovely turban wrapped man spent the hours brightly offering insightful comments about the world, making sense, and laughing.

But even here, sitting on the thick pile carpet of the prayer room, where we are told people can wander in and out at any time during the service, I can detect trouble. Like some folks say that some gurus are better than others, and some folks might start splitting up who can follow whom when, how and where. My vagina might not be the trouble maker, but there are hierarchies and divisions here, and I bet somewhere it'll be implicated.

Another religion we encounter today that's not for me, then.

Dear little grits, religion might, or might not be for you. Sure, I will complain, quietly, if one day you come home with God. But I will also remember that sometimes cynical old mama wished she could have a religion too. It would have helped me offload that mental torment I had; I could have given whole chunks to a deity that I couldn't see but in whom I could trust. So I will try and understand. I'll respect your choice, whatever it is, and I hope that you interpret your duties kindly.

But you should know I am a lost cause. I cannot be converted.

Yes, everyday's something like this

Should I post about this morning watching children explore light, prompted by yesterday's Mad Science club?


Thanks to the scientist who yesterday taught some twenty home ed kids. Today happy hours were spent making colour filters, playing with prisms, and thinking up ideas about refraction, reflection and diffraction while flipping through reference books and finger pointing new experiments to try. And yes, we gathered round the worn out pine kitchen table.

Perhaps not that. I could post about our Heritage Day trip to the Holy Sepulchre church in Northampton. On the way we listened, attentive, to the Naxos CD on Great Scientists (and thanks, Michelle, part of our wise and wide communities of educators all around, for putting us onto those).


Perhaps the church. One of four round churches standing in England, nudging a thousand years old. Grit collars an old man there to guide us. He turns our time into a back and forth seamless session of the history and religions of Norman-twenty-first century England.

He's a fine teacher; he knows every stony nook and cranny, and proudly runs his papery hand over a Saxon dial embedded in the ancient wall. Our thanks go to him, too, and a wish that he won't have to submit to being vetted. His talk should fit in well with the home education group we follow, because they're up and about this term exploring religions around the world.

Well perhaps I should post about the other events of the day. Like turning up at Central Milton Keynes Library in the lock-up time, for their evening storytelling session. The storytellers wove wonderful tales, and invited the audience to tell their own stories of how they came to Milton Keynes and what they recall of this new town.

The town might be new; the land is ancient. We have stories to tell of Roman burials and Celtic roundhouses. Tiger, Shark and Squirrel were the only children there. Sad; I wanted many children to be there, listening to ordinary citizens tell their ordinary stories; this glue which holds us all in a community together. But I guess the evening time is past bed time for school next day.

So that's our day. A home educated day. Following up our lessons, clubs and societies. Working at home with practical things. Anticipating joining in with organised groups. Going out on trips. Meeting people who care. Listening to adults tell us stories about how this place came to be.

Extraordinarily ordinary.