Home education grows up

You’ve heard about them of course, those rather odd people who educate their children at home. Now and then you read an article about them and their strange ideas and you feel sorry for the kids. How on earth will the kids turn out? Misfits, you might conclude - uneducated, unemployable and socially inept.

Katharina Russell Head, a teacher, was one such parent. Before becoming a parent, she began to wonder why, at the age of five or six, children suddenly lost their inner drive to discover and learn what they must (a drive which all small children have) and suddenly needed to be driven and directed by a school. She began to wonder what would happen if children continued to have the freedom of toddlers after the age of five. As her three daughters were born she decided to find out.

Reflecting on their education, Katharina says now, “In the eyes of the world, therefore, my children were neglected, and isolated. They were exploited, as the subjects of an educational experiment. They followed no curriculum, and were allowed to do pretty well what they liked.”

Dindy Vaughan came to home education from a different angle. Her daughter started school as a bubbly child and keen learner who separated easily. Within months she was quiet, withdrawn and reluctant to let mum out of her sight. Dindy acted swiftly and withdrew her child from school.

The Sing, Loxton and Snow families all home educated their children also. None of these parents followed the state curriculum and each of them had what might be viewed as fairly casual approaches to educating at home. Their children have now grown up. So how did they turn out? Did they grow up uneducated, poorly socialised, ignorant, and useless?

Katharina’s daughters are now aged 27, 25 and 21. They are independent, thoughtful, responsible, considerate, interesting, and actively involved in the community. Less importantly, each is also well educated in a formal sense. The eldest has two university degrees and is about to begin a third. The second has an honours degree and is now working for a further qualification. And the third is a university undergraduate, presently looking to expand her field of study at a second institution.

In 1999 at 18-years of age, Joel Sing was the youngest student ever to graduate from LaTrobe University, Bendigo and achieved the best academic performance of a final year student. He graduated as a Bachelor of Computing with Distinction. He then went on to do Honours, won several awards and was nominated for Young Australian of the Year in the Science and Technology category in 1999 and 2000. Now 24-years-old, Joel is married, undertaking a Doctorate in Computer Science and is in partnership in a computer technology business. He has lectured and tutored at La Trobe University, and at 18-years of age became their youngest academic staff member.

He says that through home education, he “learnt to love to learn”. It also gave him opportunities that he would never otherwise have had. “There is pretty much no other way that I could have graduated at 18 nor could I have spent as much time focusing on the things that I was interested in.”

But maybe they do not all turn out as well as Joel and the Russell-Head girls? Surely the risks of no curriculum just cannot be justified.

Levina and Geoff Snow chose to home educate their two children after the kindergarten experience for the oldest was a disaster - bullying and being excluded by the other children and being overlooked by the teacher. The choice initially was to home educate for a few years - then for primary school - then for lower secondary. As it turned out their children each only attended full time school for one year - Year 12.

The Snow family used their own method of learning that did not involve a rigid timetable. They used copies of blank report cards for each year level to construct expected levels of progress similar to state schools and as long as their girls were up to that standard they were happy. “Neither of us has teacher training - just common sense.”

The Snow girls have grown up. They are well mannered, responsible and productive citizens. They value honesty, trust and compassion and are caring individuals. They look out for each other and take care of young and old. They have social networks that include both home-educated and traditionally-schooled young people of all ages. Levina and Geoff Snow comment:

Our eldest child has a unique learning style and we are absolutely convinced that had she attended school she would not be where she is today - third year of Bachelor of Science (Latrobe University), majoring in Mathematics. We are sure that attending school would have resulted in a distressed, bullied child who didn’t learn much and dropped out early. Our younger child would have coped at school but wanted to stay home with her sister. She has completed a Bachelor of Science (Melbourne University) majoring in Zoology and is doing honours this year.

Ben and Joel Loxton’s education consisted of following their interests which in retrospect always dominated their play, their choice of reading and their choice of activities. If they found they needed to learn to use a particular computer program to enhance their model making or film making then they learnt it either from books, by just doing or from a knowledgeable friend or relative.

When the time came for them to enter their chosen fields of study at university, they had amassed an incredible amount of general and specific areas of knowledge. Ben is now doing a PhD in Aerospace Engineering and has recently been awarded the Aerospace Staff prize (Fourth Year) for outstanding academic and social performance. Joel is in his third year of a Bachelor of Arts at Monash University and has directed several successful small films with many others being planned.

These are not isolated examples. The largest study of home educated adults in America showed that they were more likely to have taken university courses than the general population. The research shows that the social outcomes of home education are just as good - home educated children grow up to be thoughtful, competent, sociable and involved in their communities.

None of these parents followed the state curriculum in the home and there was much about their methods to concern department officials. In fact Dindy Vaughan was continually hassled by Education Department Inspectors and told that her educational provision was inadequate and that her daughter ought to be in school. Were these parents therefore irresponsible and neglectful? No.

Although these parents did not reproduce the school system at home, they encouraged learning at every opportunity. Not following the curriculum does not mean neglecting a child’s education. Dindy stood her ground. Her daughter was free to explore the world in her own way and time, and she was certainly encouraged to learn. Dindy says children have a natural desire to learn, and among the home educated children that she watched grow up she observed that a lot of material could be learnt very quickly and efficiently, simply because a child suddenly “wanted to know”.

Carleen Sing agrees. Her observations of children led her to question whether adults knew very much about how children learn after all. “Who said that the person who wrote the curriculum got it right?” She believes that children have an innate love of learning and, if provided with whatever materials they need they will retain that desire to learn. Carleen is still home educating her younger children and much of their learning takes place informally in a self-directed way - through conversation, reading, making and doing.

It is not a matter of letting children run wild. Home education represents a large commitment on the part of the parents in terms of being available to facilitate learning. Dindy emphasises that:

For parents it is a long, dedicated slog. Children with a passion for learning are very tiring. Seven times a day they will challenge your own preconceptions: one of the first things you learn to say is, ‘I don’t know, but we can find out.’ Sometimes that’s a hard task. I vividly recall a small person pirouetting along the pavement on the walk back from the Post Office, gracefully closing the last turn with a gesture of the arm and the question, “And I take it you can’t have factors of a minus number?” We worked that concept for a number of weeks.

Dindy says that, of the small home education group she belonged to in those days, all the children have succeeded in their chosen fields and not, as might be expected, in the so-called soft subjects. Her own daughter is now completing a PhD in Social Linguistics and teaches English to Sudanese refugees on weekends.

Katharina Russell Head says:

Having got to know many home educating families over many years I can say with confidence that children who grow up outside the system are generally friendly, thoughtful, delightful, natural people whose wisdom and intelligence recommends them to everyone. I would call them “well-educated” in every sense of the word, whatever the particular method or philosophy held to by their parents. The secret is that their inner drive to learn and their intuitive knowledge of what they need to learn has not been artificially masked or stopped by handing their education over to an external agent.

While home education will never be embraced by the majority of parents, it is a viable, necessary and successful alternative to mainstream schooling. It represents a totally different approach to learning - one based on inspiring children to learn rather than forcing them to do so. Dr Alan Thomas found that:

Most families who start out “doing school” at home find that what works in school does not transfer easily to the home. Of necessity home educators find themselves pioneering new educational approaches, nearly always less formal ones.

Under the existing regulatory regime, home educators are required to provide regular and efficient instruction and can be prosecuted if they fail to do so. This in itself represents a significant commitment by the parents both in terms of time and, for many, in lost income due to the need to have one parent at home.

The Victorian state government’s new Education Bill proposes that home education will be regulated by a newly created statutory body, the Victorian Registration and Qualifications Authority (VRQA). Neither the registration criteria nor the regulations are spelt out in the legislation. Instead, the VRQA will be granted unlimited power over home educators. The new proposals create the possibility for the VRQA not just to ensure that education is taking place but to dictate the manner of that education. Are home educators to be lumbered with the “edubabble” endemic in the Victorian Essential Learning Frameworks? Instead of inspiring a love of learning home educators may find themselves thwarted by reams of bureaucratic paperwork.

If the Victorian Education Department had been granted such unlimited power in the past, many highly successful home education stories would have been prevented.

Whilst Geoff and Levina Snow are proud of their children’s academic achievements and that they will be lifelong learners - willing and able to research whatever they want to know, they conclude, “We are more proud that they are great young adults who behave well and will be the backbone of future society that is often reported so bleakly”.