Some Thoughts from a Home educator

A Day at the Zoo

Below are some recollections jotted down at various times, on the experience of educating my children at home. It is a personal record; I am not attempting to comment on home-educating in general. Home-educating parents are a varied bunch. Some keep their children at home because they consider schools too competitive, others because they feel schools are not competitive enough. Some parents wish to shield their children from being conditioned in extreme ways, others because they want to do a more thorough job of it.

First day of summer here, some unexpected time at the zoo with the Children watching and listening to the school parties being moved around emphasizes so well the differences in conventional education and the education of my children (note I do not say the education I give my children). Outside the glass panel of the monkey enclosure, a class is being lined up. Order of a sort is established, silence of a sort is enforced, so that the teacher can recite a collection of facts about monkeys. And on they march, some knowledge having been installed, perhaps. Incidental conditioning included some guilt-inducing comments about failing to give way to some adults, and some mysterious comments about their belonging to the "best school in the town".

Every feather that flutters down is observed, how the wind catches it, how each one spins or turns, how it is noticed by the other monkeys.

If there seems to be pride in what I write, let me quickly say that I do not deceive myself for a moment that I have taught them to observe. Even if observation is a skill that can be passed on (is it?), I would not know how to begin to do this. I think it is freedom, space, which has allowed the skill, the art to flourish. Like all things that have real meaning, it already exists in the children, it is their birthright. Perhaps all home educating has done is to keep away the influences which inhibit, which crush their natural flowering. In this sense, education has, indeed, "led out". (I am reminded of an incident when Jarrath was about three years old. We were in some park and he was apparently loitering near the concrete toilet block. Somewhat impatiently I called him to come, and asked what he was doing. "I'm LOOKING at the wall", he explained rather indignantly.) I should add neither of my children exists in some infinite state of attention. They are both forever leaving their boots lying around and their bedroom doors open.

More school children pass by the monkey enclosure, pausing just long enough to make comments like "they're boring" or "they're cute". In the entrance block of the zoo is a door marked 'education room'. The implication is, of course, that being at the zoo is not educational per se. Only through the input of teaching staff, only through the use of "educational material" can the experience of a zoo visit be turned into education? Life is not, presumably, in itself, educational?