Issues in home education

Ever since Radio National ran a talk back show on homeschooling a few weeks ago, I've been feeling defensive. Thinking of words like enmeshed, hot-housing, extreme. I was thrown by the number of people who were prepared to criticise our choice in such a public forum, especially when I make it a mantra not to criticise the choice of others to send their children to school. My radical ideas on the school system ( that it is designed to raise cogs for the capitalist system, that it lends itself to desensitising children to fascism ) I keep to myself, even amongst other home educators. The only family I'm qualified to make decisions for is my own and that's fraught with practical and ethical issues all of its own.

So I felt soothed this week when Lucy told me that she'd decided to have a go at writing a picture book, and she could take all the time and space she needs for it. It felt good to hand Arwen a copy of Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf, taking seriously her stated aim of becoming a Tolkien scholar, being able to promise that we will find her an Old English tutor if that is what she wants. It's not called hot-housing, it's called having the time and the support to follow your passions. And I'm glad that Snowy can have snuggles on demand!! Extreme affection rules!!

I was shaken by the ignorance and ready judgements of that program, both from the general public and the expert educators and psychologists speaking out against home education. This lifestyle has its costs - I'm no fanatic - but it also has a multitude of gifts.

'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory'

Reading the first few chapters to Snowy last night, he asked anxiously, " Charlie does get a Golden Ticket, doesn't he ? " He knows that Charlie does indeed get a Golden Ticket, he knows there's no story without it, he knows it's guaranteed, he's (ahem - slight touch of mother guilt) seen the movie before reading the book. Still, he needs to ask.

It's not really all that sugar that makes children love this book so much. It's a neat piece of plotting that does it. Roald Dahl causes us to care for Charlie, to invest our hopes in him, to identify deeply with him before he ever grants him his unlikely, unplanned bit of luck.

It's the old three chances thing. First Charlie opens his birthday chocolate bar - Wonka's Whipple-Scrumptious FudgeMallow Delight - hoping, in a hopeless way, to see a glint of a Golden Ticket inside, and - thud - is disappointed. Next, his hopes are raised and dashed with a Wonka's Nutty Crunch Surprise, bought with Grandpa Joe's last silver sixpence.

And at this point in the book, we are Charlie, because we know (even as children) that life does not, much of the time, go our way, despite our wishing it. At the back of our wardrobe is a panel of wood. Dahl acknowledges this to the reader before he offers Charlie a third, random, lucky try. And because he has told us the truth first, we are willing to walk with him through Wonka's fantastical factory gates.

Poetry Friday

Came to this favourite Dylan Thomas poem via thoughts of whether or not it's OK to let small boys think that using 'the Force' is fine if you're a Jedi. Was it fine to bomb Dresden because the Allies were the' goodies' ? Where is the movie that presents a pacifist hero ? Is pacifism always flawed ? Can 'Force' be used for the good ? Does the end justify the means ? Could the Empire have been resisted through peaceful means ? In the end, a light-saber is just another weapon... too much illness-induced bed rest, too much thinking...

But 'Force' led to 'the force that through the green fuse drives the flower' and that to this.


Lie still, sleep becalmed by Dylan Thomas

Lie still, sleep becalmed, sufferer with the wound
In the throat, burning and turning. All night afloat
On the silent sea we have heard the sound
That came from the wound wrapped in the salt sheet.

Under the mile off moon we trembled listening
To the sea sound flowing like blood from the loud wound
And when the salt sheet broke in a storm of singing
The voices of all the drowned swam on the wind.

Open a pathway through the slow sad sail.
Throw wide to the wind the gates of the wandering boat
For my voyage to begin to the end of my wound.
We heard the sea sound sing, we saw the salt sheet tell.
Lie still, sleep becalmed, hide the mouth in the throat,
Or we shall obey, and ride with you through the drowned.


Oh, all that lovely alliteration, the half rhymes of 'wound' and 'sound', a poem part hallucination, part valediction, language the only force to be sure of.

'She's the Man' - a guest post by Arwen

A lot of people would probably roll their eyes and turn their nose up at a modernised version of Shakespeare's great work, Twelfth Night - which just goes to show how wrong a person can be! While one might think that turning Lady Olivia's comic manservant, Malvolio, into a pet spider is an insult to Shakespeare's memory, you will soon find out that instead of being tacky it is hilariously funny.

So, what am I talking about ? Well, director Andy Fickman decided to get a new take on Shakespeare's funny play and just how did he do that ? Well, by directing a movie called 'She's the Man'. The plot follows soccer mad teenager Viola as her school soccer team gets cut. disguising herself as her brother Sebastian, she starts at his new school so she can join the boy's soccer team - which is not as easy as it sounds!

She has to face many obstacles, including a mad principal, falling in love with her room-mate, Duke Orsino, and the radiant Olivia (Viola's lab partner), falling in love with her. With a great cast of Amanda Byrnes, Channing Tatum and Laura Ramsay,' She's the Man' is perfect for reluctant Shakespeare readers or just for a laugh. It's highly funny and I would rate it 5 out of 5. It's rated PG for mild violence, mild coarse language and mild sexual references but I thought it was a great movie and it's definitely worth watching.

Poetry Friday

They played this on The Music Show last weekend, Rufus Wainwright's version from his new album 'Songs for Lulu'. It was glorious.

Sonnet 43 by Shakespeare

When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,
For all the day they view things unrespected;
But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee,
And darkly bright are bright in dark directed.
Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make bright,
How would thy shadow's form form happy show
To the clear day with thy much clearer light,
When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so!
How would, I say, mine eyes be blessed made
By looking on thee in the living day,
When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade
Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay!
All days are nights to see till I see thee,
And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.

Daniel Radcliffe and a horse

Last term, the girls' book club read 'Huckleberry Finn'. Arwen and Lucy were most unenthusiastic, to their father's disappointment. Every time I asked the girls to describe where they were up to in their listening ( BBC Audio, narrated by Patrick Fraley ) Arwen would sigh wearily, "They're on the raft...again..". Still, hard to believe it could rouse enough dislike to be one of the most banned books in America.

Such an extreme thing, to ban a book or the reading of it. A girl in my HSC class, whose father was a minister, was banned from studying Peter Shaffer's 'Equus', a play that brings nothing to mind other than Daniel Radcliffe and a horse. The part of my brain allocated to 'horse' is forever colonised and scarred by the reading aloud of a number of Saddle Club books to a pre-reading Arwen. Of 'Equus' there is little trace. I may as well have been like A, excluded from the class.

I like to think I've never banned the children from reading anything, but censorship can be subtle, can come in the guise of snobbery, and when it comes to books, snobbery is a Bad Idea. I once had visions of raising my children on an exclusive diet of Milne, followed by Shakespeare and then Plutarch. Like all visions, it suffered in translation to reality ( luckily for the kids, who might have died of boredom otherwise.)

Lucy learnt to read with Dr Suess, who was, at least, A Classic, but Arwen conceived a passion for the Rainbow Magic series - predictable, formulaic, perfect fodder for the new reader, full of ethereal beings with names like 'Honey the Sweet Fairy'. Our journey into eclecticism had begun, full of missteps and judgement on my part and voracious reading on the children's.

I know I'm getting better at not being a book snob. I hardly sniffed at all when Snowy, ready for a snuggle and a chapter or two on the sofa, brought me 'Jedi Apprentice:The Deadly Hunter'.

Maybe I'm desensitised after my struggle with 'Twilight'. Arwen wanted to read it last year, just to see what all the fuss was about. I wanted to say no. I said yes instead. When it came down to it, I valued her freedom to read more than my ideas about reading 'good' books or even 'suitable' books.

We both read all four of Meyer's novels. Now there's no mystery about them. Arwen worked out for herself that they are badly written, that they rely on ever more sensational plots to keep the reader hooked. She knows that dating a vampire is never a good idea and that Bella needs to put down her copy of 'Wuthering Heights' ( see, even the classics can be dangerous! ) and get a life, develop her skills - cooking school, maybe ?

So, no censorship in this house. What about yours ?

Poetry Friday

In honour of Arwen's 11th birthday today...

Bilbo's Song by J.R.R.Tolkien

I sit beside the fire and think
Of all that I have seen,
Of meadow flowers and butterflies
In summers that have been.

Of yellow leaves and gossamer,
In autumns that there were,
With morning mist and silver sun
And wind upon my hair.

I sit beside the fire and think
Of how the world will be
When winter comes without a spring
That I shall ever see.

For still there are so many things
That I have never seen.
In every wood and every spring
there is a different green.

I sit beside the fire and think
Of people long ago
And people who will see a world
That I shall never know.
But all the while I sit and think
Of times there were before,
I listen for returning feet
and voices at the door.

Poetry Friday

Some more Wendell Berry, because I'm in the mood...

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at
the least sound
in fear of what my life and
my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down
where the wood drake
rests his beauty on the water,
and the great heron feeds. I come into the
peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives
with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence
of still water.
I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world.
I am free.

I love this poem enough to try to live by it.
Do not tax life with forethought of grief.
Rest in the grace of the world.

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

This tale of time travel recently won the Newbery Award and came recommended via the blog of American author and homeschooler, Melissa Wiley. Bought it, read it aloud to the girls, caught them 'reading ahead' almost daily - a practice officially banned in our house but indulged in frequently and normally a sign of A Good Read.

Set in 70's urban America, it's a clever puzzle of a book that had me reading ahead as well and staying awake at night trying to get the intricate plotting straight in my head. I'd love to know how Rebecca Stead kept track of it herself. ( I have a vision of her walking round and round a very long table, moving draft pages from one end to the other, playing a game of paper-chess with herself.)

The heroine, Miranda, carries around a well-read copy of 'A Wrinkle in Time'. She's dealing with normal pre-teen troubles - life with her single mother, snooty girls at school, the fall-out of a friendship gone suddenly wrong - but when she finds the first in a series of mysterious notes, life becomes more intriguing, more complex, more frightening.

For all its fancy plot and referencing of 'A Wrinkle in Time', underneath it's still a rite of passage novel, with Miranda learning to navigate her city, her time, her emotions and her expectations. Stead handles the plot with dexterity; she writes believably about unbelievable things.

Yet something didn't quite grab me. I didn't warm to Miranda ( not in the way I've loving the main character in our current read-aloud, 'The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate' by Jacqueline Kelly, a Newbery runner-up ) and I'm putting that down to a slight drabness in the time and setting that leaches into the characters, though not into the plot. The girls may feel differently. Let's just say that given my own time travel machine, I wouldn't be going back to the 70's.

High Falutin'

Of course, mothers are also for more mundane things than that high falutin' Peter Pan nonsense. Like dealing with screaming 10 year olds who have fallen off their scooter outside - while their mother is blogging about motherhood inside - and broken off a front tooth and who need their mama to hold them while they swish out mouthfuls of blood and tooth fragments and get whisked off to the dentist and the doctor and the dentist again and need reassurance that their 'fake' tooth will look just as good as their old, smashed up tooth and that breathing in between the screaming is a good idea and that it will all, in the end, be OK. Which it will. But I bet you Germaine never had to tell that story.

What Are Mothers For ?

If Peter Pan is to be believed, mothers are for telling stories. Wendy Darling, once in the Neverland, acts out with gusto her part as 'mother' - sewing and darning, enforcing bedtimes, dosing the Lost Boys with imaginary medicines - but the only essential part of her role is the telling of stories, which is a medicine in itself.

Much of what Peter, and the Lost Boys, do not know is due to lack of a mother's tales - the old tales like 'Cinderella' and the informal, personal ones, such as the story Wendy tells of her own home and mother - stories that widen a child's understanding of the world beyond their immediate experience and that develop imagination and through it, empathy.

Children may begin "gay and innocent and heartless" but through story they will have their hearts opened and the limits of their innocence extended. Story is a way of growing up. Peter Pan's inability to remember story, even that of his own personal narrative, is indicative of his decision not to grow up.

"Who is Captain Hook ?" he asked with interest when she spoke of the arch enemy.
"Don't you remember," she asked, amazed, 'How you killed him and saved all our lives ?"
"I forget them after kill them," he replied carelessly.
When she expressed doubtful hope that Tinker Bell would be glad to see her he said "Who is Tinker Bell ?"
"Oh Peter,"she said, shocked; but even when she explained he could not remember.

Last week I came across an article by Germaine Greer in The Guardian about 'old wives' tales' in which she says "Women teach babies and children to speak, which is the same as teaching them to think. An integral part of this activity is waking up their imagination, to see the numinousness of the real world, giving them, to adapt Wordsworth's phrase, glimpses that would make them less forlorn."

So that is what mothers are for - to teach a mother tongue, to shape that tongue into story, to read and tell aloud, giving her child the tools for growth and maturation.