Jay Doubleyou: explaining how your country's education system works
Children in the UK are being taught more and more at home, as an article from Saturday's Independent reports:
In a sign that thousands of parents are turning their backs on the schools system, figures released in a Freedom of Information request show that 20,842 children were home educated in England in 2012 – a rise of 500 from the year before. Home educators believe the actual number could be as high as 80,000.
The latest figures show that in Wales the number of children being home educated rose from 1,103 to 1,225 between 2012/13 and 2013/14, while in Scotland the figure has risen from 350 to 500 since 2010.
Home schooling is becoming increasingly popular in certain parts of England. Kent had 823 children studying at home last year, and in Tonbridge 55 parents were home educating – almost three times as many as in 2010. In Gloucestershire, the figure went up from 250 to 400 in the five years up to 2013.
Edwina Theunissen, who runs a helpline for Education Otherwise – which offers support to families educating their children at home, said: “We don’t keep figures but anecdotally it does seem that the numbers are going up.
“There is no doubt that it is a fairly recent phenomenon that quite a few people are coming to because of difficulties in finding a school.”
Days earlier the Local Government Association had warned of a £1bn “black hole” in funding for school places; an extra 130,000 extra primary places will be needed by 2017/18, it said.
Mrs Theunissen added: “There are two types of home educators really – those who philosophically support the principle and the refuseniks from the school system.”
She said the latter included many parents whose children had been bullied at school – or who had considered their children too young to go to school. Some schools were insisting children started at their nurseries at the age of two-and-a-half to ensure a school place.
“Some parents are temporarily educating their children at home until they can get a place,” she added. “Some find they quite like home educating, so they continue.”
Alex Byers, who is home educating her two daughters, aged five and six, said: “I always thought my youngest, then aged four, was too young to start school but was told by playschool I didn’t have a choice – she had to go. She struggled from the beginning as she was simply too young.
“Society seems to have lost its way somewhat with regard to education. Schools are obsessed with Ofsted and meeting targets. Children are coaxed into learning merely to pass tests, with the promise of golden time and reward stickers. School doesn’t foster a love of learning.”
Exclusive: Nearly 2,000 families still without school places for their children - Education News - Education - The Independent
Do you know who Gradgrind was?
Mr Thomas Gradgrind is the notorious headmaster in Dickens's novel Hard Times who is dedicated to the pursuit of profitable enterprise.[1] His name is now used generically to refer to someone who is hard and only concerned with cold facts and numbers.[2]
In a famous passage, a visiting official asks Gradgrind's students "Suppose you were going to carpet a room. Would you use a carpet having a representation of flowers upon it?" The character Sissy Jupe replies, ingenuously, that she would because, "If you please, sir, I am very fond of flowers."
| “ | "And is that why you would put tables and chairs upon them, and have people walking over them with heavy boots?"
"It wouldn't hurt them, sir. They wouldn't crush and wither, if you please, sir. They would be the pictures of what was very pretty and pleasant, and I would fancy -"
"Ay, ay, ay! But you mustn't fancy," cried the gentleman, quite elated by coming so happily to his point. "That's it! You are never to fancy." "You are not, Cecilia Jupe," Thomas Gradgrind solemnly repeated, "to do anything of that kind." "Fact, fact, fact!" said the gentleman. And "Fact, fact, fact!" repeated Thomas Gradgrind.[3] | ” |
Gradgrind is the most dynamic character in Hard Times since he comes to recognize that emotions are important when his daughter Louisa has an emotional breakdown.
Gradgrind - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tom Hodgkinson: The old educational ways are not remotely Gradgrindian
Sunday 9 March 2014
For the past three days we have been home-schooling my nine-year-old son, Henry. The reason is that we are waiting for a place to come up for him at London's busy schools. OK, I accept three days is not enough time to present a detailed research document. But let me offer a couple of reflections.
Henry is delighted not to have to go to school. He sees this period as an opportunity to upgrade his character on Skyrim, the fiendishly complicated computer game he likes, where he wanders around a medieval landscape in the form of a vampire, killing monsters and his ex-wives.
Home-schooling for me, on the other hand, is an opportunity to take responsibility for his education, even for a brief period, and get him out of the grip of the state and its latest ideology.
I suppose in an ideal world, I would instruct Henry in the noble trivium in the morning, then take him skateboarding after lunch. That was the three-fold path of old. Conceived by the Greeks (the trivium, not skateboarding), it stayed more or less at the centre of primary education until the Enlightenment. It is how Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton would have been taught.
The three parts were grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. First you were taught the grammar of your own language, its rules. Grammar was – is – essentially a science, and a body of knowledge taught through repetition. "A pronoun is a word that stands in place of a noun," would be repeated in chorus by groups of medieval children.
Such building blocks were seen as an important foundation to critical thinking. As the great autodidact William Cobbett put in his grammar guide of 1832: "The actions of man proceed from their thoughts. In order to obtain the co-operation, the concurrence, the consent of others, we must communicate our thoughts to them. The means of this communication are words; and grammar teaches us to make use of words."
Following grammar, the children of yesteryear would be instructed in the art of dialectic – what today we would call logic or critical thinking. The third part of their education was rhetoric – the communication of ideas, whether by speech or writing. Then the students would move on to stage two, the quadrivium. This consisted of music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy; in other words, the study of the world out there.
The trivium is showing signs of returning to the educational debate. A couple of weeks ago at the Idler Academy, we held a talk by former drama teacher Martin Robinson based on his new book about the trivium. In the audience were gangs of primary-school teachers, grammar-school heads and Liz Truss, the education minister. A few days later, that Michael Gove popped into our shop and we told him all about it.
So I sat down and taught him (Henry, not the Secretary of State for Education) the definition of a noun, a verb, a pronoun and a conjunction. I taught him how to play the scale of C-major. He did four pages of the maths book we bought from WH Smith. And he read a few Greek myths on his own while I got on with some work.
Henry also wrote a review of Stig of the Dump which included the line: "Overall I think it is a good funny book," which is not going to win him the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, but it's a start.
A couple of hours of this each day and we'd get Henry up to 11-plus standard in no time. This is not to diss school teachers: they have to teach classes of 30 or more, so progress will necessarily be slower. But what is really fascinating is that the old educational ways are not remotely Gradgrindian, which is how they are routinely caricatured. In fact, the liberal arts, as they are known – and that means an education for a free person, not a slave – were non-utilitarian, and included what we would call a progressive element: they encouraged dialogue and debate, in the spirit of Socrates.
What Henry is really missing out on, of course, is playing with other boys. And home-schooling demands a lot of parents. I suspect that after a few weeks of our experiment, his parents will welcome his return to the arms of the state, for all its imperfections.
Tom Hodgkinson is editor of 'The Idler'
Tom Hodgkinson: The old educational ways are not remotely Gradgrindian - Commentators - Voices - The Independent
.
.
.
For the past three days we have been home-schooling my nine-year-old son, Henry. The reason is that we are waiting for a place to come up for him at London's busy schools. OK, I accept three days is not enough time to present a detailed research document. But let me offer a couple of reflections.
Henry is delighted not to have to go to school. He sees this period as an opportunity to upgrade his character on Skyrim, the fiendishly complicated computer game he likes, where he wanders around a medieval landscape in the form of a vampire, killing monsters and his ex-wives.
Home-schooling for me, on the other hand, is an opportunity to take responsibility for his education, even for a brief period, and get him out of the grip of the state and its latest ideology.
I suppose in an ideal world, I would instruct Henry in the noble trivium in the morning, then take him skateboarding after lunch. That was the three-fold path of old. Conceived by the Greeks (the trivium, not skateboarding), it stayed more or less at the centre of primary education until the Enlightenment. It is how Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton would have been taught.
The three parts were grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. First you were taught the grammar of your own language, its rules. Grammar was – is – essentially a science, and a body of knowledge taught through repetition. "A pronoun is a word that stands in place of a noun," would be repeated in chorus by groups of medieval children.
Such building blocks were seen as an important foundation to critical thinking. As the great autodidact William Cobbett put in his grammar guide of 1832: "The actions of man proceed from their thoughts. In order to obtain the co-operation, the concurrence, the consent of others, we must communicate our thoughts to them. The means of this communication are words; and grammar teaches us to make use of words."
Following grammar, the children of yesteryear would be instructed in the art of dialectic – what today we would call logic or critical thinking. The third part of their education was rhetoric – the communication of ideas, whether by speech or writing. Then the students would move on to stage two, the quadrivium. This consisted of music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy; in other words, the study of the world out there.
The trivium is showing signs of returning to the educational debate. A couple of weeks ago at the Idler Academy, we held a talk by former drama teacher Martin Robinson based on his new book about the trivium. In the audience were gangs of primary-school teachers, grammar-school heads and Liz Truss, the education minister. A few days later, that Michael Gove popped into our shop and we told him all about it.
So I sat down and taught him (Henry, not the Secretary of State for Education) the definition of a noun, a verb, a pronoun and a conjunction. I taught him how to play the scale of C-major. He did four pages of the maths book we bought from WH Smith. And he read a few Greek myths on his own while I got on with some work.
Henry also wrote a review of Stig of the Dump which included the line: "Overall I think it is a good funny book," which is not going to win him the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, but it's a start.
A couple of hours of this each day and we'd get Henry up to 11-plus standard in no time. This is not to diss school teachers: they have to teach classes of 30 or more, so progress will necessarily be slower. But what is really fascinating is that the old educational ways are not remotely Gradgrindian, which is how they are routinely caricatured. In fact, the liberal arts, as they are known – and that means an education for a free person, not a slave – were non-utilitarian, and included what we would call a progressive element: they encouraged dialogue and debate, in the spirit of Socrates.
What Henry is really missing out on, of course, is playing with other boys. And home-schooling demands a lot of parents. I suspect that after a few weeks of our experiment, his parents will welcome his return to the arms of the state, for all its imperfections.
Tom Hodgkinson is editor of 'The Idler'
Tom Hodgkinson: The old educational ways are not remotely Gradgrindian - Commentators - Voices - The Independent
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