There is another type of learning, though: what one might term ‘life lessons.’ I’ve been reflecting on the life lessons that home education taught me, and how I benefit from them today.

Curiosity drives learning

Human beings are naturally curious. Many parents remember the first time a toddler asked, ‘why?’ and how the questioning then went on and on! Little children pick things up that they shouldn’t, poke their fingers into things, and want to know everything. For some children, anxiety, especially at school, can diminish curiosity. To follow our curiosity, we need to feel free and safe. We need to know that no one will laugh at our questions.

Our home educating partnership was calm and safe. Gradually, my son started to ask questions. ‘How do mortgages work?’ ‘What do you think about capital punishment?’ ‘What is university like?’ I took the time to answer those questions at length, looking things up when I needed to. The questions often led to long conversations.

Adults need to cherish their curiosity. I sometimes worry that having the internet at our fingertips eliminates that interesting sensation of wondering. I wonder if… I wonder why… I wonder how… I try to encourage my students to wonder about things. English encompasses many topics, and students often ask questions that might not be related to what we are doing. When I can, I stop and answer the question, or we do some research together. Without curiosity, there would be no progress.

The power of ‘I don’t know’

You will notice that I have mentioned looking things up or doing research together. There is no shame in not knowing something, especially when you are facilitating a young person’s home education. We teach by demonstrating behaviour, so when we explain that we don’t know something and then we take action to find out, we are helping our young people to become independent learners. I often tell my students that I don’t know something. This can even be the exact definition of a word; I may have a good ‘feel’ for the meaning and I may know how to use the word, but I may suddenly find that I can’t supply a precise definition. This often happens with students who don’t speak English at home, and who are often more concerned about understanding every single word they read. If I don’t know, I explain this and I look the word up. Simples, as we used to say quite a few years ago.

Listen

Everyone wants to be heard. Many children are to nervous to speak up in class or to ask a question that they fear might be ‘silly.’ Life is fast and busy and it can be difficult to stop and make time to listen. Home education means that time must exist. There is no ‘class size,’ just individuals on their own journey. I found that our days out, in particular, provided excellent opportunities for listening time. I already had a professional interest in listening, from my experience taking instructions from clients (many of them teenagers) in the criminal justice system. My master’s dissertation was all about the human rights of young people in police stations: a situation where accurate, active listening is vital.

Sometimes, being heard can change things. A teenager in trouble with the law can suddenly feel that what they have to say matters, and this can be the beginning of an increase in self worth. A young person who has suffered with anxiety at school may start to relax when they find themselves in a comfortable situation with an adult who wants to hear what they have to say. This may take patience, but it’s worth it!

Of course, now that I work one-to-one with students, a large part of my job is listening. I need to listen to what my students tell me, but also to what might be behind it. Finding a subject boring might mean that they don’t quite understand it. Not managing to finish tasks in school can mean they feel rushed or that they need to adjust their approach.

These are the little lessons I learned: encourage curiosity; admit it when you don’t know; make time to listen. But they’ve made a big difference to me.

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Social Life

One of the most common questions addressed to home educating parents is ‘but what about their social life?’ To be quite honest, anyone making the decision to home educate out of desperation, as opposed to a lifestyle choice, is likely to have more pressing concerns than this. I never worried about my son’s social life and I never had cause to. We were lucky to be living in a large village, and many of the children he had been to school with lived nearby. I came to expect teenagers banging on our front door at 4pm, straight off the school bus, to see if he was free. 

In a school setting, students are surrounded by others the same age, so they become used to socialising with those children. I found that, outside school, things became more organic. Friends had older or younger siblings. Like-minded people might be slightly older or younger. My son was able to choose the people he wanted to spend time with, and while they were roughly the same age, they were a more varied group than a class full of children all the same age.

Young people also need to mix with adults. In my current job, I sometimes worry that young people now miss out on adult conversation, maybe because entertainment is always available via various devices. Before the digital age, young people spent hours and hours being bored, picking up bits and pieces of adult conversation without even meaning to, and family conversations were more frequent and common. My son accompanied me to all sorts of places and we spoke to lots of different people. We had conversations in museums and galleries; we met Benjamin Zephaniah; we talked together incessantly. I feel that these encounters and conversations with adults were a vital part of his intellectual development.

The answer is, no, I didn’t worry about his social life and I didn’t need to. 

My Career

When we started home educating, I had only been qualified as a solicitor for a few years. I was able to work as a locum going to courts and police stations, so that I had plenty of time at home during the day and a lot more flexibility than an office job would have allowed me. Of course this affected my legal career. I was lucky to be able to work in this flexible way, but it was exhausting at times and very unpredictable and insecure. I effectively opted out of having any career progression. I don’t regret that in the slightest; I would do it again. Of course I would always put my child’s wellbeing before my career.

This also meant that we didn’t have money to do lots of expensive things. We managed a few trips and holidays, including the Lake District, Scotland, Rome, Florence, a festival of history, but always on a shoestring. Most museums are free, and I joined English Heritage so we could visit castles and other historic sites. It would be nice to have been able to afford more exciting outings and holidays, but we managed very well on what we were able to do.

What Other People Thought

If you home educate, people will tell you what they think, and often those opinions will differ from your own. It’s understandable that home education is viewed with a measure of suspicion: rarely, but significantly, children can be taken out of school for reasons that are not in their best interests. Home education is an enormous responsibility and not a decision to be taken lightly. I would never have embarked on this journey as a lifestyle choice; as I’ve said before, it was the right decision for us because it seemed like the last resort. 

I don’t really think of myself as thick-skinned (although possibly working in criminal defence is a good way to develop a thicker skin!); however, I really didn’t worry about what others thought. This was our journey and our decision, and, ultimately, my responsibility. Luckily, it turned out to be the best road, despite being the one less travelled.

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Credit: Markus Winkler on Unsplash

I’ve often heard, ‘I don’t watch the news; I don’t need that sort of negativity in my life.’

This makes sense. There is a lot happening in the world, and the stories reported in the media are usually pretty awful. Right now, this week, some terrible things have happened. Upsetting and, sometimes, frightening. Today, many of us remember exactly where we were when we heard the first news about the 9/11 attacks. It’s a lot to carry in your mind and heart, especially when we all have our own lives, and the lives of our loved ones, to attend to as well.

However, I feel strongly that being in the privileged position of living in a house, with a job, in a country that is not war-torn or stricken with famine or natural disasters, I owe it to my fellow human beings to be aware of their very different stories.

I once heard someone say, ‘You have to be informed, but you don’t have to be overwhelmed.’ I’m not sure who it was. I’ve found this a useful piece of guidance to help me deal with current events and my relationship to them. I could also say, I don’t have to be overwhelmed, but I do want to be informed.

I am interested in politics and I like to know what is happening in the world. I also like to gather various opinions on important topics, to help me work out where I stand. I find that the best way to inform myself and to fill in the details is by reading. TV news is very easy to digest, but it’s also extremely easy to take in too much. 24 hour channels repeat stories over again and again. I don’t really need to hear something more than once. If I read the news, I can learn about people and events, but I can view them from a slight distance. After all, that is reality. Most of those things are not happening in my village.

I am not saying I don’t want to empathise. I can feel empathy for people suffering all around the world if I read their stories. Sometimes it’s more effective, as text gives me access to facts, statistics and details that I might not take in from video or radio.

I try to avoid – at all costs – taking in news from social media. If I click on a link that I see on one of those platforms, I am being manipulated by the algorithm. That link has been placed there by a person or organisation who wants me to be pulled in and read it. Or it has been shared by someone who thinks it’s important. If I follow these breadcrumbs, I am letting others do my thinking for me. I prefer to read my news from a wide selection of stories. Then I can decide what I want to read.

Of course, we do still need to watch out for bias. Media organisations, although regulated, can still curate their content to present things in a certain way. Consulting more than one source is at least a start in maintaining independence.

I’m not saying that I never watch or listen to the news; just that I try to limit my intake. Most of the time.

The post Is the News Bad for Us? | 110925 first appeared on Harriet Stack.

Do you still use handwritten shopping lists? Or do you keep a list on your phone? I may be very old fashioned, but I prefer a paper list. I have a notepad on my fridge, and I add to it whenever I think of something I need to buy. If I am being really organised, I will re-write the list in the order that I will find those products in the supermarket. When I get there, I can hold my piece of paper at the same time as pushing my trolley and grabbing tins from the shelves. I have no desire to walk around the supermarket with my phone in my hand, scrolling up and down a list, waking my phone up when it has gone to sleep and struggling to manage the other things I need to do with my hands. The paper list works for me, and I am unlikely to change.

Handwriting has gone out of fashion. I know that almost everyone keeps notes in their phone, uses their phone as a diary and types almost everything. I have nothing against typing. I taught myself to touch type when was an undergraduate, using a manual typewriter. It’s a skill I value almost every day. I am typing this now. I love the speed and ease and the way my words appear magically on the screen as my fingers tap away.

However, I also value writing by hand. My handwriting is atrocious, and almost no one can read it. That comes from too many years making notes in lecture halls, courts and police stations. Legal secretaries seem to have special powers and can read solicitors’ handwriting when no one else can. But during my last year or so of practice, many solicitors were starting to type their notes on iPads, even in police stations. I never made the change, clinging desperately to my paper forms and ball point pens (always having several in my bag for fear of them running out!).

In the UK, at least for the moment, most exams have to be handwritten, for most students. I think that this is a good thing. Writing by hand requires no device (apart from pen and paper), no battery and no internet. There is also some sort of intimate connection between brain, hand and paper that psychologists could probably explain. There is lots more to say about this, but, for the moment, just think about the difference between a handwritten birthday card and a printed one. The first feels more personal and heartfelt, doesn’t it?

It saddens me to think that, in time, handwriting might become a rare skill. I think that we would be losing a valuable part of creativity if we stopped using pens and paper. For the time being, GCSEs and A Levels mean that our young people have to practise writing the old fashioned way, and I am all for it!

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