Saturday, February 24, 2007

Telegraph Getting it Right

Coo, the Telegraph is on a roll: first an short and positive update on the home education situation in the UK, in response to the most recent bit of research and then (finally, alleluia), a story on the damage done to children when they start school at age 4.

(HT: JFT)

On the other hand, the Guardian write-up of the NFER report irritated HEors with the following:

"A DfES spokesman said: "Standards [in schools] have never been higher and with record funding in our schools we believe the best place to educate a child is actually in school. "

to which many HEors just say "Ha! Totally ridiculous, but that is what you get with skewed reporting, " and other things like "I'm not sending my child to a place where corruption is rife, those who choose to be involved in protection rackets do good business, drugs are easily available, children are knifed and knocked downstairs and are otherwise generally harrassed and bullied."

Further in the Yorkshire Post, The Mirror, The Manchester Evening News and The Independent.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Brilliant to see that! - linking that UNICEF report with the fact that we ignore the findings too! It's a shame there is no space there for comments.

The assumption in the UK (heard it again on Radio 4 yesteray!) is that more and more discipline will solve the problems and make our schools great places (let's ignore the fact that we are starting them too young, that we have bullying teachers as well and a boring, rigid curriculum). It is SO frustrating that the evidence of what works better elsewhere is consistently ignored by us.

Will calm down....

D x

Anonymous said...

It seems like a good article but Unicef has its own agendas for children. They are for compulsory education. It's also not mentioned that other European countries have strict home-education laws if they have them at all!

It might as well be that your compulsory school age becomes continental but then home-education goes continental with it.

The latest articles on home-education put it on a very negative light. It's like it only exists because schools are bad.

Anonymous said...

very interesting point, Leo. I sort of knew that HE is illegal in most of those countries but was repressing this in my mind as their schools are better.

Very probably if the government take on anything from them it will be, as you say, to outlaw home education. However, there is no sign at all of the UK and schools upping the starting age - quite the opposite. And this (amongst other things) guarantees the failure of our school system. So HEd has to exist.

And there is no doubt though that a lot of the current HEers would be happy for their children to go to school if the schools were good...but I see you point and it should of course morally remain a free choice.

I would be interested if you could post a link to those Unicef articles, if you have one.

D

Carlotta said...

Dear D,

Unicef report at:

http://unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/rc7_eng.pdf