Education. At home, at school, or otherwise.

On opening my WordPress App in order to blog about Thing 1 making us dinner tonight from having nothing in the cupboard, I thought I’d have a quick clear and sort of draft blog posts.

I have four draft posts about the decision to homeschool, the first dating back to over a year ago.

Well, as family and friends now know, we have made the decision that Thing 1 will be educated at home. Our in the woods, at the beach, in a museum, wherever, but he will be leaving formal schooling as of the end of this school year.

It hasn’t been a quick or an easy decision and it was made by all three of us. We probably would have taken him out a year ago when he was getting into trouble needlessly, but he wanted to go to school, we decided at that point to inform him of what home education was likely to be like and wait for him to make the decision unless things turned bad.

He goes to a lovely little primary school, it’s not perfect, but it’s a good school. He skipped in and out of class every day for the first two years. At some point over the course of year 2, he stopped skipping out.

He comes out looking like the World is being carried on his shoulders, bleary eyed. He said recently that he feels sad at school, but that it isn’t the work that makes him sad, he enjoys the work, it’s interaction with people. Well, the big draw of school is social interaction with peers. What if instead of learning how to socialise, he is learning how to avoid socialising? What if he’s growing to dislike talking to people, to dislike interaction with anyone other than those closest to him? Then school is most definitely not the best place for him.

Right now, school is not the best place for him. The right place for him now and for as long as we feel it’s working, is being surrounded by the love and understanding of his Mummy and by compassionate caring families who can support all of us.

Fundamentally, the school system, the National Curriculum, is screwed up. Michel Gove screwed it up first and his predecessor has continued to muck it up, quite surprisingly even more spectacularly than Gove did.

You get one childhood. This is our child’s childhood and we want it to be the best it can be.

At the end of this school year, we will become a home ed family and we really can’t wait.

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