Memorandum submitted
by Tom Paine
We are registered and monitored by our
LA and have been home educating our daughter for 3 years following her
diagnosis with epilepsy after brain surgery.
Elective Home Education has offered us a valuable life to throw at a
brilliant mind as it teeters on the edge of a dark precipice.
The Badman
Review was not an independent review as it had the predetermined outcome to
inhibit Elective Home Education in such a way as to effect a ban. This
can be evidenced by the fact that England
and Sweden
have been sharing information* and implementing the same strategies (an annual
licence) and using the same time line (June and October 09) for their
deadlines. Sweden
is quite clear on this though: it will be a complete ban. The rationale
for this can be traced back to Germany's
defence of its 1938 ban on home education at the ECHR in 2006 (Konrad v Germany).
The freedom to Electively Home Educate was enshrined in law during World
War II in 1944: the same year the free world landed on the beaches of Normandy at a cost of
10,000 casualties. The symbolism should not be lost on Parliament, here -
ancient British freedoms secured at great cost or a redundant Nazi ban working
its way through the back door?
*(Badman
Literary Review's first entry is an email between Sweden
and England
dated
Review of Elective Home
Education in England
· I concur with the
concerns of Professor Bruce Stafford about the conduct of the Badman
Review. This submission does not seek to
repeat those concerns but instead is focussed around raising issues which
surface when the wider context, within which the review sits, is examined
· I question the
independence and objectivity of the Badman review, it clearly had predetermined
outcomes. I have been curious as to why
the UK government and the Swedish government appear to be sharing information
(the very first item on the Literary Review is an email dated June 2008, before
the review was announced) ahead of changing their respective legislations on
Elective Home Education, and why they are working to the same time table
(June and October 09 deadlines)
· The Badman review
evidences misconceptions about the relationship between EHE and society, and
school and society, which are held on a pan-European level and are evidenced in
the ECHR court case Konrad v Germany
and in the Swedish government's rationale for moving towards a ban on EHE. The disparity between the evidence presented
to Badman and the conclusions he draws, with no basis in evidence, can be
explained in part by the review taking place in this wider European context.
· The
rationale of the judgement in Konrad v Germany is flawed, and moreover (and independent
of the flaws in the judgement) the decision is not applicable to the
educational context in Britain.
Therefore the principles underpinning Badman's conclusions have to be rejected.
· What would a ban
on Elective Home Education mean? I give
a brief historical perspective.
1. I agree with all the concerns of Professor Bruce Stafford about the
conduct of the Badman Review.
2. I have been curious as to why the UK government and the Swedish
government appear to be sharing information and are working to the same time
table* before changing their respective legislations on Elective Home
Education (*June and October 09 deadlines). The Literature Review
for the Badman Review notes that Sweden
has Scandinavia's strictest official regulation of home education in Europe
with an annual license to EHE and Britain has the most liberal. Sweden is now tightening its legislation and
England is following suit by adopting Sweden's annual license and is providing
a further opportunity to ban a family from exercising EHE (elective home
education) with the words "anything else" embedded in the sentence which gives
local authorities the right to refuse a license for reasons including "anything
else which may affect their ability to provide a suitable and efficient
education". If you look at the use of
language that is being used in both of England and Sweden's proposals it would
appear as though England and Sweden are both in process of bringing their
legislation on home education in line with that of Germany's current
legislation which bans home education - this is further suggested by the 2006
the European
Court of Human Rights ruling that upheld Germany's ban (a ban
brought into being during the Third Reich by Bernhard Rust in 1938).
3.
The Swedish government, unlike the English government, is quite clear that they
are going to all but ban home schooling and the reasons given on the Rohus
website (Rohus is The Swedish Association for Home Education) are: "...that
the education in school should be comprehensive and objective and thereby
designed so that all pupils can participate, regardless of what religious or
philosophical reasons the pupil or his or her care-takers may
have." Thus, the proposed law argues: "...there is no need
for the law to offer the possibility of home-schooling because of religious or
philosophical reasons in the family. All together, this means that this
proposed change cannot be said to contradict Sweden's international obligations
[i.e. Human Rights Conventions]."
4.
All of which look suspiciously like the reasons given by the European
Court of Human Rights in upholding Germany's ban on EHE.
|
5.
"In a landmark legal case commenced in 2003 at the European
Court of Human Rights a home-schooling parent
couple argued on behalf of their children that Germany's compulsory school
attendance endangered their children's religious upbringing, promoted
teaching inconsistent with their Christian faith - especially the German
State's mandates relating to sex education in the schools - and contravened
the declaration in the Charter of
Fundamental Rights of the European Union that "the State
shall respect the right of parents to ensure education and teaching is in
conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions". In
September 2006 the European Court of Human Rights upheld the German ban on
home-schooling, stating "parents
may not refuse... [compulsory schooling] on the basis of their
convictions", and adding that
the right to education "calls for regulation by the State". The
European Court
took the position that the plaintiffs
were the children, not their parents, and declared "children are unable to foresee the consequences of their
parents' decision for home education because of their young age.... Schools represent society, and it is in
the children's interest to become part of that society. The parents' right to
educate does not go as far as to deprive their children of that experience.
The court stressed that the decisive point was not whether or not
home education was equally effective as primary school education, but
that compulsory school attendance require children from all backgrounds in
society to gather together*." The European Court endorsed a
"carefully reasoned" decision of the German court concerning
"the general interest of society to avoid the emergence of parallel
societies based on separate philosophical convictions and the importance of
integrating minorities into society." *My emphasis (see Konrad v. Germany)
|
6. A little too coincidentally this also mirrors
the quote from a submission made by the Church of England to the Badman Review
even though the C of E concluded their submission by stating there was no need
for a change to current legislation (a conclusion that was ignored by the
review).
7. The Church of England's submission states:
|
8.
"that children and young people not in formal education are missing the
benefits and challenges of learning in community with their peers. Children who do not go to school may
not experience the social and cultural diversity encountered there; they will
not learn how to deal with the rough and tumble of everyday life; they
may never meet people with different faith and value systems. All
such encounters, even the difficult or painful ones are enriching. We
are concerned not only with the five Every Child Matters outcomes, but
also with the spiritual well-being of all children and young people.
Spiritual well-being arises not only from being cared for in a loving
family and/or faith community, but also in encounters with people of
different opinions and backgrounds; in learning to listen to a variety
of opinions; to encounter diversity and the riches and life-enhancement
it can bring. Spiritual well-being depends on living and taking a full
part in community life. Children and young people in schools learn about
and from the five major religions. This may be a difficult part of the
curriculum for home educators to provide, yet it is vital for the Government's community cohesion agenda
that all children learn in a balanced way about the variety of religious
values and practices, and to be encouraged to question their own beliefs
and practices."
|
9. This is
somewhat ingenuous of the C of E given the admission policies of their schools
strongly favour those of the same faith, and given the well documented evidence
that C of E schools accept a disproportionately low number of children in
receipt of free school meals. Their observation is further compromised by the
fact that all British school children must, by law attend a daily act of
Christian worship or sit alone in a classroom (and paradoxically, given the
championing of children's over parent's rights alluded to in Badman's
rationale, the right of withdrawal rests with the parent, not the child). Importantly, though, it provides the
government with the appearance of evidence that makes roughly the same
points made by the German courts i.e. - "The
parents' right to educate does not go as far as to deprive their children of
that experience. The court stressed that the decisive point was not whether or
not home education was equally effective as primary school education, but that
compulsory school attendance require children from all backgrounds in society
to gather together." As does the AS Neill quote mischievously used in
the Badman Review "the function of a
child is to live his own life - not the life that his anxious parents think he
should live, not a life according to the purpose of an educator who thinks he
knows best." - i.e. "The European Court took
the position that the plaintiffs were the children, not their parents..".
|
9. This
gives credence to the, now, widely held view of another home schooling parent
that - "The government doesn't care about the evidence. If they did
there would never have been a review in the first place and its
recommendations would not have been accepted by the government. The real
problem is that the government publicly claims that they implement
evidence-based policy, but time and time again they have shown that they
actually manufacture policy-based evidence."
|
10. The reasoning of the
judgement in Konrad v Germany
is flawed, and moreover neither this judgement nor the Swedish application of
it to their own circumstances has any relevance to the circumstances of British
EHE children and should not be applied to the UK.
11. The reasoning used by the federal state of Baden-Württemberg is flawed: as schools do not
represent society any more than the police service, hospitals or prisons do,
but are just one aspect of society.
Whereas the home schooling family, are
immersed in the world around us. EHE, as
we experience it, is absolutely society
centred education (Alan Thomas explains this eloquently on the Education
Otherwise YouTube video). A typical day involves encountering people of all
ages and from all walks of life in the context of their normal life and interacting
with them as equals. By contrast school
restricts social encounters to social encounters with children of the same age
(and as we shall see in the next paragraph, in Britain all to often the
restriction is also in terms of sex and/or class and/or religion and/or
ability) in an artificial setting not reflective of the rest of society. The only relationships with adults are
hierarchical and again serve as no preparation for interactions in the rest of
life.
12. Not only is the reasoning flawed it is not applicable to the
British context. Firstly the
circumstances of that case were particular to one family with a singular and
atypical view of the world and should not be presumed to apply more widely. Secondly the historical and present day
context of our education system is vastly different to that of Sweden (where,
for example, private and single sex education is not so deeply embedded). In urban Britain, at secondary level,
children do not mix with children of other backgrounds - their parents can
choose to send them to schools which segregate them by sex, or religion, class
or ability and anyone who has ever met a parent of a 10 year old in London (2
years before secondary transfer!) will have witnessed the effort the middle
classes go to ensure their children go to a school with other middle class and
or Christian and or high achieving children (as Harriet Harman's and Diane
Abbot's famous defections to the private sector, and Tony Blair's choice of a
religious school exemplify). Indeed our experience is that in secondary school
children do not even mix with children in a different academic stream from
themselves. So the idea "that compulsory school attendance require children
from all backgrounds in society to gather together" is a nonsense in this country.
|
11.
"Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little
or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have
different origins. Society is produced
by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our
happiness positively by uniting our
affections, the latter negatively
by restraining our vices. The one
encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
Society
in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a
necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or
are exposed to the same miseries by a
government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamities are heightened by reflecting
that we furnish the means by which we suffer..."
From
Common Sense by Thomas Paine, who
died 200 years ago this year, and who argued that people are born with a set
of natural freedoms and that any society that violates those freedoms is
flawed and should be changed..
|
12. Now, it
is quite clear that today's Germans have absolutely nothing to do with their
country's Nazi past and as one German commentator recently remarked: the
Germans were probably the most pacific country in Europe.
Yet their government has gone to some considerable length to get a square peg
into a round hole and ensure their ban on EHE, originally motivated by a Nazi
desire to control and indoctrinate all children, remains law. The Germans may
be motivated by a desire not to return to the sensibilities of that era,
sensibilities that did not tolerate difference, but paradoxically, in the
British context the restrictions proposed to be placed on EHE do exactly that.
Badman's proposals discriminate against a minority group, assuming their
children to be more at risk of child abuse and less well educated than the
dominant majority. Moreover the Badman report proposes powers of state
intervention so draconian that they are more appropriate to a totalitarian
regime than a liberal democracy.
13. What would a ban on home education in England mean? The list of extraordinarily important
contributions to our world made by home educated people (from Darwin to
Einstein) is becoming increasingly well known so I will focus on one example of
a home educated person for whom the targets based approach proposed by the
Badman report would have been clearly nonsensical. William Blake was born above a shop in Soho, London, to a family of
hosiers who were able to send their children to school but decided to educate
William at home. This was clearly a
natural choice that they were free to make in the second half of the 18th
Century. They were free to choose what
was right for each of their
children. This freedom had always
existed for as long as parents have looked after their young and the
restrictions placed upon you were simply going to be one of status and
therefore income. William Blake is now
considered to be one of England's
greatest poets and artists. Blake saw each thing as unique - as irreducible to
categorisation, but at the same time each thing contains the totality of
everything in the world. So you have an interplay of uniqueness and
connectivity - " to see the world in grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower". He went on learning right to the end of his
life and did some of his best work in later life. He perfectly illustrates the power of being
autodidactic and the worth of his own self belief even when he was never going
to be understood in his own time (but "I hate scarce smiles, I laugh a lot." he
wrote nonetheless). The sensibilities
underpinning Badman's conclusions negate the life and extraordinary vision of
William Blake.
14.
In 1944, when we were at war, the natural
instinct that the Blakes had to educate their children, that has been inherent
in humans since the beginning of time, was enshrined in English law, as a
duty. In the same way that we, legally,
also have a duty of care towards our children. "every civil right grows out of natural right; or, in other words, is a
natural right exchanged" (Rights of Man - Thomas Paine)
15. From
Hansard 19 January 1944: Rab Butler MP introduced the 1944 Education Act to
parliament saying:
|
16. "Instead of elementary instruction in the
"three R's," which should be so familiar to all hon. Members, or
the provision, for which Wordsworth pleaded when he wrote of the State as:
Binding herself
by statute to secure,
For all the
children whom her soil maintains,
The rudiments
of letters, and inform,
The mind with
moral and religious truth
We substitute a new Clause 34 which says: It shall be the duty of the parent of
every child of compulsory school age to cause him to receive efficient
full-time education suitable to his age, ability and aptitude, either by regular
attendance at school or otherwise."
|
19. With this new legal duty the Blakes would have found their freedom
to make the same choices that they made for their children, in the first
instance, intact. William Blake, who
hated scarce smiles and laughed a lot, would still have been educated
otherwise.
20. The freedom to Electively Home Educate was enshrined
in law during World War II in 1944: the same year the free world landed on the
beaches of Normandy
at a cost of 10,000 casualties. The symbolism should not be lost on
Parliament, here - ancient British freedoms secured at great cost or a
redundant Nazi ban working its way through the back door? Or as my Swedish correspondent noted - Hitler
himself is quoted saying: -"My greatest resource is people's ability to
forget."
September 2009
