Home education is still very much a minority option in Ireland but numbers are growing, writes Breda O'Brien
MY REFLECTIVE friend Fiona once mused about the places you end up because of your children. She was on a horse at the time, which would not be her natural habitat, but I think she meant it in a wider sense. Our children stretch us and challenge us to do things and go places that we would never dream of on our own.
I thought about Fiona at the weekend, when I entered a small hexagonal hostel room with bright orange walls and six sets of metal bunkbeds. The top bunks were cheerfully bare of any kind of railing, and I was planning to share this room for the weekend with three other adults and seven children ranging in age from seven to 15. Ah, the places to which your children lead you! I am not a hostel kind of person. The only thing that would have brought me to a hostel in Kerry for the weekend was the fact that the Home Education Network was holding its annual conference there. Our children were dizzy with excitement.
They love the conference for all sorts of reasons, not least because of the sheer amount of craic that is generated when you get families together who have chosen the educational road less travelled.
Home education, that is, not sending children to school, but taking responsibility as parents for their education, is still very much a minority option in Ireland. However, the numbers are growing. There are some 420 families registered with the National Education Welfare Board, and no one is entirely sure how many more remain unregistered.
Choosing not to send children to school arouses the most extraordinary reactions in people. Home-educated children are used to fielding politely such questions as: "Can you read? Are you bored all the time? Do you have any friends?" (The answers are yes, no and yes, lots.) And those are just the questions from adults. It seems to be very difficult for people to conceive that people might learn, or have social skills, if they do not spend most of the day with 30 people of the same age.
One of the workshops at the weekend was on educating teens. At one stage, home education was primarily an option for younger children, and it was only very brave souls who ventured on when their children hit their teens. Now, however, more and more families are continuing through the teenage years.
Home educators tend to be sturdy and resilient. No one is completely immune, though, to the pressure to conform to the conventional route or at least to prove that your children are doing as well as they would in mainstream schooling. Given that we have a national obsession with the Leaving Certificate, pressure tends to mount when young people approach the age when this rite of passage would normally happen. Many of the young people want to attend university, and the Leaving Cert is the most direct route, although some may decide to wait until they qualify for mature student status at 23.
Some choose to do GCSEs instead. Some return to conventional schooling. Others choose the grind school route with heavy hearts, because there must be few approaches more opposed to the spirit of home education than the relentless, points-focused nature of these schools. A growing number decide to sit the Leaving Cert, but to study at home.
There is one aspect of the Leaving Cert where home-educated young people should have an advantage. In recent times, many subjects have course work, which is usually an opportunity for young people to undertake an extended study of some particular topic, or to do practical work. It is submitted in advance of the examination and can be worth 20 per cent or more of the final mark. Given that home education tends to be thematic and project-based rather than tied to 40-minute periods on one topic, course work suits home- educated children very well.
However, in a blinding irony, if young people choose to continue their education at home, their course work will not be marked, because the State Examinations Commission demands that it be supervised by a teacher and signed off by a principal.
Apparently, exactly the same rules apply to adults who choose to study on their own, thus discriminating against "second-chance" learners and violating the spirit of lifelong learning that the Department of Education is always saying that it favours.
As previously described in this column, the mother of one young person has just spent a year trying to right this injustice on behalf of her daughter. She found that the State Examinations Commission had a decided fondness for fudge. They told her that if she could persuade a teacher and principal to sign the form, that the course work would be marked. Naturally, no teacher wants to sign a form that states the work must be regularly monitored, if the student in question is not being taught by him or her.
Eventually, this September, long after the actual exam, the mother was told that if the principal of the school where her daughter had sat the examination signed the form and a qualified teacher vouched for the work, her daughter would receive her marks. Finally, after a torturous year, her daughter received her well-deserved excellent marks.
However, the State Examinations Commission found itself unable to confirm to this writer that two signatures of this nature would be sufficient in the future for other home-educated candidates. Despite repeated requests, it was unable to say what the position is for adult extern candidates. Nor could it give any information about levels of plagiarism or other concerns regarding course work among mainstream candidates. It was a repetition of the kind of approach that the mother of the student experienced.
Home-educated children generally like learning. They want to choose subjects that interest them and to do extended pieces of work because that is the way they have always learned. The system conspires to frustrate all these aims, because if they want to sit the Leaving Cert, the uncertainty about whether their course work will be accepted virtually forces them to choose subjects without course work. How can any education system worthy of the name stand over this?
bobrien@irish-times.ie