100 Days - day fiveteen

Oh how I laughed. Look, parents are going to sue the government for failing to provide education for their children. Having been a home educator for many years with the Education Welfare Officer breathing down your neck every now and then, demanding that you demonstrate you were providing an education for your children on pain of having them forced back into school, I did find this report most entertaining. Call it karma or something. 

I have read, mostly on facebook, a lot of posts about people 'homeschooling' during the coronavirus lockdown, both positive and negative reactions. Lots of jokes about how teachers should get a big pay rise because making two children sit down and jump through the academic hoops you have planned for them is really hard. Others saying how much their children have flourished away from the stresses of compulsory school attendance. Also home education pages pointing out that what parents are currently doing is *not* home education. It is crisis management. If you're interested Idzie Desmarais writes at 'I'm Unschooled, Yes, I Can Write', and this article on National Geographic. I hope that the experience, the enforced extended companionship of their children, has shown parents that children are people too, and that they don't need to control their every waking moment for them to be 'learning' stuff (whatever that means).

In keeping with the rest of the post, today's Book to Make You Think: Weapons of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gatto from 2013

Stay safe. See you tomorrow.

#100DaysToOffload

Damn hippy home educators

We sat at Julie's the other day and watched the pilot episode of 'Raised by Wolves' on 4oD (available for another 17 days, and a somewhat pretentious Guardian review here); it is written by Caitlin Moran (no relation to Dunk) and her sister Caz and is based (loosely) on their own childhood being home educated in a large family living on a council estate in Wolverhampton. It is being cheered in home ed circles purely because it contradicts the notion that all home educators are middle class hippy types (for visitors from America please read that as 'all home-schoolers are fundamentalist Christian types'). It doesn't make a big issue about them being home educated, though the scene where they watch from the garden when the school kids come past was excellent, it is more about family relationships. Certainly hoping they make it to a full series, the two young women playing Germaine and Aretha are wonderful.

And it ties in quite nicely with my Christmas listening which was 'Wild Abandon' by Joe Dunthorne (who also wrote the book that became the film 'Submarine'), which is about a bunch of home educating hippies. It is the story of an intentional community, started by Don and Freya and Patrick but enlarged over the years by a motley collection of drifters and WWOOFers. The story follows the disintegration of relationships as people begin to change their ideas of what they want in life and Don desperately tries to hold the whole thing together; daughter Kate goes off to college and meets a young man who's home offers all the comforts of modern life that their farm lacks, Don and Freya's marriage crumbles and their son Albert is left feeling abandoned and turns for companionship to Maria, who has all sorts of wacky ideas about where the world is headed. The relationship between Kate and Albert was lovely, siblings who grow up quite dependent on each other for company. Albert remains embedded in his experience of and love for commune life while Kate, out in the 'real world', makes a conscious decision to avoid discussing her childhood experiences. The story build towards the 'Results Party' that Don throws to try and tempt his daughter home. I liked the way that the character's little dramas were going on while the rest of life carried on regardless. Don is not a sympathetic character but he spouts some well reasoned arguments against formal schooling which are randomly scattered through the story so I felt that was his redeeming quality. I think the story succeeded because although it is witty and Joe allowed himself to gently mock some of their efforts it manages to avoid tired clichés, it created real people and a community who were trying to live their lives outside the accepted assumptions and values of society, and I can't help sympathising with people who try, it was hard and they made compromises but they didn't stop trying. 

Mass Instruction (weapons thereof)

Most people don't realise that compulsory schooling has only been around in western society for a relatively brief period of time, since around 1870. John Taylor Gatto has been around and writing about the evils of school for over twenty years now, having worked within the system, and received awards for doing so, for thirty before that. 'Weapons of Mass Instructions' is his latest offering, and though he has a tendency to circle around and around the same arguments he does present them in a very informal and readable way. They are all arguments I am familiar with so you'll have to excuse the slightly haphazard collection of quotes that I will use to sum them up. Many years ago he sent me a preview copy of his weighty tome The Underground History of American Education (that can now be downloaded in full here), not that we were on first name terms or anything, I was just actively involved in Education Otherwise at the time and he probably pulled my contact details from the newsletter. It was a detailed history of the education system enmeshed with his own life history and experiences. This one has much the same style, skirting around some of his own teaching experiences and giving example after example of people who go their own way and what they achieve by doing so. 

In a potted version of the earlier Underground History he begins his thesis by giving us the state of America prior to compulsory schooling :
"Long before this habit training took hold, America was, by any historical yardstick, formidably well-educated, a place of aggressively free speech and argument - dynamically entrepreneurial, dazzlingly inventive, and as egalitarian a place as human nature could tolerate." (p.17)
I found his view a little idealised (I wonder if it is his way of demonstrating he is not being un-american  in his critique of such a fundamental part of their society) but he then goes on to explain how a centralised school system was imposed on a reluctant population. He claims it's purpose:
"But in the new fashion, different goals were promulgated, goals for which self-reliance, ingenuity, courage, competence, and other frontier virtues became liabilities (because they threatened the authority of management). Under the new system, the goals of good moral values, good citizenship and good personal development were exchanged for a novel fourth purpose - becoming a human resource to be spent by businessmen and politicians." (p23)
and backs it up with this quote from Woodrow Wilson from 1909:
"We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." (p.23)
And thus:
"From 1880 to 1930, the term 'overproduction' was heard everywhere, in boardrooms, elite universities, gentleman's clubs and highbrow magazines. It was a demon which had to be locked in the dungeon. And rationalised pedagogy was a natural vehicle to implant habits and attitudes to accomplish that end. Under this outlook, the classroom would never be used to produce knowledge, but only to consume it; it would not encourage the confined to produce ideas, only to consume the ideas of others. The ultimate goal implanted in student minds, which replaced the earlier goal of independent livelihoods, was getting a good job." (p25)

Gatto is a big proponent of what he terms 'open source' learning, people pursuing their own ideas and fascinations and eschewing formal teaching situations. He gives example after example of people who did just that, from Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and the likes, to a student of his called Stanley who ditched school in favour of learning the trades of various family members:
"A big secret of bulk-process schooling us that it doesn't teach the way children learn; a bigger secret is that it isn't supposed to teach self-direction at all. Stanley-style is verboten. School is about learning to wait your turn, however long it takes to come, if ever. And how to submit with a show of enthusiasm to the judgement of strangers, even if they are wrong; even if your enthusiasm is phoney.
School is the first impression we get of organised society and its relentless need to rank everyone on a scale of winners and losers; like most first impressions, the real things school teaches about your place in the social order last a lifetime for most of us." (p.63)

He talks about resistance from without, like the Amish community in Wisconsin fighting to preserve their way of life and values, and how little resistance there was from within:
"Once a principal in the richest secondary school in District Three asked me privately if I could help him set up a program to teach critical thinking. Of course, I replied, but if we do it right your school will become unmanageable. Why would kids taught to think critically and express themselves effectively put up with the nonsense you force down their throats? That was the end of our interview and his critical thinking project." (p.76)
John himself found many and various ways to allow his students to escape the confines of both the imposed curriculum and the school building and away also from what he saw as the enforced passivity of television consumption:
"I set out to shock my students into discovering that face to face engagement with reality was more interesting and rewarding than watching the pre-packaged world of media screens, my target was helping them jettison the lives of spectators which had been assigned to them, so they could become players. I couldn't tell anyone in the school universe what I was doing, but I made strenuous efforts to enlist parents as active participants. ...
Plunging kids into the nerve-wracking, but exhilarating waters of real life - sending them on expeditions across the state, opening the court system to their lawsuits, and the economy to their businesses, filling public forums with their speeches and political action - made them realise, without lectures, how much of their time was customarily wasted sitting in the dark." (p.93)
His own attempts at resistance and his aims to spread his ideas and understanding has on occasion been met with quite virulent opposition. He recites an incident when speaking at a prosperous high school about the realities of SAT scores, college admissions and the myths of schooling and the event was literally bought to a halt by the school superintendent calling in the police; the scene is quite surreal and yet quite believable.

He quotes this lovely analogy from a young man called Andrew Hsu who he met at an award ceremony, it captures so perfectly pretty much everything the book tries to say. It concerns the training of fleas:
"If you put a flea in a shallow container they jump out. But if you put a lid on the container for just a short time, they hit the lid trying to escape and learn quickly not to jump so high. They give up their quest for freedom. After the lid is removed, the fleas remain imprisoned by their own self-policing. So it is with life. Most of us let our own fears or the impositions of others imprison us in a world of low expectations." (p.141)


The one thing I find annoying about his approach and use of 'shining' examples, young people sailing singlehanded around the globe or setting up successful businesses or making amazing scientific discoveries, is that he ends up implying that opting out of the school system is only ok if you end up doing something remarkable. It is ok to opt out and just be ordinary, to just live an ordinary life that is of your choosing. Compulsory school is not just a waste of time for geniuses and creative types, it is a waste of time for everybody, it crushes the life out of the unassuming ones too. (Also politically he is a bit of a libertarian, an admirer of free market economics and does not seem interested in political change. For me it seems logical to extend the argument into other areas of life.) It is something that the whole home education community is guilty of to a certain extent, to point vociferously to the success stories as a justification for our opinions and existence, as if we have to be better than school, that our children have to get better exam results so that we can say 'look, we should be permitted to do what we do because we achieve within the confines of your narrow definition of success'. 

While I think that 'Dumbing Us Down' is a better book (and I will get around the rereading and reviewing it some time), it dwells less on history and more on an examination of the effect of schooling on the individual, I find that what I continue to like most about Gatto is that he just pursues the ideas. He keeps pushing and repeating, hoping that in the end more and more people will finally get the message. He ends the main section of the book thus:
"I hope this has been enough to continue weapon-hunting on your own. Writing this has made me so sad and angry. I can't continue."
Sometimes I still feel sad and angry about schools, but so long as there are people out there telling it like it is there has to be hope.

(Fourth book in the TBR pile challenge 2013)

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be

So what do you do when you find you have been friends with a family for fifteen years ... why have a barbecue of course. We met the Ridley Birks family in August of 1996 at the Education Otherwise group that used to meet at what was the Parrs Wood Rural Studies Centre, and because we found that we lived just around the corner from each other we took to sharing tea (though I spilt mine on her living room floor on my first visit) and letting the kids run wild together. A year later we moved away but somehow the friendship stuck, through visits and camps and EO gatherings. The rest, as they say, is history. We had a bit of a nostalgia session on Sunday having dug out a collection of old photographs of us doing silly stuff together. It was a pity not to have the big kids there too, for the 25th we'll have to make it a more formal event I think, proper planning and invitations.

Obligatory Silly Faces

And Worn Out By All the Excitement (except the Babe that is:-)

Learning Nothing

A friend on Facebook pointed me in the direction of 'Learn Nothing Day', set up by a lady called Sandra Dodd, one of those americans who seem to have made themselves a career out of home educating their children (I mean one where they earn a living rather than it being something that just occupies their time). Certainly she is a passionate proponent of 'unschooling' and someone who I read when my children were younger. Just a note about the politics of the otherwise movement: 'Unschooling' is a US term, used to distinguish themselves from the homeschoolers, who, over there, tend to follow purchased curricula. Here in the UK we tend to call it 'autonomous education', and it is characterised by following and facilitating the individual child's interests and supporting them in making their choices about what they learn and how they spend their time.

Learn Nothing Day was started to answer the 'don't you have holiday's?' question (one of many that come from random strangers who think they have the right to comment on your lifestyle choice), because, of course, since learning is a natural function of the human brain it could be quite hard to spend an entire day learning nothing. The main trouble with the school system (so many troubles so little time) is that it divides the world into two halves: the time in school when you are 'learning' stuff, and the time outside when you aren't. This is the basis for the government's draconian punishments for parents who take their children on holiday during term time, because if they are not inside the school building they cannot possibly be learning anything. Because something is only really 'learned' if you have written it down in an exercise book and had it ticked off by the teacher.

So here I am desperately trying not to learn anything and already, while blog browsing, I have followed the instructions on how to sew, and put a baby into, a baby wrap, how to do a Colonial knot and how to do a French knot.

Go on, try it for yourself, see if you can 'not learn' today.

In need of a bedside bookcase

I really need a better system for my TRB (to be read) pile. I should make a list, prioritise ... or at least finish one book before I start the next.

Books that I am in the process of reading:

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (just a few chapters in)

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (this has been the 'breakfast table' book since I joined a readalong back in September last year, though I am past page 900)

The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark (it is small and thin and got lost under something else)

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (short stories that I lent to mum part way through, enjoying dipping in)

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver, just a fascinating book, but also very long, nearly down to the last 100 pages, this is my bedtime read.

The Steep Approach to Garbadale by Iain Banks is my bus book at the moment, picked up after enjoying The Wasp Factory so much.

The trouble is that the bigger the pile gets the more older things get relegated. I borrowed A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book from mum and really want to read that, but I keep thinking it should be somewhere down the queue, after stuff that I bought two years ago?

The pile has to be nice and tall to make sure the jelly babies are easily accessible though the lamp is still too low down to be helpful when I turn off the main light.

And I realised this morning that Creature (the daughter formerly known as M) has officially left 'school'. As of the last Friday in June she is no longer required to justify her time to anyone from the LEA. Over the years we have had a variety of ignorant intrusive visitors wanting to know what the children were getting up to, and mostly failing to get to grips with alternative ideas about learning outside the formal schooling system.

That reminds me that I have plans to move stuff from my now closed STB website onto some pages attached here. Also just for nostalgia sake to add a link to my first ever website, called unsurprisingly Silencing The Bell, that is still accessible via a web archive.

Recorders at Manchester Art Gallery

Today we have been real home educators and been on an educational outing to the Manchester Art Gallery, mainly to experience the exhibition by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, which consisted of a series of installations designed to interact with the visitors, so that the people become part of the work of art. This one below records people' heart rate and then puts the pulse into one of the lightbulbs suspended from the ceiling, so you have a room full of hanging bulbs all pulsating at a slightly different rate. The bulb that is 'you' moves across the room each time a new person records their heart rate until it is gradually removed from the exhibit by new participants.
This next photo is in a room with bright projection lights that cast huge shadows on the wall; or huge if you stood near, small if you stood further away. Here are Julie and I holding hands with a giant baby Althea. Julie took some much better photos of giant people squashing little people, and everyone had fun in moving about in front of the lights.

p.s. (Friday 28th)

If you pop over to Dunk's Blog he has posted the short video he took of the lightbulb exhibit and a video of the artist himself discussing his work.

In other family news my cousin Saul recently published a very intellectual sounding book about Michel de Montaigne, a 16th century philosophical essay writer influential during the Renaissance. I get to feel clever just by dint of being related to such highfalutin pursuits. It does sound an interesting read, and there is also an article he wrote for The Guardian if you would like just a little taste of the ideas in the book.

Mina

'My Name is Mina' by David Almond is a prequel to the much loved 'Skellig' published back in 1998. I remember being so excited to find a book that had a home educated character presented so positively and my children remain very fond of the story. As soon as I heard that he had written a story specifically about Mina I ordered it for M (and myself of course). I have not read all his books but have loved all the ones we have. David Almond is a brilliant writer and I like him particularly because he doesn't patronise children when he writes for them, nor does he moralise (like Jacqueline Wilson, who I really do not like), nor does he try to be funny. 'Skellig' is a wonderful magical realist story where Michael and Mina discover an angel in his garage. 'My Name is Mina' is the story of how Mina came to be home educated and the background to her slightly strange life, right up to the moment when she meets Michael.

This book is written in a diary form, with Mina describing how she spends her time (mostly up a tree), her relationship with her mum (both grieving the recent death of her father) and recalling the events leading up to her leaving school (the dreaded SATs day!) but also interspersed with 'Extraordinary Activities' and little poems and thoughts about words. Although the book is partly about home education, as an alternative approach to school, it is not preaching nor particularly taking sides. Mina paints a very unsympathetic picture of her time in school, she is obviously very bright and the teacher lacks any empathy with her unconventional learning style, and Mina is not prepared to compromise or jump through the hoops that are expected of her. Almond presents a very positive image of an autonomous, child-directed education that Mina's mum provides for her, giving her time alone to just think and absorb her experiences, and spending meaningful time together talking about things that interest both of them. He then puts the (boringly predictable) negative side into the mouth of the mum when she expresses concern about Mina not having any friends and maybe she will think about going back to school later.

I have to say that although I loved the book, and I hope people will read it and be provoked by the ideas, I was not totally convinced by the way it was written. I felt a little bit like he was trying too hard. It is a very difficult thing to do for a grown man to write as a little girl, even quite a precocious one, and I am not sure he pulled it off. Some of the time she came across much older than she is meant to be, not just precocious but more seriously reflective and mature than a girl of 12 could be. Then at other times I think he pitches it just perfectly. He has a scene where she tells the story of the day she runs away from school and goes down into a tunnel under the park, believing she is going down into the underworld to bring back her father, and it felt very real. A young child grieving might have all sorts of strange notions about their loss and what has happened to their lost parent, and the need to feel they can change things, and how vividly they can imagine something.

"Sometimes I think that Heston, the place where we live, is like ancient Greece, and that the Underworld is in the earth beneath us. I think of the King of the Underworld, Pluto, sitting on his throne deep down below. I think of his queen, the kind Persephone. Sometimes I think that I really did see something down there, something deep and ancient, and I wonder what would have happened if I'd kept on going, if I'd crossed the stream, if I'd walked towards the shadow in the shape of a man, if I'd said, 'My name is Mina McKee and I'm searching for my dad.' " (p.61)

I don't read much children's or young adult fiction any more so it was lovely to enter into this story, I am going to have to re-read Skellig now. I would highly recommend any of his books to anyone with kids 8+, definitely good for reading together as there are always ideas to discuss. Almond doesn't shy away from tackling challenging subjects, but without making you feel that the book is 'tackling a challenging subject', the story is the important part, the issues are secondary.

"A good term's work"

I got a letter this morning from the Local Education Authority home education lady asking for an 'update' on my daughter's educational progress. She has now been out of school for a year. I am tempted to write her a one line reply. It would say,

"The other day my daughter M told me she was happy."

A good term's work in my book.

Erasing David

I received an e-mail from David Bond back in September of 2008 when he was researching the documentary film 'Erasing David'. The film is an investigation into the amount and nature of the data held about individuals by government and all sorts of other sources, and his plan (as it unfold in the film) is to try to 'disappear' from the system for as long as he can while some specially hired private detectives will attempt to track him down.

I had written to the local paper about the fingerprint registration scheme that M's school were intending to introduce and he had tracked me down (via the internet, see how easy it is) to see if we would be interested in being involved in the film. So he came to our house and interviewed M and myself about the whole fingerprint thing, though he was really lovely and interested and we ended up talking about home education and all sorts of other stuff too, and about the film and his interests in 'personal data' issues. And we had a 'small world' moment as he had also interviewed Terri Dowty at ARCH (Action on Rights for Children) who I know from being involved in EO (Education Otherwise).

I had forgotten all about the film it was so long ago and then Dunk spotted it on telly last night (and will be available to watch on 4OD)

M and I didn't make it onto the small screen, our little interview was edited out, though they did show the interview with Mrs France at school. However we did get a credit at the end for participating in David's research so we felt like we had been part of something very interesting.

He has his own website here (but it is not responding at the moment), you can see a little intro clip here on Youtube and a very interesting article on Spiked here.

The Waves

I had to take my own photo of 'The Waves' by Virginia Woolf as I could not find an image that had the same cover. There is no nice 'wave' design on this one, it is rather ordinary.

For anyone really enjoying the 'Woolf in Winter' reading challenge, and who wants to read some very intellectual and erudite thoughts on The Waves, please visit over on Claire's site Kiss a Cloud and follow a few of the links.

This book is a real challenge, and I fully intend to read it all, just not this week (and To The Lighthouse is well down the TBR pile I confess). I should have known, after Mrs Dalloway, that I could not expect a novel in the conventional sense, but it did not prepare me for The Waves. So I launched in with naive enthusiasm expecting to find at least a 'story' of some kind. Then I tried the 'just read and let it flow into you' technique. I think it tells you so much about Virignia, how much she lived inside her own head, and how her life was centred on intellectual and emotional engagement and reflection.

You know the idea that some people are visual readers, who take in the words by looking, and some are aural readers, who take in the words by hearing them, actually saying the words aloud in their head. My daughter says she reads slowly because she says the words to herself. Now I think I probably am mostly visual, but with Virginia Woolf I think you have to be aural, to go slowly and appreciate the density of the language. Older daughter Tish (having helped me writing the Mrs Dalloway review) commented that surely such writing would never get past the editor, and I said that was probably one of the perks of self-publishing (that you can do something that has never been done before and not just end up with a pile of rejection letters.) If one of the rules of good writing is to not overdo the adjectives, then any editor worth his salt would have cut this book down by at least a third. But then I have to take it all back because when I look at the half dozen little notes I have made myself they are all about the language:

Rhoda speaking of a chorus of birds startled by the opening scullery door: "Off they fly like a fling of seeds."

The boys talking (am often unsure who) and within a few lines we get: "incorrigible moodiness", "innumerable perplexities", "profound distinctions" and "ferocious tenacity" (this last one being my favourite).

Susan, later, (p.70): "The day is stark and stiff as a linen shroud."

Rhoda (p.77): "I see the wild thorn tree shake its shadow in the desert."

I am yet to discover what life has in store for Susan and the rest (and I can't help but have an image of Susan from the Narnia books when I read her name) so I will leave you with her feelings about school, which are just so perfectly expressed I may post them to my home education e-mail list. Here she is watching from the train window going home for the holidays:

"But the day is still rolled up. I will not examine it until I step out on to the platform in the evening. I will not let myself even smell it until I smell the cold green air off the fields. But already these are not school fields; these are not school hedges; the men in these fields are doing real things; they fill carts with real hay; and those are real cows, not school cows. But the carbolic smell of corridors and the chalky smell of classrooms is still in my nostrils. The glazed shiny look of matchboard is still in my eyes. I must wait for fields and hedges, and woods and fields, and steep railway cuttings, sprinkled with gorse bushes, and trucks in sidings, and tunnels and suburban gardens with women hanging out washing, and then fields again and children swinging on gates, to cover it over, to bury it deep, this school that I have hated." (p.44)

New Room and New Life

Jacob has been gone for just over a week (we haven't heard from him so I assume he hasn't come to blows with Lewis) and M has now taken over his space. The bunk beds found a taker on the Freecycle very quickly and I dropped them off on Saturday afternoon. It took quite some time this morning to wash down all the walls and the mouldy window frame but now it is looking lovely. We shifted the big unit that had divided the room, and then put her high bed in the opposite corner, bought up the old chest of drawers from Tish's room and ... voila!

And she's all ready for her new life of being in charge of her own education. I am feeling slightly disconcerted, it being now seven years since they were obliged to return to school, I'm not sure I remember what I should be doing. Tomorrow I am writing the deregistration letter to the Head, and then will be awaiting with some trepidation some kind of contact with the Local Authority.

For any visitors unsure of how this all works, here's the basics:

Section 7 of the 1996 Education Act states that "the parent of every child of compulsory school age shall cause him to receive efficient full-time education suitable to his age, ability and aptitude and any special educational needs he may have, either by regular attendance at school or otherwise."

The presence of the 'otherwise' clause in the original 1944 Act was reputedly insisted upon by Winston Churchill, who apparently hated school, but don't quote me on that one.

If you have never sent your child to school you are under no particular requirement to inform anyone of your plans. To remove a child from school however you are obliged to deregister (this applies to England and Wales, check the EO website), as follows:

Dear Mrs F

r.e. my fabulous daughter

From today, 3rd September 2009, I am withdrawing my daughter from ***** ***** school in order to take personal responsibility for her education. I would be grateful if you would remove her name from the register in accordance with Education (Pupil Registration) Regulation 8(1)(d) 2006 as she will now be receiving her education otherwise than by schooling. Please would you confirm in writing that this has been done.

Yours sincerely .... etc etc.

Although the children were home educated for most of the first 12 years of family life, since the divorce I never thought I was going to have a 'home ed' teenager (thought technically Lewis never made it back into real school, he was not living with me then) so it is going to be a new experience all round. M claims to remember being at home, she was seven, but so much water has flowed under the bridge since, I think it is going to take her a while to adjust too.

Scary stuff!

Spot the Difference

So here are two nearly identical photographs ... the question is, can you spot the difference? They both look quite smart presentable uniforms, just the way most young people are obliged to dress these days while they attend school. In spite of the fact that the rest of Europe and the United States don't seem to think that young people need to wear identical clothing in order to learn efficiently, our country seems to have made quite an issue of the whole uniform thing with younger and younger children being obliged to dress like their peers when they pop along to playgroup. Many positive claims are made about the wearing of school uniform, such as creating a feeling of being part of a community and avoiding the perils of being marked out as a 'loser' if you wear the wrong clothes ... so I was not really surprised when we find the claims becoming more and more outrageous.

Believe it or not it seems that the girl in this second photograph is definitely going to be a better learner .... all because of those few extra inches of fabric in her skirt. Oh yes, the Head Teacher and Board of Governors decided in their wisdom that from September all skirts must be knee length. We all know how hard it is to learn properly with a bit of your thighs showing.

But we are celebrating in our house because it was not an hour after we went to the new uniform event at school and purchased this skirt (and paid for the blazer that they are also re-introducing) when M's dad phoned to say he will agree to her leaving school and return to being "educated otherwise than by schooling". So now she can learn in her jeans and in her pyjamas and in her short skirts and in her long skirts and in her bikini and in her shorts and in her hoodies and in her hats (of which she is very fond) and with nail varnish on and with electric blue hair and at midnight and 6am and in the garden and up a tree and anywhere and anyhow she choses.