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By  Mike F-W Your man in a hammock
www.home-education.org.uk
http://HomeEducationUK.ourtoolbar.com

Earlier in the year I was a speaker at a conference in the Netherlands
and was asked to speak about home education and Europe. I wrote the
following.

I’m sorry that its so very long but I thought people might be interested.

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Europe

If, like me, you welcomed the development of children’s rights over the last 15 years you may have been surprised to see how these rights are used by some European governments as tools to control families parenting styles,particularly families like ours.

Governments are focusing ever more on families, like home educators, who take independent minded decisions. While children’s rights as expressed in documents like the UN rights of the child, are reasonable and fair in themselves, the governments rhetoric of children’s rights is to use these rights as a tool to drive a wedge between parents and their children. Where at one time governments were parents of last resort, involving themselves only if and when dysfunctional families failed to protect and care for their children, over the last few years this relationship has gradually changed. Now, more and more governments second guess decisions made by families, effectively micro managing children’s lives. To be fair this is not confined to Europe it is prevalent in other western democratic nations. The USA, Australia, Canada and New Zealand are all guilty of state trespass into the private affairs of families. In The UK its call the “Every Child Matters” agenda in the USA they call it “No Child Left Behind” it has similar names in other parts of the world. The contents of these agendas are also very similar. In the UK the Every Child Matters agenda is for children to be healthy, safe, enjoy, make a positive contribution and achieve economic well-being. Few people could object to any of these aims. What good parent would, object to a child being healthy, safe or achieving?

But it doesn’t end there, Governments then link their own targets for children to these categories and develop policies that state that a child’s failure to meet one or more government target is tantamount to child abuse. By ’slight of hand’ governments turn rights into government targets, government targets into welfare issues and welfare concerns into child protection cases. A child’s failure to meet a government target is translated into the language of child abuse, with parents labelled as the culprits. Parents are effectively locked into the government’s aspirations for their children and may no longer to bring up their own children in their own way. Instead they must either follow government directives on parenting regardless of their child’s individual needs or risk the stigma of being labelled neglectful!

Governments proactively protect children’s rights, sometimes against their parents. While this sounds reasonable on the face of it, what it means is that governments take ever more intrusive powers, not only to act to protect a child from a known harm but to investigate the possibility of harm. The degree of intrusion is so damaging to the parent child relationship that it is itself abusive. Such policies also deskill parents who become ever more reliant upon the state to provide for their children. Parents now expect the state to take care of functions that were not too long ago the remit of parents. Consider education, health and sex education and child care; worse yet, by promoting children’s rights against parents the state has removed access to the information required by parents to parent effectively. In the UK the largest single category of children placed into care is that of ‘emotional abuse’ and for home educators that means failure to socialise.

Over the last 3 years home education campaigners have noted an increasing trend in the UK for education authorities to report parents to social services department because the child is socially isolated for no other reason than that the child does not go to school. From a definition of abuse on a UK government document emotional abuse includes; “overprotection and limitation of exploration and learning, or preventing the child participating in normal social interaction.”

www.cpdt.org.uk/f_info/dload/CPDHT02.pdf

A parent can also now lose custody in the UK because their child is over weight and yet cannot by right access their child’s medical records on the grounds that the child has the right to privacy and the first a parent may know that their child has had a termination is when the school nurse phones them to say their child is in hospital due to a bungled operation. But what good parent would object to children having the right to determine for themselves the direction their health and education develops until we realise that the cost of this right is for social workers, being the primary source of advice or the Mayors office demanding to see home educated children without their parents in an attempt to convince the child that school would be better for them. Of course no one asks school children if they want to be home educated, the very idea would be preposterous.

Some countries are taking this even further by making psychological testing of children a legal requirement. The Texas legislature is currently discussing such a law (with active opposition from the Texas home education community) a similar measure was mooted in the UK last autumn and other US states have imposed curfews on children during the school week, failure to comply can lead to criminal charges against both the child and parents. Similar laws were proposed in the UK last year for children excluded from school for behavioural issues.

We have also seen a massive growth in the numbers of children being labelled with increasingly bizarre psychological conditions; my personal favourite is “OD, Oppositional Disorder”. The medicalisation of childhood behaviour offers the state further opportunities to intervene in the family. In the UK the department of health says that there are 400 thousand children with ADHD alone, that’s 4% of all school children another 5% are said to suffer from some form of school phobia. There are schools in the UK which now have more children registered as having a ‘Special Need’ than children that don’t. The full list of pseudo-psychological conditions they can draw upon is practically limitless any inconvenient behaviour can attract a label and medical treatment or suppression and woe betide a parent who refuses drug treatment for their child.

Why

To understand what is happening we need to understand why governments would put so much energy into intervening in family lives after all, this is incredibly expensive. Many of these programmes have been driven forward by government seminars run by the World Bank as part of its globalization agenda. If you want to know more about this Google “no child left behind” and “world bank” and try looking at the World Bank’s own website. The UK alone employs some 30,000 front line children’s social workers; that’s about one social worker for every 300 children, nearly twice as many social workers as general practice doctors. This does not account for the armies of education and child psychologists, educational welfare officers and district nurses.

Governments are becoming ever more involved in children’s lives principally for two related reasons. Firstly, the burgeoning economic pressures faced by Europe as our technological advantage is eroded by the new economic superpowers of China, India and Brazil. European governments believe that Europe is in serious danger of major long term, relative, economic decline as these new super economies develop innovative low cost technologies. Western nations have concluded Europe’s future is dependent upon a highly educated and motivated workforce. They see this as achievable only by ensuring all young people receive an education suitable to the needs of modern high tech corporate industries. Governments are today involved in a race to get as high a proportion of young people into university as possible in a bid to maintain that technology gap.

Home educating parents are not trusted to produce sufficiently honed ‘units of production’ targeted on the perceived needs of corporate industry. Despite evidence to the contrary, European bureaucracies believe home educated children will grow up to be dependent upon the state and fail to contribute to society’s economic well being.

They are also fearful that home-education will contribute to social division because parents may not pass on the ideas of multiculturalism to their children. If they are right that economic decline is likely then such social division may produce an unstable mix contributing to explosive unrest throughout Europe. Germans call this (obviously in German) ‘parallel societies’ and give it as the main reason for refusing to allow home education, as though a homogenous monolithic society was likely to create real organic cohesion or innovative economic resurgence. An example of this in the UK; we in the UK are currently undergoing a review that started with an unsubstantiated claim that the home education community may, and I emphasise ‘may’, be harbouring Islamic extremists who wish to hide their children so they can be forcibly married off. None of those who raised this as an issue have been able to name even one child or bring forward one adult who has any evidence of any kind, even anecdotal, to substantiate such a claim, it was all about a theoretical hunch. But it was sufficient to justify a major review of the law relating to home education in the UK chaired by one of the authors of the Every child matters agenda.

How does it work

The mechanism is both subtle and simple. By introducing a number of rights for children they can justify making all kinds of demands on families, such as access to the child, so as to ensure that these ’special children’s rights’ are protected. And by demanding that the education industry takes over ever wider aspects of children’s lives while at the same time citing the child’s privacy for refusing to consult or inform parents on medical and social issues the child faces. This rather neatly marginalises the parent replacing mom and dad with the state’s social workers.

Also in the UK we recently had to fight off NICE, the UK authority which authorises evidence based medical treatments in our national health service. NICE attempted to force home educators to teach a certain brand of age based sex education to our children because, as they put it, it was their human right. By doing so NICE neatly disregarded the parent’s views of what was appropriate for their child, indeed they refused to take evidence from parents when considering the proposal and substituted their own views. It has also been claimed by many local education authorities, such as in Birmingham’s LEA response during the recent UK review into home education that it was impossible for home educated children to be safe at home unless they were monitored by the authorities. Think about that, home educated children cannot be safe with their parents unless the authorities are looking over their shoulder!

While parents are denied access to information the state holds on their children, the state has open access to all children’s data from whatever source. By law doctors in the UK must hand over to social workers any medical data that might impinge on a child’s life, but may not tell a child’s parents that their child has a medical condition without the child’s express permission. Neither the child or parent however can stop a social worker from accessing these same records because that is in the best interests of the child.

In the UK we now have ‘Contact Point’ a massive data hub which contains all data held by every government agency and a number of charities about every child in the UK, data that can be shared between any worker dealing with a child except of course the parents; so as to protect the child’s privacy. The irony that thousands of social workers, police, medical staff, correctional officials and NGOs (not to mention undiscovered paedophiles) throughout the UK can access data on my child, and even myself, while I may not see it; again all to protect my child’s privacy, does not seem to embarrass them in the least. In case you are thinking that this might be unique to the UK think again, Contact point was first conceived as part of the Lisbon protocol agreed by all European governments and will soon be available to a town hall near you.

The UK developed Contact Point at a cost of 225 million pounds, because our government hopes to capitalize on the UK’s advanced software skills and sell it to your governments. Ultimately the aim of European governments is to link all of these hubs together, much like the proposed European wide criminal database. One day data belonging to your child or grandchild will be available to many tens of thousands of public employees across the whole of Europe and yet as the child’s parents, you will still be unable to access this data or be told what it contains. Incidentally there are no plans to delete this data when the child becomes an adult.

Why is this a home education issue?

It is families like ours, those whose journeys through life deviate from the norm, that are most at risk. Bureaucracy is most threatened by those who are least willing to engage with it and refuse to be easily pigeonholed; which is almost a text book definition of a home educator. Our children often redefine ’success’ and live to a ‘different beat’ and we as home educating parents most often reject government help even when offered. This makes us a problem. Families living in this way cannot be expected to naturally work to government targets and worse still they have minimal contact with government agencies and offer the state few routes into the family which they can use to influence the child. This raises alarm bells for workers who are responsible for executing government policy. Our children are often only rarely seen by anyone in a position of recognised authority. The government therefore has very little data on them. What they are doing, how is their education proceeding, what they are being taught, to what degree are they integrated into society. Indeed, the very fact that local authorities hold so little data on these children will of itself suggest to them that home educated children are not well integrated into society. It is down to this that they oppose home education in the wild so to speak unencumbered by government targets and directives and it is in this area I believe we will see the greatest opposition.

What are they likely to do?

Calls for monitoring where home education already exists will become more vocal. Attempts to locate and prevent underground home education will grow. Where they find they cannot do this they will attempt to regularise home education so as to better monitor it. Monitoring will inevitably lead to the application of targets against which they can measure success, in much the same way as has happened in formal education structures in many parts of the western world. By bringing us into their regulatory systems they will attempt to bring us out of the wild into captivity. Last month the chairman of the review of the relationship between government and home educators in the UK was completely surprised when we as home educators refused offers of support. He simply could not understand why we would be so fearful of their interest in us. In frustration he rounded off the meeting with an ominous “being left alone is not an option”. He at least understood the reasons behind these moves. We in the UK are almost certainly about to loose the right to home educate in freedom. New definitions of “suitable education” will be introduced within the year, along with new systems of monitoring which the government hope to gain statutory rights of access to our children. Along side these new powers we believe we are to be offered new educational ‘opportunities and resources’ in the form of virtual schools and distance learning. I just hope that they will be voluntary arrangements. Over the last year or so we have already seen changes introduced in some parts of Europe. A number of countries have developed enhanced or reinvigorated restrictive regulations against home educators. Switzerland, Spain, Ireland, France, Germany and parts of the UK like the Isle of Man which has its own laws, have all taken a proactive interest in home education and now England looks like following suite. What can we do?

The home education networks in Europe are totally unprepared to deal with this threat to our liberties; we don’t even systematically watch European gatherings or debates let alone directives that could effect us. We are even occasionally caught napping by our own national legislatures. Our networks are neither large enough nor well enough resourced to be effective. We are divided among ourselves on a number of issues like faith and educational style. The vast majority of home educators in Europe don’t even engage with their own national forums let alone international forums, which is fine so long as they understand where that will lead and we have allowed external agencies to drive forward our own agendas.

Worst of all we have failed to inform the general public about the realities of home education; what it is how it’s done and who we are. For too long we have allowed our opponents to caricature us as either feckless lazy parents, radical ideologues who will ruin our children’s future or elitists who don’t care about ordinary people. In Germany and France for example the debate is almost totally about religion and extremist sects for example. In the UK it’s largely about socialisation. Notice, it’s only rarely about the quality of education. In other words if we want to maintain our right to continue to home educate, or even establish a right to home educate we need to organise better, take European wide debates more seriously, be more watchful and find a way of gathering more resources with which we can present our case more effectively. We have to look for common ground between ourselves, become more self reliant as a whole and not let outside forces drive our agendas.

Best wishes

Mike F-W Your man in a hammock
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mike@home-education.org.uk
www.home-education.org.uk
http://HomeEducationUK.ourtoolbar.com