Support, strings, other stuff and seeds

The third and final part of our NSPCC series has been postponed for Tech to finish off some research, so I'm just posting a general update with a few thoughts today.

I understand Mr Badman is attending another home ed meeting on Thursday morning of this week. There has been some debate on Carlotta's blog about whether we should take him up on his suggestion to ask for some form of support, or 'Why aren’t we arguing for our “share” of our tax money?' as it was reported on the Facebook thread. I think Mr Badman is trying to establish a bargaining position and that it's not in our interests to help him to do so. He talked at the Kent meeting about "wanting to 'stop the battle' and come up with a solution that stops these continued consultations," but if repeated consultations are the worst threat we're facing, I'd opt for that rather than any kind of compulsory NotSchool-type daily log-in process. At least the consultations don't negatively affect our children's learning, as official forms of monitoring would. (Mr Badman was apparently told that this was the case, and he said he didn't agree! I fail to see how he can possibly know, unless he's actually lived with autonomously educated children who have been subjected to Local Authority monitoring.)

Carlotta has also written very eloquently about autonomous learning, including the following observation:

"Often one of the biggest problems people have with autonomous education is that they simply don't believe that children have a natural curiosity. All they see is children in school who have had their curiosity ruined by compulsory education. They're thinking: how can autonomous education possibly work if children need to be coerced, either by punishments or rewards, into learning (ie. memorising) things?"

Firebird is writing about a 'typical' week this week:

"As an antidote to the depressing battle against the DCSF and its evil minions I’ve decided to address the often asked question “what’s a typical day like?” by recording what we do for the next week."

Seems similar to Clare's huge undertaking of a couple of months ago, though I think Clare wasn't so kind to herself as to set a time limit!

And I've opened Tom's business blog to general readership, having kept it as a private thing - at his request - while the business got off the ground. It's his business, but my blog. Also, the children and I have been planting seeds. We have photos and will blog them somewhere when time allows.