A theory that our ethics and scepticism are being misconstrued/misrepresented as selfish blinkered naïveté.

I wrote yesterday about the discounting of first-hand voices in favour of external “experts”. Today I want to talk about one particular flavour of discounting, applied to parents from electively home-educating families.

Can’t see beyond our own noses, allegedly

I’ve begun to think that one of the stereotypes of us is as so blinkered and self-obsessed that we can’t comprehend why other people have concerns.

It’s as if the basis of all our objections is “My kid’s all right, Jack, to hell with the others”. The implication would be that we’re too stupid and naïve to see what our stubbornness is costing other children.

When someone plays the well-known ace of trumps “If it saves even one child…”, how dare we not give in, stop arguing, and agree immediately to cooperate! What kind of callous selfish idiots must we be??!!

(This is related, I think, to why we so frequently hear the explanation “We don’t mean you of course, but what about those other families?”)

Liberty trade-offs

The fact is I do care about children-in-general as well as mine, and I completely understand the principle that sometimes a little bit of one person’s liberty has to be sacrificed to protect the liberty of someone else.

What hasn’t been demonstrated to my satisfaction - or at all! - is the necessity for (or any value in) this sacrifice of liberty: meaning the kind of expensive intrusive bureaucratic licensing-and-inspection system for EHE which is proposed in the CSF Bill.

Well-founded scepticism

On the contrary, it seems clear to me that extending the system as proposed would be damaging both to EHE children (in various ways) and to vulnerable people who actually do need help (due to sucking resources away from them).

Even for “those other families” - the very few where the parents are out of their depth, and the even fewer where the parents may have bad motivations - what’s proposed in the Bill is not a system well-designed for the children’s support.

A lot of my worst fears about the Bill becoming law are for the children who need most support - the children with special needs, who least fit the picture of what children are “supposed” to be able to accomplish at a certain age.

Remember, we’re not talking about a completely new system unknown to any of us; the Bill system closely resembles many Local Authorities’ existing ultra vires* systems, only “with added tooth-points!” and removing the option to avoid the harrow. It doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to realise what the Bill’s laws would look like in practice, and we do have reasons for the hypothesis that its overall effects would not be benign. Our scepticism is well-founded.

* “Ultra vires” means “beyond the powers [of the law]“. What I’m alluding to here is that many LAs in England have already taken it upon themselves to monitor EHE families in more detail than is required by law. EHE families frequently encounter LA staff who misrepresent current law; either they’re lying, or they haven’t bothered to learn the law themselves, instead making up the rules to suit their own prejudices.

Actually, I don’t even know why anyone would suppose that its effects would be benign - considering that the Government’s case for such laws rests on a load of myths and fears and inaccurate statistics. That’s not the way to make good law.

Give me evidence

I say to the Government: You want to change my mind? You want to convince me there’s a problem I don’t yet appreciate, which we need to fix? You want to convince me you’ve got the best solution to it? (or even one that doesn’t do more harm than good - that’d be a start.)

Well then, give me the evidence, include the raw numbers so that interested parties can check them without hundreds of FOI requests, and stop misleading people in order to prop up your argument. I’m eminently swayable by actual facts.

That demand isn’t coming from any blinkered selfish “we’re all right Jack” self-interest. It’s coming from a principle that truth is an essential foundation for ethical choices.

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2010. All rights reserved.

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There’s a quote which I’ve often found myself remembering lately in connection with the Children, Schools and Families Bill. It’s from a book by Jonathon Green, and the interviewee is Marcus Riggs. The interview was from a time after the Church had done some kind of report on gay people, although I don’t remember the details of that part.

… when people are trying to explore an area of human life - for instance, if you wanted to bake bread, you’d ask a baker; if you wanted to know how to put an electrical circuit in, you’d ask an electrician - but if you want to know what the experiences of gay people are like, they’re the last ones to be asked. ‘They would say that wouldn’t they, they’re gay.’ … The assumption in that report is that if you sat and talked to me, I’d give you a biased viewpoint.

But what I’d say is, ‘I’m a Christian and I’m gay and it’s caused me a lot of heartache to work through what all this means and come to some sort of way of living my life that has personal integrity. And that also enriches my relationship with God and the people around me. That I have worked very hard on.’

Who listens to whom?

The pattern is that if you’re from an oppressed or stigmatised group, people don’t want to listen to your version of your life. They want an “expert” to speak on your behalf, and “explain you” to them.

This means that other people who aren’t from your group can make a career of being an expert on your group. And the experts talk to each other and say “what do you think, Other Expert who isn’t from this group either?”

It’s a radical thing to allow someone from within the group to be in the “Expert” position. It’s a radical thing and an essential part of activism to be within the group and claim an “Expert” position.

Parallels

I’m thinking here of how cissexual doctors and policy-makers and “experts” go to conferences and talk about transsexual people, and make up rules for who should and shouldn’t get what kind of medical assistance to change their own bodies. It’s not my field, but I’m pretty sure that even now, after many years of campaigning by trans people, listening to transsexual people’s lived experience is only a small factor in making up those rules.

People with disabilities have been pioneers in challenging “experts’” opinion about them, saying “Nothing about us without us” (a slogan which many other groups have used too).

While writing this, I also remembered some writing by Charlotte Cooper, from a story about how she and a friend/colleague went as fat people to a couple of events about obesity:

I don’t think that you have to be fat to be able to say intelligent things about fat people or fat experience, there are people within the Fat Studies community for example who are not at all fat. What they have is empathy and respect for fat people, a capacity for self-reflection, a commitment to social change. They support other fat scholars, they use their power and privilege to include us … and they are not interested in building careers that denigrate fat people.

… most obesity researchers, including those I saw speak this week, are so alien to this kind of ethical position that they don’t even recognise that they themselves are part of the problem, they truly believe that they represent the solution, that they are the good guys.

When fat people are absent from events such as Body Image: The Impact of Magazines and Size Matters, we are abstracted and made Other. No wonder Ogden referred to fat people as “those people” throughout her presentation. …

… Who on those panels would be able to listen to somebody who they have already stereotyped and dehumanised?

Similarly, from an article about an academic book on fatness:

… works like Fat Economics make fat people abstract. These are works that do not include accounts by fat people, they are not written by fat people, and fat people have absolutely no voice in these works. … Research like this contributes to the notion of fat people as passive and stupid, people whose lives need mediating and explaining by thin ‘experts’ who arrogantly eye us as interesting scum in a petri dish.

Living it

I feel that some of the CSF Bill’s supporters are relating to people from unschooling families in a way similar to what Marcus Riggs describes:

“You would say that, you’re home educators”.

Our first-hand experience is being dismissed as bias unfitting us to perceive the issues correctly.

Not like “Well, you are the people actually living this, so we should listen deeply to what you have to tell us from your rich and varied experience of how it all works.”

At the Bill Committee

Chloë Watson, 17-year-old Chair of the Home Education Youth Council, put the challenge to the Bill Committee on 19 January:

… why not listen to the people who know what they are talking about - the people who are doing the home educating, who live it, who live with the consequences of what they do?

… Why not listen to the people who are saying, “This will wreck my child’s life”? Why not take notice of that, over and above the people who think, “Oh well, maybe in a few cases something might go wrong”?

(In Gill’s commentary on the Bill Committee, she includes a clip of Chloë speaking - second clip from the bottom. It’s worth a listen; there’s a wealth of additional meaning in the off-hand tone in which Chloë does the “Oh well, maybe in a few cases…”.)

What if…?

If the DCSF had employed someone from within the EHE communities to write what became the Badman Report, that person would still have had to do research to establish the facts. It’s not that being part of a community automatically gives you all the answers.

But what would be different?

Our input is vital

We - the unschooling families, collectively - have a close-up view of both non-school education and the existing system for interfering with it. As Kipling famously put it,

The toad beneath the harrow knows
Exactly where each tooth-point goes.

That insight is vital if the Government actually wants to create a workable system.

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2010. All rights reserved.

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I’m a fan of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. It’s a while since I read any of her books, but my quotes collection includes a good crop of thought-provoking ideas from her.

Found myself thinking about this one, from the book Tendencies:

Knowledge is not itself power, although it is the magnetic field of power. Ignorance and opacity collude or compete with it in mobilizing the flows of energy, desire, goods, persons. If M. Mitterand knows English but Mr. Reagan lacks French, it is the urbane M. Mitterand who must negotiate in an acquired tongue, the ignorant Mr. Reagan who may dilate in his native one.

Autonomous education in the Badman Review

This is reminding me of Mr Badman’s persistent lack of understanding of autonomous education (AE). As we said in AEUK’s submission to the Select Enquiry,

The author’s call for further research into AE sits oddly with his disregard of the available material.

When Mr Badman was meeting people in the process of “researching” his Review, various people told him about AE. And there are plenty of books and research relevant to it. But this information received almost no acknowledgement in the Review, and as far as I can tell, had little or no influence on Mr Badman’s own understanding either.

As a result, the Badman Review completely fails to recognise the incompatibility of autonomous education with Mr Badman’s proposed monitoring scheme.

If Mr Badman and his team had allowed themselves to learn about AE, it would have been most inconvenient for their beliefs about monitoring.

Maths

I’m thinking too of Mr Badman’s statistics on Child Protection Plans (CPPs). The other week at the Bill Committee, he was still talking about these stats as though they prove something, despite Graham Stuart MP carefully explaining to him back in October that they don’t.

The following exchange is taken from Question 85 at the Bill Committee on Tuesday 19 January 2010:

Graham Stuart MP: I must say that I am rather disappointed that, following our exchange at the Select Committee sitting, you have not reflected in any way on the child protection plan figures …

Graham Badman: I reflected a great deal on our exchange of views, I promise you. I did go back and look at the figures and I came up with exactly the same conclusion.

That session also produced this little gem:

Graham Badman: I fear we are in danger of going round in the same circle. I am afraid I fundamentally disagree with you. You think I am wrong; I think you are wrong.

Graham Stuart: It is maths.

(Hilarious or tragic? You decide.)

I’ve spent a quite preposterously enormous amount of time looking at those CPP statistics, and I assure the reader that they don’t warrant Mr Badman’s faith in them. (Details to follow when I’ve finished writing about it.)

But if Mr Badman and his team had allowed themselves to learn how statistics actually work, it would have been most inconvenient for their ability to convince other people that EHE children were at higher risk. It sounds so much more convincing when you throw in a few numbers!

It’s a human thing

It’s a very human thing to find it uncomfortable and unsettling to have your ideas overturned. Even though in principle I’m a great believer in finding out the truth, I’m sure I’ve felt that feeling a few times, and perhaps been somewhat reluctant to consider a new idea because of it.

(I wouldn’t claim to have done it quite so persistently, and certainly not in the context of being paid thousands of pounds in a professional capacity to report what’s true and known. But, “nothing human being alien to me”, I can empathise with the temptation.)

In my family of origin, this kind of behaviour would be satirised with the phrase “I have made up my mind; do not confuse me with the facts“ :-)

It can be especially painful for humans to have to “climb down” when they’ve taken a position in public and gone on and on about it. In this respect I have some compassion for Mr Badman, even while feeling cross and impatient with him. I wonder if he does actually know at some level that he’s got some things wrong, and just can’t contemplate the loss of face that would be involved in admitting it. It might not be very popular with the people who hired him, either.

But you see, one of the advantages of maintaining ignorance is that you never have to climb down like that.

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2010. All rights reserved.

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This arose out of a discussion about how compulsory school can be used to protect children from being made to work (in the economic/ money-earning/ survival sense).

Could championing the right to non-school education for our own children indirectly expose other children to the risk of being coerced into labour?

If so, that would raise an ethical question, which one writer framed in terms of prioritising our own identies: parent vs global citizen. Louisa returns to this framing in the last paragraph.

Note that we were talking about children being made to work; none of the discussion included suggesting that children shouldn’t be allowed to earn money or otherwise contribute to their households by their own choice. That can be in itself an important part of someone’s learning and self-expression.

By Louisa

The way I see it is that to force a child to labour is to initiate force against the child’s life and liberty. The forced labour is not the disease, merely the symptom of the disease. The disease is the coercion of human beings by human beings.

To force a child to abandon the pursuit of his own life, identity and values and force them to attend school where they are required to internalise the values and priorities of the state is also an act of violence against the life and integrity of the child. It is another symptom of the same disease.

Ironically, one of the grounds on which we are being attacked is the assertion that home education is a means by which some parents force their children to internalise the values, beliefs and priorities of the parent.

It seems to me that most of those who make this argument against home ed (Daniel Monk for example) are patently unable to accept or unwilling to admit that the state is not neutral in this respect. The state does not attack home ed in order to protect the child’s right to pursue his *own* life, beliefs, priorities and values - though it claims to - the state attacks home ed in order to neutralise the percieved competition - parents.

It seems to me that many libertarians lose their way here, because they assume the state to have a benign or neutral interest when nothing could be further from the truth! The state does not wish to protect the integrity of the child: it wishes to ensure that the child internalises the values of the state and not the parent! It has no interest in defending the liberty of the child to form his own.

So what I’m kind of trying to get at, in my convoluted way, is that if we champion self-sovereignty and individual liberty, if we champion the right of the child not have force or fraud enacted against his life, liberty or property then we will always be on the “right” side.

We don’t have to choose between unregulated home ed and exploited children. We can instead choose and argue and campaign for individual liberty and self-ownership.

Children will always be abused, enslaved, coerced or exploited by either parents or state so long as either party believes it has a right to do so. This in my view is the disease that needs to change.

When we cure this sickness, symptoms of exploitation like child labour, child abuse, schools in their current form etc will all disappear. We don’t have to prioritise our identities. We can simply enact freedom and self-sovereignty for all citizens of the world. Starting with ourselves.

Thanks to Louisa for letting me share this here.

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2010. All rights reserved.

This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it, giving the web address where you found it.

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