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Roland Meighan's Response to the Report
From the EO site:
Roland Meighan has just made public his personal response to Graham Badman's
Review Report.
Roland's "creditials" are impressive and he could arguably truly be called
an "expert" in education and home education:
D.Soc.Sc, Ph.D., B.Sc.(Soc)., L.C.P.., Cert. Ed., he is a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Arts, Writer, publisher, and consultant/research er on
learning systems, past present and future. His work on ‘The Next Learning
System’ has been translated into more than twelve languages. Roland is
also Director of Educational Heretics Press, Director/Trustee of the Centre
for Personalised Education Trust Ltd. He is also a former Special Professor
of Education at the University of Nottingham and was Lecturer and then
Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Birmingham.
He is an acknowledged Educational Heretic for his view that mass compulsory
schooling is an obsolete and counter-productive learning system which should
be phased out as soon as possible and schools should be recycled into
something more personalised, flexible and humane. He began researching
home-based education in 1977, appearing as an expert witness in key legal
hearings.
His response, together with a piece entitled "A Kind of Treason" can be read
answers to the questions being what the government wants and not what the evidence
shows,
The home-based education network of organisations, the social workers, the police and
the press have established that the bad news and bad cases of home-based education
are very hard to find. I have found in my investigations since 1977 that the bad cases are
so rare that inspectors, and just occasionally journalists, invent them. The present
network of home-based education groups, social workers, police and the press are an
adequate detection service for the rare cases. (In contrast, the bad news about schools
is located and reported almost daily, and a motive for some families is that home-based
education provides a much safer environment than schools. The evidence supports
them - exposure to knives, drugs, petty crime, alcohol, smoking, bullying etc.,
are school-based problems.) The forthcoming report by Professor Clive Harber on Toxic
Schooling assembles some of the key evidence on this.
Home-based educated children do not report the feelings of resentment, the boredom or
the bad habits created by schools. The evidence in UK, USA, Canada and elsewhere
shows that they are, on average, two years ahead of their schooled counterparts, and in
the case of working class children closer to three years ahead. The families have been
shown to be active in community groups of all kinds. It is rare for home-educated young
people to be unemployed. "