Home-schooling helps us resist indoctrination
by David Frost, Telegraph:
It is also the last refuge from failing state schools for those parents unable to afford private education.
Britain likes to think of itself as a supremely pragmatic country. We close our ears to abstract continental theorising. We tell ourselves we deal with problems in a practical way, without worrying about ideology.
Unfortunately not discussing ideas doesn’t remove them from politics: it just suppresses them. So when our politicians legislate, they are still pursuing an ideology: they just choose to close their ears to what it actually is. J M Keynes famously said that “practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”. So too, our politicians are very often the unquestioning slaves of the broader background flow of ideas.
Consider, for example, the present plans to restrict home-schooling in the dreadful Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. The coming attack on home-schooling is only possible because of the unspoken background belief, right across the political spectrum, that there is no aspect of life in this country that cannot in principle be regulated or changed by state action – and therefore that children are legitimately considered as much wards of the state as the responsibility of their parents.
Read also: Labour’s plan to torch three decades of education reforms by Julie Henry, Telegraph
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