by Emma Restall Orr
My son returned home from school yesterday evening, bringing the scent of the cold
country air into the warmth of my room. He bent down to kiss me and I breathed in his day, feeling
the chill winter wind in his clothes. “How was school?” I asked, and he replied in a way
that he so often does: “It was great fun actually.”
It tickles me whenever he says it. My days at school were a nightmare. My
experience began when I was almost 6 and I refused to leave the school’s entrance hall,
staying there, so my mother tells me, for the first full three days of my career in formal
education, screaming. Something about the whole system never made sense to me. I was the seven year
old who sat on the playground wall in breaktime, hoping nobody would come near me. I was the ten
year old in detention, week after week. That I was sent to boarding school for some period of time
possibly only heightened the pain of it, but without those added chains it is unlikely I would have
turned up to class at all.
Yet I have always loved to learn. Working hard beside my father in his aviary as a
child, reading books that were considered too old for me, by the time I had cut loose from any kind
of formal schooling I was reading all the philosophy, theology, physics, politics and literature I
could lay my hands on in the local public library.
When my son came along, those who knew me took a deep breath. With no idea of how
to deal with a baby, I bought a cot when I was six months pregnant, because that seemed normal. Two
months later, I’d sold it. Meditating before it, I knew that for as long as I was able to
manage and guide his life, I would do all in my power never to let him live behind bars. No cot. My
in-laws continued to hold their breath.
So did my son sleep in our big futon, as babies do in so many other cultures
around the world, our double extending out to a triple bed in time. When he was 18 months old, he
was interested in his own space, and so we gave him his own room, though no doors separated us, and
when he squealed in the night, saying, ‘are you around?’ in his non-verbal sleepy way,
we’d say, ‘yes, we are,’ and he’d slide back into comfortable sleep.
The reason I write about that is because, when it came to his schooling, my
attitude was the same.
Those who know me know well that I am no ‘earth mother’. My son has
never called his parents mum and dad, instead always using our own names. We are people, bound
together by love, blood and respect. In part, I believe, it was because I felt I had not sufficient
natural instinct for parenthood that I studied so hard, reading the works of child psychologists
and philosophers, reaching to make sense of this strange yet natural relationship that is mother and
child.
When he reached 3 1/2, I explored the possibility of him taking a few hours a week
at a local Montessori school, and for two terms he did. It was his decision. He needed to be out of
nappies (diapers) to go to the school and had shown no interest in learning how before. However,
when I clearly showed him the link between going to the nursery school and using the pot, he was dry
within 24 hours. He found some value in his time there. He learned how to play with other children
and how to stay clear of the feisty ones.
At 4 1/2, when the other children were being prepared for primary schools, I
returned to study-mode. I sat in a corner and watched him in the nursery school. He objected
profoundly to any activity that required him to hold hands, to sing and dance in a circle, to work
at the same speed as the others. He wanted constant intellectual stimulus for his curiosity, or
he’d get bored and disappear into a dreamworld that did not seem a happy place. I spoke to the
teachers and they confirmed that all he loved about nursery would be absent from primary school, and
all he found hard would be the mainstay of each day.
That my local primary school had 34 four to five years olds in the entrance class,
with one teacher and a part time assistant was further confirmation. I decided not to put him into
school. I took him along to see what he thought. He looked at me with big worried eyes, and
said, “I’m not going there.”
Brought up from a young age beside me as I made ritual, meditated, wandered
singing in the forest, worked with students and counselled those in crisis, we had early on made a
deal, my son and I. When I was with him, I would be with him, 100 per cent; and when I was busy with
something else, he had to leave me to do it, unless he needed me. Of course, such a relationship
wouldn’t be possible with some children, but in my experience with my son and working with
others’ and their children, it is more possible than one might imagine. It was on this basis,
of consciously seldom being half present with him, that we began his home education.
What do children learn in primary school? Not a great deal. In terms of academics,
I spent time with my son on mathematics, English grammar, simple Spanish. In the first years, those
were the only subjects we sat down seriously to study. Beyond that, it was a case of heading to the
library and picking up a new heap of books every week, and reading, reading and reading. Then there
was the allotment, the garden, the forest, with magnifying glass, field guides, binoculars, welly
boots and a rucksack picnic. Every part of life provided an opportunity to explore.
We’d spend hours in a pile of open books, cross-referencing stripes on
snakes or habitats of geese. Then we’d write prose in perfect grammar, poems in different
styles and meters, then add up the letters and divide by 32, before running for the wellies and
heading out to play in the rain. Itchy feet provoked my husband and me to travel, heading off on
adventures, and so did we find new books and beetles, new words and stones and stories of places.
When he was 8 years old, we moved to a village in north Oxfordshire that was the
home of the primary school at the very top of the national league tables. There it was, two minutes
walk down the road, the ‘best’ primary school in the country. So we sat and talked about
whether he’d like to go. We went to visit, talked to teachers, wandered around looking at
colourful paintings and little tables and chairs. At home I helped him as he made a long list of
pros and cons, thinking carefully about all the school could offer. The exercise was useful,
teaching us about making decisions with care, but when the pencil was put down and I said,
“It’s your call. I am absolutely fine either way,” he said thoughtfully, “I
think it would be a waste of my time.”
Education was structured in our house. It worked better for us that way. Every
morning, from 9 til 12.30, it was study-time. Then we’d have lunch, head out for a walk, and
he’d have the rest of the day to do as he pleased.
As he progressed beyond easy exploration, I picked up curriculum books from
bookshops, found resources on the internet, using his interests as a guide. In History, we started
with apes, moving through the neolithic and on, always surrounded by books, from those written for
kids to serious encyclopaedias. In Geography, we went out seeking stones and fossils, checking
though books, tapping with hammers. In Spanish, we read Asterix.
When I didn’t understand, we’d learn together. Sometimes, having read
through some mechanical process, I still wouldn’t understand, and he would explain to me until
I did. Now and then, tired, I would try to teach him, being dogmatic about form and content, and he
would get bored, his attention drifting, his understanding slackening, and I’d realize the
mistake and we’d throw it all up and start again. We laughed together, we got pissed off with
each other, we spent a lot time together, sharing, learning, growing.
He’s an intelligent individual. When we found ourselves doing key stage 4
material, he figured he may as well take the GCSEs. If he failed, he could always take them again.
For some subjects, we then bought the curriculum from a distance learning college (the NEC) or
through specialized home education tutors. When he was 11, I had a chat with the headmaster of the
local high school, who was happy to give him access to after-school clubs and provide a place to
take his exams. A few months after his 14th birthday, he’d four GCSEs under his belt, plus a
GNVQ in IT. There was no sense of exams being important, but because they were easy for him, he took
them, content to find a way to measure his progress.
What about religion? Although he was brought up in a fully polytheistic Pagan
Druid household, and had his rites of passage in the Druid tradition, happily coming to the eight
festivals run by my Grove, coming to the Druid camps and other events, he never felt pressured. He
learned the Arthurian myths, along with the Greek and Roman tales and those of the Nordic traditions,
and with the same attitude he read Bible stories. “Good stories.” Our faith, Druidry,
doesn’t require belief, only honour, and he read, finding other people’s concepts of
honour, watching the nature of belief.
When he was going to Scouts, which he did for some two or three years, he managed
to be the only lad in the troop who wasn’t sworn in. He was given a uniform shirt, but never
quite got around to wearing it. I asked what was stopping him. “You have to swear to
god,” he replied. “There must be an option for Hindus or Jews to swear to their gods.
Does it matter which god you swear to?” He shook his head, “You don’t get it: the
point is, I’m only 12, I don’t know enough about any god to take a oath in their name.
They don’t have options for agnostics.” What he’d learnt from being brought up in
Druidry was that true spirituality and relationship with deity is something that takes many years
and not a little maturity to begin to grasp.
The main issue that people raise, including my in-laws who were only just
beginning to exhale in my presence, was that word which most home educators so despise :
socialization. If you don’t put a child in school, how will he learn to be socially adjusted?
How will he learn to make friends or know how to behave in company?
Some children are naturally sociable. If they have siblings or a local group of
other home educated children, keeping them out of school may be an option. For those gregarious kids
without that social resource, home education seldom works. If their soul craves the company of a
gathering of other youngsters, that’s what they need and school provides that.
However, it is not from a huddle of six year olds that a six year old learns how
to be a caring, empathetic, listening human being. For the years of his home education, my house was
ever filled with people, and those who interacted with him well he grew to like and to learn from.
It is, after all, more natural for a child to spend their time in family and community groups, with
people of all ages, than to spend so much time with a few dozen children of his age, each one
yelling for attention.
Home educated children tend to be polite and easy to get on with. They don’t
have a sense of social hierarchy, of authority, but hold a better notion of respect. My son never
got on well in a crowd of young children, but then neither did I. We both now tend to avoid them!
It is with hindsight that I am able to write this article with some confidence,
for I see what he missed out on at school, influences which I am profoundly glad he did not have.
Primarily, he is not competitive. If he is playing a game, where the aim is to beat his opponent, he
plays to win, but that deep underlying need to be better than others does not appear to exist within
him. Nor does he have a consumerist streak. He feels no pressure to buy or own anything, because
others have it or he wants to have more than others. That lack of aggressive competitiveness is a
common trait within home educated children.
He has no sense that a person being unconventional is different, threatening or
even fascinating. Brought up within a Druid community, he barely notices how outlandish
people’s clothes are, whether a person is gay or straight, or transgendered, or what colour a
person’s skin is. He doesn’t judge others by some clear moral code laid down by a
distinct social unit like a school. In fact, it is only in the past four months, since he has been
at school, that I have noticed any glimmer of judgement within him.
And yes, now he is at school. It was his own decision. At 14 1/2, he figured he
was ready to find some more independence and so together we explored the local schools. With a
little prayer to the gods, we found one that would take him and would be flexible enough to keep
stimulating him academically. It was hard to see him head off the first day. We’d been
panicking about not knowing how to do up a tie, and giggled and found courage. None of us knew if
he’d hate it.
But in truth, he uses it as a resource. That’s another trait of home
educated kids who go to school for GCSEs and A levels. They tend to be self-motivated,
self-contained, self-directed young people. They make the most of the resources that are available
to them, and tend to ignore that which makes no sense. For example, although it’s a school
rule to own one, my son has no hymn book for assemblies, and is happy to reason with any teacher
that to sing words he does not believe in is dishonest; to have a book he does not use is unethical.
Further, because he has free periods (owing to having a different timetable from the others in his
class), one day seeking out a quiet place to work he stumbled upon an A level lesson studying the
Odyssey; because it’s one of his favourite books, he asked if he could join the group.
Although in the beginning, choosing to home educate was an intuitive move, it
quickly became a key part of my Druid spirituality. As I studied my craft, practising and learning,
deepening my understanding, I felt a very real and profound responsibility for having brought a
child into the world - and especially a boy child. To delegate that responsibility to another, to
hand over his education, felt to me to dishonour my ancestors in terms of the gift they’d
given.
It felt to me necessary to ensure that his start in life was rich with all that
Druidry taught: the structure and boundaries of the sacred circle that allows us to create a temple
anywhere and anytime; the deeply ingrained reverence for all nature and all life that disallows the
use/abuse of animals and the environment; the acceptance of individuality as we each walk our own
paths, singing our own song; the gratitude and wonder at nature’s beauty, her power and
patterns, that don’t allow us to be complacent; the need to care for our own physicality, the
creativity of our bodies, holding ourselves healthy and respectful; the sense of personal presence
within the cycles of the year, the moon, the seasons, our lives; the honour of our ancestors, our
heritage and all we have been given. All these things (and no doubt much more than I am not
remembering as I write) became a conscious framework and grounding for that period during which I
educated my son.
Of course, I gave up ten years of my life to be an unpaid part-time teacher. I had
a husband that almost managed to keep us afloat financially, even when he was on little more than
minimum wage. But as a member of the sacred unit that is the family, our family, I realized that I
had no right to ask him to do what he didn’t want to do; and from the age of 4, when he saw
what primary school was like, he didn’t want to go to school. Giving him a decade of freedom
to explore life at his own pace, he found himself at a point where he was ready, and so now does he
come home saying, “It was great fun!”
In Britain, school is not compulsory. You legally have the right to educate your
children out of school, as long as you do educate them. If you remove a child from state education,
you are likely to be questioned as to the reasons why and thereafter regularly inspected to make
sure the child is making progress in line with what they consider the child capable of achieving. If
your child is registered to attend a school and you take him out, without officially de-registering
him, you can get into serious trouble as the child’s absence is then considered truancy. If
your child has never been in state education, it is unlikely that anyone will chase you up. The only
inspector I ever saw was a health visitor; my son was 6, she walked in and smiled, finding a
situation that was clearly without problems. If she’d been unhappy, it would have been a
different story.
The power and validity of home education is about the child’s own needs.
Listening to your child, to his or her deep inner song, and learning how to be in harmony with that
song, is to me a foundational tenet of Druid practice. To walk that path with your child is a
beautiful and wholly spiritual act of parenthood. For those who home educate, this process is given
time, endless days of discovery and sharing growth. As an adult, teaching our children, we learn to
become more real and more alive. I have a strong, close, warm and honest relationship with my son,
which I do not believe I would have if he had gone to school.
If you can, and if your child wants to, I recommend it as a worthwhile and
honourable way to live in a sacred manner.
Emma Restall Orr
bobcat [at] druidnetwork [dot] org
If you are interested in home education, there are two organizations I would
recommend. Both give full details about the law, together with support on many levels.
Education Otherwise is a UK-based membership organisation which
provides support and information for families whose children are being educated outside school, and
for those who wish to uphold the freedom of families to take proper responsibility for the education
of their children.
http://www.education-otherwise.org
Home Education Advisory Service is a national home education
charity based in the United Kingdom. It is dedicated to the provision of advice and practical
support for families who wish to educate their children at home in preference to sending them to
school. Interest in home education is increasing and HEAS recognises that reliable information
should be available for everyone.
http://www.heas.org.uk
