I do not know where they got my number from. Maybe Facebook which keeps showing me tuition related ads – it might be interesting to see where they got it from. Hopefully it will lead to a (misleading!) modification to whatever source they got it from (or at least their own database).

Having lived in Sri Lanka where tuition has long become normal for most children, I find the prospect of the same happening here to be horrifying. In Sri Lanka I felt sorry for all the children I saw going to tuition classes (not even proper one to one tuition, usually), often straight from school. Where is the time to enjoy their childhood? Not only that, spending all day studying is not conducive to good development, and is not even good purely academically – learning needs time to reflect, absorb and internalise. Constant studying promotes learning by rote.

This also encouraged (very badly paid) teachers to neglect teaching in school so they would create demand for their tuition classes. It encouraged studying to the exam rather than learning the subject, as parents paying for tuition want to see high grades. Children ask to know what will come up in the exam, and lose all joy in learning.

When I was a teenager I did have some tuition in my weakest subject, French. Less than once a week. My mother told me never to mention it in school, because they school did not like tuition because they regarded it as a bad reflection on their teaching. They (rightly) thought that good teaching in school should make tuition unnecessary.

I now see tuition becoming normalised in the UK. I know multiple people who have had or have tuition as children. I see ads all over Facebook, even highly expensive TV ads on the rare occasions I watch TV (I possess a No TV), there is even tuition available in a local supermarket (on their premises, but run by an education chain).

The phrase “education chain” should not be something I need to say. It is one of the clearest symptoms of mass produced, learn by rote education.

I think my school was right. Tuition should be unnecessary if schools do their job. The conclusion I draw from the rise of tuition is that schools are not doing their job. There is a widespread serious failure in the system. I do not have a simple solution – it needs complete reform – . At a purely personal level not sending children to school worked well for us, but this is not something most people will do, and certainly does not fix the failure in the system.

The problem is that schools are failing to achieve genuine high standards, causing severe mental health problems, and are generally struggling to cope. Many good teachers are leaving the profession because they are frustrated. Those that remain are fixed on the short term: getting high grades in this years exams.

Children are naturally born to learn. Schools often suck the joy out of learning. The need to stick to a curriculum, to make individuals with different talents and interests do exactly the same things at the same time is simply a bad idea.

The concept I have is easiest to describe in how it would apply to children of secondary school age – which,is the age group who have the most issues with school. It also works for younger children but needs more parental involvement (simply because of issues such as transport and safety – for which there are many solutions).

The solution is simple: schools cease to be “providers of everything”. A student at a school is typically there for the same hours every day, other activities such as sports are provided by schools: a single institution dominates a child’s life.

Instead schools provide classes and facilities. Other institutions provide extra resources: libraries, for example. Many resources can be provided online at a national or international level – these already exist but they could be so much more if they received government funding.

From all these parents and children choose what they want to use. They sign up for individual classes, and access the resources they want. Children good at a particular subject can move to a more advanced class, children who are struggling with a particular subject can move to an easier one. There will be more flexibility to fit in activities outside school.

It will also improve education. Teachers can teach the subject instead of focusing on league tables. Children can be sent o the classes taught in the way that best suits them. If they prefer to self study some things, then they can do so and be given access to the books, online resources, and whatever they need. They will also have a much wider range of subjects to choose from. Consider the choice of GCSEs a typical school can offer: it is nothing like the dozens that are possible (I have not done a thorough count, but it exceeds 60 subjects without even counting modern foreign languages).

Having more choices will also make learning less of a chore: it is a chore because it is compelled. I love reading, but if I have to read a book it because a chore – and this is a good example of something schools do that kills the joy. A library is a great educator.

It is also better in terms of social and personal development. Instead of spending all day in one place with the same people of exactly their own age, they will interact with far more people in multiple settings. They will be encouraged to take more responsibility for themselves instead which is a better preparation for adult life.

I know many people will be asking whether all this will work. I know it will because I have done it and it has been hugely successful. It is the commonest form of what is called “home education”. There are multiple studies around the world proving that home education works well, and that it works better than school for poorer and less well educated families.

The differences between what I propose above and what we do is that I had to pay for everything, and because it is something only a minority of people do the resources available locally are limited (which pushes us towards remote resources).  If it were adopted as national policy the budget that goes to schools, that is currently inadequate, would be enough to provide a very well resourced system on these lines (what parents pay to do this is invariably far less than the cost of school places).

The usual attempts to make maths relevant to children are pathetic pretences. Children do not need to use much arithmetic: but it is easy to make them enjoy things. Unlike with reading I have not found a simple answer: I try a lot of things to see what works. Some of the things we have done:

• Playing games that require logic: noughts and crosses, nim, etc. It works well, and even other types of games can be useful (playing monopoly is a good chance to practice addition, for example).
• Cutting out shapes and making solids such as cubes, tetrahedrons, cylinders, etc. Lucy loved this.
• Learning programming. Lots of kids like computers. I taught Lucy to draw shapes, so she learnt a bit of geometry at the same time, with a Logo (which is designed for children) variant. It worked for a while, then but she hit her limits. It is something I intend to return to, and I have some ideas.
• Binary numbers. She loved converting from binary to decimal and back when I taught it to her last year. She can still do it, even after a lapse of some months.
• Sequences. Lucy was delighted by the idea of sequences. See my previous post.
• Graphs: This also went really well. Lucy got her first taste of a lot of concepts this way:
  • Cartesian co-ordinates
  • Algebra: She can draw a graph given an equation of the y = a + bx type.
  • In conjunction with sequences, and diagrams, the ideas of convergent series. I am not sure this has stuck.

None of this was particularly difficult to teach and there is nothing to demanding for a child this age: I want it to be fun, not a chore, and it has been (for both of us).

1. It is fun. Children enjoy reading, teaching them to read adds to the number of enjoyable things they can do.
2. It forms a habit of reading, that can become a life-long pleasure.
3. It helps them develop in innumerable ways.

The last of these is the most contentious point, so that is what I will concentrate on. That does not mean I think it is the most important point: on the contrary, I think it is possibly the least important (insofar as one can pick between such important issues).

The commonest argument against teaching children to read is that they may not maintain that lead, over children to learn to read later, forever. I do not know what evidence there is for this claim, or whether it is even true. My family’s experience over at least two generations has been otherwise.

My immediate answer to that is that it does not matter. Think of all they have learnt, and all the enjoyment they have derived in the meantime.

The other is that, if it is true the lead disappears, the reason is that if they only read what they are set in schools, and they are not given continually interesting and challenging books, then of course they will lose that lead. Schools tend to standardise, and parents need to provide an environment that supports any children who are in advance of what their school teaches. The problem is that so many children spend spare time in from of the TV, and read only what they have to.

I have already discussed the sort of environment that nurtures reading in a previous post. All I have to add to that is that having a lot of books in the house, whether they are books the child will read in the near future or not, is a huge help.

I challenge those who claim the advantages of learning to read do not last, to provide evidence that it is true, and that it remains true given the right home environment.

The other claim is that children’s brains have not developed enough to learn to read until they are five or six. My reply to this is, to put it politely, that it is nonsense. It is trivially easy to teach a two year old (the exact age may vary from child to child) to recognize words: my mother did it, and I have repeated it. Once they can recognise enough words, they can read sentences, and then simple stories.

As soon as Lucy could talk reasonably well (I think a little short of her second birthday), we started using look and say flash cards. We made it fun: it was a game not a chore.

A lot of schools prefer to use phonics. Our experience was that phonics at school did not help much: partly because Lucy was well ahead of what they were being taught in school. The other reason parents should not use phonics lies in the reason schools use it: it is easier for children who are slower to read It also slows down faster children so the teachers have a more uniform class that is easier to teach. Very few children will be slow to read, if:

1. they are taught one to one,
2. it is fun, and,
3. they have an atmosphere that encourages reading.

The first is easy for parents, if impossible for most schools. Making it fun means making a game of it, and not trying to push them to do it when they do not want to. Children enjoy learning, so this should not be a problem either.

The last is the most difficult. The best thing to do is to buy and read books yourself. If children see their parents reading, they will want to read themselves. That is why Nisha (now 18 months old) has been fascinated by books since she was a few months old. She wants to know why her sister and parents spend so much time staring at these objects.

The other thing we did, which for most people would be a sacrifice they would not be prepared to make, is to invest in a No TV. It means that we read more, and do more constructive things in general — and by “we” I mean the whole family, adults and children.

The end result as been a success. The only time I thought it might not work out was when Lucy started reading snippets of books and lacked the concentration to read whole books. Now, she is a few months short of seven she is somewhat ahead of my reading at the same age. She is just finishing Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series. Like me, she loves the Narnia books. Like other children of her generation she loves Harry Potter.

Now, many people will question the benefits of teaching children to read so young. My next post will address that. [Edit: no done here.]

Lucy, who is a month short of seven, is not very interested in her maths homework. It is basically lots or practice in basic arithmetic, and things like measuring lengths, with some rather pathetic attempts to make it relevant or interesting with contrived examples.

While helping her multiplication, I took the chance to show her some simple sequences of numbers. She was instantly fascinated, and thought that trying to figure out the rules of each sequence was a wonderful game. Whenever I ran out of ideas, she pestered me for more sequences.

I stared with very simple ones (2,4,6) but once she got the idea I tried others. She managed to work out how the Fibonacci sequence worked from the first five digits. Of course, she was stumped by some that are obvious to an adult ( such as 1,10,11,100,101,…. and 1,2,4,8). These two were useful as they gave me an opportunity to remind her of binary numbers, and she then pestered me to give her decimal numbers to convert to binary and vice-versa.

I persuaded her to do her maths homework by promising to give her more sequences once she finished it. I am planning to try (1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 …….) to introduce the idea of asymptotes.

Children usually need something to motivate them to learn maths. What Lucy and the sequences shows that it does not have to be real life problems: pure maths can be a game that requires arithmetic to solve and it teaches them to see patterns and the beauty of maths at the same time.

First the motive for lying, is, as he says, commonly to protect children. This is something that needs to be lifted gradually as they get older. In general many parents are too protective and become busybodies who control their children’s lives well beyond childhood. Laws that treat anyone under eighteen as a small child, for example, by preventing them from pursing hobbies independently also encourage extended childhood.

Sex and drugs is a tricky area. I am not going to lie to my children. The answer Paul gives as the honest one is exactly what I would say: “you have lousy judgement. People with twice your experience still get burned by them”. Of course, as my older daughter is just five, these are not issues yet!

I do not thing discouraging kids from using obscenities and profanities is lying: provided you hold yourself to the same standard. I do not pretend to be perfect, but I do not have double standards either — they are an ugly habit, and we would all be better without it. I no longer use the offensive words, and Lucy feels quite able to correct me if she here the occasional milder one (usually a damn of a bloody).

We do not conceal the reality of death at all. We have whisked away the bodies of dead goldfish before Lucy saw them, but we have told her that they died. More importantly, she was present when my mother’s ashes were scattered at sea. She has asked if we will die and been honestly answered that everyone does but on one of us is likely to die for a long time.

I think that conflating religion with identity is accepting dishonesty. Like anything else that makes factual claims, what matters is whether they are true of not. Of course, my children are being brought up as Christians insofar as they have been christened, go to church (simple because we both go and there is no one else to look after them), and are exposed to christian ideas. On the other hand, they know that I used to be an agnostic, that my wife used to be a Buddhist, and that there is no agreement about the facts. I will certainly teach them to be intellectually honest.

I know from my own experience that identity cannot simply be imposed, so I am not even tempted to try. Neither do I feel any need to be dishonest to protect my authority. Why should you try to conceal your flaws — your children are going to notice most of them anyway.

As for schools and education, I suspect that my experience is better than what Paul Graham’s. I can certainly remember no distortions as blatant as those he describes. I can recall a lack of questioning and criticism of the way things were in geography (with regard to over-production in agriculture, for example), and that is about it. Like me, my children will gain a more rounded view by living in different countries.

I would take the cure a stage earlier than PG (as he is often referred to). We should bring children up with an awareness of the difficulty of achieving a truly neutral point of view: they should be taught to question from the start.

What exactly was she thinking? That we should be grateful that children are being conscientiously protected from the dangers of killer fruit? Perhaps we should also keep them swaddled till they are 18 to stop them hurting themselves?

The whole point of the scheme was to encourage children to eat more fruit and vegetables to reduce the risk of cancer and heart disease. How many people do you know who have died of choking? How many do you know who have died of cancer and heart disease? Which danger is more important?

The reason for this is clear. If a child chokes in school today, it is the school’s problem. Teachers will have to look after the child. In today’s ludicrous legal climate the school could even be sued. On the other hand, if a child gets cancer, be it next year or on fifty years time, it is not the school’s problem. That is quite an agency problem.

I find this worrying. If schools neglect children’s long term interests to look after the short term in this context, surely they will do it in others? We should not be surprised when teaching is geared to passing the next exam, rather than genuinely improving children’s understanding. Why should expect keeping them quiet today to be more important than encouraging self-discipline.

Of course, the scheme was doomed to failure anyway. The children are avoiding fruit not because they cannot get it, but because they do not want it, and parents are not sufficiently motivated to do anything about it. Handing out fruit in school is not going to change anything, except make the government look like it is doing something.

At least it has proved two things. This sort of government intervention is futile, and schools will sacrifice children’s future for their present.