We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.

Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]

Who’s a clever boy, then?

A little boy called Arran Fernandez that’s who. This lad is clever enough to have caught the attention of the UK Times [No link – you know the drill]:

A BOY of eight has become the youngest person to receive an A at GCSE.

‘A’ is the top grade and the GCSE is a national examination paper for pupils of age sixteen.

As pupils across the country received their results, Arran Fernandez, from Surrey, celebrated the grade awarded for a mathematics paper that he took when he was 7 years and 11 months. Only 32 per cent of candidates – most considerably older – reach the same standard.

So little Arran must be the brainiest kid in his school, right? Wrong. Because little Arran doesn’t go to ‘school’ at all:

Arran, who is also the youngest person to pass a GCSE at any grade – a D in the subject when he was five – is educated at home by his parents, Neil and Hilde.

Another successful product of Britain’s small, but growing, home-school movement, I’d say.

His father, Neil, a political economist who achieved a grade A at O level maths when he was 13, is evangelical about the benefits of home tutoring.

“I believe that every child could do this, given the right encouragement,” he said. “Why are children held back in their earliest years? And why are parents, who are their best educators, discouraged from realising and exercising their ability to teach?”

Because so many generations of parents assigned those abilities over to the state, doubtless believing that the state would do a better job of it. That same state is likely to respond to the increasingly successful reclamation by trying to put a stop to it.

7 comments to Who’s a clever boy, then?

  • Guy Herbert

    The state does try to put a stop to it, in a typically Kafkaesque manner. Parents are wisely advised that they must register their children with a school and are responsible for their attendance there unless they make “other arrangements which provide an effective education”.

    The DfES and local education authorities are generally reluctant to be drawn on what might constitute valid “other arrangements”, but they are happy to suggest you’ll be prosecuted if they are inadequate. (And if you are prosecuted in relation to childcare there’s always the veiled threat your children will be taken away.) So it is a brave and determined parent who starts out on that route. Effectively the option is closed to all but the very-well-educated upper-middle class doing it themselves, the super-rich employing private tutors, or religious fanatics with support from their own faith community.

    The state’s strategy is a common one in Britain. Compare opening a bank account. The Financial Serices Authority denies it makes any specific requirements of banks with regard to procedures for identifying their customers–though it does require them to take “reasonable” steps to do so, nominally to prevent money laundering. It does however reserve the right to fine them huge sums if retrospectively it doesn’t like the procedures. Consequently it is now next to impossible to open a UK bank account (regardless of how well your personal identity is established), if you don’t also have an address that is corroborated by an officially recognised document. State compulsion by suggested example.

    Frankly I’d prefer to be tyrranised according to explicit, knowable, rules. But I suppose that would reduce the fear that officials have at their command, and we can’t have that.

  • A_t

    “Frankly I’d prefer to be tyrranised according to explicit, knowable, rules. But I suppose that would reduce the fear that officials have at their command, and we can’t have that.”

    oh come on… if there were explicit rules set out, you’d be on the front line of those who’d be picking the rules apart, decrying the rigid lack of flexibility. I agree, this may place too much power in the hands of government authorities, but at least it’s not imposing a national curriculum, or rigid guidelines about what should be learnt & when.

    Also, yes this may be a victory for home-schooling, but it’s hardly proof that the average brit could do it, is it? I’d be happy if every parent was a political economist, & in that case, children might well be better educated than they presently are… but we all know this isn’t quite the case.

  • Andrew

    You’ve misquoted horrifically. He received an A*, which is the top grade. And only 3.2% reach that standard, not 32%.

  • Dishman

    I’m with Guy on rules. I’d really like to know what powers the civil body politic has granted to government. If I dislike them, I can work to change them. An amorphous blob with the power to dictate life is, as is being demonstrated, fertile breeding grounds for tyranny.

  • Tim Haas

    Guy and Dishman:

    I can tell you from experience, as the answer-man at the New Jersey Homeschool Association, that a lack of rules serves homeschoolers better than explicit ones.

    There is no statute that specifically allows homeschooling in New Jersey, only an exception to the compulsory attendance law and a court case from the ’60s that defines relevant terms in that law. Consequently, we are free to educate our children in whatever manner we deem fit without state interference. When you decide to homeschool here, you are no longer part of the the state system — full stop.

    Contrast this with the next state over, Pennsylvania, where in the 1980s one guy who “prefer[ed] to be tyrranised according to explicit, knowable, rules” managed, after a four-year campaign, to have enacted one of the most restrictive laws in the nation, with yearly reviews (for which the parent must pay, I might add); compulsory subjects; testing in 3rd, 5th, and 8th grades; and the very real possibility that one’s homeschooling could be ended forcibly if the district decides one’s children aren’t up to snuff. (BTW, the fellow who campaigned for the law now runs a thriving business helping parents “comply” with the law.)

    It’s true that a district superintendent in NJ will occasionally get it into his head that he can make his own rules; in such cases parents usually receive a scary letter or two, but ultimately the super has no choice but to back down because there is no law to back him up. And it’s also true that many PA homeschoolers find ways to fulfill the letter of their bad law while flouting its authoritarian spirit.

    But overall, we Jerseyans are by far the happier, healthier bunch, and our kids are absorbing a wonderful lesson — in something as essential to well-being as education, the state is at best wholly superfluous, and at worst one’s sworn enemy. I look forward to the heights to which that insight will lead them.

  • Mike Peach

    A_t

    Also, yes this may be a victory for home-schooling, but it’s hardly proof that the average brit could do it, is it? I’d be happy if every parent was a political economist, & in that case, children might well be better educated than they presently are… but we all know this isn’t quite the case.

    Speaking as a non political economist who home educates (What has it got to do with school.) I can confirm that yes, the average Brit can and does do it, in their thousands.

    The state system is failing thousands and thousands of children most of whom would be called “average”. If their “average” parents were more aware of the possibility to home educate schools would very quickly become like the Yukon after the gold rush…..

    Yours in an average Brit kind of fashion.

    Mike

  • Guy Herbert

    Apologies for the foregoing irony.

    Please realise, A_t and others, that I would prefer not to be tyrannised (better spelling, I think) at all. But if I’m going to be, I’d like to know on what basis. Thus no income tax is best, but the IRS is in many ways preferable to the Inland Revenue.

    Of course, broad flexible rules do have some advantages over over detailed and rigid ones–as long as they are public and justiciable. Flexibility is not what I’m objecting to, but arbitrary official power and intimidation masquerading as rule of law.