Educational Heretics Press
and Education Now
Educational Heretics Press is a not-for-personal-gain,
research, writing and publishing company.and any
profits are donated to the Centre for Personalised Education
Trust.
Educational Heretics Press and Education Now
promoted a more flexible approach to education:
“Alternatives for everybody, all the time”
Education Now Publishing co-operative
has ceased to trade and has merged
with the
Centre for Personalised
Education Trust Ltd
(which
now trades as Personalised Education Now)
Education Now books are still available from Educational Heretics Press, acting as agents.
Educational Heretics Press
Telephone 0115 925 7261
Educational Heretics Press
incorporating Education Now Books
Books in Print
2009
Educational Heretics
Press is a
not-for-personal gain, research, writing and publishing company. Any profits are donated to Personalised Education Now, (the trading name of The Center for Personalised
Education Trust).
We are a small press that exists to question the
dogmas and superstitions of mass, coercive schooling with a view to developing
the next modern, humane, flexible, personalised and more effective
public learning system.
Our team of radical educational
writers includes:
Glen Buglass, Clive Harber, Tony Jeffs, Clive Erricker,
Jan Fortune-Wood, Roland Meighan, Bryn Purdy, Mark
Smith, Ann Sherman, Chris Shute, Anthony Swift, Bernard Trafford, Julie Webb,
Mark Webster and James Whitehead.
Best selling titles include:
The Next Learning System, Natural Learning and the Natural
Curriculum, With Consent, Finding Voices
Making Choices, Compulsory Schooling Disease, John Holt,
Henry Morris, Alice Miller, Edmond Holmes, Bertrand Russell, A.S.Neill, Robert Owen,
Charlotte Mason, Damage
Limitation, Participation, Power-sharing
and School Improvement, Rules Routines
and Regimentation, Doing It Their Way, Children for Social Change, When Learning Becomes Your Enemy, Theory and Practice of Regressive Education,
and Those Unschooled Minds,
"I am a fan of the Education Heretics Press
because it asks necessary questions about the fundamental processes of
schooling."
(Gerald Haigh of the Times
Educational Supplement)
Joy Baker:
trailblazer for home-based education and personalised
Learning
by Chris Shute
Winston
Churchill wrote that schools had little to do with education since they were
mainly instruments of control. Joy Baker was of the same mind and sought to
have her children educated rather than schooled.
Later
writers agreed with her – Paul Goodman in Compulsory
Mis-education, John Holt in Instead of Education), and Everett Reimer in School is Dead, to mention but three. So had earlier writers such
as the Chief Inspector of Schools, Edmond Holmes in The Tragedy of Education.
Chris
Shute tells the story of Joy Baker’s bitter
encounters with the Authorities over a period of ten years or so. In the end
the rigid policies of the Authorities were exposed and over-ruled. But she had
to endure court hearing after court hearing, and at one stage, experience her
children being taken away from her by force, before she eventually achieved
success.
Joy Baker believed that she could do a better job of
educating her children than the State could, in spite of its good intentions.
She did not want them to become mere rule-followers.
Chris Shute is a former
teacher who became a notable writer on education. His previous titles have
been: Compulsory Schooling Disease: How
Children Absorb Fascist Values, then Alice
Miller: The Unkind Society, Parenting and Schooing
then
ISBN
978 1-900219-35-8 Price £10-00
Comparing Learning Systems:
the good, the bad, the ugly and the
counter-productive
and why home-based educating families have
found one fit for a democracy
by Roland Meighan
Thank you, thank you for
your lovely level-headed book! It’s a
model of clarity and good sense.
John Taylor Gatto, in a
postcard to the author
A fine
review of why current schooling does not work and an indication of better
alternatives.
Professor Ian Cunningham in ‘Self managing,
learning and democracy’.
The great value of Meighan’s book, of his life’s work, in fact, as an
academic, a publisher and a writer, is that it tells us, quite simply, that education
does not have to be the way it is.
Gerald Haigh, review in Times Educational Supplement
The book concludes with
consideration of the principles to guide the next learning system that needs to
offer ‘alternatives for everybody, all of the time’. …When you emerge from this
book you will see a different educational world … of ‘what is and what might
be’.
Alan Wilkins in Personalised Education No 3, Summer 2005
It was a Swedish colleague who identified the central focus
of my work as a sustained analysis of learning systems. He pointed out that my
pattern of research into consulting learners about learning in schools, later
followed by developing democratic learning co-operatives in teacher education
and then switching to the study of home-based education, looked eclectic, but
actually they were studies of the logistics of different learning systems.
Which learning system is best? The answer depends on your purpose. The current learning systems in use in UK,
schools and universities alike, draw most of their inspiration from
totalitarian-style thinking on education, with the emphasis on mass schooling
heavy with coercion and domination. The book ends with a consideration of the
principles of a learning system fit for a democracy.
This book replaces an earlier
volume, The Next Learning System: and why
home-schoolers are trailblazers.
Dr. Roland Meighan now works as a writer and
publisher. Previously he was Senior
Lecturer in Education at the
ISBN 978-1-900219-28-X price £12-50
Community –
Creativity – Choice - Change
This series has been created to give a platform to new
ideas in Community Education, Life-long Learning and Community Arts. All the titles in the series aim to give
voice to alternative perspectives in contemporary practice.
The series editor is Mark Webster.
Finding Voices, Making Choices (new edition)
is
the lead book in this series
We are all bombarded with images and ideas created by
other people. The Community Arts movement developed as a response to the closed
doors of elitist art and the increasing saturation by, and commercialisation
of, popular culture. Community Arts offers people a voice in the development of
culture.
This book sets out to re-state the values that underpin
the movement and to explain some of its key themes such as access,
participation and ownership. It explores Community Arts work in a number of
contexts; from Youth Arts to housing estates, and a number of art forms; from
community pantomimes to interactive computers.
This book is for cultural heretics everywhere and will be
of interest to anyone who thinks that art is for everybody and that it really can
apply to everyday life.
Mark Webster is Senior Lecturer
at the
ISBN 978-1-900219-22-0 price £10-00
Informal Education (new edition)
is
the second book in this series
Of late there has been a major growth of interest in
informal education. But what is it? Who does it?
How is it to be developed? This
book provides a unique and practical introduction to the area. The writers focus on the central features of
the work. They examine engaging in
conversations; encouraging learning; fostering democracy; attending to product,
process and education; thinking about ethics; and planning the work.
ISBN 978-1-900219-29-8 price £12-00
Comparing Learning Systems is the
third.
Further titles are planned on
Health and Community Issues, Youth and Community Issues, and Community Values
and Home-based Education.
The fourth is:
Personalised Learning:
Taking Choice
Seriously
edited by Mark Webster
What happens if you start to take choice in education seriously?
This was the theme of a challenging one day conference at
Personalised learning is an
idea which puts the learner in the driving seat. It challenges the shallow version of learning
with learners as mere receivers as promoted within the present education
system, and proposes a different approach where learners themselves make
informed choices about their learning. ‘Taking choice seriously’ addresses
issues of key importance to all learners and educators: from schools to
home-based settings, from community and adult learning through to youth work
Contributors include
Leslie Barson from 'The Otherwise Club, a home-based
education invitational learning community',
Professor Ian
Cunningham from
the Centre for Self-Managed Learning,
Terri Dowty, from Action on Rights for Children,
Peter Humphreys from the Centre for Personalised Education Trust,
Tony Jeffs of
Dr.
Roland Meighan, former Special Professor of Education at
Dr Tim Rudd from Futurelab,
Mark Webster, from Staffordshire
University’s Creative Communities Unit,
Alan
Wilkins
consultant on Co-operative Learning,
and members of the Bridge International Youth Project.
ISBN 978-1-900219-36-5 Price £12-50
Comparing Learning Systems:
the good, the bad, the ugly and the
counter-productive
and why home-based educating families
have found one fit for a democracy
by Roland Meighan
Thank
you, thank you for your lovely level-headed book! It’s a model of clarity and good sense.
John Taylor Gatto,
in a postcard to the author
A fine review of why current schooling does not work and an indication
of better alternatives.
Professor Ian Cunningham in ‘Self
managing, learning and democracy’.
The great
value of Meighan’s book, of his life’s work, in fact,
as an academic, a publisher and a writer, is that it tells us, quite simply,
that education does not have to be the way it is.
Gerald Haigh,
review in Times Educational Supplement
The book
concludes with consideration of the principles to guide the next learning system
that needs to offer ‘alternatives for everybody, all of the time’. …When you
emerge from this book you will see a different educational world … of ‘what is
and what might be’.
Alan Wilkins in Personalised Education No 3, Summer 2005
“It was a Swedish colleague who identified the central
focus of my work as a sustained analysis of learning systems. He pointed out
that my pattern of research into consulting learners about learning in schools,
later followed by developing democratic learning co-operatives in teacher
education and then switching to the study of home-based education, looked
eclectic, but actually they were studies of the logistics of different learning
systems.
Which learning system is best? The answer depends on your purpose. The current learning systems in use in UK,
schools and universities alike, draw most of their inspiration from
totalitarian-style thinking on education, with the emphasis on mass schooling
heavy with coercion and domination. The book ends with a consideration of the
principles of a learning system fit for a democracy.
This book replaces an earlier volume, The Next Learning System: and why home-schoolers
are trailblazers.”
Dr. Roland Meighan now works as a writer and
publisher. Previously he was Senior
Lecturer in Education at the
ISBN 978-1-900219-28-X price
£12-50
The Face of Home-based Education
1:
Who, Why and How?
by Mike
Fortune-Wood
Everyone agrees that home-based education is growing both
in numbers and in scope, but despite some excellent pieces of research,
particularly from the
This book is the first in a series
of publications following the life of an extensive programme
of research into home-based education initiated by the Centre for Personalised Education Trust. Home-based
educating families provide the context in which personalised
learning is most likey to be found, so the Trust has
made this a top priority in its research programme.
The research covered here is just
the beginning. In 2002, after commissioning a feasibility study into research
on home-based education, the Trust,
which trades as Personalised Education Now, decided to commission a
full research project over a number of years. The first set of results are
contained in this book and cover three major questionnaires dealing with who
home educates, why families choose home education and how home-based education
is conducted in practice.
The Trust is grateful to the Ernest Cook Trust and the Esmée Fairbairn Charitable Trust
for substantial financial support, along with donations from various
individuals and other organisations.
Mike Fortune-Wood is Research Officer for the Centre for Personalised Education
Trust and a consultant on home-based education
ISBN 978-1-900219-30-1 price
£10-00
“This slim book is a massively important first step in drawing
together what so many people are learning from home-based education and which,
if spread and understood more widely, could change the face of the formal
education structures in our country. Now
wouldn’t that be something?”
from
a review by Bernard and Katherine Trafford.
The Face of Home-based Education 2: Numbers, Support,
Special Needs
by Mike
Fortune-Wood
In the second book in this ground breaking series from the
Centre for Personalised
Education Trust, research into the face of home education considers questions
that have previously gone unanswered. The key question of the numbers of home
educators has always been a vexed issue. Here, Mike Fortune-Wood takes an
innovative look at numbers research using evidence from a series of enquiries
to LEAs using the Freedom of Information Act in
conjunction with evidence from the home education community to arrive at an
estimate.
Bu this is not research concerned only with quantitative
evidence. In this book Fortune-Wood moves into new territory in the field of
home education research, examining the support networks, both voluntary and
statutory, and how they serve or fail the needs of home educators, focusing
particularly on the continuing problems that home educators routinely encounter
in dealing with statutory authorities that persist in acting beyond the remit
of their legal duties.
A chapter from Jan Fortune-Wood extends the theme of
support for or obstruction of home education, that arises with a consideration
of how university admissions officers respond to home educators across a sample
range of arts and science disciplines.
Finally, a group continually overlooked
in research are given detailed attention. Home educators with special
needs children face distinctive challenges in providing a suitable education,
challenges which can be significantly eased or added to by both the home
education community and a range of statutory agencies. Why do parents choose
home education for their special needs children? What are the effects on
parents of taking on this particular type of education at home? How are home
educating families of special needs children supported or failed by informal
and voluntary networks and professionals?
Anyone concerned with educational provision in the 21st
century should be reading this invaluable source of new research.
CPE (trading as Personalised Education Now) are grateful for the support of
the Esmee Fairburn Trust, Educational Heretics Press
and the many individuals who have made this research possible.
Mike Fortune-Wood is Research Officer for the Centre for Personalised Education Trust and a consultant on home-based
education
ISBN 978-1-900219-32-8 price
£10-00
Damage Limitation:
trying to reduce the harm schools do to
children
by Roland Meighan
with contributions by: Linda
Brown, Hazel Clawley, Charlie Cooper, Jane Dent, Clive Erricker, Kim Evans,
Michael Foot, Derry Hannam, Clive
Harber, Ben Koralek, and
Philip Toogood
This book is primarily for parents and grandparents. It
answers one need – that of home-based educators who say they do not know what
to say to friends who, by force of circumstances, have to use schools. This book offers some advice and
suggestions. It answers a second need –
those who understand what Bertrand Russell was saying when he wrote: “There must be in the world many parents
who, like the present author, have young children whom they are anxious to
educate as well as possible, but reluctant to expose to the evils of existing
educational institutions”.
It will appeal to those who adopt the position of Mark
Twain when he declared that he never allowed schooling to interfere with his
education. But the book is of no help to those who are happy to hand their
children over to a bunch of complete strangers, and then hope for the
best. Nor will it appeal to those who
think that the devotion of schools to the message of relentless competition of
modern capitalism for its dubious prizes, is to be
preferred to any ideas of co-operation or community. It will also be rejected by those who are
content that the primitive form of democracy we have, whereby we get a chance
to elect a new set of ‘dictators’ every four years, using a rigged voting
system, who can default on their promises at will, is the best we can do, and
that we need domination-riddled schooling to get us used to the idea.
The answer to the question of what is wrong with mass,
coercive schooling is 291. That is the
number of separate criticisms logged by Nigel Wright in his Ph.D. research,
even before the advent of the second National Curriculum, league tables and
obsessive testing. The 15,000 hours (minimum) sentence served in schools often
just grows into low-level misery alleviated by ‘having a laugh’, although Clive Harber, in his contribution
to the book, shows how this escalates into psychological and physical violence.
The learner-hostile nature of our current school system is indicated in
the classic anthropological study of classrooms, Life in Classrooms, by Philip Jackson when he concluded that, for all the children some of the time, and for some of
the children all of the time, the classroom resembles a cage from which there
is no escape. It is echoed in Colin
Ward’s comment that our
expenditure on teachers and plant is mostly wasted by attempting to teach
people what they do not want to learn in a situation that they would rather not
be involved in.
ISBN 978 1-900219-27-1 price
£10-00
Learner-Managed Learning and Home Education:
A European Perspective
Edited by Leslie Safran Barson
In association with Learning Unlimited www.learning-unlimited.org
Learner-managed education is a philosophy that has many
supporters but little official recognition in this increasingly centralized and
bureaucratized
The book is based on lectures
given at the Learning Unlimited conference in 2005. The articles have been translated into
English, French and German, and each copy of the book contains all three
versions.
The Foreword is by Dr Robert Bell,
vice-president of of the European Forum for Freedom in Education. There are accounts of keynote lectures by Dr.
Roland Meighan and Dr. Alan Thomas followed by repots
of home-based education in
ISBN 978 1-900219-31-X price £10-00
One of our best
selling titles is:
Natural Learning and the Natural Curriculum
by Roland Meighan
Parents soon find out that young children are natural
learners. They are like explorers or research scientists busily gathering
information and making meaning out of the world. Most of this learning is not
the result of teaching, but rather a universal researching activity, as natural
as breathing. Our brains are programmed to learn unless discouraged. A healthy
brain interacts with what it finds interesting or challenging in the world
around it.
We parents achieve the amazing feats of helping our
children to talk, walk and make sense of the home and the environment in which
it is set, by responding to this natural learning process. All this is
achieved, with varying degrees of success, by so-called amateurs – those of us
who are parents, along with other care-givers such as grandparents.
But, this process of natural learning can be hindered or
halted by insensitive adult interference.
Sadly, the schools available to us, whether state or private, are
usually based on an impositional model which, sooner or
later, causes children to lose confidence in their natural learning and its
self-correcting features, and instead, learn to be dependent on others to
'school' their minds. This trains children to be obedient to a script written
by remote strangers rather than one of their own, using the help of people who
love or care about them.
The consequence is that parents wanting an effective and
morally healthy education for their children based on natural learning principles, have a dilemma. The system is not in the habit
of providing any of these things, and often has a vested interest in providing
the opposite. So, like the vegetarian pioneers, the non-smoking rights movement
and the environmental protection groups, parents wanting education that
respects natural learning principles, will have to argue and organise to try to get it.
Dr. Roland Meighan was formerly Special Professor of Education at the
Based on articles published in Natural Parent magazine
ISBN 978-1-900219-19-0 price
£10-00
With Consent: parenting for all to
win
by Jan Fortune-Wood
With Consent is the
second edition of the book Without
Boundaries, which argued that, both in theory and in practice, coercion is
not only destructive of personal autonomy, but inimical to learning and the
growth of knowledge. In With
Consent this theory is re-visited; with a new chapter exploring the
role of memes (ideas that reproduce) and entrenched
ideas in parenting, new scenarios to illustrate common preference finding and
clear summaries to help parents make the shift to the radical parenting
paradigm of ‘taking children seriously’.
The book falls into two sections, with a concluding chapter
drawing the themes together. The first part sets out a theory of non-coercion
as it relates to parenting and learning. It sets out a clear understanding of
the terminology (with new easy reference summaries), looks at how changing our
ideas can help us to change how we parent, examines the role of parents in the
lives of autonomous children and explores the growth of knowledge that can take
place when autonomy is respected and nurtured.
The second
section takes a practical, in depth look at the issues that arise when we begin
to take children seriously. Using illustrative scenarios, the chapters focus on
major issues in family life and learning, concentrating on ‘learning to win’
for every family member.
The Taking Children Seriously (TCS)
philosophy, which is the inspiration of this book, is a wide ranging and far
reaching theory. The book offers a broad introduction to thinking that could revolutionise how we parent and how we think about
learning. With Consent offers a distinctively radical and practical
alternative not only to how we parent, but also to how we relate to our
children and how we all learn. The book
should be of interest to all those in the fields of education and parenting,
whether as professionals or practitioners.
Bound To Be Free:
home education as a positive
alternative to paying the hidden costs of ‘free’ education
by Jan Fortune-Wood
Bound to be Free explores the myth that compulsory education is free education,
arguing that in fact institutionalised education is
detrimental to our freedom and autonomy, whether as children, parents or
members of society. Since financial control and philosophical control
inevitably go hand in hand, parents must take back the former if they value the
latter. The social costs of free compulsory education, including the rise of
medical, psychological and civil liberty intervention into families under the
guise of education, can be astronomical.
This is not so with home education. Similarly, the cost to individuals
of being required to conform to institutionalised
systems, with the resulting emotional costs, including bullying. It is a tragic
waste of human resources that home educated children need never suffer. Finally, 'free' education
de-skills both parents and children in favour of
'experts', whereas home education nurtures a culture of mentors, resources and
skills. Bound to Be Free is a radical re-appraisal of education as a way of
life, as opposed to an institutional instrument of control and social planning.
ISBN 978 1-900219-20-4 price
£10-00
Doing It Their Way:
home-based education and autonomous learning
by Jan Fortune-Wood
The book begins with a brief
overview of the thinking of those who have significantly influenced the trend
to autonomous education. This includes
names like Karl Popper, John Holt, Ivan Illich, Alice
Miller, John Taylor Gatto and Roland Meighan. In part
two, the practice of autonomous home education is explored, looking at key
issues and questions. This is followed by an analysis of the notion of
‘necessary’ knowledge. We see that autonomy fundamentally questions the prevailing
mythology of essential, age-related, ‘balanced’ education. Next is an
examination of the question of socialisation,
questioning the relevance of school models of compulsory, age-related socialisation and the need for homogeneity, and proposing
instead a model which allows for the social self to develop without
compromising the child’s autonomy. The wider questions of the effect of
autonomous home education on lifestyle are introduced, focusing on eradicating
the demarcation between education and life and looking at practical issues such
as limits on autonomy, television and computers, the role of play and
life-style education.
ISBN 978 1-900219-16-6 price
£10-00
Learning Unlimited:
the home-based education case-files
by Roland Meighan
Roland Meighan has researched and written about home-based
education since 1977. “For about
fifteen years, I was an educational double agent. Some of my time was spent in teacher
education, preparing post-graduate students for a career in schools, and some
spent researching and supporting families choosing to educate their children at
home.”
Over the last thirty years, he has collected a considerable
number of stories, case-files, from the experiences of home-based educating
families. In this book he opens fifteen
of his case-files. The files capture some of the variety, pathos, difficulties
and excitement of the families who become ‘reluctant heretics’ and take charge
of their own education. The contrast
between school-based and home-based education has been likened to that of
factory farming versus the free-range option.
All the
case-files in this book are based on true incidents. Most names and most locations have been
changed to avoid any possible embarrassment. The author has permitted himself some
poetic license in the files, over the actual dialogue and the exact sequence of
events.
Dr. Roland Meighan was formerly Special Professor of
Education at the
ISBN 978 1-900219-18-2 price
£8-00
Those Unschooled Minds:
home-educated
children grow up
by Julie
Webb
The book is based on interviews
with 20 home-educated people. They are now in their twenties or thirties except
for one, a man who is older. Julie Webb first spoke to about a quarter of them
as teenagers in the early 1980s. She
wanted to find out what sort of lives they were leading now, and hear their
reflections on the process of home educating - she thought it would be
interesting to see whether they would contemplate home educating their own
children. She hopes her discussion of interviewees’ reflections on their
experiences will shed an incidental light on the growth of a movement with some
fairly revolutionary implications for standard educational thinking. The common factor in their approach is the
intention of replacing the ‘one size fits all’ philosophy, with learning that emerges from the abilities and
interests of the individual, deepening and expanding as the child matures.
ISBN 978 1-900219-15-8 price £8-00
The Holistic Educators