While the legal definition of education is wonderfully vague and confusing a few things have been established. One important element is that education should achieve what it sets out to achieve. While this doesn’t help with narrowing down exactly what education is, it does mean that what we’re trying to achieve is an important factor when it comes to local authorities assessing our provision of a ‘suitable education’.
Now you may be thinking, if education is supposed to achieve what it sets out to achieve, the school system appears to fail to meet this standard for many children. This might lead you to think that there’s a double standard being applied here. All of these thoughts would be absolutely correct but as home educators we have to bite our tongues, breath in and out and do a lot of counting to ten. Home education might be held to a higher standard than the school system but unfortunately that is the current system we have.
But I digress, the fact is if we after a quiet life we have to satisfy the local authority that we’re achieving what we set out to achieve. So this begs the question, what do we want to achieve? I think it’s fair to say that most of us want to achieve happy, mentally well children brought up in accordance with our values. The authorities give these sort of aims a name – this is called an “educational philosophy” which really just means how we intend to achieve what we want to achieve”.
However, if you’re anything like our family, this isn’t a simple question to answer. Furthermore, the pressure to quickly produce an educational philosophy can push home educators toward conforming to local authority-approved forms of education rather than allowing them the time and space to find the best method for their children.
We took a look at this and realised that we could actually make this much easier for home educators and we could do this in a way that was home education positive. So welcome to our very own education philosophy generator. We think it’s possibly the worlds best philosophy of education generator – to be fair we don’t really know what the competition is – but it’s super easy to use, you can change your mind as often as you like and unlike many of the forms sent out by local authorities, it is very home education friendly.