Diary – 4 July 2009

Some friends home-school their three children and hats off to them. I was the sort of cruel, wicked mother who required hers to be out of the house for three full terms a year and could never have taught them round the kitchen table. They do it because their children are bright and have inquiring minds and were held back by the misplaced egalitarianism, poor intellectual diet and political diktats of their state schools. They are not socially isolated, as they enjoy a merry-go-round of sports and arts clubs and classes, but they are streets ahead in their learning and not subjected to a strident PC agenda that also regards the acquisition of pure knowledge as elitist, to be replaced by that of assorted ‘skills’. So they read with trepidation of a government threat to subject home-schooling to a new regulatory regime requiring strict compliance. In my leftie youth I marched to Aldermaston and to abolish capital punishment.