Prison Time?

The homeschool furore has nothing and EVERYTHING to do with race. The powers that be are Black. They say that homeschool parents are keeping their children out of schools so they don’t have to mix with Black children. Their response has been to come up with a new Education Bill. One of the proposals is to put home educating parents in jail if they don’t register with the education department. IF they approve your homeschool registration, they want to oversee what you do. They want you to have a schedule with school times that have to be of a certain length each day, they want you to keep your child’s school records for three years, they want to assess if THEY believe your home is ‘suitable’ And they want YOU to hire an external assessor to come every year and test your child. And of course, your curriculum must be according to their standards.

Nope! Must homeschooling parents didn’t register their children even before prison was mentioned. Some parents who have registered have had no response for up to two years. Some have had officials drop in without warning. One was told she couldn’t use the dining room table because the light wasn’t directly above it. Of course, some have had things run smoothly, and others don’t care that strangers pop in randomly. But the rest of us do mind.

My children have never used the South African curriculum. They’ve never been assessed by anyone external and yet here my teens are, with an A average (so far) for their official Cambridge exams. There’s no NEED for someone to assess the children. The parent knows full well what strengths and weaknesses they have!

On the opposite end of the spectrum, are my special two. They have significant barriers to learning. My entire formal school day for them is 30 minutes long. They can’t handle the length of time the government would want them to have. They’ve incidentally begun the academic portion of their assessments -today is the final hour- and the psychologist told me that even that hour with different activities was too long for my daughter, she got “tired.” That’s exactly what I’ve heard from other therapists too. If an hour of varied activities is too long and wears my girl out, what kind of torture would I be putting my child through by making her sit and write for many hours a day?

My son apparently found some of the activities “terrifying” so she had to stop and just play with him. Impossible to do under the government guidelines. She said he was very hard on himself, scared he would fail even though she assured him that he wasn’t being ‘tested. ‘ (My teens are writing exams. Maybe that is where he’s getting the idea that exams or tests are pas or fail and that failing would be terrible. My children carastrophise a lot.😅)

The whole point of home education is flexibility-meeting the child where they are and tailoring their education to suit THEIR needs, not government standards. It’s not like the government will pay for therapy when our children are burnt out from too much pressure.

Also, this would mean that I’m paying someone to come tell me what I know. “My children can’t handle mainstream education.” That’s a huge waste of money! And imagine how stressed they’d be having some stranger doing typical exams with them.

Nope.

Might as well cuff me how. My children’s hearts and minds matter more than government pettiness. And yes, not a few homeschooling parents ARE racist. Most of them ARE White. But they aren’t the only homeschool families in South Africa.

I’ll have to face jail time before I change my flexible, child-friendly homeschooling programs to “doing school..at home.”