Sent: Monday, 25 March 2002 11:33 AM

Subject: home schooling

Dear XXX,

I chanced to hear part of your home-schooling segment today, and it brought back some fond and fearsome memories: in about 1973 we took our three children out of XXX Infants' School to teach them at home.

We had just come from XXX a couple of years earlier, lived in Cairns for half a year, returned to Sydney where the three older children first went to schools in Killara and Gordon, respectively, until we moved to XXX, right opposite the school. We were exposed to all sorts of strange routines taking place in the schoolyard but didn't really know the full story. This emerged only after our oldest daughter cowered in the corner of her room after the holidays on back-to-school day, and point-blanc refused to return to her class. She told us how children were being mistreated by teachers, having their legs tied together with rubber bands during assembly to stop them fidgeting, having their mouths washed with soap for using 'rude' words and similar 'atrocities'.

I made up my mind then and there that my kids would not be subjected to such treatment, wrote a letter to the school advising that the children would not be returning and that we would be teaching them at home "pending our return to XXX".

The NSW Department of Education promptly took us to court on the pretext that our children were being neglected, and we fought this case, without representation, for a year, dashing off to Albion Street Children's Court every few months for the hearings.

The reason this dragged on for so long was not only that we might have chanced upon a sympathetic judge, but that we were able to contradict the Department's assertions as they were being made. The Department's lawyer argued the children were being deprived of the socially important contact with their peers - this was easy to disprove as they made friends at the beach and attended Little Athletics and swimming classes. They were receiving no proper schooling: we showed a curriculum we had fashioned ourselves and the most modern types of teaching materials we could find at Dominie's in Brookvale; the children would fall behind their peers: we had experts from Macquarie University test them and submitted the ACER results - the three children were in the top five per cent in the State with their scholastic achievements after nine months of home school...

This could have gone on for much longer, but the truth is that the permanent pressure on my wife - mainly due to the need to constantly "prove" something to the authorities - was becoming a bit of a burden. Towards the end of the school year, we therefore opted for a compromise with the Education Department: we would shop around for a suitable school and enrol the children in the system again. After some investigation, we decided that North Sydney Demonstration School might be suitable; we interviewed the headmaster at his home, and the green light was given for the children to transfer out of their normal school district and attend NS Dem. One of the further concessions was that no-one would insist on my children wearing a school uniform - something I abhorred because of the perceived negative influences on behaviour by people able to hide beneath a uniform but which I now recognise had the equally pernicious effect of making the children, particularly my son, too much of an outsider.

But during the year the children were taught at home by my wife, who took great joy in learning subjects such as set theory herself before imparting them on her 'class', the effect on the children was very noticeable: they were bright, outgoing, interested, experimentative, fearless, socially adept (they would go out on assignments involving reasearch and interviews in the community, for example), highly motivated and very capable of completing any assignments set by their very broad 'curriculum'. I was intensely proud of them, and my wife!

PS: Sometime after all this a woman stopped us on the [street] to congratulate us on what we had done. She said that other parents had also had objections to the type of 'teaching' performed at XXX Infants', but no-one had dared rock the boat... We also learned that the headmistress had been transferred or retired (I'm no longer certain of the details)...