School's Out Forever

Homeschooling will never be the norm, but it's a pointer to the future of organized learning, argues researcher Barratt-Peacock. The days when the great storerooms of information were the university libraries are fading. The Internet has brought something approaching the totality of mankind's knowledge into the home, dismantling the barriers that limited people's choices about where and what they could study. In the new global village, Barratt-Peacock wonders, how long before a teenager in Christchurch, working from the computer in his bedroom, can attain a Harvard degree? "The idea of learning only in a large, formal institution with lots of other people . . . that is going to change." It's hard for outsiders to accept home education, which challenges so many fixed ideas. Teachers teach and parents raise. School is a societal glue. Brothers and sisters singing together is a little too twee. If society's aim with children is to help them become decent, happy and employable, there's little concrete evidence to suggest that homeschooling is a more flawed way of trying to achieve it than packing them off to school when they hit age five. And yet the unease persists. One day, you pass a primary school where a bunch of 10-year-olds of all colors and shapes are having a physical education class in the autumn sunshine. Within the space of a few minutes you watch them encourage and console one another, succeed and fail, concentrate like demons and muck about amid noise and mirth. And you have to wonder, whatever the arguments to the contrary: Is this a snapshot of something - school life - that children could really be better off without?