To What End?
Many parents worry that if they were to take their children out of school, the children wouldn’t be able to obtain any qualifications. Actually there are several ways to sit high school exams. But before going down any of those routes, I would ask the question, to what end? Why are such qualifications important? I suspect the first answer would be, “To get to university.” If parents want to send their children to university, again I would ask, to what end?
These days, universities have limited benefit. What are parents’ concerns about school? Low standards, alien ideologies, problem peers? I’m afraid to say, the same accusations could be levelled at universities. Perhaps the parents then think that their children are close enough to adulthood that the ideologies won’t be too troublesome, they will make friends and they are sufficiently self-motivated to maintain their own standards. This may be true, but it leads us back to the same question: to what end?
Is the answer,”A better job”? The number of good, useful jobs which need an university degree is falling. Engineering is the most obvious. Engineering is important and at present, university is the best way to progress in this field. We could argue that healthcare is another, but the NHS is in freefall and the future of healthcare is uncertain. My recommendation would be to study nutrition and its importance to health (some research on Novak Djokovic would be a good start) because the direction of travel, the increasing medication of society, is not a good one.
Home education gives your children the freedom to think beyond traditional jobs and think like an entrepreneur. Never have we needed more entrepreneurs. At TruEd, we are keen to support you and your children into the world of work beyond the narrow confines of state education.