It’s an unfair exchange, trading beaches and backyard cricket pitches for boxy classrooms and endless arithmetic lessons. After a languorous summer holiday, there are crisp new uniforms to be donned and lunchboxes to be filled, school buses to be caught and timetables to be followed.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. And for a growing number of children, it won’t be: for them, January will merge seamlessly into February, and summer will flow on into autumn with nary a mention of tests or assignments, rankings or competitions. They will take their lessons beneath the gum tree, out in the paddock, on the beach or – at a stretch – whilst seated at the dining-room table.
These are the children who are home-schooled, an estimated 26,000 Australians who represent an appealing alternative in a landscape fraught with debate over private versus public education, the virtues of the My School website and the fairness of education funding models.
It’s a daring move, the decision to home-school one’s children in an era beset with angst over academic achievement, selective school placement and the perceived superiority of one method of parenting over another.
The furore that erupted recently when Chinese-American mother Amy Chua accused Westerners of being too soft on their children masks a subtle yet pervasive move among middle class parents in Australia towards emulating the high expectations of parents such as Chua. In her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, she writes with pride of the demands she has placed on her two teenage daughters, expecting nothing less than excellence in their academic and extra-curricular pursuits: they were denied sleepovers and play dates and, in one disturbing instance, food and toilet access until a tricky piano piece had been mastered.
Whilst Australian parents are not nearly as authoritarian as this, they do comprehend the increased competition – often from disciplined immigrant students – and the concomitant pressure on their children to maintain their position within the pack. This pressure is absent within the home-schooling community, where parents have deliberately rejected the vulgarity of intensive competition and the hot-housing of children who will achieve predictably high marks in their final exams, but who will often miss out on those quiet moments of abandon, exploration and self-reliance that make for a truly enriching childhood.
And home-schooled children, despite receiving an education a world away from the veritable pressure cooker that is our modern schooling system,