Julius Blumfeld puts a different slant on why he likes to home educate ...

Mary Whitehouse was a slightly sinister old lady who, until her death at 91, was a ceaseless campaigner for censorship of all the many things she disliked. I always felt she was a jolly bad thing, but I fear I am beginning to turn into her.

The problem is that I really don’t want my children to be exposed to the horrors of the modern world. I include in that category: discoes, crop-tops, any book written after 1950 (except Josie Smith), any word ruder than “silly”, the non-existence of God, the non-existence of fairies, slang, sex (of any kind), computers, most other children, popular music, mobile phones and television.

Please don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind these things for other people’s children. I don’t mind them for me - I write as an internet and TV addicted atheist who makes full use of Anglo-Saxon vocabulary when the need arises. It’s just that when it comes to my children, I make old Mrs. Whitehouse look like a 60’s Liberal.

When we started down the path of home education, my motives were largely educational. I always felt that schools were a wretched way to educate. Even the best schools tend to bore their pupils half to death, teaching irrelevant nonsense, badly (and I was lucky – I went to one of the “best” schools in the country).

But as time has passed, I’ve begun to appreciate more and more one of the indirect benefits of home education. I’m almost embarrassed to admit it, but for me the fact that we control what goes into our children’s minds is a very big plus. There’s always the risk that when they are older they will resent me for it, but I’d rather our children learned their values at home than from the knowing pre-teens who inhabit the modern school playground. And if that means a bit of censorship, I say “tough”.

Julius