‘Transformed’: Schooling as one paradigm among many (Elective home education as another)

To think about education as schooling, is a common mistake. There is a sense that this mistake is part of a dominant ‘world-view’ where valid education happens in schools or educational institutions and also often adheres, to varying degrees, to an established educational modality of teacher-led teaching. Home education is one form of education that disproves the myth of education as schooling. It does so in intriguing and surprising ways that involve new approaches to learning and becoming (Sheffer 1995; Thomas and Pattison 2007). In its very difference from schooling, home education offers an alternative world-view of education in a human life that does not need to involve an educational institution. Nevertheless, despite this offering of new educational modalities home education often meets with incomprehension and even hostility. This paper looks at the discovery of home education as a product of a Kuhnian ‘gestalt-switch’ (Kuhn 1962) that takes a person from one world and into another, with subsequent ontological implications for lifestyles and communication between ‘world-views’. It investigates possible reasons for incommensurability of understanding and communication in relation to home education, suggesting that education needs to re-consider schooling as inhabiting a hegemonic position, towards being located instead as one paradigm amongst many in a diverse educational arena.