Panic! Academic Inspection Under New Law!

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I suspect myself of having finally found what I need to push me out of this situation.

The papa managed to get the director of the correspondence school on the telephone yesterday afternoon, who said that actually ( ) it was just aswell the papa had not used the name because it turns out the man that he saw was not an inspector but "only" an education advisor to whom it would have meant nothing and looked funny.

After hearing how it went, and the threat of full set of tests which hangs over us, he said he will phone his friend/contact at the ministry/inspectorate himself and ask him to intercede directly. Apparently he and the papa were laughing at idea of face the advisor will have when told to back off.

In the meantime, while waiting for official confirmation of success of such a backroom approach, we are to play dead.

Am feeling completely freaked out/washed out/wiped out by the stress of it all. Calmer than yesterday but rather shocked by the state I was in. The worst thing is how it shows the immense cracks ( full of molten lava and flaming gases) in my relationship with the father of my son. How much, how easily I loathe him. How much I prefer it when he's not around. How utterly irritating I find him, etc.

Anyway. Going to press on with passport application, so can at least leave when need/want to.

Just heard that apparently the french govt is in the middle of changing the law on homeschooling surveillance/control/inspections again, supposedly to return it to something like it was before the last amendment, and to eliminate the ambiguity.

It has been causing so much confusion; different districts interpreting it differently, and the reputation/seriousness of correspondence schools being implicitly cast in doubt by those districts choosing to interpret the law as meaning they need to test for academic attainment in children already assessed by their corr school, etc.

Basically the system is a mess. The director of our corr school actually said that our private lives are disappearing, when the authorities can come into your home to see how you are bringing up your child. Which is exactly what I feel, literally persecuted, for my personal choices as a parent who already has trouble assuming and carrying my parental role/responsibility.

Someone famous said, "Parents haven't resigned, they've been fired". It certainly feels like it.

I earnestly hope that these new changes will be for the better. But they haven't happened yet, so we still depend on the director's personal connections to avoid the battery of tests, which would, according to the education advisor yesterday, be 3-4 hours long. ( for an 8 year old boy, with AS)!

Oh boy, I hope your son doesn't have to take the battery of tests. I know if my son had to take a test, they would declare him borderline ret*d and tell me that I need to medicate him. That's what they used to tell me when he was in school.

About your husband, I would try to give him a break and realize that getting away from him would not improve your situation. I'm a single parent and it is not easy to homeschool, work, and be the only adult in the house. It is difficult to find a mate who will help raise a challenged child.

Oddly enough this is a subject being discussed by several AS parents ( not just me ) on the "AS-Parents Support Thread" in the Members Only forum at:

http://wrongplanet.net/postt66773.html

We have been expressing how much living with an NT co-parent is at least as much of a problem as being a parent. It's an AS parent thing maybe to feel stronger, be in fact a better parent, without the extra, energy draining, company of an NT.

Are you AS? It doesn't say so on your profile but that could be because you have prioritised your son's situation.

Last edited by ouinon on 27 May 2008, 1:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I'm NT. Being married is difficult and raising kids together is stressful. However, being divorced is not easy either. I would not recommend divorce unless the other spouse is unfaithful or excessively cruel.

I think it's fairly common for one parent to feel like they are the better parent.

Not the better parent, but a better parent without the extra strain, ( sensory and cognitive overload ), of another person to share living space with when are AS and love peace, quiet, control/routine, etc etc.

I wasn't talking about being better or worse than the NT papa, but of my perhaps being a more active/capable/energised parent to my child if I did not have to also deal with/tolerate/process the company ( noise, activity, interference, unpredictability, sociability, etc) of the NT papa.

Okay. I see what you're saying. That's interesting about the sensory and cognitive overload of having to deal with a spouse.

Shouldn't matter, really. Frankly, if you need the diagnosis, go get it. No fear of doctors should be preventing you, provided that you are willing to get and receive second-opinions.

However, some assurances need to be made by the French government that they are willing to provide education tailored for autistic-spectrum children. I know in the larger cities in Canada, this is available.

I don't want the govt to provide education for my son. I just want them to allow him to carry on homeschooling.

When did governments stop trusting parents to raise their children?

John Taylor Gatto puts it down to the spread of capitalist industrialist commercialism; school was the tool invented to create obedient unthinking workers and obedient unthinking consumers; to put down/extinguish independent thought and activity; snuff out creative, non-profitable ( for capitalism) use of leisure time ( making one's own music, stories, games, craft hobbies, local community enteprises etc)

If they would just start trusting them again, at the same time as allowing children ( of all ages) back onto the streets in the daytime, life as a parent would be so much easier.

I wouldn't need to go to doctors to have my son labelled disabled so as to avoid a court order to put my child in school. Actually I suspect that getting such a label for my son could result in greater pressure on me to put him in some sort of school, which is why I am not going to do that.

He doesn't want to go to school, for all the obvious reasons. Almost any child given the choice ( as my son was right from the start) early enough in their life would not want to.

The pressure on parents to give up responsibility for raising their children to "professionals" is immense. Astonishing.

Wow, what a horrible experience. Just not right on so many levels. Am appalled at the possibility of having to pay a huge fine
I hope it all turns out okay in the end.
Good luck with the passport; it might make you feel better to know you at least have that option.
I suspect you may be right about papa's motives. So sad but in the end, maybe all for the best.

Thank you.
The fine would be imposed if we received an official letter ( following test results they considered unsatisfactory) which ordered us to put child in school and we didn't comply within a certain period. If non-compliance continued, or we couldn't pay, then prison is next penalty.

I don't think that this has happened to more than one mother in the last 10 years. She was german, they had moved to France because could homeschool here, and their children were slow learning french. This was judged/deemed to be the consequence of neglect of the childrens "instruction" by the parents and they were ordered to put them in school.

When family refused to send them to school and could not pay fine the mother was put in prison. Don't think it was for long, can't remember. But it is a scary stick.


I just deleted that about the papa actually because I realised that it is far more likely to be about me, what this extra pressure might mean; that I would get to leave after so long/years of dithering. I feel almost excited now about the whole thing, because it might be that these developments are the winds of change I was thinking were almost due ( saturn cycles )

So much for playing dead!

The Education Advisor phoned yesterday afternoon, when the papa was not there. He said that as the father had not called him back to propose an alternative date for an inspection he would suggest one. This Friday here at the house. I said no, not possible, have arranged activity with another homeschooling family. ( almost true, it's for tomorrow, Thursday) . He said that this was becoming a bit urgent now as almost June.

I said that we were in fact not convinced of the necessity of our son's being assessed by the IA in addition to by his correspondence school. He said, "yes, but..." etc. He proposed this Thursday instead. I said, no actually we are waiting for a response/advice on how to proceed from the corr school, on whom this inspection reflects very badly, suggesting as it does that they are not reputable. He said "The law ... etc"

I said that apparently the law is being changed again anyway. He replied that he would be very happy, because he has quite enough work as it is without these extra tests to organise etc. I agreed with him about how wonderful it would/will be when this situation is sorted out.

He settled for the 10 June. Us to confirm by Friday. The papa phoned the school director who though saying we should wait until friday to hear from him what his buddy had achieved, was clearly less optimistic than before, because he said we should insist that the inspection be held in our house " because the inspector would be less at ease, and we would be more".

I do not agree, having thought about it. I think the idea of a complete stranger, potentially/fundamentally hostile ( by definition/inherently) to one of our biggest lifestyle choices, making demands on my son in our own space is horrible. I also think that things like the xmas decorations including tree ( a white fake one) which are still up because I think they look beautiful, might suggest to him that he is dealing with the mentally ill. And finally I think that going to his offices will be more in harmony/logically consonant with the spirit of the thing. Grimly bureaucratic. ( and I used to be good at exams, perhaps my son will be too?).

I need to find out if the advisor will demand to see/test my son on his own, which is absolutely out of the question, so that I can establish that beforehand. I intend to ask too if we can't spread the tests out over the day, to give my son time to get used to the environment and the man.

I will go this time, because after my conversation with the Advisor it is clear that I get on better with him than did the papa, who admits that their encounter was "fraught" with irritation, and that he "couldn't help" letting a mocking little smile lurk at the corner of his mouth while there, which can hardly have improved matters. The papa thinks that the guy is a jerk. I don't know if I will be able to manage as well face to face, but on the phone it was ok.

That would have been false then. It was Napoleon I who started the whole public school system as a means of undoing the anarchy that gripped France at the time. I assume this is still the modus operandi of the French public school system today - preventing anarchy, yet still fostering technical progress. It wasn't the nefarious capitalists or industrialists who sought that, however in England and America that may have been different.

Anyways, I'm just going from experience. My sister did not benefit academically from being home-schooled, but only offered a temporary reprieve from the awkward social settings of an ill-equipped school. My younger brother was pulled from that school and brought to a school where learning-disabilities was its specialty.

That is incorrect. Napoleon only invented higher education, for those who wanted it, the upper middle class, those intending to enter the professions etc.

The person largely responsible for the public/national school system in France was Jules Ferry, in the 1880's, perhaps inspired by the example being set in America at that period by the capitalists and industrialists, ( which Gatto was talking about) .

It was he that created the "modern", free, public, non-religious school of France today, who introduced/proposed the law which imposes the "obligation to instruct " on every parent, and the "right to instruction" on every child, which is causing me such problems at the moment.

The problem is that he had this law passed because he believed, as many did at that time, that children were like empty vessels, passive recipients of information which had to be fed to them by some outside active agent, a teacher. This conception of learning has been proved false.

Public/national schools are founded on what has been demonstrated to be fallacious thinking about how we learn, as far as gaining knowledge is concerned that is, whereas it is very effective indeed at inculcating social values and forming behaviour.

Last edited by ouinon on 30 May 2008, 4:18 am, edited 3 times in total.

Actually, I've been reading about Ferry, and it turns out his creation of a free national public school system was fired by his hatred of the church, and the church schools which were the only ones offering free/cheap schooling ( compared to the private schools for some middle class) at that time.

His support for a particular structure and type of schooling, and its mandatoriness, may well have been the result of his ( resentful/envious) admiration for the Prussian Empire, whose schools had also served as model for the founders of american public-schools. And we all know what the end result of the Prussian system was.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system

Another reason why he imposed one language, french, on all the schools in all the french provinces, which resulted in the virtual disappearance of half a dozen regional languages, ( as the same measure had in Prussia, much to the increased power of its rulers), was because of his ambitions for France as a colonial power, which goal he also contributed to while a minister in the government.