Thread drift maybe, but I wanted to respond to something Helen said about Home schooling - we thought about it for our son, and in the end decided against it for the same reasons Helen gives. No way of knowing whether that was the right choice or not, but you have to jump one way or another.

But I'm not at all sure if the argument about socializing and that really holds up. What schools tend to do, among other things, is to instill into people the idea that the people you relate to are almost exclusively the same age as you, and so forth. That feeds into assumptions about music and reading and all kinds of things.

And I'm inclined to think that is not a particularly good thing. It's not how human society has been structured for most of the time our ancestors have been on this planet - people of different generations are programmed to work and learn together.

One of the best things about the folk music scene has been, and continues to be, the extent to which it is not geared to any particular generation. I've been in singing circles where an eight year old girl and an 80 year old man followed each other, and received the same non-patronising respect.