"The research [on home education] has been spiked...I have yet to see independent research that looked at it dispassionately"

Business Day Weekend Review 21-22 October 2006

Prof Jonathan Jansen is Dean of Education at the University of Pretoria.

He is clearly unaware that, as far back as 1997, his own faculty awarded an M.Ed degree cum laude to a student who cited pages of references to "independent research that looks at [home education] dispassionately."

It also seems to have escaped Jansen's attention that, as recently as 2003 his neighbouring institution, the University of South Africa, awarded its Chancellor's Medal for the best Master's thesis in all disciplines for an M.Ed thesis showing that home learners perform substantially better than their institutionalised peers.

Evidently, Prof Jansen is not well read on either the recent or the not-so-recent litereature on the subject.

That a Dean of Education is, despite his admitted ignorance, is willing to condemn the entire body of research on the subject as Jansen does in Business day, makes one despair of the academic standards at the University of Pretoria and of the level of intellectual debate in the teaching profession in general.