THE Munchkin has put his foot down. Actually, I'm surprised you didn't hear him. He is not an insubstantial child and his boots bear an uncanny resemblance to a pair of Foss barges.

Granted, very few barges are adorned with pictures of large luminous dinosaur skulls (he chose them; I take no responsibility whatsoever), but in terms of size there is little between them.

This week he was mostly complaining about the books he was being given to read at school. They were, he said, very, very boring. And, for once, I agreed with him. He taught himself to read a while ago - like ice-skating and arson, I think some kids just take to it quicker than others - and has devoured books at a ridiculous rate ever since.

But, like most four-year-olds, he has the attention span of a gnat. So if a book does not grab him immediately, if it doesn't contain dinosaurs or animals that go on adventures wearing hats and boots but no trousers, he soon becomes bored.

And so it was inevitable that the books he brought home from school - books about visits to the allotment with granddad and loose teeth that fall out at the greengrocer's - were going to illicit more than a few jaw-breakingly cavernous yawns. They were, in his own words, very, very boring.

Thankfully, when the Munchkin put his foot down, his teacher was right behind him. Neatly side-stepping his dinosaur skull barges, she agreed that instead of following the set stream of semi-educational stories the school provided, he could pick and choose whatever books he liked. A free-thinking philosophy I absolutely agree with - up to a point.

Letting your child pick and choose which books to read at nursery school is one thing, but letting your child pick and choose what to study throughout their entire academic career is quite another.

Increasing numbers of parents are choosing to educate their children at home. More than 150,000 families have taken the plunge in the UK, with about 100 families joining Education Otherwise, a support group for home-educators, every month.

Home-schooling in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. After all, Albert Einstein and Yehudi Menuhin were both educated at home. But so was Britney Spears. I could rest my case right there, but I'll continue.

Belinda Harris-Reid, of Education Otherwise, says children should decide for themselves what they learn about. She agrees they may do nothing but watch The Simpsons and pick their nose for the first day or two, but then she argues that they will opt for something more productive and will actively pursue topics of interest to them.

While I agree that watching Homer skateboard off a cliff loses its appeal eventually (after about the fiftieth viewing at a rough estimate), I would argue that no child is going to switch off the telly and beg to do quadratic equations.

They may very well decide to read the odd book, learn a bit of history or do the occasional scientific experiment (especially if it entails cutting things up that were nibbling cheese not two minutes earlier). But what kid is going to swap nose-picking for algebra, or Bart Simpson's adventures in Springfield for a line-by-line dissection of Wilfred Owen's war poems?

If her kids want to spend their days playing video games, Ms Harris Reid, a jazz a cappella singer and potter (well, you didn't really think she worked on the checkout at Asda, did you?) lets them, because she says she knows they will soon tire of it and move on to something more academic.

But what about when these kids get a job? Somehow I don't think their boss will be quite so happy for them to set their own agenda. "Sorry guv," young Harris-Reid will say. "I'm not going to do the filing today, I'm going to plait my hair and play Tomb Raider II."

There is also the question of social development. Can children who miss out on the playground microcosm of the big, bad world cope with real life when they are eventually set free from the home cocoon?

According to Education Otherwise, school is unnecessary for social development because being cooped up with 30 others is an unrealistic situation that children never face again in adult life. Unless they work in an office of course, or a school, or in a factory, or a police station, or a call centre or - God help them - a newsroom.

Yes, there is too much testing in schools today, and the atmosphere of competition and fear is becoming too Americanised for comfort. But this is the real world and the best we can do is teach our kids to live in it - without skateboarding off too many cliffs.

Updated: 09:38 Tuesday, January 21, 2003