Fun Stuff
Top 10 Amazing Chemistry Videos
Parents, Kids and Family
Court deems homeschooling a criminal offense.
Planned Parenthood accepting donations to specifically help abort minority pregnancies?
The solution to societies problems is getting married? A book review on the recent book Get Married by Candice Watters founder of boundless.org
Noticing the over-use of the word “man” in today’s language.
Paris exhibits a children’s guide to sex, aimed at getting parents and children as young as 8 or 9 talking about sex.
Can today’s women have it all? Apparently not. Revisiting The Compleat Woman and standards for success.
Just Plain Silly
Say what? South Pasadena, Calif., declares itself a cuss-free zone
Norway will be enforcing a law that 40% of company directors must be female.
Imagine you’re one of the 13 men on this all-male board of a large company and are told five of you must go to be replaced by women. Unlikely? Not in Norway, where they’re enforcing a law that 40% of directors must be female.
Founder of the Weather Channel wants to sue Al Gore for fraud.
Misc.
Problems in the publishing world… is there now a “post truth” era?
Harvard bans men from gym to allow Muslim women to exercise in private.
Ron Paul easily won his congressional seat.
New letters reveal Lincoln had a plan to buy slaves. This would have cost the equivalent of a couple of months of the Civil War.
I scored 50 on the hermeneutics quiz.
The first link is wrong.
Thanks Bryan. I fixed it.
Planned Parenthood began as a eugenics organization. It used to be called the National Birth Control League. When it began, eugenics was a widely accepted field of study. Eugenics taught that certain people should not reproduce. In fact, even some state governments were even responsible for sterilizing poor and mentally handicapped people. The popularity of eugenics died down after WWII when it was associated with Nazism.
That’s true, Chris A. This particular sting operation doesn’t sit well with me, though. As Todd Friel said on Way of the Master Radio, this isn’t a black mark on Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood believes abortion is a good thing, so of course they should be eager to accept donations specifically to help black women in need.
Sadie gave us some great links on family life. I just ordered the Getting Married book. Sounds so quaint in today’s view, but getting (and staying) married is a good thing.
I didn’t like that quiz very much.
Is it just me, or does Al Mohler confuse “truth” with “facts” in his piece on the “post-truth era”? What makes something “true”? Can one write a “true” story about something? For instance, the book he mentions in detail, Love and Consequences, could very well be a true autobiography of someone, just not the actual person who wrote it. Does this make it wrong? I think not. The fact that the story told by the author is not her personal, factual life doesn’t make the book a lie at all. Dr. Mohler, it’s not that the “post-truth era” blurs the line between empirical facts and fiction, but that the “truth era” before it blurred the line between empirical facts and truth. The two are very different things when looked at epistemologically–or have we been so inundated with Duns Scotus’s ontology that we can no longer see the difference?
On the homeschool front, I mostly agree with the court’s decision. Too often, parents who claim to homeschool their children do a very poor job of actually educating their children and use it more as an escape from the society in which they live. I do think there are cases in which parents without certification do a good job at homeschooling, but this has been, in my experience, the minority. However, this decision does not look like it will be as problematic across the country, depending on how states define acceptable credentials for educators. However, none of this will truly be resolved until there is an agreed upon definition of what constitutes acceptable forms of primary and secondary education and acceptable credentials for providing such.
But it’s always been an issue. Most employers, colleges, and universities do not recognize degrees from unaccredited institutions and nobody has a big problem with this. Why should it be different when it comes to primary and secondary education?
Do average people know who Duns Scotus is, or people on here for that matter? The only reason I know the name is becasue I’ve been looking at Radical Orthodoxy who traces modernity to him. Thats almost as an obscure philosopher as Vico. Nice!
Heh. I’m sometimes so deep in obscure philosophers that I forget their obscurity! I’ve been playing around with Duns Scotus for a while, but I still haven’t read him seriously yet. Also, since you mention RO, my mention of him echoes Jamie Smith in Introducing Radical Orthodoxy.
Cchrisr, why is it the government’s duty to be involved in a parent’s responsibility, except when the parent ALLOWS government to play a part in the educational process? You seem to have a twisted idea of the role of government.
In my own personal experience with homeschooling, which I would hazard to guess is vastly greater than your own (since I was homeschooled my entire life until college and saw firsthand many different aspects of homeschooling), most homeschooling parents were NOT “certified” yet provided at least as good of an education than the local public school offered (lest we forget that public school education sucks, to put it bluntly). My dad actually was a teacher prior to homeschooling us, but he was the exception. Most parents did not have certification (what use is that anyway, many of today’s public school teachers are incompetent), but many had college degrees and were quite competent in teaching their kids. Not to brag, but to show the case in point, I tested out of high school by 5th grade. All of my siblings likewise tested much higher than their public school peers. A majority of my homeschooling friends were also ahead of their public school counterparts.
Most of the homeschool families with which I was/am acquainted taught their children at home for myriad reasons, not simply to “escape from society.” For Christian homeschoolers, it was both to protect their children from the ravages of public school foolishness and debauchery (until such an age where the children could better handle it) and, more often the primary reason, to provide them with a quality education in comparison with the public school attendees.
I freely admit there were indeed some parents who did a lousy job of teaching their kids or only did so to keep their kids from having any contact with the outside world. However, why should government have any right to interfere? Are you and your neighbors responsible for the education of a neighbor child? Because that’s what we’re talking about, the interference of the “village” in parental rights.
The fact that the story told by the author is not her personal, factual life doesn’t make the book a lie at all.
Again, like Atanamis said the other day, it is hard to dialog with you when your reality is so skewed from my own. A book that purports to be autobiographical but isn’t true is the definition of a lie. Sure it can be entertaining and perhaps will make people think, but it’s still a lie. I was refreshed to see Frey get in so much trouble over his lies; it showed that at least truth still matters to SOME people.
I have that book on my shelf, and found it quite informative, although I didn’t fully catch everything that was being said. I also have Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition in my to read pile…hopefully next month once school is done.
Scotus is on my list to read becasue of that book, but before I read him I want to read Boethius and a bit more of Aquinas.
Unfortunately, your position is verifiably factually incorrect:
Whatever other criticisms you may have of home schooled students, colleges are so desperate to attract them that they have in many cases greatly altered their acceptance policies (toward standardized tests) to accommodate homeschooled students. I have known a FAR smaller proportion of homeschoolers to have below standard educations, and in the vast majority of those cases the cause was a late escape from a disastrous public school program. I would agree that it is desirable for a homeschooled student to have access to labs, sports teams, and occasionally to experts in specific fields, but the vast majority of the “traditional school experience” is a complete waste of time and money, both for wasted teacher time and wasted student time.
The faulty premise is that it requires some kind of special credential to teach basic math and reading. Honestly, I think any college graduate who is UNABLE to teach these skills at the first through third grade levels should be ashamed of themselves. There is NOTHING taught at these levels that cannot be trained by someone with a Bachelor’s degree. Above this, a reasonably intelligent person should have no problems until at least middle school. I am willing to accept a “No child left behind” style test, so long as the alternative is for the student to be taught by a teacher who has NEVER had a child score lower. Only the very best of private schools provide a similar level of education to your average homeschool, and at FAR higher cost.
If you don’t see the difference between demanding accreditation of college level material which one can legitimately argue only an elite is capable of teaching and teaching a first grade student to read, there is absolutely no benefit in continuing this conversation. You will likely refuse to reconsider your position despite the fact that it has NO factual support and little logical foundation regardless of what I say. Unfortunately, this is entirely the approach of some politicians and of course the teacher’s union, who would prefer to throw up roadblocks based on teacher credential rather than student capability because they KNOW doing the latter would have little effect (and also demonstrate more clearly the inadequacies of the public school system).
Atanamis, as always, you’ve misconstrued my statement of experience as fact then ignored my hypothetical other-case-scenario. Further, you take something such as accreditation and take my statements to the absurd extreme. Where I come from, both primary and secondary schools are accredited. My whole point, summarized in small words for you, is this: I have experienced too many homeschooled children being taught poorly. That is my only objection to homeschooling. If children are being homeschooled properly, then I have no qualms with it. But, considering that in high school, I was taking the equivalent of 5th semester Latin and 3rd semester Calculus, among other advanced coursework, I doubt that the majority of homeschool parents could adequately teach these things.
Darius,I view government as an agency of the people. It is supposed to do all the annoying administrative work that we don’t want to do. We, as citizens of this country, agree to abide by the laws of this country, which does include this oversight. As I mentioned above in response to Atanamis, homeschooling is fine by me if the children are being educated properly. My experience (which does include my younger brother being homeschooled first by my mother who has a college degree and board certification as an RN and then later by my stepfather who has a PhD in biogeography and is the department chair at one of the state universities back home) has been contrary. By the time my brother (re-)entered school for 5th grade, he was miles behind the kids. Most of his time being homeschooled was spent not doing any kind of education. It took him two years to catch up to the level of understanding and education that his classmates had, and this was primarily because he is a bright kid. Had he not have been, he’d still be taking remedial level classes.
Now, on these comparisons to public school, I find them disturbing because I knew enough public school students who could not pass the ASVAB. I’m not a big fan of public schools primarily because where I come from (New Orleans), it is an utter joke. I’m the kind of person who does want to see some strong standards when it comes to education, but I try not to be partial about it. I think all children, by the time they enter college should be well-rounded and well-educated to the degree that they take very few general ed classes because they’ve already reached that level of education (yes, I do look to many Europeans educations systems as my example here). I don’t expect students entering college to have worked through single variable calculus, but it would be nice if more of them had. (On a side note, when you say you “tested out of high school by the fifth grade”, are you speaking of how you placed on standardized tests such as CAT? If so, that’s not good evidence of “testing out of high school” since my brother [see below] did the same)
On your comment about protecting children from the “ravages of public school,” I have to disagree. In my experience (again, New Orleans, where there are as many private, “Christian” schools as there are public), the kids who went to the Christian schools were no better in moral/ethical terms than their public school counterparts. In fact, many of them had to take time off of high school for maternity leave. It was generally agreed upon there that the “best” schools were the private Catholic schools because they (1) had excellent education standards (my high school averaged 15% of each class as National Merit Semi-Finalists with a third of those being Finalists) and (2) maintained a strong code of conduct (expulsion for those who repeatedly failed or did amazingly dumb things).
Darius, on truth and lies, how do you explain the changes “truth” gets, such as the switch to heliocentrism, genetic evolution, etc? My point of contention with Mohler’s argument (and what appears to be yours as well) is that truth is not equivalent to empirical facts. Truth, as the person of Christ, does not change. Our relation to it changes, but truth itself does not. The problem with Mohler is that he does not differentiate between the two, which leads him to the uneasy position of having to accept ideas that he does not agree with, such as the evolutionary model because he has limited his definition of truth to the empirical science of the time. I’m sorry, but truth is so much more than simple empirical science. (And this is coming from the “nihilistic” postmodernist!)
Okay, I think I see your point about truth. I have a scientist acquaintance of mine to whom I have been trying to explain basically the same thing regarding evolution and intelligent design. Science can only explain truth that is able to be empirically tested; it has nothing to say about metaphysical truths.
First of all, thank you Atanamis for the factual evidence to back up my anecdotal experience.
Cchrisr wrote: “If children are being homeschooled properly, then I have no qualms with it. But, considering that in high school, I was taking the equivalent of 5th semester Latin and 3rd semester Calculus, among other advanced coursework, I doubt that the majority of homeschool parents could adequately teach these things.”
And you think that most public school teachers COULD properly teach those things?? Again, we’re discussing public school versus homeschool, ignoring the unavailable third option of private schooling (at least in most rural areas).
Just because your parents (while I’m sure are very competent at their jobs) were incompetent teachers of your brother doesn’t mean that even some non-college educated parent cannot do what most public school teachers can do. You seem to put teaching and education on a pedestal, while I think much of what is learned in today’s universities is of no particular use in every day life. In almost all state schools, history and the classics are ignored for modern rubbish. Common sense can take someone pretty far in life.
That said, I do think there is a place for homeschooling and a place for public schooling. The area where I was weakest was the sciences, because my parents didn’t have a lab or the ability to offer some of the technology that public schools have. However, growing up on a hobby farm, we learned a lot about normal everyday science that public schools never taught, and my dad encouraged an interest in science. Regarding sports, I played almost every sport available with my local public high school from 4th grade on up, and my siblings participated in band as well. In Minnesota, homeschoolers can participate in most public school activities that they can’t offer themselves.
My comment regarding testing out of high school in 5th grade was in reference to some standardized test (Iowa Basic Skills Test, it was called). The test would score you on a grade level, and by 5th grade I was testing at 11th grade, 5th month. Meanwhile, my peers in public school were mostly testing between 5th and 7th grade. I took algebra in 7th grade, largely teaching it to myself. My dad actually mostly removed himself from the learning equation about that time, serving more as an accountability partner rather than a teacher per se (with a couple exceptions). Most everything one learns in high school or prior can be taught to oneself with the proper book. Even in college, this is sometimes true. One of my professors frequently reminded his students that they were paying $20,000 a year for accountability, since almost everything they learned they could find in a local library for free.
Regarding the morality question… again, I am not discussing private schools, but rather home schools. On private “Christian” schools, I agree that the kids are many times no more “good” than public schoolers. Part of that reason is that I believe the whole format of public and private schools is wrong. It promotes a “Lord of the Flies” mentality in the students, with little accountability to adults on behavioral matters. Compare that to the setting of a home, where kids interact on a healthy scale with adults and only a handful of other children. I will say that I knew plenty of homeschool kids who “went bad” even though their parents were strong Christians. I think this was due to the faulty idea that as long as they weren’t going to public school, they would be okay. So the parents didn’t bother to pay attention when their kids were hanging out with the wrong crowds.
Darius, as I mentioned previously, I am fine with homeschooling if it is done correctly. The same goes with any kind of education. While I’ll not go on my rant about statistics, if the more common experience in homeschooling is proper preparation for the child’s expected level of education, then I by all means support it. ((In fact, I have thought about homeschooling my own children if there is not a decent school where we live)) When I mention Latin and Calculus, while I don’t think most public school teachers could teach those things, the public school system is much more capable of finding someone who can. Homeschooling, by and large, is restricted to two “teachers”: mom and dad. My brother-in-law was homeschooled for all of his secondary education. When he reached the point that mom and dad couldn’t teach him a particular subject, he began enrolling in those courses at the local community college. This is something I respect because it means that the educators (his parents) understood their limits and found an avenue by which he could continue to learn even if not directly through homeschool.
I’m sometimes a big fan of self-education (that’s what graduate school is all about), but I think it first requires a good base. As one who is entering the realm of teaching at the university level, I find the idea of giving students Thus Spoke Zarathustra for an intro course to Nietzsche is horrible. Understanding the context of any work is vitally important and that comes from a proper education at the introductory level. In this particular case, that would require a decent understanding of Plato, Kant, and Hegel before being able to understand what Nietzsche means in a particular passage (e.g., truth as an army of metaphors from “Truth and Lies in an Extramoral Sense”). From my experience, most people who want to go to college want to jump straight into the advanced levels (e.g., quantum physics, textual criticism, etc) without touching the “boring” elementary levels (mechanical physics, linguistics, etc). College is a bit more than simple accountability because it is the instructor’s job to ensure not only that students are reading texts in their own context but also that they are understanding the many other contexts that properly interpret the data (this is also a problem I find with many Christian authors writing on comparative religion, but again, another topic!).
Back to the “morality” question, my point is that the public school isn’t any worse than any other avenue. In fact, I’d say that because it has a greater population, there’s a better chance of getting the “right crowd” (of course, there’s also a larger amount of the “wrong crowd” as well).
Your brother-in-law sounds like he did EXACTLY my own educational route. I also took some classes at the local community college my junior and senior years to help complement my schooling at home, particularly in the math realm. I took Trig and Calculus and other college-level courses to help prepare me for the switch over once I moved on to college.
I still think we’re mostly avoiding the bigger issue here. What gives the government the right to impose its will on parents’ right to raise their children as they see fit? One could very easily argue that public school does more damage socially and culturally than homeschool could ever do to one’s educational or learning abilities. A government that oppresses the rights of the individual and the parent for some “right” of the collective is a fascist one and one that should be overthrown. Is it really any wonder that in modern times, the governments that outlawed homeschooling were Hitler’s, Stalin’s, and Mao’s?
I don’t see government the same way. I see it as holding parents accountable to raising up children to be educated citizens. It’s not a right of the government, but rather a function the citizens have given it. As I’ve stated now repeated times, I don’t think homeschooling should be outlawed but rather that those who do homeschool should do so not simply as an escape of some kind. It should be something that is truly an alternative to public school, as private school is. I’m not even saying it should be regulated by the government, but rather that parents should have the common sense to give their children the best education they can (even if it means supplementing “pure” homeschooling with public education).
Also, I could invoke Goodwin’s Law at this point…
I think you mean Godwin’s law.
Fair enough, but it should give us pause that the most fascist governments in recent history banned homeschooling.
Eh, after reading too much Deleuze on fascism (e.g., link), I’m not as “shocked” by that tidbit as most people are (there’s also the tidbit that those three are the only ones in recent history that were as “patriotic” and flag-waving or more than the USA).
Simplicity and my own experiences
To summarize my own experiences, my younger brothers are in advanced placement classes in public schools which fail to equal the materials I was studying by my sophomore year. I was NOT unusual in my homeschool group. Outside of a university setting, I have rarely met a public school educated person who had even a basic education. To demonstrate, I consider a familiarity with the term “pronoun” to be such basic education. I rarely encounter a public school student who ever remembered hearing the term. I have never met a home schooled student unfamiliar with it. This is merely my experience, but it also matches up with statistical data showing that while the public schools graduate kids who can’t even read, home schooled students score highly on standardized tests and do well in college. I will agree both systems have flaws, but until the public school system is fixed it is a waste of effort to address anything but the most faulty of home schools.
Availability of access to specialists
You must have gone to one of the best public high schools in the nation. I’m not exaggerating, I’ve lived near many large high schools, and NONE of them provided the kind of education you are describing. They normally contract such classes out to the local junior college, which is what MY family did for me with laboratory and language classes. I never suggested home education should be conducted exclusively by parents, not that there were not many classes desirable at the high school level that do not benefit from expert teaching. My post specifically stated “below middle school”, and if you can find more than 1% of children who need more than a college educated parent can teach them before 6th grade I’d be surprised.
Abuses of Home Schooling and comparisons to Public Schools
For your well educated parents to fail your brother to this extreme extent requires almost deliberate neglect. My family put in perhaps 3 hours a day to schooling, and all of us emerged well above grade level in every subject when taking standardized testing. The same is statistically true for most homeschooled students. For $200 in books a year, you can provide a higher level of education than most private schools, and there is MASSIVE amounts of help for new homeschoolers in most areas. It is sad to hear what happened in your brothers case, but it is statistically not the norm.
This is my primary point. IF there was a demonstrably better education system available, I would be less opposed to cracking down on home schools. I still think that home schools working in conjunction with lab facilities and expert consultants would be preferable, but you would have a point. As of today though, the alternatives are a crappy public school system that fails to educate students, a private school system that is very expensive, or a home school system that occasionally allows neglectful parents to provide a similar level of education to what is common in the public school system. My complaint about public schools isn’t the moral exposure, it is that they teach a hatred for learning and waste vast amounts of time that could be spent preparing for one’s future.
Conclusions
This is in fact the majority case, and the reason why colleges do many things to attract the home school graduates. (This is harder because they can’t as readily just visit the high schools.) I do share your concern about the abuses that sometimes take place in home schools, but feel that effort should be put into fixing the public school system first. Once there is a reasonable alternative available, it makes more sense to regulate something that already works most of the time.