The Enlightened Redneck » Home Schooling

Posted on 10.20.10 by Danny Glover @ 1:10 pm

Statistics are all around us, every day. That’s the message of this informative video from the U.S. Census Bureau, which was produced to celebrate today as World Statistics Day:

As a journalist, I’ve always been fascinated by the role of statistics in our lives. Statistics was one of my favorite classes my first year of college. (I learned enough to know how important statistics are — and I learned that math is not my forte.)

At the same time, I’m skeptical about how easily statistics can be manipulated to push an agenda. The classic book “How To Lie With Statistics” was required reading in journalism school at West Virginia University, and I recommend it to everyone because everyone will be saturated with stats-based news throughout their lives.

We all need to be enlightened about numbers.

Why We Home-School, Lesson #32

Posted on 08.11.10 by Danny Glover @ 6:32 pm

We want our children to learn how to spell “school” correctly:

Future lessons: “2+2 = 5,” and “Barack Obama is the first president of the United States.”

OK, this flub technically isn’t the school’s fault. But I’ll bet the road contractor who painted the sign got his fifth-grade education in public school. Plus remember, his bosses and officials at the nearby school let the error dry long enough for journalists to snap embarrassing pictures of it.

(Read previous “Why We Home-School” lessons.)

A Valedictorian Educates Her Educators

Posted on 08.08.10 by Danny Glover @ 8:47 pm

Last month at Coxsackie-Athens High School in Coxsackie, N.Y., an 18-year-old girl who rose to the top of her graduating class embraced her valedictory speech as an opportunity to deliver a pointed message to the educational system that molded her.

“School is not all that it can be,” Erica Goldson told her teachers and school administrators, her peers and their parents. “Right now, it is a place for most people to determine that their goal is to get out as soon as possible.” Her speech has created a minor buzz online.

I don’t agree with every gripe Goldson voiced. Most children need educational goals to excel, and tests are the best way to gauge student progress toward those goals. Based on the awkward delivery (see the video below), I also doubt that Goldson spoke from her own inspiration. I suspect that an adult who hates authority, structure and the “evil corporate world” unduly influenced her.

But as a whole, her speech is worth a read. Here are some of the high points:

I cannot say that I am any more intelligent than my peers. I can attest that I am only the best at doing what I am told and working the system. … I did what I was told to the extreme.
I excelled at every subject just for the purpose of excelling, not learning. And quite frankly, now I’m scared.
Between these cinderblock walls, we are all expected to be the same. We are trained to ace every standardized test, and those who deviate and see light through a different lens are worthless to the scheme of public education, and therefore viewed with contempt.
Our motivational force ought to be passion, but this is lost from the moment we step into a system that trains us, rather than inspires us.
We are thinkers, dreamers, explorers, artists, writers, engineers. We are anything we want to be — but only if we have an educational system that supports us rather than holds us down. A tree can grow, but only if its roots are given a healthy foundation.

Filed under: Business and Culture and Home Schooling and News & Politics and People and Video
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Why We Home-School, Lesson #31

Posted on 07.16.10 by Danny Glover @ 12:41 pm

Our children don’t need as “leaders” religiously correct busybodies who are determined to push all references to God, even those that are part of America’s government and culture.

The key quote from this video: “So, this school district is arguing that Judeo-Christian views, as expressed in our nation’s history, are too offensive for students to view — but other religions, even anti-religion … OK.”

(Read previous “Why We Home-School” lessons.)

Filed under: History and News & Politics and Religion and Why We Home-School
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Why We Home-School, Lesson #30

Posted on 07.07.10 by Danny Glover @ 11:22 pm

We want our children to get an education without being subjected to all the stressful and counterproductive pressures of a system created by the government and run by bureaucrats.

Watch the trailer for the documentary “Race to Nowhere: The Dark Side of America’s Achievement Culture” for a glimpse of what formal education has become:

To be fair, part of me wonders, after watching the video, whether the bigger problem is that we have reared a generation of whiny kids who cry “Woe is me!” because they have to do homework to get ahead. But I also think this is a valid point:

[W]hat’s documented here is that everyone from the federal government to state and local governments, to teachers unions, to school districts, to administrators, to teachers, and yes, parents have contrived — not conspired because the “good intentions” thing is definitely present — to royally screw kids up, steal their very childhoods, stress them out to the max and generally do them the double disservice of both wreaking havoc in their lives, and for most of them, not really educating them. It’s all downside, or mostly so.

Teaching done right will make children love to learn, and loving parents focused on educating just a few children can do the job better than most “trained” teachers in today’s schools.

(Read previous “Why We Home-School” lessons.)

Filed under: Entertainment and News & Politics and Parenting and Video and Why We Home-School
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Why We Home-School, Lesson #29

Posted on 06.28.10 by Danny Glover @ 10:19 pm

We don’t want our children “educated” in an environment where administrators encourage sexual promiscuity as early as elementary school by distributing condoms.

(Read previous “Why We Home-School” lessons.)

Filed under: Culture and News & Politics and Why We Home-School
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Why We Home-School, Lesson #28

Posted on 04.02.10 by Danny Glover @ 12:05 am

We want to teach our children reading, writing and arithmetic in a loving family atmosphere, not turn them over to an education bureaucracy that thinks “school-homing” is the way to go.

What’s school-homing, you ask? Schools that dedicate as much or more time and resources to “extras” like social services and school-based clinics that offer reproductive health counseling and contraceptives, among other things. The Heritage Foundation makes the educational case against such nonsense in schools:

At the classroom level, such policies put demands on teachers that they can’t fulfill. Most teachers and administrators will readily admit they can’t make up for the fundamental role of the family and don’t want to.

At the same time, it’s frustrating for teachers if some parents don’t engage adequately in their children’s education because of challenges in their own personal lives. But the answer isn’t to push more government interventions into family life via public schools. It’s to start restraining government to its constitutional role, limiting public schools to their basic educational purpose, looking to civil society to restore family and community life, and empowering parents with real authority over and resources to direct their children’s education and upbringing.

(Read previous “Why We Home-School” lessons.)

Filed under: Government and Why We Home-School
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Why We Home-School, Lesson #27

Posted on 03.31.10 by Danny Glover @ 12:24 am

This one comes courtesy of fellow journalist/blogger Robert Stacy McCain, who explained in an interview at the blog Jumping In Pools why home is the school for his children:

Parents have to understand that the problems of public schools are not temporary, isolated and episodic, they are chronic, pervasive and systemic. Whatever you have to sacrifice in order to save your children from the menace of the government school bureaucracy, that sacrifice is worth it. …

Government schools are just another form of welfare slavery. Stop sending your kids to those liberal indoctrination camps. However crappy a job you think you might do as a home-schooler, you could hardly do a worse job than the overpaid government bureaucrats at your local public school.

(Read previous “Why We Home-School” lessons.)

Filed under: Government and Why We Home-School
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Why We Home-School, Lesson #26

Posted on 03.05.10 by Danny Glover @ 7:57 pm

We think it’s important to teach our children good grammar during the elementary and secondary education years so they don’t look foolish while using bad grammar to protest during their college years.

(Read previous “Why We Home-School” lessons.)

Filed under: Grammar and News & Politics and Why We Home-School
Comments: 1 Comment

Why We Home-School, Lesson #25

Posted on 02.26.10 by Danny Glover @ 7:43 pm

Last week, first lady Michelle Obama launched the “Let’s Move” campaign to fight childhood obesity in America and “raise a healthier generation of kids.” Today, a pre-teen relative of mine who shall remain anonymous posted this note about his new school to Facebook:

lunch is awesome a snack bar with poptarts, rice krispies, muffins slushies cookies giant soft pretzels frozen treats gatorade & every fri. papa …johns pizza vanilla milk juice any time & 2 differrent meals each day but my school is really old

So our public schools are stuffing kids full of sugar- and fat-laced snacks but apparently not teaching them capitalization, punctuation and other basic rules of grammar. Parents might as well send their kids to a candy store for classes — which may be their best chance for employment if they don’t start learning how to write.

It’s enough to make an enlightened redneck journalist like me scream.

(Read previous “Why We Home-School” lessons.)

Filed under: Culture and Food and Grammar and News & Politics and Why We Home-School
Comments: 1 Comment

Bob Marshall’s Disability: His Mouth

Posted on 02.22.10 by Danny Glover @ 7:47 pm

Bob Marshall used to represent me in the Virginia House of Delegates, and that was great because he is passionate about many of the issues that matter most to me, including his support for home schooling and his opposition to abortion.

But today I was glad we moved to a neighboring district several years ago because Marshall certainly wasn’t representing my views when he said this last week:

The number of children who are born subsequent to a first abortion with handicaps has increased dramatically. Why? Because when you abort the firstborn of any, nature takes its vengeance on the subsequent children. In the Old Testament, the firstborn of every being, animal and man, was dedicated to the Lord. There’s a special punishment Christians would suggest.

Marshall quickly backtracked from his “poorly chosen words.” “No one who knows me or my record would imagine that I believe or intended to communicate such an offensive notion,” he said in a statement on his Web site. “I have devoted a generation of work to defending disabled and unwanted children, and have always maintained that they are special blessings to their parents.”

But that quote is likely to follow Marshall the rest of his career — and rightly so. Marshall referenced the Bible in his comments to the Capital News Service, so here’s a reminder of what Jesus said about men’s words in Matthew 12:

For the mouth speaks out of that which fills the heart. … But I tell you that every careless word that people speak, they shall give an accounting for it in the day of judgment. For by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.

My point isn’t that God will condemn Marshall eternally for his words because he did apologize (albeit in the “mistakes were made” way that politicians typically do). Besides, that’s not my place to suggest any more than it was for Marshall to suggest that God uses “nature” to visit the sin of the mother who aborts a child upon a future child. I’m just saying that politicians like Marshall say dumb things because in their hearts, they believe them to some extent.

The good news is that bad publicity has a way of making politicians change their hearts — and their words — once they hear how foolish they sound.

[Cross-posted at Hot Air]

Filed under: Health and Home Schooling and News & Politics and People
Comments: 1 Comment

Note To Self: Avoid Sweden

Posted on 12.30.09 by Danny Glover @ 11:05 pm

As the parent of three home-schooled children, I don’t want to visit a country that seizes children from parents who see themselves as the best educators:

Swedish authorities forcibly removed Dominic Johansson from his parents, Christer and Annie Johansson, in June of last year from a plane they had boarded to move to Annie’s home country of India. The officials did not have a warrant, nor have they charged the Johanssons with any crime. The officials seized the child because they believe home schooling is an inappropriate way to raise a child and insist the government should raise Dominic instead.

“It’s one of the most disgraceful abuses of power we have ever witnessed,” said [Homeschool Legal Defense Association] attorney Mike Donnelly. “The Swedish government says it is exercising its authority under the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child in their unnecessary break up of this family. In addition, the Swedish Parliament is considering an essential ban on home schooling. We have heard that other home-schooling families in Sweden are having more difficulty with local officials. We fear that all home-schooling families in that country are at risk.”

I’d like to think a crime against parents like that could never happen in America, but the undercurrent of animosity toward homeschoolers that prompted a California court to rule against parents in 2008 may be strong enough to this country in that direction one day.

Filed under: Government and Home Schooling and News & Politics and Parenting
Comments: 1 Comment

Globs Of Home-school Humor

Posted on 12.17.09 by Danny Glover @ 2:25 pm

Our son gave me a good home-school laugh this morning. He missed a math question, so I had him go back and look at it again. He came to me and asked, “Is this a trick question — what is the geometric shape of a glob?”

Indeed that would be a trick question. But the book actually asked the geometric shape of a “globe.” Reading is fundamental — even in math class.

Filed under: Family and Home Schooling and Just For Laughs
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Why We Home-School, Lesson #24

Posted on 12.11.09 by Danny Glover @ 9:45 am

We don’t want our children put on a government-approved diet of “spent hens” and other menu items that don’t even pass muster with the fast-food industry.

The good news is that some unlucky members of Congress and their aides will be served a heaping helping of school lunches one day next week — ironically enough because the Agriculture Department thinks it is doing a great job feeding America’s schoolchildren.

We’ll keep serving our kids lunches from Costco. The food there is a safer health bet.

Filed under: Food and Government and Parenting and Why We Home-School
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Why We Home-School, Lesson #23

Posted on 12.07.09 by Danny Glover @ 4:31 pm

We don’t want our children subjected to the kinds of perversion embraced by education “leaders” like Kevin Jennings, head of the Education Department’s Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools and founder of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.

Jennings is under fire for the reading list that the “education network” he built recommends to schools. It is full of vile portrayals of explicit sexual acts, both visual and textual.

If you want the proof, it’s at Gateway Pundit. But be forewarned that it is repulsive, X-rated content. As Michelle Malkin says, “Make sure you have an empty stomach before you read.”

If this is the Obama administration’s idea of quality education, everyone should start teaching their children at home immediately.

UPDATED to add this related Day By Day cartoon, homeschooling reference included:

(Read previous “Why We Home-School” lessons.)

Filed under: News & Politics and Why We Home-School
Comments: 2 Comments

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