Homeschool Ping!
Social Justice: tax, tax, tax, spend, spend, spend, kill babies, kill babies, kill babies.
(Yet Another Reason To Homeschool)
This is why school vouchers must be pushed anywhere it has hope of passage. This is why any parent who can, must homeschool.
-You provide good counterpoints to any leftist dogma. Even private "Christian" schools do this. Many parents abrogate the raising of their children to the schools.
-You send your kids to schools in Red States. A lot of the teachers down here in mississippi are NOT part of the NEA Labor Cabal.
Before you flame me, I homeschooled my kids for several years, but now have them in Public School. My youngest daughters' elementary school principal is a Pentacostal old-school teacher. My two older kids are in middle school, and they don't discourage Christianity at all. What i found with homeschooling is that, you better have a good plan and nothing heavy interfering with your life. The good thing about homeschooling is that you can get 8 hours of public school work done in about 4 hours. The bad thing is that sometimes you get a sense of isolation, especially if the homeschool support association is cliquish.
Finally, I read in the Bible that "we should be in this world, but not of it". Sometimes, homeschooling isolates the kids from the world. I WILL encourage my kids to go to a small, private Christian college so they can hone their walk with Christ to a finer point.
· I am a product of the government schools (GS). I graduated from high school in 1957 and was exposed to several hundred teachers. Most were dedicated professionals. And I can STILL name the EXCEPTIONAL ones.
Edna Kleinmeyer who didn’t just teach English: She imbued us with a love of language I carry to this day. It was Ms. Kleinmeyer who told me I had a gift for writing;
Charlie Kluckholn, the tough old wrestling coach who taught chemistry and gave me some of the best advice I had received to that time;
Charles Huffman, the homeroom teacher who helped me over a very rough spot in my life;
Franklin Jefferis, a “lowly” shop teacher, whose love of a job well done was wordlessly communicated to his kids in thousands of subtle ways. Mr. Jefferis died soon after I graduated. One October night, I “visited” him – alone — at the funeral home and wept as I thanked him one last time.
But the current GS are radically different from the system through which I passed 50 years ago. Know that my concern and hostility are NOT directed at those who still TEACH — really teach, really want the best EDUCATION for the kids, want to prepare them academically for the future.
Those feelings are reserved for SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS who have socialist/collectivist agendas or quietly acquiesce to the agendas imposed on them from above. They know that what is going on is wrong, but say nothing lest they jeopardize their careers. Author Thomas Sowell calls these folks “the anointed.” And as the title of his book on the subject, “The Vision of The Anointed,” indicates, they HAVE a vision!
That it is NOT the PARENTS’ vision is of no concern to them.
When my kids were still in the GS, my wife and I were quite active. The Principal of their elementary school chose me to represent the school in something called the LSAC (Local School Advisory Committee) program. I attended several meetings held at the County Board of Education headquarters. I came away from the VERY FIRST of those meetings with these impressions:
1. Those folks DID NOT speak English. Through tight little smirks clearly indicative of the low esteem, indeed, contempt, they had for the uninformed and ignorant gaggle of parents arrayed before them, they spoke in buzz words and technobabble code only they comprehended. At one point — to the visible relief of the other parents — I stopped one woman’s presentation and asked for a translation of what she’d said. She was NOT pleased!
2. They DID NOT want parents involved! Cookie sales and PTA? OK. Serious criticism of a course or textbook? Verboten! Your option was private or parochial school. There very little home schooling then.
3. Most of these people MAY have once been educators. They were now bureaucrats guarding their turf.
4. Many of those administrative folks were making over $50K and, though I looked for signs of it, I saw little evidence of anything resembling “work.” And this was 20 years ago when the average classroom teacher earned less than $25K.
5. There were WAY too many administrators in the GS. It is a perfect opportunity to provide make-work sinecures for “anointed” members of the educational fraternity. Four years as an Air Force instructor taught me how to spot the signs.
Here’s the “bottom line:” Simply hurling more money into the black hole of the GS WILL NOT WORK. Most of that money will NEVER get to the classroom or into the pockets of DESERVING teachers who actually TEACH. And teach what any sensible human being – REGARDLESS of race, faith or ethnicity — instinctively understands to be correct, morally defensible material.
Bush is right about one thing: We need accountability! Perhaps you recall Clinton’s asinine plan to send 100,000 PAID Americorps “volunteers” into the grade schools to TEACH KIDS TO READ. Why hadn’t their PREVIOUS teachers – OR THEIR PARENTS! — taught them to perform that rather basic skill???
Think about what you just read as YOUR local government schools continue to raise YOUR property taxes.
Another encounter with “The System”
In 1978, my wife and I came to know a young woman named Patty. She
was a devoutly religious young mother who’d become more devout when her
husband and father of her two small sons aged 2 and 6 informed her that he
was leaving. In dire economic straits, I offered to let her stay in our
former home in Chamblee — which was not rented at the time – rent-free until she got back on her feet. She had been clandestinely home schooling the 6 year
old for about 2 years using very well done Christian course materials from
an organization in Texas the name of which escapes me. The lad had recently been tested and had placed at least a year ABOVE his chronological age. As required by the government school authorities at the time, she dutifully apprised the authorities of his scores.
For reasons which would become clear in a moment, Patty had been harassed by the DeKalb County school authorities for about 6 months and, by the time she moved into the Chamblee house, had been — unbeknownst to us — ORDERED to put the 6 year old into the nearest government elementary school or suffer the consequences. Because she wanted the boys to be educated Christians, there was no way she was going to do that and she told them so.
At approximately 2 am one morning, a loud knock on the door announced the
arrival of the aforementioned “consequences.”
Dressed only in a nightgown, she was confronted by several burly police officers who thrust an arrest warrant in her face. With the now awakened 6 year old watching and the 2 year old wailing in the other room, she was handcuffed and led out the door to jail. She was tossed into a large cell with a couple of hookers and a junkie who spent much of the rest of that morning vomiting in the corner. The two young boys for whom the educational authorities professed such great concern were just left AT THE HOUSE — ALONE! Patty was later told that the bureaucrats from Children Services who were SUPPOSED to accompany the cops were late and, in their haste to get this dangerous miscreant behind bars, the cops just missed the fact that the Children Services people were, well, missing. The CS folks showed up an hour later to find two terrified kids, one of whom had just seen his mother hauled off in cuffs.
Patty was ultimately brought to trial under the Georgia Truancy Statutes. Her pro-bono attorney tore the school authorities to shreds and hers has been called THE case that opened the floodgates to home schooling in Georgia. Once they had all the facts, the jury didn’t take long to acquit her. I’m proud to have played a small part in that.
At Patty’s trial, a previously overlooked aspect of the government schools was put into sharp focus for those paying attention: The Director of Instruction for DeKalb County testified that the then current 7 hour school day consisted of an average of approximately 3 hours or less of instruction. At that time, Patty was devoting 4 to 5 hours a day to direct instruction.
He also as much as admitted that the REAL reason they wanted ALL these kids in school was the $3,000.00 per kid per year (I’m sure that number is higher in 2001!) they then got from the state and federal government. Empty seats = lost funds. As in most things, follow the money.
Patty home schooled these two boys through high school.
And how did the boys turn out?
One is now a physician and the other a budding journalist.
But that now seems to be the norm for the growing legions of home schooled kids – which most likely explains why the NEA and the government school folks feel so threatened. For what it’s worth, a home schooled kid won the last National Spelling Bee.
Thomas Jefferson believed an EDUCATED PUBLIC to be the cornerstone of the system he and the other Founders TRIED to leave behind. He would NOT, I feel certain, be a big fan of the current government education system. If he returned today, he’d home school just as he did before.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0lR1KQq2-U
IBT “not my local public school.”
"If we give the bureaucrats our children, we may as well give them everything else." (J. Gresham Machen, 1928, congressional hearing that aborted the federal department of education)
It is a sin to render unto Caesar that which is God's. (me)
Seriously, folks. If we agree that Caesar has the right to confiscate 30 hours a week of our children's lives, 36 weeks per year, then what will we defend? The Southern Baptist leaders, for example, are totally cool with K-12 sodomite indoctrination. Not even that is enough to shake their support for the public school system.
What will it take?
Our mission is to articulate the biblical call to social justice, inspiring hope and building a movement to transform individuals, communities, the church, and the world.My point is that it's not just the schools that are pushing the social justice agenda. It's all around us.
A better reason (to explain why the younger evangelicals voted so heavily in Obama's favor) is found almost anywhere else. It has to do with the well-documented macro-economic and macro-political conditions in 2007/2008.
Haven’t read it all yet but will when I get back from town later, plus ping it out. Looks very interesting but also exactly what we all know! Keep ‘em home!
bttt
“Children Rebel Against their Parents!”
Phyllis is quite the genius to discover such a phenomena.
What will Phyllis discover next?
“The majority of unmarried 18-to-29-year-old evangelicals have sexual relations.”
First, summarizing the problem as explained by Schlafly:
Students are unsuspecting and uninformed and are being preyed upon by teachers who have it in mind to do more than to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, they have come to indoctrinate them.
Solutions:
1. Create a pamphlet to make students aware of, and to be alert for, any practice of socialist indoctrination. "Is Your Teacher A Socialist Brainwasher?" Something provocative like that. It should include known examples of this practice. This solves the unsuspecting problem. Also in the pamphlet the student will find information on the differences between a Republic and a Democracy. We throw that word Democracy around all the time, but our Founding Fathers tried their best not to give us a Democracy, they wanted us to have a Republic form of government. A simple, to-the-point explanation of these concepts will work wonders. Further it could state the pitfalls of socialism, communism, oligarch, monarchy, etc. This solves the problem of students being uninformed
The pamphlet can be sent to mom's and dad's with a plea with them to sit down with their children and go over the material in the pamphlet. The pamphlets can also be used as a handout and passed from one student to student to another prior to or after school.
2. Massive radio and TV advertisements, clear, appealing, and to the point, again with a leading question, ie: "Is My Teacher Indoctrinating Me?" for example. Other spots simply explain the way government works as an innocuous and friendly "American Minute" done much the same way a "Bible Minute" program is done on radio by preachers. Content: "Did you know that socialism is bad for our economy?" for example. Ended with: "Get more information at (blog web address)" As elementary as that subject sounds, thats where we find ourselves today.
3. Creation of a 1-800 line and reporting blog where students can report incidents of socialist indoctrination in the classroom. Yes, it will be abused, but do it anyway and filter out, block, the flamers. Flagrant cases of indoctrination may require litigation or other action. Which leads to....
4. Creation of a legal team to handle the worst cases that are proven legitimate. It is amazing what a short letter from an attorney can usually accomplish.
5. Creation of response teams who will go to the communities where these violations occur (yes, they will be very busy.. but lets just get to work, on school at a time) and take action to alert, make a lot of noise about the incident, pass out materials such as the pamphlet mentioned above, buy some spots on local radio TV and newspapers, etc. Kind of like a fire brigade.
It would be easy to think that the volume of work would make this effort impossible... but I predict the instant word gets around that teaching "social justice" might just result in legal action, activist squads, thousands of informative pamphlets and a host of radio ad's to correct the problem, the incidents will quickly become few and far between. Give it a year for it to sink in that the effort is serious, well funded, and on-going... and they will start to get the picture.
Lastly, the idea of homeschooling or private schooling all of the kids isn't going to happen, it isn't practical. Families all over the country don't have the time or the money to simply withdraw from the public schools and their aren't enough empty seats in private schools to hold them all. We stand and fight back.
And yes, I am prepared for all the "our school is like fighting vietnam" posts. If your school is that bad, send in the National Guard. This is an ideological struggle that does not require wearing a helmet and flak jacket to school. School violence is another subject entirely... please lets stick to the subject.