Ah, the “no true Scotsman” defense again... :)
If you guys really think that using Sandy Hook is a great lead-in to a pro-homeschooling / anti-public school thread, I hope you aren’t in charge of PR or advertising strategy anywhere. I’m not saying that homeschooling was at fault, I’m saying that it’s really poor “optics”, given that the general public’s perception is that an adult homeschooler murdered tiny public school children.
You claim I was being disingenuous about Adam being a homeschooler, but “not entirely accurate” (your words), is a good synonym for “far from wrong”... ;)
But, I’ll gladly concede that Adam wasn’t really a homeschooler, if you’ll ping your ARtH ping list with your opinion on how many years (or percent) of homeschooling it takes before a kid is a “real” homeschooler, and ask for feedback. Let’s get a thread started!
Once you’ve developed a consensus, you can use that as a determination on whether any given achievement is by a “real” homeschooler, and can therefore be celebrated on a ARtH thread. It’ll require some investigation into each child’s past, but it’s the only way we can all be “entirely accurate”, which is clearly very important.
“Ah, the ‘no true Scotsman’ defense again... :)”
I passed this up the last time you wrote this, figuring you mistyped or just had a senior moment or something. But I see you've trotted out this canard again, so let me lend a hand.
What posters, including myself, have written, isn't actually the No True Scotsman logical fallacy. In my case, I actually confirmed that Mr. Lanza was homeschooled, but pointed out that in context, he'd spent most of his school years in traditional schools, public and private, and for this reason I asserted that your original post was not so much false as dishonest because of the failure to note context.
In the case of others, the tack is a little different.
Here is a short blurb from wiki:
“No true Scotsman is an informal fallacy, an ad hoc attempt to retain an unreasoned assertion.[1] When faced with a counterexample to a universal claim, rather than denying the counterexample or rejecting the original universal claim, this fallacy modifies the subject of the assertion to exclude the specific case or others like it by rhetoric, without reference to any specific objective rule.”
Although you may debate its merit, it is a reliance on an objective standard to state that someone who attends traditional schools for primary and secondary years for 11 years and is homeschooled for the last two is far more a traditional schooler than a homeschooler.
Better luck next time.
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