A while ago, I read about a case where children as young as 7 were given a survey asking how often they had "sexy feelings" and other sexual related questions. Well, another similar case just went to court, and---GASP---the parents lost.

Phyllis Schafly has the scoop:

Questions 92-93 in this survey given to Ridgewood children asked "how many times" they "had used cocaine" in their lives, or during the last 12 months, and the answer choices were 0, 1, 2, 3-5, 6-9, 10-19, 20-39, and 40+. This gave students the false impression that casual use of cocaine is common and acceptable.

 

Misleading questions can have a powerful effect. Our legal system recognizes this by providing dozens of reasons for lawyers to object to questions in court in order to protect their witnesses from having to answer improper questions.

 

Children lack the maturity to tell the difference between questions they should or should not answer. Children are trained in school that they must answer questions or face discipline or a poor grade.

 

Ask an adult when he stopped beating his wife and expect to be told to get lost. Ask a child in the classroom how often he takes drugs or has sex, and the child will think he ought to answer.

 

I can't imagine how angry I would be if my kids took surveys like that. These are our children! Don't they realize that? I guess they really think they know best. But my kids are wonderfully innocent, having a wonderful time being, well, KIDS, and I want them to stay that way. They don't need to be corrupted by ugliness. There's enough time for that.

Of course, public school supporters often say that we're sheltering our kids, but that's not true either, at least not the way they mean. We're putting our kids in a greenhouse to grow, rather than planting them before the last frost has passed. We're not subjecting them to danger, we're giving them a good start so that they can grow strong and bloom.

I'm so glad no one else has their hands on my kids. My girls are confident, fun, bright, articulate, and they're not worried about peer pressure, or designer labels, or having boyfriends in grade 5, or whether or not they've seen the right movies or listen to the right music. They enjoy each other. And that's just the way I like it.

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It always makes me laugh a bit when people in the media seem stunned that gender actually matters. You know, that boys will naturally do boy type things and girls will actually like to dress up. Shouldn't we all be the same? Isn't it just the cruel society telling us how we're supposed to act? Here's what I wrote about all of this a while ago:

I used to think that all children were blank slates, with everything, from their gender identities to their personalities, still to be written. By giving them Barbie dolls or trucks I could determine who they would be. Then I actually had kids. When Rebecca was a year and a half old, I was pregnant, sick, and I couldn’t have found my make-up if my life depended on it. My favourite clothes were maternity sweat pants. And yet this little girl, who had no role model for "pretty", was constantly reaching into her closet to get down her one white frilly dress. I couldn’t understand it.

 

My friend Barb had a similar experience. She had three boys, and then along came Annie. Annie didn’t want to play with any of the boys’ toys, even though the house was riddled with them. She wanted her dollhouse. The boys, to be fair, liked the dollhouse, too, but they liked it because of the neat sound effects they could make as they shot the dolls through make-believe cannons.

 

I really think, though, that boys are the ones that usually get the short end of the stick in terms of the gender debate. We who homeschool know that boys and girls aren't the same, and we school accordingly. At school, boys are increasingly told they can't act masculine. Some schools have even banished tag and dodgeball from the playground because it might hurt someone's feelings. So what is a boy to do? Reject school and go play hockey (at least up here in my Great White North). No wonder boys are dropping out of school in alarming rates. Anyway, to see what got me thinking along these ways today, visit here.

Have a great day!

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