Hi everybody! I'm sorry I don't update very often anymore, but that's because I'm usually over at my main blog, To Love, Honor and Vacuum. I update there several times a day, and just try to post homeschooling type stuff here.

Anyway, I don't have anything homeschooling today, but I do have my column for this week, which was on the public school system. I thought you may enjoy it!

Problem Kids, Problem Schools

I have a young friend who is big but gentle. Unfortunately, he shares his 45 minute school bus ride with a particular boy who isn’t as gentle, though luckily he also isn’t as big. He was discussing with his father one day what to do when this boy picked on him. Finally his dad sighed and said, “Son, I think your only choice is to take a swing at him.”

The son appeared shocked. “But at school we’re told never to hit!” The father replied, “Sometimes you have to. And the school will likely suspend you. But then he’ll stop bothering you.”

Was the dad right? I don’t know, but I do know two other dads—and even one teacher—who have recommended the same thing recently! In the schoolyard, desperate measures are increasingly called for.

In this case, the troublemaker had already been suspended multiple times for fighting, to no avail. But no student had ever fought back, and this dad figured that decking him might just teach them a lesson. The philosophy seems straight out of the last century, because today we’re not allowed to think that way.

Then we wonder why our schools are out of control.

With the school’s hands tied, real discipline just doesn’t exist. When we were children, if we were suspended, parents supported the schools. It didn’t matter what you did, it was assumed the school was right.

Today teachers have to document everything they’ve done leading up to a suspension because parents are sure to challenge it. Parents don’t want the responsibility of having to look after their child during that suspension. So they don’t support the teachers.

And all the tools that a school once had to deal with problem kids—corporal punishment, expulsion, cooperation with parents, extra work, singling out the child in the classroom, failing them—have also been eroded as children’s rights have been expanded. The self-esteem philosophy dominating education states that the reason students fail is because they don’t feel good about themselves. So instead of being harsh we’re going to help them feel good! Judges and legislators have removed the ability of schools to punish students or even to hold them accountable for their grades. It’s gone overboard.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that many classrooms, especially in rough neighbourhoods, are comprised primarily with these problem kids. They’re pretty much unteachable, as the steady stream of teachers and substitutes demonstrates.

But what options does the school have?

I once volunteered in a kindergarten classroom where my job was to have the children, six at a time, complete a reading worksheet. When I summoned little Charley (not his real name), he didn’t even acknowledge me. I called him again. No response. So I headed towards him to pick him up. Charley was small for his age, and he would have fit very nicely under one arm. But the teaching assistant stopped me. “We can’t physically force him, so we just let him play. That way he doesn’t disrupt everybody else.” The child was learning at the age of four that if he just put up a fuss, they couldn’t make him do anything.

I asked a young neighbour a few years later whatever happened to Charley. Apparently he only grew worse. In grade 3 he still couldn’t read, but he threw tantrums if you tried to convince him to work. I felt sorry for his fellow classmates who actually wanted to learn.

No wonder children lose hope in school. If you’re surrounded by misbehaving kids that teachers can’t control, how would you feel?

Personally, I think we need a better alternate school system for those children who make life intolerable for others. Of course, in some areas these alternate schools may end up with a higher enrollment than the regular school! But what we’re doing right now isn’t working.

The school system today has no effective way of dealing with problem kids, because discipline has been eroded, authority has been erased, and children’s rights to disrupt everybody else trumps children’s rights to a good education. Something isn’t right. Maybe it’s time for the government to learn something.

Remember to come by To Love, Honor and Vacuum sometime! I have a giveaway going on this week, too!

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Amy over at Heart of the Matter has a great post on why socialization at public schools is ridiculous anyway. Why would we want our kids to be socialized that way?

It got me thinking about how I answer that question. I think maybe I'm being too defensive.

I usually rattle off all the kids do with other kids during the week to show what an active life they have.

But instead maybe I should challenge the basic assumption that socialization at school is actually good! I guess I don't want to embarrass people or cause a ruckus, but really, isn't that the main issue? That we don't want the kids to learn the negative behaviour that's present at schools?

One woman once remarked that she didn't think my kids would learn how to deal with people who were dififcult or stupid. That's why we need school. But kids can learn that later. Why should we subject them to it now? And as an adult, they can learn to treat people with Christlike love, even if they aren't forced to sit next to an idiot every day of their grade 5 life.

Anyway, I like the socialization they're getting at home, and I like the fact that they're not being socialized at school. So next time someone asks me, "What about socialization!?" , I'll reply, "Exactly! That's why we homeschool!", and then wait for the puzzled look to appear.

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There's some debate going on about Obama across the web and whether what he advocates is really best for America.

On the education front, Victor David Hanson said this, first quoting Obama:

“He said schools should do a better job of teaching all students African-American history "because that's part of American history," as well as women's struggle for equality, the history of unions, the role of Hispanics in U.S. and other matters that he suggested aren't given enough attention.”

"I want us to have a broad-based history" taught in schools, he said, even including more on "the Holocaust as well as other issues of oppression" around the world.”

But anyone familiar with the historical illiteracy of today’s college student understands that more of the “oppression” history that Sen. Obama is advocating is precisely the problem, not the solution. Our high school students already know who Harriet Tubman is, but not U.S. Grant or Shiloh. They have been introduced to Crispus Attucks, but not Alexander Hamilton. They know World War II largely as the Japanese internment and Hiroshima (cf. Reverend Wright on that), but have not a clue about the Bulge or Okinawa or the Munich travesty.

In other words, it is precisely this pick-and-choose therapeutic curriculum of "oppression" history presented as a melodrama of winners (white male Christian capitalists) and losers (women, people of color, the working classes) that has ensured an entire generation of historical illiterates, who can’t distinguish between the profound and trivial, or identify basic names, dates, and places to ground even their politically-correct views. They are told to remember and repeat that Hiroshima is bad, but not why or how it occurred, what were the alternatives, and what were the consequences in a war of bad and worse choices.

Instead the sins innate to mankind—war, oppression, slavery, bias, etc.—are nearly always presented as sins unique to the West in general, or to America in particular. We hear always of commission, never of the remediation, always of our terrible past, never of the pretty awful present that goes on outside the United States.

What we need from a healer at this late date is not advocacy for more gripe-history that tries to portion out equal victim status to various competing constituencies under the guise of multicultural brotherhood, but rather tries, in holistic and inclusive fashion, to explain both the noble and tragic history of the United States, an experiment that was and is not perfect, but still very good and preferable to all the alternatives.

Now I'm only an American by fluke of birth (my parents were at Harvard when I was born). Really my whole family is Canadian, and we live in Canada and homeschool in Canada. But my girls know a ton of American history because IT IS IMPORTANT. It is key to understanding the West, to understanding human rights, to understanding liberty and even classic liberalism.

This pick and choose history that so many advocate is not really history at all. It doesn't teach the kids to see things in its context. My kids know the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence and the preamble to the Constitution and the Federalist - Anti-Federalist debate. And they're only 10 and 13! They also know about the Holocaust and women's suffrage and slavery. But they know it in context. If all you teach is oppression, how will kids ever learn how unique America is?

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I just watched a video from Ornament of Grace that reminds us why we homeschool!

Ironically, last week we were studying women's suffrage in our homeschool, and my 10-year-old wrote a research paper on Susan B. Anthony.

In this video, a guy with a clipboard visits an elite private school and gets college prep girls to sign a petition to "end women's suffrage". All but one do. They even chant! It's just unbelievable.

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I find it so frustrating that so many schools won't teach phonics, even though it's been proven to be the most basic way to teach reading. After all, reading is simply deciphering a code, in letters, and that's what phonics is.

Anyway, the education schools don't believe in phonics because it's boring and it could turn kids off. So they try all these other things that don't work. And then, when kids don't read, they turn around and say it's not their fault. Some kids won't ever read.

Even though a century ago everybody who was taught to did, more or less.

Here's a classic quote from an education textbook used in teacher training:

'Saying that we are determined to teach every child to read does not mean that we will teach every child to read....The best we can do ... is ... to ensure that, if not every child lives up to our hopes, there is a minimum of guilt and anguish on the part of teachers, students, and parents. (p.441) Smith, F. (1992). Learning to read: the never-ending debate. Phi Delta Kappan, 74, 432-441.

So don't expect every kid to read! That's ridiculous.

We, who teach at home, know that every child can read, though they will do it on their own developmental schedule. Some read at 4. Some at 8. In the end it doesn't matter much. But they should all learn to decipher the code. Too bad schools can't figure that out. The number of kids I know in school who can't read is just sad.

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I have a dear friend who withdrew her second grade daughter from school this year because the little girl hadn't learned to read, and the school wanted to stick her in the reading group with the first grade teacher. My friend thought this would be devastating to the child's confidence, and decided to teach her herself, since the school had never used phonics.

She's done a good job the last three months, using the Hooked on Phonics program, and I've noticed a big improvement. But my friend's husband believes the child should be in school, and they agreed to have her tested in January to see whether she was at grade level or not.

So my friend received a phone call to say that the little girl was actually worse (yeah, right). The school has big concerns with her homeschooling and wants a meeting with the mom next week. I'm insisting I go with her, because these are the questions I'd like to ask the principal and other teachers:

1. How come when you had this child for three years and a bit (kindergartens plus grade one), and she didn't learn, it was her fault?

2. Now, when her mother has had her for three months, it's her mother's fault. When does it get to be your fault?

3. Why does she read fine in every other situation but school? What does this tell you about school?

4. Why do you expect every child to read at the same level all the time, despite the fact that the children could be separated by a year in age? Why are kids not given room to develop at different ages?

5. Why did this little girl get an A in math when she can't do plus ones in her head and counts on her fingers? What exactly did you teach her?

I think I'll go to this meeting, as will my husband, who's a pediatrician, just so that he she won't be intimidated. But the whole thing makes me sick.

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Bill Bennett, on his radio show this morning, went off on quite a funny rant today on creative writing vs. reading, and the necessity of really knowing how to use words properly.

He just gets so angry at schools--it's quite funny and worth a listen. Very short:

Click here.

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That was a criticism of homeschooling that I heard levelled against our family recently. It wasn't said maliciously; the woman is a good friend and a lovely person. But I think it reflects something that many people think: if you homeschool, how will you learn to deal with people who are annoying, incompetent, lazy, stupid, add whatever adjective you want.

I find this a difficult line of reasoning to address, because it seems so strange to me. Why should we want our children to have to get used to people who are difficult because of character flaws? But even if we're not talking character flaws, but only people who simply have less intellectual capacities, or who are challenged in some way, can actually be more easily accomplished in a church or family setting anyway.

When you're trying to learn in a classroom and someone isn't picking it up quickly, it's aggravating. It becomes difficult to like the person, and an antagonistic relationship is set up because they're slowing you down and causing you to become bored. When you're in a church setting or in the family, they're not hurting you in any way, so it's easier to want to be kind to them and bless them.

I think this idea that we have people who are difficult to get along with all our lives, so our kids may as well get used to it when they're young, is just strange. As adults, there's no need to hang around unpleasant people if we don't want to. We can circumvent them in our jobs, or avoid them in other social settings. In a classroom you can't. You're stuck with them sitting beside you whether you want them to or not. So school really is a unique situation that has a tendency towards very dysfunctional relationships.

My girls are turning out to be very compassionate, and they know several children with learning disabilities (their brother who died had Down's), and they like helping them. I don't think they'll end up with problems at all, and I'm still glad they don't have to put up with a classroom of several rude children just to learn to survive in the "real world". This is the real world, and they're doing just fine.

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What would our grandparents have thought about the public school system? I asked that question in my column today. See what you think:

As the first week of school is upon us, I thought it might be helpful to have an educational “reality check”, and ask an expert from long ago what they think of our educational system. So I called up my grandmother, even those she’s been gone for over 14 years. Here’s what she said.

Well golly! These schools sure are pretty, aren’t they? They’re so big, with so many windows, and all that play equipment, that’s just lovely!

But it seems to me, Sheila, that schools must be for something very different than in my day. We had to sit straight and behave or else we would regret it! I guess today people have decided that the teachers don’t have to be in charge anymore, eh? I didn’t see any teacher punish a child, though I saw many children who needed it, I can tell you! I’m not sure how all those other children were supposed to learn with kids yelling and being rambunctious around them. Maybe I’m missing something.

And just look at how they teach them to read! When I was young we learned phonics. They drilled those rules into our heads and pretty near everyone could read, even those whose parents couldn’t. Unfortunately, by the time my own girls went to school just after the war, schools had switched to that whole language “look-say” approach with those awful Dick and Jane books. I thought the school system would have realized by now that straight phonics works, but it seems they haven’t. All the tutoring services have, though.

Another thing I wonder about: are today’s schools afraid of males? I hardly saw any male teachers at the elementary schools, and very few fathers, especially at some of the schools in poorer areas. Even most of the stories and pictures in the books were of girls! Why, I hear they’re changing that great classic, Winnie The Pooh, which was named after my hometown of Winnipeg, so that Christopher Robin is a girl in the updated edition! And I heard of several schools that have banned playing tag because it’s too competitive. Have boys changed that much since I went to school, or do schools just not understand them anymore?

I also found it strange that there was hardly anything patriotic. I remember sitting in school the day World War I ended, and the party we had! But you don’t celebrate your soldiers, except for one ceremony on November 11. And there’s very little explanation of what is great about Canada and worth defending. My school was filled with immigrants speaking all different languages, but we learned what it meant to be Canadian and we were proud of it. Your textbooks talk more about the good in other cultures than they do about the good in yours.

But then, we also had prayers and faith. You have lessons about character. I hate to seem narrow-minded, dear, but our generation learned character just by reading the classics and having good moral teaching. I’m not sure how you can have “character” classes and expect children to be nice to each other if at the same time you’re teaching kids that there’s no such thing as absolute right and wrong. Seems a little fishy to me.

It also seems to me—and I don’t know how to say this nicely, dear—that children have become, well, stupid. I’m not sure if those funny computer things have anything to do with it, but little attention is being paid to actually learning the English language. Let me give you two vocabulary lists. List 1: aggression, divergent, prestigious, bizarre, cogent, propagate, ambiguous, exonerated. List 2: illimitable, coquetry, impudent, undulation, stalwart, monolith, dissipation, variegated. The first list is for high school seniors today preparing for their SATs in the United States. The second list is from an old textbook of my own father’s for 11-year-olds.

Something else occurs to me. My school was cramped, with plain books with no colour pictures. We had large classrooms with young teachers. But the children I went to school with ended up living through the Great Depression, and many fought heroically in World War II. I wonder, what are you preparing your students for?

And she waved good-bye, and wandered off.

You can sign up to get my column in your inbox every week here!

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One of the critiques of homeschooling that I often hear is that children are only with their mothers. Dads may be home at night, but they don't get to interact with males on a regular basis. They grow up in a female-only society.

Interestingly, though, I think homeschooled kids probably know adult males better than most kids at school. Consider this bit of evidence:

Two trends are converging to lower their representation in K-8 classrooms: More women are stepping up to become principals, and fewer men are becoming teachers.

In Arizona, almost 60 percent of grade school principals and nearly 90 percent of teachers are women. Six years ago, the majority of principals were men. Some schools have no men, meaning kids may not have a male teacher or principal until middle or high school. It’s the same picture nationally.

My kids see other dads on the sports days we have together, or the hockey days in the winter. They are taught by their dad on days when I'm writing (you can find out about my books here). They see my husband's colleagues. They learn that it's natural for men to be part of a children's life.

Partly out of fear of abuse, though, men are being slowly squeezed out in other areas. At least our kids get the men. That matters!

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I've been doing research for my radio show on why people should homeschool, and came across this great article by John Taylor Gatto. He's a great thinker in the unschooling movement, and even though I'm not an unschooler myself, I think his observations of the public school system are downright brilliant. Here's a few samples:

Now, you needn't have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up.

I think we all know how public school can actually cause kids to be immature.

And how and why did mass public schooling start? The answer is not pretty. I'm not talking about the one room schoolhouses run by little 16-year-old girls like Laura Ingalls Wilder or the fictional Anne Shirley, who taught brilliantly, but the industrialized schools of the 20th century. Here's what Gatto says:

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My column today (it appears in 10 papers) was about how we treat sex versus smoking when it comes to teenagers. See what you think!

I was a little nervous about this one because it is controversial, to say the least. My column appears in secular papers, so I'm always trying to present the biblical worldview without coming out and using the Bible. You have to show how the biblical worldview actually makes sense (because God, after all, does make sense!). Anyway, here's what I wrote. Tell me your thoughts,

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Okay, this story has me just stunned. A school in Massachusetts (and it's not the first one) has banned the playing of tag during recess because kids might get hurt and the school sued.

Tag, you're out! Officials at an elementary school south of Boston have banned kids from playing tag, touch football and any other unsupervised chase game during recess for fear they'll get hurt and hold the school liable.

 

"Recess is "a time when accidents can happen," said Willett Elementary School Principal Gaylene Heppe, who approved the ban.

 

While there is no districtwide ban on contact sports during recess, local rules have been cropping up. Several school administrators around Attleboro, a city of about 45,000 residents, took aim at dodgeball a few years ago, saying it was exclusionary and dangerous.

 

Elementary schools in Cheyenne, Wyo., and Spokane, Wash., also recently banned tag during recess. A suburban Charleston, S.C., school outlawed all unsupervised contact sports.

Just what exactly are kids supposed to do to get out their energy, especially boys who really need to run around? They're taking all the games that kids have traditionally played and one by one eliminated them.

I remember when I was in grade 2 playing Kissing Tag. Now I don't think that was a great idea, but if kids tried it today they'd likely be suspended. I wonder how a 6-year-old will feel being told that they can't play a totally innocent game like tag? We're shaming kids into a culture of conformity and not letting them be themselves. I guess that's why we homeschool, eh?

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My column this week (that appears in several newspapers) is about how boys--especially those born in the fall--are often shortchanged in the school system.

Here it is:

            If you’re trying to get pregnant right now, you should probably get a move on. Your window is rapidly closing this year—at least for the sake of your potential sons. If you have a boy, you definitely want that child to be born before July. If they’re born after that, they are far more likely to have trouble at school. The various Ministries of Education don’t advertise this fact, but schools are meant to be populated by girls born between January and June.

            Let me explain what I mean. When our society, in its great wisdom, decided to educate children solely based on their year of birth, they decided that children should be able to read at 6.4, do multiplication at 8.3, and add fractions at 8.5, or roughly thereabouts. But what if your child is 6.4 at a time when other children are often 7.1? Does this matter? It does, especially if your child happens to be a boy.

            I have a friend who had the unfortunate luck to give birth at 11:00 p.m. one fateful December 31. She didn’t want her little boy to have to start school in the assigned year, so she asked to hold him back. She was told she could not, lest she wanted him labeled learning disabled. So she packed him up at 3 ½, and off he toddled onto that school bus.

            A close family friend of theirs has a daughter who is six weeks younger than this little guy. They are reading the same books. When they do math problems, they do them at the same speed. They are completely comparable academically. Yet she is receiving all A’s, and he is receiving B’s and C’s. Why? Because he’s in the wrong grade.

            Any woman who remembers puberty will have no trouble telling you that girls mature faster than boys. This isn’t necessarily a good thing; having hormones run ragged over your emotions at 11 means that things like who sits with whom at lunch get blown way out of proportion, as opposed to worrying about rational things, like where in the world I stashed those leftover Easter bunnies. But girls aren’t just more mature; they also have a leg up in language arts, tending to read and write at a younger age than boys do.

            So if your poor little guy was born in the fall, and he’s thrown in with a bunch of girls who were born in the spring, he’s going to look like an idiot, even if he is absolutely, perfectly, fine.

            Picture a little 5-year-old boy who is active, social, and loves life. He is excited about starting school. But when he gets there, his teacher tells him he has to sit in a circle and listen to a story about the feelings of turtles or badgers or bears. He has to learn what sounds letters make, but he can’t hear any sounds when he looks at the page. Instead, he starts talking to the kids on either side of him. The teacher gets mad. Now the little boy doesn’t want to go to school. He starts getting stomach pains. And because he doesn’t read in first grade, he falls further and further behind, often acting out in frustration. By the time he’s in fourth grade, he’s become sullen. He resents the adults in his life, all of whom make him feel stupid. He never caught up, because he wasn’t ready to start in the first place.

            My husband, a pediatrician, used to see many children in his office for ADD and school problems. Those boys were three times more likely to have been born in October than in February, to choose the highest and the lowest months. If our boys with school problems are congregated among fall babies, then maybe the problem is not with the kids. Maybe it’s that the school system just can’t cope with kids who don’t fit their mold. Not every kid will learn at the school’s pace. All of us have our own internal clocks. Ultimately it’s up to parents to figure our out kids’ timing and work with them so that they do learn. Schools, with so many kids in a classroom, aren’t always up to the task.

It's so odd, isn't it, how the school system expects all kids to learn at the same age? Not only that, but they expect all kids to learn at the same pace in each subject.

I don't know about all you other homeschoolers, but my kids are in different grade levels for different subjects. They're moving at their own pace.

I just feel really sorry for parents of December babies who fail to learn, and then fall further and further behind while everyone labels them "problem kids". Maybe the problem is with the school system, not the kid.

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Well, here's another reason many more parents will be homeschooling soon in British Columbia.

At the Proud to be Canadian blog, Joel notes this story:

BC’s Province newspaper, reports that parents in BC may not be allowed to opt their children out of school programmes promoting the homosexual lifestyle under the rubric of “respecting diversity”.

 

[...] As a result of a Human Rights Commission case brought by two homosexual men, a “married” gay couple called Murray and Peter Corren, the two men have been granted an extraordinary say in all school curricula from kindergarten to grade 12 in British Columbia schools. Their role is to ensure that all courses are inclusive and gay-friendly.

 

I wrote my response in the form of a column that I think will go out to papers next week. My column Reality Check has been criticizing schools nonstop for about three weeks, so the one I send in this week better not be about schools, or I'll be accused of crying wolf. But this one (here in draft form) will go out soon. Let me know what you think or if you think it can be improved. I'm already a little over word count, so don't tell me to add anything!!!! Thanks!

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I have two Master's degrees from Queen's University, one of the top-rated universities in Canada. One's in Sociology; the other is in Public Administration. My husband is a pediatrician. Between us, we have 17 years of post-secondary education.

And I'm not sure it was worth it. My husband's was, certainly. The only route to becoming a physician is through university training, and he made good use of it.

But mine? I was indoctrinated with left-wing thought, and was never introduced to any conservative thinkers who could have challenged the party-line, even in a relatively conservative discipline like Public Administration. I was a darling of the sociology department, winning several awards, and even becoming a teaching assistant. But I knew nothing about how the world works. Most of what I have learned on an intellectual plane I have learned since graduating.

And so it was with interest that I read this article about Richard Vedder, an economist whose main field of study is whether or not higher education is worth the money. Increasingly, he has decided that it is not. And government subsidies and inflows of capital have simply caused tuition costs to skyrocket, not increased accessibility of post-secondary education to the poorer members of our society.

I have often wondered what I will do with my own girls. I appreciated university for several things, especially the social aspect. Queen's Christian Fellowship was amazing, and I made life-long friends (including my husband!). To be around people who enjoyed intellectual debate was so refreshing for me. But unless the kids want to do sciences, I don't think a liberal arts education is worth it. It's not an education anymore. They don't want you to think. They just want you to spout.

I remember an essay I wrote in third year university. I thought long and hard, and wrote about how it is necessary to have some over-arching idea that unified society in order to keep that society going. I said that was what society had benefited from when it was mostly Christian, and why society would slowly fall apart now. It was well-referenced, well-written, and well-argued. It was original (though such a thought should have been obvious to any sociologist). I received a C.

From then on I simply spouted what the professor said, put no thought into anything, and only used the textbooks, no other research. I finished the year with an 86.

What will my girls do? I don't know. We have eight years to watch the course of higher education before we have to make a decision. But watching we will be. And worrying, too.

Cross-posted to www.sheilawraygregoire.com.

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I have two Master's degrees--one in Sociology and one in Public Administration. My husband is a doctor. Between us, we have 17 years of university education.

And I'm really not sure mine was worth it. Keith's arguably was. You had to go to university to become a doctor. Mine? It taught me to write better. I met some great friends there (including my husband). But that's about it. The quality of my education, and I went to the top-rated university in Canada, was horrible. I have learned more since graduating.

I was indoctrinated into left-wing thinking galore. I read books upon by books  by people who were writing about people who were writing about Marx, or Gramsci, or Durkheim, but I never actually read Marx or Gramsci or Durkheim. We didn't read the originals. We just read thinkers on the originals.

I never read anything remotely conservative, showing a different viewpoint. I was only ever presented the postmodern, leftist view on things. Even in my public administration course.

So I read with interest this article about Richard Vedder, whose big area of scholarship is whether or not higher education is actually worth it. He looks at spiralling costs for a university education, and then measures whether you get out of it what you put in. And the answer, increasingly, is no. He also looks at how government subsidies and inflows of capital have resulted in making university even less accessible to the poorest of our citizens, not more so.

This is something that I've thought a great deal about. I don't believe a liberal arts education is worth anything at this point. If my kids wanted to go into science, that would be different (and, thank goodness, right now they do). I still think the social aspect of university is key. I met some amazing people at the Christian Fellowship group at Queen's. And to finally be around people who were able and eager to discuss intellectual things was a revelation. But the rest of it? It was terrible.

We're planning on having our daughters complete the basics of a university education by the time they're finished high school anyway, but what to do after that? I don't know. It will be interesting to see what's going on in higher education in eight years, when Rebecca reaches that stage. For now we're just watching. And worrying.

Cross-posted to www.sheilawraygregoire.com.

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Every now and then you see these stories and you just have to shake your head. Here's this story out of Milwaukee of a survey that was given to students on the "Day of Silence" organized by the Lesbian & Gay groups in high schools:

Parents are angry and school leaders are promising action in response to a "Heterosexual Questionnaire," approved by two teachers, that asked students questions such as: "If you have never slept with someone of your same gender, then how do you know you wouldn't prefer it?"

What I really love about the story, though, is this little tidbit:

Both Principal Duane Woelfel and Patty Ruth, president of the Port Washington-Saukville School Board, said the survey was inappropriate and that proper authorization was not given before it was brought into classrooms.

Proper authorization wasn't given? Two teachers okayed it. In other words, you can't even trust the teachers anymore.

Then there's this from Michelle Malkin, about a California court decision saying that it's okay to pressure students to imitate and practise Islam in seventh-grade classrooms:

In a recent federal decision that got surprisingly little press, even from conservative talk radio, California's 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled it's OK to put public-school kids through Muslim role-playing exercises, including:

 

Reciting aloud Muslim prayers that begin with "In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful . . . ."

 

Memorizing the Muslim profession of faith: "Allah is the only true God and Muhammad is his messenger."

 

Chanting "Praise be to Allah" in response to teacher prompts.

 

Professing as "true" the Muslim belief that "The Holy Quran is God's word."

 

Giving up candy and TV to demonstrate Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting.

 

Designing prayer rugs, taking an Arabic name and essentially "becoming a Muslim" for two full weeks.

I asked my 11-year-old daughter what she would do if she were in school and they asked her to say that the Qur'an is the word of God and Muhammad is the last messenger. She said she would sit down and not say anything. It's moments like that that make a parent proud!

The article goes on to say that Christianity is only covered for two days, and that time is taken up going over how Christians have persecuted others in their history. No attention is paid to modern jihad in the Islam section.

We are homeschooling our children to understand the history of Israel, the "dhimmitude" of Christians and Jews in Muslim lands, the history of Byzantium and the origins of the problems in Eastern Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and all the other conquests that Islam perpetrated over the centuries, along with the evils done in the name of Christ. But it will be balanced. And they will see that while the church has apologized for the Inquisition, Islam is still doing the same thing.

The problem is public school students are not being taught this. We are losing our civilization and no one cares. I think I'll go take a bath and eat chocolate. At least then I'll feel better.

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We often talk about homeschooling because it helps them academically, or it provides a chance to ensure that they understand the Christian worldview, or it grounds them spiritually.

But how about this reason? They just simply like life better.

Interesting article in Real Clear Politics today about school choice. What he's saying is that kids with school choice tend not to engage in such destructive behaviour, such as substance abuse or suicide. School, it seems, is just not healthy. Even though death rates from communicable diseases are going down, the death rate among adolescents has remained stable because of these types of behaviour. The author recounts:

I have a cousin who sniffed glue, developed brain-damage, and later stabbed his room-mate to death. A brilliant former student of mine in elementary school went on to a middle school she hated where she dropped out and hung out with drug addicts who raped her and murdered a homeless person. Prior to the worst of it her mother, a good person, hand-cuffed her to her bed at night in a desperate attempt to keep her from running to these people. Another former student of mine was terrified of leaving the safe school that I had created, up through middle school this time; I later heard that he had attempted suicide and was institutionalized.

What the author goes on to say is that in order to change this, we need schools with clear moral values (and he's a secularist!). Public schools can't provide this. That's why we need school choice.

He concludes with this:

It is possible to create safer, better, happier, healthier, schools, and many parents would send their children to such schools if they had the option. An open education market would create an innovation dynamic that would allow for steady improvements in the school communities in which young people spent most of their waking hours. [6] Had we followed Milton Friedman's advice in 1955, millions of young people would not have died, and millions more would be healthier and better off today. Parents, choosing among educational entrepreneurs, could solve the problem of adolescent health far more quickly and more effectively than can academics trying to guide public policy.

As I was contemplating this, I think back to the reasons that we homeschool. A few nights ago I was plagued by nightmares again of my high school days, and the friends and boyfriends who took up so much of my waking hours, and caused so much heartache. I don't want that for my kids, and they can avoid so much of it by being home and having friends that they want, rather than the ones thrust upon them in the school system.

My kids are so happy. Surely being home is a big part of this. So once again, I'm sure we made the right decision.

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Another great article by Thomas Sowell on education here:

Some years ago, when I looked at the math textbooks that my nieces in Harlem were using, I discovered that they were being taught in the 11th grade what I had been taught in the 9th grade. Even if they were the best students around, they would still be two years behind -- with their chances in life correspondingly reduced.

 

New York City has two kinds of high school diplomas -- its own locally recognized diploma, that is not recognized by the state or by many colleges, and the state's Regents' diploma for high school graduates who have scored above a given level on the Regents' exam.

 

The Regents diploma is for students who are serious about going on to a good college. Only 9 percent of black students and 10 percent of Latino students receive Regents diplomas.

 

That a Southern city's school children would now top the list of big city test scores may be due to the fact that the South has not jumped on the bandwagon of the latest fads in education to the same extent as avant garde places like New York City, where spending per pupil is about 50 percent above the national average.

What I think is so interesting, too, is the acknowledgement that money is not correlated with educational achievement. We don't need to spend a lot of money; we need to have high expectations and high standards. What provides that better than homeschooling? Maybe eventually the public school system will listen, rather than spending money and getting very little in return.

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