View from the Loft

Hell No!

In light of the recent court decision regarding a public school's prayer banner that had been hanging in the gym illegally since the 1960s, my son's experience with the imposition of religion--specifically Christianity--in his school came to mind.

In objecting to the posters put up by an after-school bible club, he did not experience vilification, threats of assault and even death, ostracism, and elected officials spewing vitriol, as did Jessica Ahlquist, who acted as plaintiff in the lawsuit. (See here, here, here, and here, just for starters--there's much more.)

Jessica Ahlquist ran into trouble from day one. And the school administration was dishonest, claiming that the banner (which began with the words "Our heavenly father" and ended with "Amen") was not a prayer, just a "tradition." This fooled no one, certainly not people speaking at a public meeting about the issue last February. Speakers invoked god and insulted atheists openly.

Here's what happened in my son's case: the Hell No! club hung posters in the hallways featuring bible quotes, quotes such as "only a fool does not believe in God," and threats of eternal punishment for nonbelievers. Our son felt that these were inappropriate in a public school and wrote letters to the principal, superintendent, and school board. While I'm sure that some people thought we put him up to this, we did not. Ethan asked me to check the letter for spelling and formatting, which I did. I had no other input.

A few days later he was called to the principal's office. The school's attorney had been informed of the situation, and some of the school board members contacted a local college to see how such matters were handled there. The attorney  considered that featuring a cross on posters advertising a bible club was legal, but that posters suggesting superiority of a particular religion and containing arguably harrassing statements had to come down. About half the posters were removed.

As Ethan reminded me in an e-mail, "A few people were irritated about the signs coming down, but once I exposed myself as the 'squeaky wheel,' no one was really mean about it and some people congratulated me." I recall running into the superintendent and a few of the board members at a restaurant shortly after this happened and being complimented on our son's letter.

But as my husband pointed out, the religionists have gotten much uglier in the past couple of decades, so who knows what might have happened to him if the events that transpired then were to happen today? Whether it's the political clout of the rabid religious right or fears about a secularist minority that's becoming more vocal and less inclined to stay closeted that's causing such vile behaviors as Ms. Ahlquist has had to suffer, the godbotherers have gotten nastier and nastier.

There is a reason not to tolerate such expression of religion in a public school: as the courts have decided again and again, it violates the separation of church and state. Yes, I remember singing a little song in first grade that started with "Oh, the Lord's been good to me," but that doesn't mean it was right, and subsequently such religious artifacts in state-funded schools were ruled illegal. As they should be. The majority of Americans may believe in god, and particularly a Christian god, but the Constitution exists to protect the rights of the minority.

We were very proud of our son for taking this action, as I assume Jessica's parents are of her. It isn't easy to stand for what's right when the majority of your community is against you--even without name-calling and death threats.

To all those religious believers and promoters who tell the rest of us to shut up, I can only say, "Hell, no!"

 

Most Americans learn science outside the classroom

The latest issue of American Scientist includes a fascinating article on the importance of nonschool science experiences for achieving scientific literacy among both children and adults (non-members of Sigma Xi, the research society that sponsors the magazine, will be able to read only the abstract, alas).

The authors, John H. Falk and Lynn D. Dierking, point out that it's a deeply held, mostly unquestioned assumption that school learning is, and should be, the primary vehicle for science education:

The "school-first" paradigm is so pervasive that few scientists, educators or policy makers question it. This despite two important facts: average Americans spend less than 5 per cent of their life in classrooms, and an ever-growing body of evidence demonstrates that most science is learned outside of school.

This body of evidence includes international assessments of adult science literacy:

. . . for more than twenty years, U.S. adults have consistently outperformed their international counterparts on science literacy measures, including adults from South Korea and Japan, as well as Western European countries such as Germany and the United Kingdom. If schooling is the primary causative factor affecting how well the public understands science, how do we explain these findings? 

Indeed, how do we?

We can't.

It isn't that science education is all that great in our public schools, particularly in elementary schools, where studies show that very, very little time in the classroom is spent on science. But interestingly enough, it's just when more class time is devoted to science that childrens's scores on international tests drop compared to their peers in other countries. U.S. elementary school kids do well on the tests despite the lack of time given over to science in the classroom, while older students do poorly compared to children in other nations.

So it appears that it's time to give up the illusion that school is where science learning takes place. As any homeschooler can tell you, though, the assumption that school is the primary locus of learning (of any kind) is one that most people, including policy makers, are loath to relinquish.

Falk and Dierking point out that children benefit from out-of-school science experiences, such as trips to zoos, aquariums, museums, and national parks, and exposure to educational television and radio. They quote the Harvard Family Research Project:

The dominant assumption behind behind much current educational policy and practice is that school is the only place where children learn. This assumption is wrong. Forty years of steadily accumulating research shows that out-of-school, or "complementary learning" opportunities are major predictors of children's development, learning, and educational achievement. The research also indicates that economically and otherwise disadvantaged children are less likely than their more-advantaged peers to have access to these opportunities. This inequity substantially undermines their learning and chances for school success.

But school success isn't the only thing undermined by inequity of opportunity. Life success may also be at risk, and certainly life enrichment is diminished when both children and adults are denied such opportunties.

For adults, the Internet provides an enormous amount of information to those looking for it. An example most of us may be familiar with is the search for information about a particular disease or health problem. It's easy to be curious about news stories involving science (tsunamis, oil spills, etc.) and to dig for information beyond the headlines.  Adults also may have hobbies such as astronomy, raising fish, gardening, making model rockets, and so on that involve acquiring scientific and technical knowledge.

Those of us who have long questioned the efficacy of many of this country's educational policies will not be surprised at Falk and Dierking's conclusions. Somewhere recently I also read that Americans love history--they just don't love it as it's taught in schools. Give them Ken Burns's series on the the Civil War, though, and they watch enthusiastically.

There's something wrong with the way we educate our children in our public schools. There's something wrong in clinging to the notion that school is the primary place for learning--clinging to the extent that we are probably not appropriating funds efficiently. There's something wrong when a college student is heard to say (as one of my students once said), "After I graduate I'll never have to learn anything again!"

Learning is natural for humans, because curiosity is natural. When we can freely choose to learn, when we learn something because it's fun or because we want to or because it's useful to us, then learning is far from an onerous task. It's way past time that we gave up the absurd notion that school is the only, or even the best, place to learn.

Register homeschooled kids? What's the agenda?

A bill sponsored by Michigan Democratic state representatives Joan Bauer (Lansing), Mark Meadows (East Lansing), and Mike Simpson (Liberty Township) would require parents to register their homeschooled children with the local school district and provide the parent's or guardian's name and address.

Sound innocuous? Maybe. But when seemingly harmless legislation is proposed, especially that which is completely unnecessary, it's wise to look for an agenda on the part of sponsors and supporters.

Michigan and its school districts have managed to function just fine without requiring homeschooled children to be registered, but suddenly, we are to believe that such legislation would "address questions of truancy" and that it is critical to our knowing, in Rep. Bauer's words, "where and if our children are being educated."

Beats me how registering homeschooled children would clear up questions about truancy. Just how would that work? A child who is truant from school is one who is registered at, and attending, a school; his or her continued, unexplained absence would point to truancy. It seems to me that registering homeschooled children would just muddy the waters here, as they'd appear on school rolls without actually ever attending.

The more revealing comment is Rep. Bauer's: "where and if our children are being educated [emphasis mine]." "If"?

How would merely registering a child with the district give any information about whether that child is "being educated"? Well, it wouldn't, of course. And that points to the real purpose of this legislation: to establish a record of homeschooled children that will then allow the next slide down the slippery slope of more and more regulation of homeschooling. The real agenda is given away in that casual (unguarded) remark.

No wonder homeschooling parents turned out to protest in Lansing. They see this bill for what it is.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, there's a persistent belief that homeschooling is usually inferior to public education. Nothing could be further from the truth. There's also a horror out there of children unrestrained by the regimentation of school: witness this opinion piece by Jack Lessenberry, in which he says that this bill is necessary:

For one thing, if we don’t know who is home schooling their kids, how can we know who is teaching their kids at home – and who are simply letting their kids run wild?

Apart from some terrible writing ("if we don't know who's teaching their kids at home, how can we know who's teaching their kids at home?"), there's an assumption here that needs to be addressed. That assumption is that numbers of homeschooling parents are shirking their duties and, instead of teaching their children, are just letting them turn into little Lord of the Flies wannabes. There's also the implication that the real purpose of registering homeschooled kids is so that homeschooling parents can be spied upon to ensure that the children are being educated instead of just being allowed to be little savages. That's precisely what homeschooling parents immediately sniffed out in this supposedly innocuous bill.

Lessenberry goes on to call for greater regulation of homeschooling:

Actually, this bill doesn’t go far enough. We need a strong package of bills firmly regulating home schooling. They should prescribe a curriculum and require home schoolers to prove they are qualified to teach. We owe it to our kids and ourselves.

I believe that a bill establishing registration of homeschooled children is the first step toward exactly that kind of regulation. Once you know where they are, and once you pass laws regulating homeschooling as to curriculum and whether or not parents are qualified to teach, it's a simple matter to hunt down families and force their compliance.

There may also be a motivation for the individual school district to add students to its rolls. Whenever schools in my area experience a drop in student enrollment, the schools always talk about this in terms of loss of federal funds to the district. So, in the monetary crunch the state of Michigan is currently experiencing, getting all those homeschooled kids into the classroom may be seen as a plus. This doesn't actually make sense to me, as more kids means more teachers, classrooms, equipment, buses, and so on, but since schools regularly mourn the loss of students as a loss of federal dollars, I can only speculate that such might be the case.

Whatever the motivation, it certainly isn't concern for children and families and their needs. Some variation on this comment by Lessenberry is often heard:

More and more, we are evolving into a place where two kids the same age have wildly different educational experiences.

That’s a prescription for eventually losing our identity as a people and a nation. And if that doesn’t scare you more than internet porn, you clearly need more education.            

Actually, it doesn't scare me. There's enough cultural sharing through mass media alone to make that a silly bugaboo. Americans also share a government and a history, a popular culture, and so on. Beyond that, most homeschooled children learn just what publicly schooled children learn--only more of it, and in many cases, with the kind of in-depth treatment and critical thought that public schools just don't prioritize in this standardized-test-driven era. But that fear of "losing our identity" is often echoed by other critics of homeschooling. I once visited a blog on which the author had posted a tirade against homeschooling that declared homeschooling parents to be traitors! She was quite serious, claiming that to homeschool a child was to defy the state. If so--more of this, please.

I also think that people invested in public education and employed in public education fear for the future of that institution. Homeschooling becomes more attractive as public education becomes less effective. Perhaps some see public education as able to continue only if parents are forced to place their kids in public schools. That's pretty sad. A better solution would be to revitalize public education, but alas--we don't have too many thinkers outside of the box when it comes to creative ways to do so.

Finally, let's not forget that the public schools are all about providing what the corporate culture demands. For all the spouting off about how we need highly educated citizens in this technological age, blah blah blah, in fact most of the jobs that are being created are in the service sector, mostly having to do with serving food and drink. For that you need people who will do what they're told without fuss and without suggesting a better way to do it; otherwise, it's too difficult to standardize menus and foods and so on. Not rocking the boat is much more important at most places of work than coming up with creative solutions or suggesting changes. Homeschooling is not efficient at providing what late capitalism/high consumerism demands, namely, an unthinking subjection of the self to market forces and advertising. I don't say it doesn't, given American culture, produce workers who fulfill corporate needs, only that homeschooling isn't nearly as efficient at doing so.

For all these reasons, there are a lot of people out there who want to make homeschooling difficult and fraught with regulation, red tape, prescriptions, and proscriptions, in order to discourage it or make it nearly impossible. Registering homeschooled children can have no other purpose than to gradually introduce such a process a bit at a time. It's just the first step in eventually taking away the right of parents to educate their children at home.

Michigan education reforms: bad for kids

My local newspaper editorialized recently that lowering the state's compulsory age of education to five, mandating all-day kindergarten, and raising the dropout age to 18 would all lead to a brighter economic future for kids and the state of Michigan both.

My reaction to this was summed up neatly by a response from Detroit Free Press reader Mindy Nathan:

Families in Michigan and everywhere else should have educational choices available to them based on their families' and their children's needs, values, hopes and dreams. When did education and learning become about marketability and a brighter economic future? Perhaps when it stopped being about children and their healthy intellectual, social and emotional development. Perhaps when schools became the sites of a corporate agenda that does not view children, especially 5-year-olds, as people with free will and free spirits.

While she was responding specifically to the call for mandatory all-day kindergarten, we can all recognize the appeal to marketiblity and economic success in every one of the proposed "reforms." Along with a "brighter economic future," promised benefits include a reduced dropout rate, fewer people ending up in prison, and fewer people relying on government services.

I call bullshit.

Let's just take a look at lowering the compulsory age of education to five years. First, not all five-year-olds are ready for half-day kindergarten, let alone all-day kindergarten. My daughter's friend reports helping out in her child's class and seeing one little girl crying the entire time she was there. She reported it to a room aide and was told glibly, "Oh, she does that every day. She misses her mom."

How can that be good for a child? How can it lead to an enthusiasm for school that will keep her in school until the state decides she can leave? If a child is ready for school, fine, but if not, it's difficult to argue that forcing a child to be miserable six hours or more a day is beneficial. Life does not begin with adulthood; childhood is not just a preparation for adulthood. Childhood should be a time of satisfaction and happiness just like any stage of life. It is life itself, not "getting ready" for life. This is often completely discounted, if not forgotten entirely.

Second, where is it written that school, and only school, provides learning experiences for children? Or, for that matter, that "learning experiences" are the only things that matter? Children need imaginative play, time for creativity, enough emotional security to venture out into broader experiences, and so on. It's way past time that the state and the entire educational apparatus looked beyond the narrow strip of utilitarian highway we call "a brighter economic future" and started looking at the entirety of a child's existence, including her present circumstances. Rationalizing every educational decision in terms of some possible future benefit is cynical and materialistic if it does not allow for individual differences in present circumstances, readiness, personality, needs, and the like.

All-day kindergarten is similarly something that many children are simply not ready for. That's a long time away from home every day. The idea, again, is to spend longer hours getting a jump on academics, a goal I find questionable. If a family is comfortable with it, then fine--go for it. But not all kids are.

As for raising the dropout age to 18, it's hard for me to see how this is going to be a real boon. Yes, dropouts have higher rates of unemployment, crime, etc. But if a kid is sitting in school until age 18 and resenting every moment of it, getting nothing out of it, how is that a good thing? If our educational system is already failing these kids so badly, how is forcing them to endure more of it going to be of benefit? If they've experienced only frustration, boredom, anger, and resentment at having to be in school, are two more years of those emotions really going to result in improvement and prevent all those evils statistics tells us dropouts are more likely to incur?

Particularly under the mind-numbing rigors of No Child Left Behind, with its rote learning and regurgitation of same on standardized tests, It's hard to see how an extra couple of years are going to make a difference. I foresee a lot of resistance and a problem with enforcement if this "reform" should pass.

There are reasons for kids leaving the school system before graduation. They're not just stupid people who can't see what's good for them. If we were honest, we'd acknowledge that school, for many kids, is a pointless, boring exercise, that it feels like a prison (and truly, schools are tending that way more and more), and that it's not going to lead to improvements in their lives.

Something I'm not reading about anywhere is a challenge to the notion that there are numerous high-tech jobs out there just waiting to be filled by educated people, if only we could produce enough of them.

Is that true? Isn't it true that we're seeing increasing unemployment, much of it due to outsourcing of technical jobs, as well as to companies' cost-cutting measures in hiring immigrants with work visas? Is every student capable or desirous of attending college? Isn't it true that for many, hands-on work is what will guarantee a job? It's pretty hard to outsource engine repair, for example.

I like the idea of Britisher Tony Howell, who thinks that kids should be able to leave school at age 14 in order to receive other kinds of training, particularly in apprenticeship-type settings. Naturally, his proposal netted the usual responses about how children who stay in school earn more money, are more successful (whatever that means), etc.

This is a knee-jerk reaction that comes from looking at statistics and drawing doubtful conclusions. Yes, the statistics show that those who stay in school do better in various ways, but it's simplistic to think that merely being a warm body in a classroom seat automatically leads to success. Those who don't drop out have some motivation for staying, whether it comes from their parents, from social pressure, or from a desire to succeed at school. Those who drop out have no such motivation, and forcing them to stay won't magically imbue them with such. What it will do is create a lot of angry, resentful, frustrated people who would rather be doing something else.

I haven't even mentioned the financial aspects of expanding schooling in the ways various proposals have suggested; how Michigan in its present economic state could possibly fund such reforms is beyond me. I'm more concerned with the effects on kids, and, to some extent, the effect on public education itself and our perceptions of what education is and what it can and can't do. Public education as it is currently constituted is not a panacea for what ails us. More likely, it's part of the problem--but that's a subject for a different post.

"Judgment Day"

Two nights ago Jim and I watched Nova's (that's on PBS) program "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial," a show about the court case in Dover, Pennsylvania that followed the 2004 decision of Dover's school board to require mention of ID as a possible alternative to the theory of evolution.

It's quite frightening to me to see religious fundamentalist attempts to discredit science and to argue that their religious myths should be treated as scientific theory. It has often been noted that without evolution, the biological sciences simply don't make sense. I don't know a lot about evolutionary theory, but I know enough to think it an elegant, beautiful framework for understanding the differentiation of species and the unfolding of all the diversity of life on this planet. So many people who say "I don't believe in evolution" really have no clue about Darwin's work--or about science, or even the basis of scientific thought and the scientific method.

Anyway, the crux of the Dover issue can be briefly summed up this way:

Dover's lawyers tried to argue that ID is science and, therefore, that teaching it does not violate the principle of the separation of church and state in the Establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution. At the end of the trial, Judge John Jones issued a 139-page verdict supporting the teaching of evolution and characterizing intelligent design as a religious idea with no place in the science classroom. It was a landmark decision, all the more so because Judge Jones was appointed by President Bush and nominated by Republican Senator Rick Santorum.

What was fascinating to me was the argument in court of just what constitutes science. What it comes down to is that scientific inquiry requires a testable hypothesis. Those who argue that life on earth was designed by an intelligent agent simply do not have a testable hypothesis: how can you test such a claim? Evolution is a theory that poses testable hypotheses, and over and over again evolutionary theory has met these tests.

Another aspect of arguments involving evolution is the misunderstanding of the word "theory" as used in scientific fields. People behave as if "theory" means "wild-assed guess" (WAG) or a hunch on the part of a scientist or some other such thing more approaching a whim than what scientists mean by the word. Thus people say, "Well, it's only a theory, it's not a fact." True, but "theory" doesn't mean "guess." From Wikipedia:

In science, a theory is a mathematical or logical explanation, or a testable model of the manner of interaction of a set of natural phenomena, capable of predicting future occurrences or observations of the same kind, and capable of being tested through experiment or otherwise falsified through empirical observation. It follows from this that for scientists "theory" and "fact" do not necessarily stand in opposition.

Obviously, this is much more rigorous than "conjecture" or "speculation." But usually when people say dismissively "it's just a theory," they're assuming that a theory is nothing more than a conjecture, of which one is as good as another.

Intelligent Design does not actually provide a rival theory for the origin of species and the changes that take place over time within species. There is no coherent framework. Rather, when faced with challenges (such as its favorite bugaboo, "irreducible complexity"), it simply throws up its hands and says there is no explanation other than an intelligent designer. This is akin to, if not actually the same as, superstition. It is certainly not conducive to exploration, to the whys and hows a scientist will typically probe when confronted by a puzzle.

And what, really, is an Intelligent Designer if not God? There's just no getting around the idea that Intelligent Design is creationism by another name. The convolutions and contortions the ID-ers go through to try to look scientific would be laughable if they weren't so dangerous. Yes, dangerous, because the ID-ers are out to subvert science and science education. They've received lots of help from the notoriously anti-science Bush administration and the religious fundamentalists who read the Bible literally and argue that their view of how life began is every bit as valid as evolutionary theory.

What happens when people take the Bible literally is that they end up with ridiculous claims about how the earth is only 10,000 years old or that kangaroos originated in the Middle East. One has to reject all of what science has shown about geology and biology in order to believe such nonsense.

Millions of people have no trouble being both religious and scientific. To teach religious belief as if it were science is where the trouble begins. The scientists were so compelling in the Dover case that even a judge appointed by George W. Bush could not see his way clear to ruling other than as he did, in favor of evolution and against the idea that ID is science.  (For his trouble he received death threats against himself and his family, and federal protection had to be called in. Sadly, this doesn't surprise me.)

Unfortunately, we probably haven't seen the last of such court cases. Those who want to force their religious beliefs on the rest of us will no doubt continue to press on. Bizarre though it is to those of us who consider ourselves rationalists, such people will continue to insist that their belief in Biblical inerrancy ranks right up there with rigorous, testable scientific hypotheses and theories. That's fine and dandy--as long as they don't seek to impose their beliefs on the rest of us while arguing that Bible stories are science.

Autodidacts

A recent post on my daughter's blog got me to thinking about our family's tendency to teach ourselves what we need or want to know.

We're a curious bunch. Our home has always been cluttered with books and magazines. My parents had a set of World Book encyclopedias when I was a kid, and Jim and I bought a set of Encyclopedia Britannica for our kids. The Internet has made such things unnecessary: a little Googling or a visit to Wikipedia yields quick answers to most questions. But I remember hours spent just browsing the encyclopedia, even the dictionary, for the sheer fun of learning something new and, sometimes, unusual. When our kids were growing up, the library was nearby and we paid regular visits. Questions were often met with the exhortation "Look it up."

Our daughter once returned from a friend's house and said, in a horrified tone, "They have only two books--a dictionary and a rhyming dictionary!" She couldn't get over this. I know how she felt--I once gave my students an assignment involving newspapers and/or magazines and was told by more than one student, "But we don't get any newspapers or magazines at our house!" I suspect that ignorance of what's going on in the world is pretty widespread in America, which would partially account for the sorry state of our (former) republic.

Curiosity is a normal human trait, but public schooling seems designed to all but erase it. Of course I'm aware that poverty and the need to put all energies into survival can equally drive away curiosity, but for most Americans, I think institutionalized education has to bear much of the blame for the death of curiosity. Analysis and critical thought, deep exploration of a topic, following a tangential but interesting by-way--all these things are sacrificed in Teaching to the Test. But even before the emphasis on standardized testing, the lockstep approach was firmly entrenched and individual pursuits discouraged.

In our family, though, self-teaching was, and is, a natural behavior. When school became too oppressive and ineffective for my son, it wasn't that much of a challenge to home-school him through his final year of school, because there was nothing odd about discovering things on his own anyway. When I was a grad student at the University of Michigan, I had to pass two language exams to continue in the PhD program, one a basic proficiency test and the other an advanced proficiency test. I'd taken German as an undergrad, but that was the only foreign language I'd learned. So over the summer I taught myself French, enough to pass the basic proficiency test. My son taught himself chemistry in order to take the college science classes he wanted. My daughter has been educating herself in economics and alternative medicine. As for my husband, his job is a daily educational experience: as a research scientist, he is constantly learning and applying what he learns in creative ways. Back in college, he taught himself trigonometry in order to take a physics class.

And me? Most of my learning these days is quite practical. I've taught myself a lot about the food supply in the US, about nutrition, baking bread, getting away from processed foods, growing vegetables, preserving what we harvest, and locating and buying locally grown organic beans and grains, grass-fed beef and free-range chickens. (The Internet is a great help in all of this, needless to say.) I've also learned about Peak Oil and climate change, and I continue to absorb more on these issues that will have a profound impact on all of us.

I expect to be curious and to keep learning until I die or suffer dementia. What I cannot understand is why all human beings able to live beyond the subsistence level don't share this drive to learn. Perhaps it's because learning something new can threaten one's world view, one's comfortable, automatic way of being in and seeing the world. Perhaps it's because some of what is learned is not pretty and causes us discomfort or downright pain.  Or, learning some new thing might cause a whole edifice of previously held belief to collapse, or at least lead to questioning what was once unassailable. And maybe most people think of school when they think of learning, and school wasn't any fun at all.

But learning definitely is fun. And satisfying. We humans are born to learn. All little kids ask "Why?" to the point it can drive a parent crazy. They have boundless curiosity, and that's to be encouraged. It's worse than unfortunate that our current public school system is designed to exterminate that natural curiosity. The effects can be seen everywhere, from the mindless garbage on our television sets to the dim bulbs who sit in Congress. We human beings, with our big brains, settle for so little, feeling empty but not understanding why, not recognizing our relationship to the natural world, not exploiting our own inborn capacities, not challenging ourselves, not opening ourselves up to the great questions and uncertainties. We deserve better, and we should demand it. But we can't do that if we turn our backs on learning itself and ignore our own natural curiosity. We have to have some appreciation of our own inherent abilities and potential in order to recognize that we're given the most pitiful of scraps, fooled into believing that Things, more and more Things, will satisfy us. And most Americans don't seem to understand how they've been conned.

We don't need "experts" like this

Spare me from the ideas of "experts," oh please spare me:

Helping your child perform better in school could be as easy as installing a blue light in their room or encouraging them to chew more gum, according to a new book.

[snip]

Lawlis also suggests children try alternate nostril breathing — breathing out one nostril then the other. The technique, he says, floods the brain with oxygen, which can improve test scores.

Alternate nostril breathing: it's the new fish oil.

And we all know that improving test scores is of utmost importance.

"What we discovered is that if you breathe through the mouth, you really lose I.Q. points," Lawlis said. "You need to really breathe through the nose and create that kind of metabolism that makes the most sense to the rest of the body as well as to the brain. Chewing helps that."

Okay, so all those jokes about mouth-breathers are right ... Better cure little Jill's bad sinuses, eh?

The saddest thing of all is that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of parents will buy this book--which I'm not mentioning by name here--in the hopes of raising their kids' IQs and improving their children's all-important test scores. Are your kids happy? Curious? Enthusiastic? Doesn't matter. What matters is IQ and standardized tests, so give your kid that extra advantage by buying them a year's worth of Wrigley's.

Disheartening, to say the least.

Homeschool as treason

Whatever one thinks of homeschooling, it's hard not to be shocked at this (via Freelearner), if true [warning: this is a Christian site with an unconcealed fundamentalist agenda] :

The Brussels Journal reports that Katherina Plett responded to a knock on the door from an undercover police woman Thursday morning at 11:00PM. Once the Baptist woman opened the door, police officers, hidden outside the house, stormed into her home and arrested her for the crime of homeschooling her children. The female officer insisted that she watch Mrs. Plett as she changed her clothes claiming, “She would arm herself and shoot us all.”

[snip]

The arrest of Mrs. Plett came as the latest act in struggle between 7 homeschooling families in Paderborn and the local education board of the county. According to the board’s director, Heinz Kohler, “The parents’ right to personally educate their children would prevent the children from growing up to be responsible individuals within society.”

[snip]

Manfred Müller, governor of Paderborn country, has also justified charging homeschoolers with “High Treason,” saying “the obligation to attend school is a civil obligation that cannot be tampered with.”

According to the Brussels Journal, Landrat Müller threatened to charge Hermann Stücher, a 68 year old man giving aid to these families with “High Treason and incitement of the people against the authorities (Hochverrat und Volksverhetzung), the same charge used by Nazis to squelch any resistance to their absolute power.

Yes, the last sentence of that last paragraph is a bit of editorializing. But don't let the article's emphasis on comparisons to Nazism obscure the fact that here state power is brought to bear against parents who wish to raise their children as they see fit, and moreover, that such parents are accused of treason.

While many decry the Christian fundamentalists who seek to "protect" their children from the blasphemous and worldly ways of the public school, it should be remembered that the invocation of state authority over the rights of parents can be used against parents of any religious or political stripe, and not just in Germany. In the past, such authority has been used in the US, Canada, and Australia to justify separating aboriginal children from their parents in boarding schools--even to the extent of kidnapping them and imprisoning parents who refused to send their children to the white man's schools. And I've run across at least one modern-day American homeschooling critic , Carrie Luce (whoever she is), who believes that all homeschoolers are guilty of treason:

Homeschoolers say they have many reasons for what they do, but it all boils down to one simple thing:  Treason.

Although they say otherwise, it isn't because of "better academics" (which they tout through flawed research) or fear of violence (which is just as likely to occur at home as it is at school - and if they ever DO let their children out into the real world, they are exposing their children to other threats - just like the rest of us). Homeschoolers, quite simply put their own selfish biased agendas above the well being of the society and community that supports them.

I get pretty nervous when someone claims the right of the state to exert its authority at will over the rights of individuals, and when those who rebel against such a claim are accused of treason and of undermining the social order. That smacks ot Stalinism and fascism (and probably a whole lot of other isms).

The idea of police storming a private home at night, frightening the entire family and hauling a mother away to jail, is damned scary.

Unfortunately, the way things are headed in this country, it doesn't seem all that impossible here in the United States, especially with such brainwashed "thinking" as that of people like the above-cited Ms. Luce.

So much for abstinence-only

Even true believers in abstinence-only education sometimes have to face the facts: when 65 out of 490 female students get pregnant in one year, you gotta know that abstinence-only just isn't working. So, in Canton, Ohio, Timken High School is modifying and expanding its sex ed program to teach safe, responsible sex along with abstinence after 13% of the female student population became pregnant. (And kudos to them for doing it.)

Over and over I've seen studies showing that abstinence-only does not work: see here, here, here, and here, for starters.

Since it doesn't work, isn't it better to teach kids about safe sex--how to have sex without contracting STDs or HIV? As it is, kids are having oral sex without even thinking of it as sex, and they're doing so without using condoms, with a corresponding rise in cases of chlamydia, for example. Herpes, HIV, gonorrhea, hepatitis, and syphilis can also be transmitted orally. Isn't it wrong not to teach kids who are going to go ahead and have sex anyway how to protect themselves? Do we really want our kids contracting and spreading STDs?

There's nothing wrong with presenting abstinence as one option, even emphasizing that it's a choice that should be honored. But by the same token, the sexually active should not be stigmatized. Instead, they should be given the information they need to take care of themselves.Emotional and relational issues surrounding sex do need to be addressed, but that can't be done when the message is Don't Do It At All. I'm not sure how those issues can best be addressed, especially if parent-child relationships aren't good, but I do know that we can at least protect kids from physical risk.

Stunned

For the abuse du jour against students in our public schools, check this out.

I don't want to hear another word about regarding children as precious.