Re: Homeschooling
Some piece of knowledge being ultimately peripheral in importance and that same knowledge being specifically quashed has very different ends...and different consequences. Learning the 50 states only to visit fourteen of them vs. being deliberately told that there are no 49 other states so as not to contradict the idea that one's own state is the only one are completely different things.
Okay, so again. Apart from the ideological aspects of the thing, what is really the harm?
It's not like the parent's can keep these kinds of things from the forever. For that matter, it's not like there aren't traditional schools that neglect to teach evolution either.
You're basically just trading one creation story of "peripheral importance" to a person's life for another.
I disagree. When the attempt to constrict a person's knowledge of the world (universe) is deliberate and ideological in origin that is harmful.
I would be more inclined to agree with you if this wasn't already something that even secular, state-funded education attempted to do on a routine basis.
Heh. Next time I run into a homeschooler who proudly uses all of the who's who of logical fallacies I'll let you know and you tell me.
Works for me. :lol:
I'm sure there's some pretty stupid crap out there. As I said before, there are legitimately bad school systems even here in California, the details of which were frankly shocking to a good, freshly scrubbed New Englander like myself. And while that is often the pretext for homeschooling, the homeschoolers I myself encounter are almost invariably of the religious, ideological type.
I'm not going to deny that it is a lifestyle which tends to attract people of a particular political lean.
I'm simply saying that I don't really see the harm in that fact. Our public educational system is already heavily ideological.
Actually I'm not familiar with that person, at least not so that I'd automatically know who you're referring to.
He has a red avatar.
Yes, there is a problem with that. Education is supposed to be about teaching facts, not someone's wingnut, asinine religious beliefs. We do children a disservice when we allow them to have their heads stuffed with religious nonsense.
Okay, so name a single way in which a non-scientific layperson is going to be
objectively harmed by being taught one version of creation over another.
Oh, there are some whopping morons too. Some kids who are "homeschooled" are left to their own devices and told to sit unsupervised in front of a computer and just learn.Also, the progressive version is called "unschooling". These kids have liberal parents who think that taking their kids on roller coasters is a physics lesson, or shooting pool teaches you geometry. Needless to say, they're idiots.
Ugh. Yea... I've met a couple of those. Things generally didn't end well for them.
My first girlfriend had fruit-loopy Liberal "compassionate" Catholic parents. They "unschooled" her, focusing on art history, music, and foreign languages while ignoring academic fundamentals almost completely.
After bombing her SAT, she ran away from home, got knocked up, and wound up as a single mother after her live-in boyfriend left her high and dry. I think she's
finally found a guy to settle down with now (after running through six or seven others and having another kid), but the whole situation is still a damn train wreck.
Her younger brother's got a much better head on his shoulders, but he's pretty limited in his job prospects due to his lack of a college education. Last I heard, he was making 25K a year as an engraver at a downtown Charleston jewelry shop.
I'm not opposed to Homeschooling at all, but I
definitely think that there need to be at least a few regulations on it.