I was homeschooled and would recommend it to anyone. I never had a shortage of friends or social activities either. Actually it was quite the opposite! And by homeschooling me, my parents were able to teach me the principles this country was founded on without being undermined by progressive indoctrination in the public schools.

I dissent. When people of faith abandon the institutions of culture they create a situation in which the people formed by those institutions are incapable of responding to the message of faith. In other words, the time will come when pagans no longer reject the gospel because they prefer paganism; the gospel will cease to be a viable option to reject.

With all due respect to the Rev. Moore, his approach seems designed to cocoon his own children from the influence of the world at the cost of condemning the world to being without salt and light in one of the places where it would have the most influence. And when his grown children encounter that saltless, lightless world for the first time, when they are no longer breathing the atmosphere of the environment he controls, the crisis of confidence will be a challenge he’d better have them well prepared to meet.

You will say to me, “Better to prepare them in the controlled atmosphere of home-school than to risk their exposure to the godless system of public education.” But I say to you, inoculation by exposure to the live virus when it is weak is preferable to the first exposure being the virulent version in its natural habitat. In the same way, examining worldviews and presuppositions behind the curriculum is far easier if one starts in early elementary and continues through high school than addressing the sophisticated challenges at the university level. If my daughter should encounter Zinn’s text in her high school history course (and her mother and I will know), she’s already equipped to recognize the worldview behind it and challenge it.

I’m not arguing against home-schooling. The home-schooled kids whom I’ve had the pleasure of teaching in my first year classes are generally first rate. What I am arguing against is the asinine assumption that parents whose kids are in the public schools are too stupid to understand the danger and thus are part of the problem of public education. It’s the arrogant position of an ideologue that presumes to know the single legitimate response to the fiasco that is government run public education.

We live in a conservative Texas school district but even it had problems. We started home schooling this year for our youngest, a junior. Wish we would have done this a long time ago!

A rather short and sudden post for a revolution. How long have the Other McCain children been out of public school?

Tomorrow may be too late? It is already too late. Since 1997 another generation of children have been indoctrinated to hate Christianity and capitalism. That generation includes most of the Christian children who were blindly sent into public schools during that time. Christians will be but a remnant in America twenty years from now.

I’m homeschooled as well…………hardest thing – I cannot join Interscholastic sports, I have written to a local Senator he supports homeschool efforts, but we’ve got idiots in charge of NY….leaving us homeschool younglins with little hope.

The Jesuits said, “Give us a child until he is seven and we will give you the man.” The liberal-progressives behind public education have taken that to heart, but they were smart enough not to come out and say it.

I was educated at a public high school, and private college. While I believe education is what you make of it, I was an economics major and upon graduating, had never studied Friedman, Schumpeter, Mises or Hayek. It was all Marx, Engels, Walra and the whole cadre of heterdoxical economists. I still have my copy of Open Veins of Latin America (Chavez gave a copy of this to Obama).

I’ll be homeschooling my kids someday, and reviewing any curriculum when they go to post-grad school. The level of indoctrination is astounding — Howard Zinn????? God help us all.

My ex and I home schooled our five kids through the sixth grade. At least when they entered the public schools, they had already learned to think.

I went to public school in a liberal northeastern community. There I received a fine education, made swell friends, and encountered next to no propaganda.

Sure, there were a few left-leaning teachers who couldn’t keep their yaps shut, but there were also a few vocal right-leaning ones, too. Most teachers were apolitical, rather apathetic in general. They said their piece and that was it.

My English courses were dominated by ‘Dead White Male’ canon works. I recall a not-insignificant portion of one semester during junior year was dedicated to studying the Bible. The humanities program was comprised of standard fair, nothing controversial, mostly mainstream interpretations of Big American Events. All points of view given fair hearing and debate was encouraged.

I’ve heard some public school horror stories, but Stacy’s dismissal of the system as thoroughly rotten is nonsense. Hey, I even recall the principle of my high school greatly curtailing antiwar students’ freedom of protest (only after classes, only in specific areas, only pre-approved literature could be distributed, etc.). Right up your alley, eh, Stacy?

And, as I noted, this is a liberal district of a liberal state in the north-freakin’-east!

Stacy, you write: “Get your kids out of public schools, now.” And send them where, exactly? Most Americans — you know, the “ordinary” folks you pretend to champion — haven’t the time or money to home school. Don’t you realize both spouses are employed full-time in 51% of American households?

Not to say that many folks don’t have the temperament — or, speaking frankly, the brains — to given their kids a proper learning’.

Free public education is crucial to the health of a democracy. It acts as a leveler and facilitates understanding across racial, ethnic, and religious lines. It helps foster a broad cultural consensus. That’s more necessary now than ever before. What we need now is MORE, not LESS, public schooling.

The majority of the founding fathers were “home-schooled” as was most of our population for the first half of the 1800′s. Compare the functional literacy rates from that time until now. Our democracy was founded by homeschoolers who believed that fear of God was the beginning of knowledge. Check out the book “America’s Providential Heritage” for a mind-blowing history of our country and how home-schooling or classical education played a huge part in it. My 5th grader and I are reading it together and it explains so much of what’s wrong!

Google Yuri Bezmenov lectures and he will explain that the first step to taking over a country with psychological warfare is to co opt the education system. We are now well into over 40 years of what he calls “demoralization”, which results it people with views such as Philip’s.

While I have a chemical engineering degree, I believe anyone who loves their kids and is literate can teach their child, even Forest Gump. The average public school teacher scores low on standardized tests themselves, you really couldn’t do worse. As far as temperment goes, that’s really something you need to work on as a family anyway. My homeschool umbrella school coordinator says that one of the best things about homeschooling is that it allows you to sin against your child and they see you a fallible and gives you an opportunity to ask forgiveness from your child. It’s a Christian thing, you might not understand.

Discipleship is something that is an ongoing process whether the child or family is aware of it or not. When a Christian sends a child to public school, their child is being taught that they can ignore God for a large part of their day. This violates Deut. 6 which tells us that we are to teach them all day long.

Also, if you think your school is just Norman Rockwell hunky dory, know that all the textbooks are written by leftists and the novels they are required to read are often crap and often vulgar.

Public education is what elected Barak Obama. Homeschooling families are much more engaged in the political arena and watch their freedoms carefully

We read Beowulf, Shakespeare, Camus, O’Connor, Steinbeck, Austen, etc. Hardly vulgar crap. I can’t say I remember the textbooks too well, but I’m sensitive to p.c. wackiness, and it certainly didn’t rear its ugly head often enogh to make a mark on my memory.

As is typical with cultural extremists who detest mainstream civil society, your hatred is based on distortion bred from ignorance. Parents aren’t entitled to dominate every aspect of the lives of their children. They have enough power to derange the minds of their children without depriving them of crucial socializing and trained, knowledgeable educational professionals.

” I believe anyone who loves their kids and is literate can teach their child, even Forest Gump.”

Literate? That discounts most Americans, I guess. Unless you count the ability to parse the dollar menu and TV Guide “literate.”

No thanks. I’m not so deluded as to think I can give my children a decent education. I had enough trouble with trig and physics and Latin myself. In this competitive world, a proper education requires specialization — and, thus, specialists.

“The majority of the founding fathers were “home-schooled” as was most of our population for the first half of the 1800’s”

No, most of the founding fathers were educated by learned private masters, sometimes one-on-one but more commonly in small groups, and then shipped off to elite colleges at early ages. (Some, like Franklin, attended their equivalent of public schools — i.e. Boston Latin.)

But step back and expand your view. Isn’t the rural, clapboard, one room “country schoolhouse” a potent symbol of American equality and frontier democracy? This clannishness, this desire to isolate the family against the supposedly infecting influence of society, it is deeply corrosive to the values of a liberal society. No surprise the home school movement is driven by religious zealots with medieval worldviews.

Philip,

I feel sorry for you that you received that great education at your liberal northeastern university and still feel unable to relay that information to others. I’m so happy for you that you studied the classics at school, just be aware that your experience is not necessarily normative.

Your attitude toward most Americans is typical of liberal elitism, especially those graduated from liberal northeastern universities. You may not be as sensitive to indoctrination as you believe.

As I said educators as a group score very low on standardized tests and could not cut it in any other field requiring a college education. They are not anything special.

My daughter is on track to begin Algebra 1 in seventh grade and we read Beowulf back in second grade. I love trig and Physics, we’ve just gotten to the 3rd conjugation in latin. Oh, and we’re just in 5th grade!

More and more liberals, pagans, and other groups are jumping on the homeschooling wagon. Partly because homeschooling yields serious success. On national standardized tests homeschoolers score an average of 30 points higher than public school peers.

I’m not isolated at all. I belong to a wonderful, diverse group of families that homeschool. When I have a problem with something out of my expertise, such as dyslexia, I can ask one of my friends who used to be a reading specialist for advice. Some of my friends are uncomfortable teaching science and ask for my help.

My kids have more friends now than when they were in public school and are more involved in community activities and don’t have to sit inside during recess for talking in the halls or during lunch.

As far as the founding fathers are concerned, please see John Taylor Gatto’s comprehensive “The Underground History of American Education” to see the problematic roots of our system.
I’m a religious zealot with a medieval worldview – Love It!

I don’t have kids so I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I am going to weigh in anyway.

Pivey remarks that the majority of the founding fathers were home-schooled. I have seen no evidence of that. In that era entry into universities occurred at a much younger age, high school age, so you could make the case that they were products of private schools or in some cases private tutors. Of the seven that Richard Morris identified as key founding fathers (Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Jay, Madison, Hamilton) only Washington was wholly homeschooled as the term is being used here.

Also in regards to the founders. I would argue that the intellectual movement that most influenced the founders was the Scottish Enlightenment. That movement was made possible in large part because Scotland at the time had the highest literacy rate in Europe, because of (dunh dunh duh) Mandatory Public Education. Because the populace was literate ideas could be developed and distributed to the populace at large.

That tradition carried forth in the US. I think if you look at settlement in the United States one of the first things to be established in new areas was a school.

A factor that public schools served that homeschooling destroys was assimilation. ethnic enclaves and “strange” customs are a constant source of wailing from some. Well by destroying public schools you destroy one of the main methods in which assimilation occurs.

Like Philip I attended a public school. My education wasn’t up to the standards of an Exeter Academy but it wasn’t substandard. I graduated able to read and write (kind of) do math, because of required shop classes I have enough mechanical skills to get by and I learned enough history to be impressed by America. Basically a solid education. From what I have seen of my nieces and nephews education in the Seattle public schools they are getting basically the same sort of education.

I am not going to go as far as Philip and say that “the home school movement is driven by religious zealots with medieval worldviews.”
but I do believe there is something profoundly unhealthy in it. I wouldn’t ban homeschooling, it’s a parents right to educate their kids as they see fit, but I don’t support it. What I do support is parents regaining control of school boards and insisting on higher standards.

I believe what drove Stacy’s post was the reports of Organizing for America offering internships and Howard Zinn’s book being used in AP History classes. As to the first, So What? Conservatives could do the same thing if we were a little more on the ball. As far as the second, My understanding is that the AP curriculum is essentially set by the College Board, a private organization. If people have a problem with it that’s how it should be addressed. Taking your kids out of AP History would be one way. Having schools drop[ the course would be another.

Home schooling is an option. So are private and parochial schools.

I avoided the indoctrination at my ultra-liberal undergraduate university by majoring in engineering. Our fluid dynamics and thermo books never had anything about political correctness. I did not so much avoid the indoctrination in law school as get another side – three cheers for the Federalist Society!

That aside, twelve years of public school, even with a freshman year “Decisions” course taught by a pro-abstinence teacher, was enough. The biggest problem, IMHO, is not the liberal voices, but the lack of conservative values. It’s rather difficult to explain your intuitions – or not feel like a sex-a-phobic freak for not engaging in premarital sex – in an environment entirely devoid of morality.

Majoring in engineering was my way around indoctrination in college as well.

There is no such thing as an a-moral education. If you refuse to discuss morals and the natural laws upon which they are based, you are still promoting a code of values whether you like it or not. This results in our kids growing up not having a basis for what is right and wrong.

My point in my earlier posts for invoking the founding fathers was that based on their own writings, NOT what was written ABOUT them by some pinhead, they would not tolerate for 30 seconds what passes for public school in this country. Yes, some of them had private tutors and went to small schools run by a local minister, but this in in effect what homeschooling is becoming today. We are networking and forming our own cooperative schools. Some mothers get together in groups of 3-5 and take turns teaching kids different subjects or on different days. Homeschooled high-schoolers frequently take advantage of dual-enrollment for college credit. I was not trying to say that the founding father’s mothers taught them the Greek and Latin they needed to get into college. But they did start studying at a more organized school or with a tutor until they were around 9-10 years old, meaning they had already been taught to read at home.

BTW, Benjamin Franklin did indeed go to Boston Latin school for TWO whole years between the ages of 8 and 10. Then he went to apprentice with his older brother where he learned the printer trade.

Scotland did not have mandatory schools as we have them now. Each parish was required to fund a school- why? So that the children of Scotland could read their Bibles for themselves. Literacy in early America went hand in hand with wanting all to have access to Biblical truth – the bedrock of morality and American ideals. You will notice that almost every school in early America was begun by a church. Isn’t amazing that Harvard’s first motto was: Truth for Christ and the Church.

“Literacy in early America went hand in hand with wanting all to have access to Biblical truth – the bedrock of morality and American ideals.”

American ideals are products of the Enlightenment, a movement which held ‘Biblical truth’ in pretty low esteem, or holdovers from our Anglo heritage, the British (then) being probably the least religious of all Europeans. If the bedrock of our society were indeed ‘Biblical truth,’ we’d probably be living in a squalid, materially and technologically deprived theocracy right now.

Whether the schools were run by churches or not is immaterial. The point is the education was mandatory.

You are conflating you’re moral judgment on a particular issue (or more likely issues since judging by the tone of your writing I’m sure you find some form of Christ hating in every class including wood shop) with whether or not public education has a societal value, which it certainly does.

I think your withdraw my kids from the world approach is wrong but they are your kids so have at it.

If the bedrock of our society were indeed ‘Biblical truth,’ we’d probably be living in a squalid, materially and technologically deprived theocracy right now.

We do.

The “theocracy” we live under is the “theocracy” of nihilistic narcissistic liberalism. This “theocracy” has much in common with another form of “theocracy” in our world today-Islamofascism. It is a “theocracy” that has it’s own “devils” and “angels”, it’s own “saints” and “sinners” and now it’s very own “messiah”. It has its own gospels that they bitterly cling to despite the fact that they have been proven wrong.

It is a “theocracy” that brands scientists who dispute the gospel of AGW as “heretics” (Pope Urban VIII was a pussy compared to the Gaia worshipers). A “theocracy” that wants to kill all non believers (read the comments from places like Kos/DU and the utterances of the overly pale MSDNC anchors for fine examples of that). It is a very misogynist “theocracy” too, just like Islamofascism-all one has to do is observe their continued behaviour concerning Sarah Palin to see that one in action. On a personal note the few true “sexist pigs” I have run into in my life just happen to have been ultra liberals of both sexes.

The list could go on and on…

Now that the “theocracy” of nihilistic narcissistic liberalism has gained control of the government they are acting swiftly to bankrupt the country and turn the population of the country into little more then serfs.

But take heart! History teaches that the “theocracy” of nihilistic narcissistic liberalism (in all of its various forms) never lasts very long in any country. Every single one of them has fallen and when they do they, their agendas, their institutions and all their followers are utterly destroyed. Sure, they always do great damage before they fall but the “upside” is that when they do fall they are totally destroyed and tossed on the ash heap of history never to rise again.

” It’s rather difficult to explain your intuitions – or not feel like a sex-a-phobic freak for not engaging in premarital sex – in an environment entirely devoid of morality.”

Seems like an exaggeration.

Home Schooling is also nice since you got to always see your kids.,~: