Messing With the Wrong Guy

Three cheers for the codger!

Free Market Education

Scary how Greenhut's sort of thinking is going mainstream (see previous post on Jonah Goldberg).

I wonder if the NEA has a contingency plan for this. Chances are that it would be like so many other disaster preparedness plans: hopelessly out-of-date (Call President Nixon and demand...) and completely out of touch with the people it's intended to protect (authorize additional payroll deductions from your salary to fund emergency lobbying...).

Stuff like this always pops up over the summer while school is out and parents are weighing their child's safety and evaluating their options. Still, I'm glad to see this stuff out there. It's time to question the public school monopoly on funds used to educate children. People have a right to a free market, especially when it comes to such an important task as educating their progeny.

Random Thoughts

Sorry I haven't been able to write much lately. Here's just a few of the things I've been thinking lately. Call them "mini-posts."

• My son is into zoology. His favorite channel is of course Animal Planet. In all the time he and I have been watching, I have yet to encounter an animal with the quality of laughter (hyenas don't count, unless they know some inside joke).
• A kitten is a cat before it learns dignity.
• Technology is only as useful as the next idea.
• That being said, I still want a laptop for my birthday. It could help me reach those next ideas.
  
• Children will never remember your annual salary. This is both a blessing and a curse.
• My grandfather's last career was insurance sales. He had trophies lining his shelves. They were up there, collecting dust for years as a shrine to his industry long after he was gone. I would trade the lot of them if I could have had one afternoon with him where I knew I could trust him not to get angry. I bet my father feels similarly.
• I'm going to hug each of my kids tomorrow.
• Lightning is cool, but I like the smell of the rain better.
• I wish my lower back pain wouldn't make me walk funny.
• If I had a remote beeper for locating the remote control, I'd probably lose that too. No one loses cell phones that easily because you can call them.
  
• No one understands that medicine is a developing science, especially no one in pharmaceutical marketing firms.
• Not bad for 20 minutes.
• Homeschooling parents who buy curricula in hopes of making up for some perceived deficiency in their teaching skills are like a bunch of balding men buying Ferraris. What you have is who you are inside, not the other way around.
  
• If Archie was smart, he'd ditch the snob and marry Betty Cooper. I mean, could it be more simple?
• Some of these mini-posts are good. Your experience may vary.
• A good Secretary of Defense would commission a weapon that would disable/destroy car subwoofers.
  
• I shouldn't write after midnight.
• I shouldn't eat after midnight either.
• Oh well.
• Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

What Would Be Different If I Had Been Homeschooled?

I should preface this with the statement that I'm not recriminating my parents for their choice to put me in public school and then private school. Still, I sometimes wonder about how my life would be different if I had been homeschooled. At the time, homeschooling was much more unusual and had a lot of unanswered questions about it. But my experience homeschooling our children leads me to wonder what might have been.

I imagine that I would be more creative, at least. Instead of driving me toward the sciences, I might have balanced it out with more of the arts and humanities. I had a knack for understanding the language of the King James Bible and therefore reading Shakespeare. I wonder, would I have been a good Henry V or simply adequate? Given that my performances onstage were limited to supporting roles, it remains a mystery.

Would I have discovered my calling to write much sooner? Probably, I would have. Perhaps we would have caught my learning disability earlier if I had the amount of individualized attention presently enjoyed by homeschoolers. Ergo, reading would have been easier and my passion for writing would have had much more time to grow.

I think my struggle to understand my relationship with God wouldn't have been as hard. Given all the teasing that goes on in class-based schooling, the rejection and heartache that I faced (not entirely uncommon), I had trouble believing that I had value, that Someone loved me as I was and that I had a reason to live and a cause to fight for. I didn't realize that I was a child of God, a son and not a servant until I was nearly a decade out of high school. I believe that if I had been more sheltered as a student, this discovery would have been easier to accept and given me a direction to go as a young man.

On the other hand, I know enough about writing that a time-travel paradox can quickly become cliche and wondering about what would have been is not always the best use of time. Really, things could have been much worse. My parents could have taken less interest in my education and my life. My mother and father reached out to me at a critical time and probably saved my life by investing their time in me. Additionally, there is some value in doing it wrong; I see how much better doing it right and I believe in homeschooling much more because of my experiences in public and private schools.

I believe God knew what He was doing. Like Gena, Treon and so many others, I needed to experience these things to know what other students continue to endure. Is this a valid argument for all children to be in government schools? Not really. That's like saying that a man should steal to know what criminals go through or that a woman should sell her body to know what prostitutes go through. The criminal aspect of such a comparison is also valid because what is going on in today's schooling is criminal compared to the benefits we've found in homeschooling. Violence, over-crowding, curricula disputes, moral training and even attitude problems are all improved when parents are able to choose homeschooling.

Homeschool Vs. Public School

Jonah Goldberg just published a piece on Townhall.com called Do Away With Public Schools. While the NEA is loading their cannons, let me point you to another target. A friend from Colorado Springs forwarded this little piece from the Gazette:

No place like home
For educating your kids, that is

On May 31, Evan O’Dorney, 13, from Danville, Calif., won the Scripps National Spelling Bee held every year in Washington, D.C. But that’s not the real news, part of which is that O’Dorney is home-schooled. The other part is that he’s the third home-schooled winner of the Bee in the past six years.

To put that in perspective, you need to know that there are about 2 million home-schooled children in the country, which represents about 3 percent of the school age population. Yet home-schooled children represent some 15 percent of the finalists in the Spelling Bee, and about the same percentage in the national geography contest for like-aged children.

Why the disparity? Well, studies show a 20-30 percentile point gap between public school students and home-schooled students . . . in favor of the home-schooled.

There are other revealing differences between public school and home-schooled students, among them that some 74 percent of home-schooled graduates between 18 and 24 years old voted in an election in the past five years, while public school graduates of similar ages voted at a paltry 29 percent rate.

The key factor in all of this, homeschoolers believe, is the role played by parents. Homeschooling takes enormous dedication and concern. Home-schooled kids aren’t smarter, obviously, than their counterparts in public school systems. They’re just brought up in a disciplined atmosphere, taught responsibility, shown the long-term advantages of a quality education, and, not least, are expected to learn. And behave. What child would not prosper under such a regimen?

Yet whom, do you suppose, fights the idea of home-schooling so strenuously that a nonprofit advocacy organization, Home School Legal Defense Association, has sprung up to defend parents’ rights to educate their children at home? If you said it’s the same people who oppose vouchers, charter schools, and any attempt to provide educational choice for children and their parents — teachers’ unions and the public school system — you’d be exactly right. We also might note that homeschool opponents are vociferous in trying to deny the use of certain public school amenities — speech therapy, occupational therapy and physical therapy — to homeschooled children. This, of course, despite the fact that those parents also pay taxes, and thus provide financial support to the public systems.

Fortunately, HSLDA has been so successful in fighting off government — i.e., union — intrusion into educational choice that the number of home-schooled children is growing at between 7 percent and 15 percent a year.

This all seems somehow appropriate to bring up during the graduation season. A huge majority of the home-schooled children now graduating will proceed to college, where they will, if the past is a guide, continue to outperform their public school counterparts. That’s not only the real news, it’s the good news, an uncommon coupling in this business.

As for the ossified public school system, an old refrain from a Pete Seeger tune comes to mind: “When will they ever learn?”

Now, I don't have their sources for all the figures (might check HSLDA), but it certainly rings true with what I've been hearing about homeschooling since my family started homeschooling. Teachers' unions and school boards may not like the homeschoolers, but I have yet to see them truly refute that homeschooling yields superior results.

We're not just talking raw intelligence or knowledge. Kids are coming out of homeschools with better (notice I didn't say perfect) moral center, a confident bearing as a peer to adults rather than an outsider and a significantly better direction for their lives. This isn't part of my Reasons to Homeschool, but it's a good supplement to it.

Kelsey Smith: Bad Things Still Happen To "Good" People

I'm not interested in grandstanding this, but my heart goes out to the parents, especially the father, of Kelsey Smith. With the same breath, I realize that it could have been someone I loved turning on the surveillance video being kidnapped and brutalized.

Kelsey Smith should have seen the joy of her wedding day, the tears of joy at seeing her newborn child's face, held her child's hand as she walked to the park, raised and loved a family with her husband and then grow old together. That's how it's supposed to be.

Not now. Not for her.

And we all take a collective sigh of relief that it wasn't our child.

Everyone, except Kelsey's parents.

I have long realized that the true victims of any murder of a believer are the ones that are forced to go on without her. They sat in a church today and instead of giving their daughter away to a young man, they had to let her go into the arms of the Son of Man, Jesus. How are they supposed to go on? What joy do they have in their future? Is there anything left now?

For God's sake, yes. We have a hope and a future, a blessed hope and a higher calling. We live and move and have our being in Him. He is the one that feeds us daily with every word from His mouth. We may have lost our loved ones, our ability to work or our life savings. But, if we lose these things now, what real trouble is that when we come into our inheritance as children of God? These light and momentary afflictions are worth it, truth be told, and are far less than what we all truly deserve, a living death in hell.

Does that make it all better? No, it doesn't. But focussing on this present world and assuming that it is all that exists is a mistake. We have pain, very real pain while we are here, but that pain will fade with time. We need that eternal mindset to help us live with the heart knowledge, not just the head knowledge, that we will not always suffer. The heartache and grief from any loss is significant, if only to remind us that our hearts were made for heaven, not earth.

Someday, this will be a memory. Until then, Kelsey's parents have one hope: to cling to God with all their strength.

Huckabee Impresses

I'm not into politicking as it's typically thought, but I was very heartened to read and view this about Huckabee.

Small Fish and Barley Loaves

Being poor isn't fun. I just thought I'd report that. I don't like wondering about our mortgage each month or our utility bill. In political language, we are "materially disadvantaged." Financially, we have never been worse off; praise God! We are rich in faith...

Listen, my dear brothers: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him?

When we are weak, that gives God His chance to show up in a dramatic and physical way. It seems to be God's pattern. He loves to use those who are needful to bless them and others. He loves to take just a little bit and turn it into a fantastic blessing. We see it with the loaves and fishes. Phillip says to Jesus, "Eight months' wages would not buy enough bread for each one to have a bite!" Yet Jesus distributes five barley loaves and two small fish, a young boy's lunch, and everyone had "as much as they wanted."

Something else sticks out in my mind on this. John recounts,

When they had all had enough to eat, he said to his disciples, "Gather the pieces that are left over. Let nothing be wasted." So they gathered them and filled twelve baskets with the pieces of the five barley loaves left over by those who had eaten.

Jesus used abundance from God, but did not allow the wasteful use of God's abundant blessing. Note also that there were 12 baskets, matching the number of disciples. Each disciple was blessed with his own abundant gift to bless himself and others later. All from a few loaves and small fish.

I trust Him to take care of my family, too.

An Inconvenient Poll

As a follow up to my post earlier, I just found out that two-thirds of America believes creationism is.... TRUE! I nearly fell out of my chair. All the effort to brainw--I mean, educate us into believing that macro evolution is a law of the universe just simply wasted.

This is a catch-22 for public school advocates. If they say that the two-thirds is wrong, and they likely will, they will have no one to blame but themselves. If they admit that they're right, and that's not very likely, they'll have to explain why they've been actively suppressing the truth for most of a century. This is one poll they just want to go away.

Gore's Cake-brained Premise

Al Gore is still at it. Here's what I don't understand. If the Earth's ecology is so precariously balanced as Gore and some scientists claim, how can the Earth be the result of random chance and time as these same scientists believe? You know what they say about having cake and eating it. It's more logical for Intelligent Design scientists than for Darwin's adherants to believe that we're fiddling with God's air conditioning.