Thursday, April 28, 2005

HOMESCHOOLING PAST AND PRESENT

Homeschooling has been around for a generation now. As the positive reports continue to roll in it is good news for those who took the plunge ten or twenty years ago and decided to educate their children themselves. Numerous studies and reports have shown homeschooled children handily outperforming their publicly schooled peers at every level, and by most measures.

Still, the parents who first embarked on the untested waters of homeschooling had no information of that kind available to encourage them. And certainly the school boards did nothing to help. In fact, in many jurisdictions public school officials went out of their way to make homeschooling difficult for parents, invoking truancy laws against them or demanding to have the right to approve all curriculum or even to conduct intrusive inspections in the homes of those so presumptuous as to think they could educate their children. Friends, neighbours, even family of the first homeschoolers were not very encouraging either. Most were aghast because they thought that kitchen table education would surely be inferior to what was offered at the shiny local school. In the early days homeschoolers were regarded as nuts and cranks. That was then.

It is true that homeschooling is much more economical than public schooling. So if you don't know much about it you might believe financial saving to have been its attraction. It involves about one tenth the cost of its public counterpart. But that amazing saving was no help to the first homeschoolers. Nor does it help in most jurisdictions even today. Parents have to pay that 10% on top of their school taxes. In other words, homeschoolers look after their children's needs at their own expense only after they have already paid 100% of the costs of the wasteful public system.

In the early days there was no Home School Legal Defence Association to help protect the interests of home educators. That organization was founded in the U.S. by Michael Farris and Michael Smith in 1983, but did not come to Canada until 1991. And it took patient years of information sessions and lectures at homeschooling conferences across the continent before enough families joined to build up the focused and potent organization it represents today.

So why would anyone have begun way back then, when homeschooling was dangerous, expensive and socially unaccepted? Studies have consistently shown that there were and are two main motivations: religion and morality. Everyone who is part of the homeschooling movement will have known that already, though it may come as a surprise to those who send their children to public schools. Parents with decided views on religion or morality find it intolerable to see those views treated as they are in the public schools: namely as something between silly quirks that polite people don't discuss and nasty perversions that have to be rooted out.

It is true that negative attitudes toward traditional religion and morality are not peculiar to the school but reflect social realities. Those who homeschool are not alone in having witnessed the successive takeovers of the public sphere by secularism, multiculturalism, the cultural left, and the long, sorry chain-gang of victims still trudging through it. The transformation of their country has been a sickening one for all conservatives, but it has also been judicially imposed and therefore accepted, however reluctantly, by most.

But not by all. A large proportion of homeschoolers could be described as people who have given up paying attention to whatever is being shouted through the public bullhorn, and begun to cultivate their own practices and communities on a scale they can still understand and in a manner of which they approve. Their spontaneous reaction to their situation has a historical parallel memorably drawn by Alasdair MacIntyre at the end of After Virtue. Recalling the period in which the Roman Empire collapsed and the so-called "dark ages" began, he reminds us how: "a crucial turning point occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead - often not recognizing fully what they were doing - was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness."

So began the monastic tradition of the early middle ages - the institution that saved civilization. It may be the privilege of homeschoolers to bear that bright torch in their own time. Our children have become healthy, well-adjusted and successful, in spite of all the efforts of public institutions to thwart them.

The above article is reproduced from here but probably the most interesting part of the article is the many thoughtful comments that follow it





ACADEMIC SPEECH CODES

One of the symptoms of overbearing political correctness has been campus speech codes that ban offensive speech, especially that directed at women and minorities. The interpretation of what constitutes offensive speech was often left to the alleged victims. In the notorious water-buffalo remark at the University of Pennsylvania case, this led to misguided accusations of racism because the targets of the remark were unfamiliar with the speaker's culture. Invariable, it is the speaker who required to be "more sensitive" in these cases.

Several court cases have struck down overly broad speech codes. The U.S. Supreme Court (R.A.V. v. St. Paul, 1992) found speech codes that ban viewpoint discrimination to be unconstitutional, even when "hate speech" was the nominal target of the codes. Other cases have similarly supported free speech on campus, including Doe v. University of Michigan, 1989 (invalidated speech code for being facially vague and overbroad), the UWM Post, Inc. v. Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 1991 (code struck down as unconstitutional), Silva v. University of New Hampshire 1994 (".the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom."), Corry v. Stanford 1995 (found that the Stanford code applied to speech that could cause emotional distress but would not incite an immediate breach of peace nor other clear and present danger). Even if speech is insulting and hurtful, as many found the recent remarks of Ward Churchill on this campus, it is not necessarily unlawful.

Despite the court victories, speech codes are still prevalent on America's college campuses. This is partly because they have not been challenged in court and partly because they have been restructured so as to be constitutional. Some of the codes are ambiguous at best. For example, the U.H. Student Conduct Code states that "A student may not behave towards another member of the University community, even in the name of conviction or under a claim of academic freedom, in a manner that denies or interferes with that individual's expression of conviction, academic freedom or performance of legitimate duties and functions."

The resilience of speech codes is thought to be related to a broader politicization of the college experience that derives from a concentration of faculty members on the ideological left. Indeed political college faculties do not exhibit diversity in political affiliation. A 2003 survey of six major professional associations of in the Social Sciences and Humanities found that Democrats outnumber Republicans by at least 3 to 1 (Economics) and as much as 30 to 1 (Anthropology). Studies of voter registration roles uncovered the following ratios of Democrats to Republicans: Cornell, 24:1; Brown University, 18:1; University of Colorado, 23:1; UCLA, 16:1; University of Maryland, 6:1; Syracuse University, 25:1 (Zinsmeister, The American Enterprise, Jan/Feb, 2005). A more comprehensive study was done by matching the faculty lists of Stanford and UC-Berkeley with voter registration roles in surrounding counties (www.NAS.org). Berkeley came in at 445 to 45 (10:1) Democrats to Republicans with Stanford at 276 to 36 (8:1). Among assistant and associate professors, Republicans are outnumbered 31:1.....

The curriculum of higher education is alleged to be politicized and guilty of substituting indoctrination for the disciplined pursuit of knowledge. General education requirements have exploded to the point where the core is unrecognizable. Following the lead of Stanford ("Ho Ho Ho, Western Civ has got to go") and other mainland institutions, UH replaced its requirement of Western and Eastern Civilization with "Global and Multicultural Perspectives," which aims to provide students with "a sense of human development . through the consideration of narratives and artifacts."

The cost of political correctness is not so much that students become ideologically warped or anti-American for life. Indeed college graduates are marginally more likely to be Republican than Democrat and significantly more likely to be independent. Rather it is the opportunity lost for learning through the disciplined application of reason and evidence. Instead students often focus on gaming the system. Douthat (2005) describes his own experience at Harvard. One of his illustrations concerned the requirement to write a 10-page paper on pair of artifacts from the early American West without doing any research on the cultures represented. Douthat had a dilemma. "How could I eke out ten pages when I knew nothing about the provenance of the weapons or the significance of their markings? The paper was pathetically easy to write - not despite the dearth of information but because of it. Knowing nothing meant I could write anything. I didn't need to do any reading, absorb any history, or learn anything at all. [He craftily sprinkled his essay with references to capitalism, violence and male domination.] .the paper got an A."

At the very least, the climate of political correctness has a chilling effect on academic inquiry. Without political diversity, how can there be diversity of thought? Can we really afford to designate some issues, such as differences by race and gender and Hawaiian sovereignty, as too inflammatory for investigation?

More here

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughley indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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