Loyalty to the State

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Nothing in the law compels me to rear my children in a specific way--except education... the LAW (not society but the law) presumes innocence and competence and leaves parents alone.

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Again, bullshit. There are implicit standards of parenting being enforced. Aside from gneral health and well-being, if your particular brand of religion involves human sacrifice or kidnapping a child-bride, I'll bet the authorities get involved! That's not even taking vaccinations... your own bugaboo... into account. Standards for parenting? YEP! They exist!

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I never asserted that children's welfare is invisible to authorities. I said the LAW does not REQUIRE routine monitoring of any aspect of children's welfare except education.

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For the simple, practical reason that the "other" monitoring is piggybacked onto education. I find it quite revealing that the best way to keep a sex slave, or routinely starve or abuse your child, or to deny them necessary medical care, is to keep them out of school. That is the one instance where physical isolation... which is a BIG RED FLAG FOR ABUSE... can be broken. If compulsory school attendance were eliminated wholesale then other monitoring laws would prolly be enacted, most likely though the health system.

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It does not mean DIY services at home need to be subject to the same routine assessments. Home cooking, for example, does not require a health dept inspection annually. If you're ok with that, why not be ok with home education being unassessed as well?

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But if a child shows up at the ER with food poisoning three times a week, or appears to be grossly under-, over- or malnourished then the regulators WILL step in. No, the health department isn't in your house joggling your elbow, but the final result of your "home cooking" IS being assessed. (And let's not forget your pet peeve: vaccinations.)

I would propose something similar for education: Test the "final result" of your homeschooling with standardized testing. Nobody is in your home telling you how to do the education, just as the Health Department isn't telling you how to do your cooking. They're just interested that the job gets done. And IF HOMESCHOOLING IS AS EFFECTIVE AS YOU SAY IT IS THERE SHOULDN'T BE ANY PROBLEM.

My guess is that your real beef is with ANY kind of outside assessment. The only kind of monitoring that you'd allow is the toothless kind: The kind that leaves children vulnerable to parents who're SO scary that nobody from "the community" dares approach them, or to parents (or other adults) who "disappear" children.
And that happens far too often for you to be claiming that it isn't a problem.
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Well, I think we found your personal preference for the Kool-Aid there Siggy.

That's pretty damn insulting, to accuse me of not giving a damn about kids when most of what I do is try to keep people like you and your fucking systems from treating them as subhuman fodder.

You think I need to bother 'recruiting' these kids to their own damn cause ?

No one ever asks them nothin, just gives out orders, and it's carte blanche to manhandle, neglect, and deprive them as long as it's a system doing it rather than the parents - and I am supposed to be ok with this ?

No, I don't think so.

My issue with schools is that for the price of an education is that they are then submitted to an environment so abusive it's only effective comparison is the penal system, an environment admitted to be hostile to everything human that is in a person - that's a damned high price, and the environment itself interferes with the education offered.

To me they are PEOPLE, human beings, and maybe somehow the rest of the world doesn't GET that, but they are, and maybe instead of treating them as something a little less than housepets, we start treatin em like people, is that so goddamn hard a concept to wrap your mind around.

That's why "ask the kid" is practically a mantra for me, cause you know, they ARE capable of telling you that, if they think you'll listen, if they honestly believe your not just fishing for the socially-acceptable challenge-response they've been trained to give - you ASK them, and you mean it, and then you LISTEN instead of dismissing, and they'll TELL you.

Somethin you also seemed to never notice so wrapped up in your defense of control based systems, is that I don't give orders... not to no one, ever.


Lemme explain in detail how yon socrates club came about so maybe you'll understand the point here...

A friends kid was having trouble at school, part of that is him struggling in math, something I ain't likely to be much help with, but part of it is that he has authority issues, both by his nature and the fact that he's used to autonomy cause it's a single parent family and his dad has a full time job, right ?

This lead to trouble, and his dad asked me to help out if I could cause it's a known fact that I can communicate with kids his age.

One of the issues, for example, was him being late to school, he missed the bus and walked in, causing him to miss one class, and be late for a second one - the school asserted that he missed the entire day, which he disputed in a somewhat over the top fashion, causing a problem.

I pointed out to him that perhaps he should get the teachers whose class he DID attend to sign a paper stating that fact, so that instead of going head to head in a shouting match which he would lose simply because people would not give his non-adult word any credence, something unfortunate, but true nonetheless.

He did this, and they docked him the late class, but he got credit for the rest, which he wasn't happy about but acknowledged that was a better result than he'd hoped for, and we got to discussing how to deal with such problems without sticking your hand in the meat-grinder of non-adult vs adult confrontation, cause that's a losing game every time you play it.

Also had a long talk about how important that piece of paper is, whether you know anything or not, and to this stuff applies in the real world, something no one has ever bothered to discuss with him, like how math skills are damned important when you're on a budget and trying decide whether 12oz for $1.99 or 16oz for $2.19 is a better deal, cause there's times when that education MATTERS.

One of his friends expressed interest, and somewhere in the ensuing conversations I mentioned how learning stuff can save you money by citing the stove example - our stove broke down, the oven would not work, and with some research I found out that those heating elements do eventually fail, yet could be replaced with naught more than a wrench and a screwdriver, ending up replacing an $80 heating element instead of a very e

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Okay Frem- So you wanna give kids an alternative to school which I can understand, while I wanna make sure that kids aren't "disappeared" by abusive parents and I find that school attendance is a useful way to keep kids in regular contact with people outside the family.

Any way to meet both goals?

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Okay Frem- So you wanna give kids an alternative to school which I can understand, while I wanna make sure that kids aren't "disappeared" by abusive parents and I find that school attendance is a useful way to keep kids in regular contact with people outside the family.

Any way to meet both goals with the best interests of the child in mind?

Don't give me any bull about "communities", tho. We don't have communities anymore.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
I think CTS is so full of parent's "rights", Sarge is so full of anti-government, and Frem is so interested in "recruits" that they've entirely lost sight of child's welfare. Seems- once again- to more an issue of control than anything else. More later.

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Good grief Signym. Remember when you used to contribute to the conversation? You like government getting into everybody's business, we don't. That's about three fourths of what we argue about on here, in one form or another. And now your trying to say "wait, this here topic is too important, I just get to win automatically. After all it's for the children ...".

Well guess what? I have some similar notions. See, as far I'm concerned blood is far too important to trust to the whims of government. So how about I win automatically? I'm sure you disagree, and I'd love to hear why. Hell, maybe you're right. But if you're going to sit there and insinuate that anyone not following your agenda somehow doesn't care about children, then you're no better than the asshats that railroaded us into an unnecessary war in Iraq on the insinuation that anyone not falling in line was a terrorist sympathizer.

In other words, kiss my ass. But for christ's sake brush your teeth first.

SergeantX

"Dream a little dream or you can live a little dream. I'd rather live it, cause dreamers always chase but never get it." Aesop Rock

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Originally posted by canttakesky:
So the biggest difference between cooking and educating is how easily you can detect severe neglect in that area "just by looking"? By that reasoning, every type of abuse that you can't detect just by looking should have annual screenings. Do you also want mandatory psychological evaluations for every child every year to prove that parents aren't abusing them emotionally? Why stop at only educational abuse?

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There are actually lots of checks that go on with regard to child abuse and neglect, which unfortunately is quite widespread. Doctors, Maternal and Child Health nurses, teachers and other professionals associated with children all report (as they are mandated to) if they suspect that abuse or neglect is occuring. You are right that emotional abuse is harder to detect and also harder to do anything about. You work with what you can to protect children. It's an imperfect world

Educational neglect is hard to ascertain as well. That's why registering parents who homeschool and perhaps testing children at several levels would be a useful way to prevent parents deciding that its their right to not educate a child at all.

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And as to your first point, imagine if you will, that you are born into a society that believes proper physical nutrition is a universal right for all children. In fact, they tax all citizens to provide free, public meals for all children. From age 5 to age 18, breakfast, lunch, and dinner are provided by the state

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Actually something like this did happen during ww2 in the UK when school lunches were freely provided to children because of the degree of malnutrition that was occuring.
Your Orwellian analogy was interesting, but its not really a useful one. Cooking is a skill, one skill that can be fairly easily learned. even if you can't cook, you can still feed your family so that they survive okay.

Teaching involves a whole range of skills and an incredibly broad range of knowledge, particularly if you plan to be 'it' with regards to your child's entire education. Even people of great intelligence often lack the skills to teach, so its quite different to cooking.

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You mean, capability? Which capabilities exactly?

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I meant capacity. The capacity to teach your children to a reasonable level.

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There is a distinction between education and training. Education is the acquisition of knowledge. Training is the acquisition of skills, usually very specialized skills. No one would dispute that training
usually requires apprenticeship to persons (usually professionals) with the desired specialized skills. For the average person, it is hard to acquire piano playing skills without being trained by someone who plays the piano. Same thing goes for surgical skills, piloting skills, car fixing skills, and any other skill that involves physical manipulation.

Some fields such as history, political science, and philsophy are entirely based on mental knowledge obtained through education. Education can be obtained in different ways, one of which is Do-It-Yourself (DIY). Other fields are a mixture of education and training, such as medicine and architecture and piloting. There is no reason that the education part can't be done by yourself, to be followed by conventional training. In fact, that is what homeschooled surgeons, architects, and pilots do. They get their education at home as children, and then go to college for conventional training afterwards. See? Plenty of homeschooled people have formal qualifications as well.

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I'm not disputing any of that. I was disputing

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There is nothing magical about education that it requires only professionals or professional supervision. Really. Teaching your kids is like cooking meals, fixing cars, and doing taxes. You can do it yourself.

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Teaching relies on expertise in any particular area, so it really all depends on your own level of skill and knowledge doesn't it? There is nothing to say that homeschooled kids can't go on to be

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Don't give me any bull about "communities", tho. We don't have communities anymore.

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They're there, not everywhere, mind - especially not in the inner city, but there's some.

There's also a lot to be said for not trying to fix what ain't broke - the merits of leaving the hell alone, as it were.

Simply introduce a standard set of basic tests for each stage of education, with associated criteria and fancy bit of sheepskin.

Split the GED into say six pieces, each required as a pre-requisite to qualify for the next.

This gives both the presumption of innocence required by law, and the occasional check required by society - not to mention giving a child positive reinforcement of the merit and acceptance of their education no matter where or how they obtain it.

Maybe it's not ideal, but you wanted my input, and I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea, particularly since the earlier you catch spots where a kid is struggling, the easier it is to help them work through it.

That bein said, I think this discussion is like to become stuck in the mud, wheels spinning, cause some folk seemingly cannot accept that other folk do not trust the State to pour water out of a boot if the directions were stamped on the heel - while others trust the state with a fervor bordering on religious ecstasy.

Those two ends of things ain't never gonna meet in the middle, so let's skip that whole argument, shall we ?

CTS has made a right good argument on how such regulation has a way of bloating and expanding to feed itself at our misery and expense - and some folks have made a pretty good case for the State as a backup to when parenting fails.

Let's just leave it at that and let folks make their own judgement calls, instead of lighting the fuse of a flame war for once, ok ?

-Frem
It cannot be said enough, those who do not learn from history, are doomed to endlessly repeat it

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