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Bill Nye to debate Creationist tonight at 7 - 2.4 on CNN

Yes, all children must be educated by the state. The state is all, embodying the will of the volk. All children must be above average and serve the state's needs. By breeding the brightest and strongest children with each other, the state can create better citizens, educating them in the most efficient and effective manner and suppressing contrary thoughts that cause social chaos or produce less efficient future citizens.

I'm guessing that's the logic my cousin followed until he was executed at Nuremberg (making my mom's side of the family very proud of him).

The Obama administration has decided to deport a German family who came to the US so they could home school their children. If we're going to do that, why not deport all the Quakers, Amish, Muslims, Jews, and anyone else who doesn't worship at the altar of mass conformity?
 
I'm not sympathetic to people who wish to homeschool whatsoever, since homeschooling is almost exclusively the purview of religious nuts who don't want their kids exposed to reality.

The German family in question was seeking asylum, and the idea that we should grant people asylum because they aren't allowed to homeschool their kids in their native country is pretty laughable. Asylum's for people with real problems.
 
Robert Maxwell said:
I'm not sympathetic to people who wish to homeschool whatsoever, since homeschooling is almost exclusively the purview of religious nuts who don't want their kids exposed to reality.

The German family in question was seeking asylum, and the idea that we should grant people asylum because they aren't allowed to homeschool their kids in their native country is pretty laughable. Asylum's for people with real problems.
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Homeschooling may be predominantly so, but that is no reason to decry the practice altogether. Also, I can imagine persecution being practiced through schools such as a prejudice against a minority which the minority would counter by teaching at home. American Indians had a long history of cultural oppression done through education. Such, though, would not be the case for this family.

The article says the kids have to go to a recognized school, and Germany has schools tailored to many faiths and preferences. Also, nothing bans their teaching the kids their faith at home, only that they must attend a sanctioned school. I imagine the immigration position amounted to persecution by the German government was not valid, but I would not accept that such conditions cannot exist and that asylum should be available for people facing such persecution.
 
Robert Maxwell said:
I'm not sympathetic to people who wish to homeschool whatsoever, since homeschooling is almost exclusively the purview of religious nuts who don't want their kids exposed to reality.
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I would really question your "statistic" there. I know many people who homeschool, and the only really religious one is also likely the smartest of the lot, as both parents have engineering degrees, and one has a law degree on top of that. Also, they're Catholic and fully believe in evolution, the Big Bang, etc. As for the others, some homeschool because of bullying problems in school, and others do it because their children have special needs. My wife and I have been this >< close to homeschooling our oldest several times for both of those reasons - he has Aspergers and he's been bullied quite a bit.
 
I've always disagreed with the concept of home schooling. I'm in favor of compulsory public education. Education should be standardized, and comprehensive. There should be no way to be able to hide a subject from a child just because you disagree with it. I'm in favor of religious education if it includes a broad view over all aspects of religion and philosophy. Teach creationism in religion class AND evolution in biology classes. Teach genesis in religion class, and the formation of the solar system and earth in astronomy, physics and geology classes. Then it's still up to the kids to decide if they want to be fundamentalists or not. But at least you can guarantee that all kids got to hear all those things.

And regarding special needs and bullying. Those problems should be solved in public schools at the root, and not by essentially shying away from it. People with disabilities should be integrated, not secluded. Bullies should be dealt with, not run away from them.

And I liked the social aspect. While it might be true that some home schooled children have great social networks, and some public schooled children don't have any friends, and some children are bullied whether they are home schooled or not, it's simply a fact that in public schools you attend a class of 30 to 40 people (in my region), and that's just healthy in general in my opinion. I liked my school years.
 
JarodRussell said:
And regarding special needs and bullying. Those problems should be solved in public schools at the root, and not by essentially shying away from it. People with disabilities should be integrated, not secluded. Bullies should be dealt with, not run away from them.
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MUCH easier said than done, believe me.
 
B.J. said:
JarodRussell said:
And regarding special needs and bullying. Those problems should be solved in public schools at the root, and not by essentially shying away from it. People with disabilities should be integrated, not secluded. Bullies should be dealt with, not run away from them.
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MUCH easier said than done, believe me.
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I never said it would be easy, but that's still no reason to shy away from it. That way it never changes.
 
Many of the home-schooling parents I know are scientists and engineers, and despite home-schooling they are also great advocates of public education, reasoning that their home-schooled children's future companies will need a source of badly-educated low-paid labor, which of course is the main output of the public school system. Having a two-tiered system is simply more efficient.
 
gturner said:
Many of the home-schooling parents I know are scientists and engineers, and despite home-schooling they are also great advocates of public education, reasoning that their home-schooled children's future companies will need a source of badly-educated low-paid labor, which of course is the main output of the public school system. Having a two-tiered system is simply more efficient.
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That's why we in germany HAVE a multi tiered system.

After our version of elementary school, students get evaluated based on their grades for Basic School, Real School (this is a literal translation, I realize how hilarious it sounds. It's probably similar to High school) and Gymnasium (which has nothing to do with sports out of regular sports classes and has the highest educational standard.)
Parents are free to disregard the elementary recommendation if they like, but kids with lower grades might struggle on a higher school.
If they turn out to be late blooming geniuses they can change tracks later on or continue after graduating on a higher school.

Basic gratuates after 9 years, Real after 10 years, Gymnasium after 12 years. (elementary years included of course.)
 
Well yeah. That's why they're elite. They gotta have somebody attaching widgets in their sprocket factories.

In tests, home-schooled students outperform public school students even when the parents of the home-schooled students are high-school drop outs. Things were probably much better when we had one-room school houses, though. When my dad was in second grade he was paying attention to what the sixth graders were learning, finding it far more interesting.

Of course back then they used McGuffey's readers, including the eclectic speller. Here are some of the words they had to spell:

ruche, hough, loir, sough, clough, cicerone, superfices, creux, ghat, ailantus, syzygy, porphyry, nasturtium, cimeter, bryony, chasseur, corymb, peripneumony, sacchariferous, Terpsichorean, danseuse, bouilli, eisteddfod, barouche, recherche, scrutoire, cattarhal, adumbrate, prothonotary

Now kids can graduate while barely able to spell OMG and LOL.
 
gturner said:
Of course back then they used McGuffey's readers, including the eclectic speller. Here are some of the words they had to spell:

ruche, hough, loir, sough, clough, cicerone, superfices, creux, ghat, ailantus, syzygy, porphyry, nasturtium, cimeter, bryony, chasseur, corymb, peripneumony, sacchariferous, Terpsichorean, danseuse, bouilli, eisteddfod, barouche, recherche, scrutoire, cattarhal, adumbrate, prothonotary
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And how often do you use those words? Memorization of extraneous information is not a worthwhile education.
 
We used to use many of those words because everyone knew them, which is why Civil War letters from common soldiers often sound like they were written by English literature professors. I'm sure after 30 more years of dumbing down our educational system, students will protest having to learn an unused word like "magnificent" when everyone with a public school education just says OMG - WOW.
 
Are you suggesting that directing the evolution of the English language should be a primary concern of education? Words fall out of use, and new words replace them. There is no need for "Barouche" on a spelling test because barouches are no longer in use other than for novelty or historical value. "Nasturtium" is of a concern only for the botanically inclined, etc. How often do you think the average person in 1800s America used "Chasseur" or "Eisteddfod" or "Prothonotary" in a letter home or a conversation. . . or ever?
 
LOL

At least our high school graduates have high self-esteem now, ignorantly believing that they're the best educated kids in the history of the world. By the time my dad was in the sixth grade (back in the early 1930's) he could recite poems like Flander's Fields from memory, and could still recite them in the 1990's. I once freaked out my young neighbor who was complaining about having to memorize some short little paragraph for public school by reciting from the Iliad for about fifteen minutes (I used to be able to go for about forty).

It's gotten so bad that my best friend, who runs a science and engineering program for
"elite" kids, has to explain to the high schoolers how to use things like a wrench or a hammer. One evening as I was there they were cleaning up from the days work and he told a pair of kids to vacuum up the wood shavings from the drill press. They were stumped, so he explained that they had to roll the Shop-Vac over to the drill press. They were still stumped. So he had to explain that they had to turn on the Shop-Vac, which they did, and then they looked around in bewilderment about what to do next. So he explained that they had to hold the Shop-Vac's hose near the shavings on the drill press so that it would suck up the debris. After some experimentation they sort of got it, but still left about half the sawdust for me to clean up.

This kind of encounter occurs daily. Very very few of the publicly educated school kids can think there way logically through even simple problems. The things I've heard leave me gobsmacked.

"So you want to attach these two pieces of wood with nails."

"Yes! How do I do that?"

"Well, you're going to need some nails, and a hammer."

*provides nails and a hammer*

"Okay."

"You have to hit the nail with the hammer."

"Okay."

"While aiming the nail through the boards."

"Okay. How do you do that?"

"Like this..."

Now he does have a few very skilled kids who can do amazing things with tools (often home schooled), but these are now by far the exception. A lot of very basic knowledge is being totally skipped. One engineering graduate student related how one of her professors asked her engineering class how many were good at welding (zip), then how many had welded before. She, the only girl in the class, raised her hand and explained that she'd learned to weld in an art class.

In the office next to mine once worked an electrical engineer with a masters degree in EE. One day he had some problem and I said he could just add a transistor. So he asked me how he'd hook it up and I drew a little schematic. He looked at it, and then said, "I'm a little vague. What's the base of a transistor do?" I spent the next ten minutes explaining how a bipolar junction transistor works, and he lamely said that it had only been mentioned briefly on one day in one class, and he just memorized it for the test.

Among the people I know who home school, the women can make bows, fletch arrows, gut deer, rebuild an engine or transmission, build a house, or do an environmental survey for the government. The men can troubleshoot Aegis radar systems, write microcode, and do long distance electronic eavesdropping or check bank network encryption security. Among the bright parents who don't home school, the demand for after-school programs is high and very lucrative, and the parents are a veritable Who's Who of important people who don't have time to home-school, but know that the public school systems are going to leave their kids unable to logic out how to run a vacuum cleaner.
 
Reciting the Iliad from memory is a party trick and nothing more. I can recite 90% of Monty Python's The Holy Grail, and near as much of The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing, Taming of the Shrew and a dozen other plays. Those things don't mean a damn without application. Critical thinking, logic and at least some of the skills you mention are well worth emphasizing however, and they're also the very classes all the anti-intellectual conservatives have been trying their damnedest to remove from public education.
 
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