Home Schooling

"SAN ANGELO, Texas — The mothers of children removed [kidnapped] from a West Texas polygamist sect's ranch after an abuse allegation are appealing to Gov. Rick Perry for help."

And this comment sums the situation up nicely:

Tubal wrote:

Wow. Baptist ministers* rape teen girls too. Let's go take all the Baptist kids and lock them up. Then when their mothers want to come see them, lets tell them no. Then when the mothers that they rounded up too want to call their loved ones to tell them what's happening, lets take away their cell phones.

"As a result, government now has so many ways to incarcerate parents that hardly a family in America has not been touched. The criminalization of parents is highly bureaucratic, effected through a bureaucratic judiciary and supported by a vast "social services" machinery that few understand until it strikes them. They then find themselves against a faceless government behemoth from which they are powerless to protect their children or defend themselves.

"Wisconsin v. Yoder, a 1972 Supreme Court case dealing with an Amish family who wanted to withdraw their children from public school after the eighth grade. [Citation] from the majority opinion written by Chief Justice Warren E. Burger:

Our children are at risk because of government schools. They are being processed there to become cogs in a system that intends them to work and consume; never think for themselves, never escape from the grids that pump money into the pockets of corporations and income into the coffers of the state. We can change direction for ourselves and for our children in ways that open new worlds. You need to know.

This week Congress is again grasping for more control over the health of American children with the expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Parents who think federally subsidized health care might be a good idea should be careful what they wish for.

Despite political rhetoric about a War on Drugs, federally-funded programs result in far more teenage drug use than the most successful pill pusher on the playground. These pills are given out as a result of dubious universal mental health screening programs for school children, supposedly directed toward finding mental disorders or suicidal tendencies. The use of antipsychotic medication in children has increased fivefold between 1995 and 2002. More than 2.5 million children are now taking these medications, and many children are taking multiple drugs at one time.

“It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.” — Albert Einstein

“Teach your children well …
They seek the truth
Before they can die.” — Graham Nash

American teens have long been in chaos, suffering high rates of depression, suicide, crime, substance abuse, pregnancy, and other serious problems. Until about a century ago, however, the teenage years were relatively benign, and adolescence as we know it barely existed. Through most of human history, young people were integrated into adult society early on, but beginning in the late 1800s, new laws and cultural practices began to isolate teens from adults, imposing on them an increasingly large set of restrictions and artificially extending childhood well past puberty. New research suggests that teens today are subjected to more than ten times as many restrictions as are most adults, and adulthood is delayed until well into the twenties or thirties. It's likely that the turmoil we see among teens is an unintended result of the artificial extension of childhood. Between a quarter and a third of young people who enter our school systems never graduate from high school, and for blacks and Hispanics, the proportion is closer to one-half.

Evidently, the state lately has been experiencing an epidemic of strippers masquerading as pompom girls at high schools with relaxed moral standards.  These girls were probably touching themselves (or one another!) or otherwise gesturing in a manner to suggest "putting it through the uprights" was something to be hotly anticipated off the field as well as on.

Homeschooling looking more and more attractive

I was running late for an 11:30 tee time.  No time to prepare my own breakfast or to sit down for a drawn-out feast at the local coffeeshop, so I decide to take the high-speed approach at McDonald's drivethru.

What a relief. For a horrible moment or two there I thought that the long-anticipated dawn of an American-style version of 1984 was finally upon us. I came by this misbegotten notion after reading articles about how the Pentagon, in recognizing the need to treat all of us as terrorists in order to protect us from terrorists, plans to build the Mother of All Computer Databases that will monitor every purchase made by every citizen in the nation. Our masters in Washington call it Total Information Awareness.

Visions of Big Brother danced in my cranium. Purchase Viagra online and Bureaucrat Bob chortles. Slip a Hustler onto your credit card and Functionary Phil snickers. Make a "sudden and large cash withdrawal" to pay for your colonoscopy and Agency Annie in faraway Washington makes a notation in your dossier.

Walk into any public school and talk to any teacher and you will hear the same complaints: Too many children in the classroom, not enough supplies or text books, students unable to sit quietly or focus on the teacher, and of course, teachers not paid enough money. If the list goes further you will find the physical conditions of the school itself is faulty. It comes down to the final question; how can we fix these problems?

Walk into any private school you will see similar problems but the students are seldom affected. Our politicians are puzzled by this and have decided to damage the concept of private schools in an attempt to make the governments schools more attractive.