Using and Abusing Analogies: The Homeschool Edition

Dana’s got a new piece taking homeschool analogies to pieces, in Heart of the Matter.

Feel free to post other analogies that annoy you in the comments here, especially if you can put your finger on what’s wrong with them. (Extra points for funny!)

Well-working analogies welcome too, if you know some. I remember a really good one for unschooling, about a free, open walking park where all sorts of people just can’t get the concept, keep pouting or asking to bring in vehicles; they won’t join in but also can’t seem to leave the happy walkers alone! Sandra Dodd’s site, I think? I’ll look tomorrow if someone doesn’t offer it before then . . .

Vote Now! Top Five Thinkers for Our Times

And hurry, voting ends next week!

Pick your top choices from 100 nominated public intellectuals worldwide, or write in your own favorite. It’s your chance to think about the “Thinkers
Shaping the Tenor of Our Times” — and make your thinking part of those times.

Not that I’d dream of influencing anyone; Thinking Parents think for themselves and help their children learn to do the same. But here are JJ’s power of mind (education) and power of story picks:

Howard Gardner
Steven Pinker
Salman Rushdie
Christopher Hitchens
Richard Dawkins

“CRITERIA: Although the men and women on this list are some of the
world’s most sophisticated thinkers, the criteria to make the list could
not be more simple. Candidates must be living and still active in public
life. They must have shown distinction in their particular field as well
as an ability to influence wider debate, often far beyond the borders of
their own country.”

Otherwise I would’ve written in Carl Sagan, and I forgot Jacques Barzun isn’t dead yet, right, even though he’s in his second century of life:

Good grief! — what are we looking for? A world leader or a bowling buddy?

It has been a very long time since America had a world-class president: Wilson the academic from Princeton, Roosevelt the patrician from the Hudson Valley, Kennedy the sophisticate from New England, and Eisenhower the beloved World War II hero.

Other than that, we’ve had a haberdasher, an actor, a peanut farmer, a few lawyers, and a failed businessman and military drop-out. None of them brought any great degree of intelligence or imagination to the highest office in the land. And still today, we’re just looking for a hand-shaker: someone who we think can chummy up to coal miners, factory workers, farmers, inner-city minorities, pregnant teens, and high school drop-outs.
Who can kiss babies, chug-a-lug beer and shoot pool. . .

This is the dumbing-down of America and the dumbing-down of our candidates. It is what Jacques Barzun, one-time dean of Columbia University, alluded to nearly 50 years ago in “The House of Intellect”: many Americans, clinging to an exaggerated sense of ‘democracy’, actually fear or envy or are suspicious of excellence.

. . . is he still intellectually active in public life, does anyone know? If not, at least his thinking is!

More Important Stuff School Doesn’t Teach

So the same “preemptive” do-it-yourself rules apply to learning philanthropy, then, that apply to everything else? School is not just unnecessary but obstructionist to education, if the main goal really is to chart your own best course, to learn how to be happy and productive with in your own life, in your own life:

Colleges, hospitals and myriad other charities are applying ways to measure their own effectiveness, including staff-time-to-donation ratios. Development offices now have quarterly gift goals. They are working on the Big Ask.

While plenty of schools teach fund-raising, there are no advanced degrees in how to be a philanthropist, turn down a request or shrink the amount of a gift that is being sought.

There is a way to avoid awkward situations like that lunch with your old college chum and the fund-raising pro. It’s called pre-emptive philanthropy. By practicing it you will probably feel happier about the gifts you do make, and you will give in ways that have more impact. . .

Unboxing Our Lizard Brains: Can You At Least Think About It?

“Not choice, but habit rules the unreflecting herd,”
William Wordsworth said in the 19th century.
. . .The current emphasis on standardized testing highlights analysis and procedure, meaning that few of us inherently use our innovative and collaborative modes of thought.

“This breaks the major rule in the American belief system — that anyone can do anything”. . . “That’s a lie that we have perpetuated, and it fosters mediocrity. Knowing what you’re good at and doing even more of it creates excellence.”

. . .But . . .“You cannot have innovation. . .unless you are willing and able to move through the unknown and go from curiosity to wonder.”

So there’s plenty of contempt to go around and deservedly so, especially imo for continuing to quarrel amongst themselves and plot against each other in domestic wargames, instead of working to turn things around for *us* in the real world.

Can we creatively and collegially cultivate our personal curiosity to the benefit of ourselves and human society, despite discomfort to our lizard brains? Can we embrace that stretch and move through its wider range until we reach “the freeing discipline of wonder”?

Here’s some bad news in good cognitive science: this won’t be easy even if we’re NOT hampered by conservative dominionist control freaks styled as preachers, pundits and prophets. Being liberal is no help, Thinking Parents have learned the hard way, because so-called liberals run most forms of public thought control, from schools to the media, and it seems with similar social-dominionist arrogance.

So somehow, in this intellectually rigged and regulated environment, we nevertheless need to get ourselves and our kids in the habit of asking open-ended and complex questions rather than memorizing and following the Orders of the Day. Start defining real education as productive, creative thought and ourselves as comfortably confident to think and learn independently. Somehow, enough of us must learn (by teaching ourselves against all odds, apparently) that humanity isn’t merely socialized, standardized insect life born to exist in preordained church hierarchies and/or one big biologically imperative collective called “School.”

So what we seem without better data to have here, is simply more white men demanding the power to Decide for everybody.

What difference does it make to me loving my own family at home in guaranteed freedom from all of them, just desiring to be left out of their Grand Plan for Global Domination, whether megalomaniacal men are liberal or conservative or communist or fascist, atheist or Southern Baptist or Jewish or Mormon or Muslim — if what they’re peddling drags us all down to the same place, servility to their agenda rather than freedom to set our own course and laugh in their frowning faces?

No one knows how many lizard brains can evolve and become conscious of curiosity and wonder, leaving the primordial ooze of dominionist thinking behind. The earthly and yet celestial ending remains to be discovered, if not created, and there are plenty of public school-pandering “Squelchers” we desperately need to “move through”– home education critics Rob Reich, Michael Apple and that Ladenblather guy for example — pulling us all back down into the slime, their narrow comfort zone bounded on all sides by credentialed, government-controlled mediocrity misnamed as merit and politically correct diversity:

. . .But there was some real public education (as in education of the public) in her next hour . . .(drum roll, please) . . . Howard Gardner!

(Can’t we just let him run the country, or at least public education?)

Renowned Harvard University psychologist Howard Gardner explains the five ‘minds’ everyone will need to succeed in the years ahead.

To Mark This National Day of Reason . . .

Florida’s academic freedom bill is dead; long live academic freedom!

I heard the good news on local public radio coverage of the end of session. Here’s the Discovery Institute’s version, poor things, bet they’re cross:

Are Florida’s House Republicans Trying to Sabotage Evolution Academic Freedom Bill?

Florida citizens who support academic freedom legislation on evolution might want to ask some tough questions of House Republican leaders in their state. Rather than pass an academic freedom bill previously adopted by the state Senate, the Florida House earlier this week adopted its own seemingly tougher measure that would actually require critical analysis of evolution. But wait: the Florida Senate had previously rejected the House approach, and with only a week left in the legislative session, Florida House members had to know that it would be extremely difficult to hammer out a new bill that could pass both houses within the remaining time. If the Florida legislature adjourns without passing an evolution academic freedom bill–after both legislative chambers previously approved bills on the topic by strong margins–Florida’s House Republican leadership will need to explain why they allowed academic freedom for Florida teachers to be sabotaged.

I hope I’m wrong, but it’s beginning to look like someone in the Florida House leadership is intentionally trying to kill the academic freedom bill. If so, that’s outrageous, and I hope concerned citizens in Florida will demand some answers.

Posted by John West on May 1, 2008 12:12 AM |

And here’s a fine opinion piece from an Intelligent Christian in our capital city newspaper yesterday — I thought bringing CS Lewis into it was a particularly nice touch:

Seeking ignorance in the name of God
Christians should have no fear of evolution
by Richard Lindsley Walton
My View

C.S. Lewis, the Oxford professor and author of “The Chronicles of Narnia,” once said that it isn’t what the devil puts into our minds that we should be afraid of; it’s what he keeps out.

We should all, religious and nonreligious people alike, be familiar with the concepts of creationism and intelligent design. Public school, however, is not the place to disseminate this “scientific information.”

The problem with the Florida Senate’s so-called Evolution Academic Freedom Act, and a similar bill passed by the House, is that the logic supporting the effort fails to rise to the standards of its own lofty title. In other words, this bill is not truly concerned with responsible academic freedom.

. . .If, in the name of academic freedom, we are going to ask whether creationism or intelligent design could be, then are we also going to ask whether unidentified flying objects or intelligent life on other planets could be?

Doc Finds Name That Fits School Sock Puppets “Laden” With Logic Disorders

Great parody of Greg Laden’s anti-homeschool piousness passing as critical thought, over at Alasandra’s — if you can stomach the Tiny Cat Pants-style side show spectacle he’s staging in her comments. I still find it pretty tawdry but it IS hard not to gawk in disgusted fascination . . . .

Here’s the rotten vegetables he and his trolls are flinging at dear Alasandra:

If you have a chance, go over to this site and tell this girl that she should change the name of her blog post. I don’t mind that her post is a parody of a post I wrote. I mean really, I’m made out of rubber and she’s made out of glue … etc. etc. … But she really should not use the term she uses in the title of her post. This girl has shown evidence in the past of being a bit of a follower and I think this term is used a lot by “Doc” the home schooling mommie. But still, she should know better.

At heart I think she is a good person, if also a bit mean spirited, terribly misguided, and, well, not very smart. So if a few people tell her that derivations of the word “retard” are not OK, maybe she’ll have a learning moment. . .

Thinking About Hitting and Children

How do we look ourselves in the mirror after putting up with things like this in the headlines day after day?

Legal journey to begin for children removed from Texas polygamist compound

Mea culpa: penitent Pope meets victims of sexual abuse by priests

Lynn Paddock ordered books by a minister and his wife that recommended using pipe to spank kids

This week’s –

Police found teenage boy in shackles

How do we continue to hide behind religion and culture and commit these violent crimes against the people we have brought into this world?

Happy Birthday Harper Lee, Boss Boost to Barack Obama

Frisky cock of the snook to Don at the Gookins for the latter, and to Favorite Daughter for the former.

I connect these in my own mind — small towns and big hearts, racial and social and economic justice, words and music and story with real meaning for real people, characters we care enough about to “step into their skin” for a little while and begin to understand, and become better ourselves for it.

ENDORSEMENT: 2008

Dear Friends and Fans:

LIke most of you, I’ve been following the campaign and I have now seen and heard enough to know where I stand. Senator Obama, in my view, is head and shoulders above the rest.

He has the depth, the reflectiveness, and the resilience to be our next President. He speaks to the America I’ve envisioned in my music for the past 35 years, a generous nation with a citizenry willing to tackle nuanced and complex problems, a country that’s interested in its collective destiny and in the potential of its gathered spirit.
A place where “…nobody crowds you, and nobody goes it alone.”

At the moment, critics have tried to diminish Senator Obama through the exaggeration of certain of his comments and relationships. While these matters are worthy of some discussion, they have been ripped out of the context and fabric of the man’s life and vision, so well described in his excellent book, Dreams From My Father, often in order to distract us from discussing the real issues: war and peace, the fight for economic and racial justice, reaffirming our Constitution, and the protection and enhancement of our environment.

After the terrible damage done over the past eight years, a great American reclamation project needs to be undertaken. I believe that Senator Obama is the best candidate to lead that project and to lead us into the 21st Century with a renewed sense of moral purpose and of ourselves as Americans.

Over here on E Street, we’re proud to support Obama for President.

Bruce Springsteen

And here’s how Harper Lee fits into our story, as homeschoolers and booklovers:

Hands Off the Hands-On in School Math??

Okay, I’m not explaining, just reporting this:

Dr. Kaminski and her colleagues Vladimir M. Sloutsky and Andrew F. Heckler did something relatively rare in education research: they performed a randomized, controlled experiment. Their results appear in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

Though the experiment tested college students, the researchers suggested that their findings might also be true for math education in elementary through high school, the subject of decades of debates about the best teaching methods.

Rapt regular readers will recall that in all those decades of debates or touted teaching tracks, nothing ever made math manipulable for Favorite Daughter.

Probably this kind of “randomized, controlled experiment” in math education won’t help any individual learn math better, since it is geared to the institutional classroom and switching to a new standard rather than switching out of standard mode in the first place. At best this kind of “science” about math education then, will just illuminate better ways to manipulate the subjective minds of the generalizable aggregate to meet the objective standards of the generalizable aggregate. I can’t glean much from it for helping my own two unschooling children compete in schoolish math and science standards step-dancing, but that was never our educational focus anyway.

So it rivets me not as unschooling mom but as former education policy pro and Lifelong Thinking Citizen, to notice this as a way I can learn more about how we the American people obsess over — and subsequently overvalue — school math instruction and test performance, as a scientifically defensible merit ranking mechanism equally applicable between individual children, classrooms, schools, cities, states and countries across the globe.

Doc Kicks Jack As[s] Representative Homeschool Critic

“Homeschooling critics, haven’t they learned anything?”:

I’m going to flame Jack’s stupid “essay” to make an analogy between his ignorance, and the ignorance he fears some homeschool children are being taught. . .Jack is what I like to call an “edutard”.

Just Because He’s Cute!

Angus the Highland Bear from The Scotweb Store:

Doing a Favor for a Friend

. . .is what has kept me from posting much lately but also why I’m posting right now.

(Nance made a special request for a new post to bump that ugly art off the top!)

The other favor is about education and Nance will think it’s cool, I predict, as soon as I get time to go into it. Meanwhile, on a completely unrelated topic, we’re researching bagpipes for beginners because Young Son is on the cusp on leaving his practice chanter behind and taking the leap, and it’s all very exciting. And so here’s art of — um — another saggy bag??