Here it is, cool! Today evolved and thinking homeschool parents get our own 15 minutes of blogos-phame. Who do you know already in this guest column, who will you find tomorrow, how will you use this to show that homeschooling adds up to much more than the sum of its hardworking helpmeets?
Go see. Link. Evangelize! 
We’re just starting to find ourselves and each other in the blogosphere, a search made more challenging by the fact we don’t know what to call ourselves. (Homeschoolers Beyond Belief?) Secular, inclusive, rational, atheist, freethinking? The online homeschooling community fights over the word “homeschool” itself, never mind the weight of all those adjectives hung around it like baggage on a skycap’s cart.
Some of us are trying Thinking Homeschoolers and Evolved Homeschoolers on for size. The main lesson I’ve taught myself so far is that it takes real thinking — knowledge work if you will — with plenty of detours through link farms and those insipid generic “about homeschooling” blurbs, to discover solid secular homeschooling resources that endure.
[...] regular JJ wrote a guest post at Parenting Beyond Belief. The subject, not surprisingly, is secular [...]
This is my favorite quote: “Then there’s an elaborate online con game in which an individual (with many names) sets up a fake but believable show of influence as homeschool leader and authority …”
LOL!!
You spent too much time being suffocated in the sock drawer, NotJC.
Haven’t seen the sock puppets in awhile.
Shoot, I forgot to include my Culture Kitchen thinking parent blog, which predated the birth of Snook and in which I first endeavored to explain smart, secular homeschooling to liberal and feminist bloggers who weren’t exactly, ah, receptive — either because they’d only ever met the patriarchal bible story version of homeschoolers and/or they were still too young and idealistic to have personally agonized over parent education decisions themselves yet.
I still love those essays and comments. They’re all about education as a matter of ultimate individual and social concern, to us all whether parents or not.
Btw NotJC, I’ve secretly been enjoying your posts about how the boys are starting to find their more academically inspired side and their own creative rhythms, discovering reading and writing are FUN. Look what you did for them, just by not forcing it on them as a chore they’d probably learn to avoid forever after.
Remember, oogedy-boogedy right-wing evangelicals are only half our battle.
Christine Escobar as “urban left” Huffposter makes sure we secular homeschoolers keep balance in our push-back so that “liberals” and “feminists” don’t box us in from the opposite end:
[...] Hat tip: JJ [...]
Example: remember Judith Warner’s oogedy-boogedy LEFT-wing argument, that schools must get parents even further out of their kids’ daily lives?
See “Visiting Day” –
I blogged it the day her argument appeared, in 2007:
I say . . . it’s worth helping families even if we have to change the whole culture to integrate learning with daily life, rather than isolating learning and working away from families and homes.
So that what she’s arguing for, right?
HA! No, this prominent supposedly-thinking mom says our whole culture needs to change indeed, but in the opposite direction, to further isolate kids away from their parents, to systematically keep even the best, most dedicated and productively present proud parents OUT of their own kids’ daytime learning and activities.
. . . if you can’t bring enough parent involvement for the whole class, don’t allow any for anyone. Level the playing field by taking all the kids away from all the parents, all day long. Parents can see ‘em after homework at night and have weekend visitation, otherwise they are creatures of the State and that’s the only fair thing to do.
No worries for my kids of course, or yours — experienced Thinking Parents schooling or not, can afford to laugh at society’s urge to dictate our family time, much less our family values or level of involvement with our own children. We already refused to be part of sacrificing our own on these perverse policy pyres.
What does worry me though, is that this can be proposed as serious commentary to solve our serious social problems. It’s a bad sign imo, if credible liberal thought from our nation’s cultural and journalistic capital is this fatally misguided on family and education policy. The schools have been thoroughly socialized (how’s that working for ya? as Dr. Phil would say) so noblesse oblige now dictates that the next step is to socialize parenting itself, turn it over to community controls both legal and cultural?
It’s like reading Julia Steiny. You finish and think, well, we’re down the rabbit hole for sure now . . .no use even trying to talk sense until I get back HOME.
And since we’re on a roll about liberal critics of homeschooling, see also:
Thinking cock of the Snook to Daryl, for PZ’s reminder that while liberals may stereotype and even mock us, it’s less harmful considering they haven’t been in charge of actually governing us from that View:
p.s. check out comment #226, a letter to Bill O’Reilly about the war of Christmas.