Speak Up When Pro-Child Politics Are Attacked as Anti-Parent

Here we go again. Families, child-rearing and home education publicly
stereotyped as conservative extremism and anti-human rights, sigh. If
you parent and/or educate children and don’t fit this stereotype, make
your voice heard too. Don’t let this define your principles.

Parental rights rally on Washington planned: Your stories needed!
November 11, 11:01 AM
by Lynda Ackert

The Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted by the General
Assembly of the United Nations on the 20th of November 1989. As part of a celebration, internationalists backing this UN Convention have
declared November 20th of this year as ‘Children’s Day.’

In response, ParentalRights dot org will rally in Washington, D.C. on that day. The rally will be held at the U.S. Capitol from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., on the East Lawn across from the Rayburn House Office building.

Speakers during the rally will include Rep. Peter Hoekstra and Sen. Jim
DeMint, the lead sponsors of the Parental Rights Amendment; Gerard
Robinson with Black Alliance for Educational Options; William Estrada of
Homeschool Legal Defense Association; Dean and Julie Nelson of National Black Home Educators; and Steven Groves of Heritage Foundation.

Whether you homeschool or not, parental rights have been and are
continuing to be under attack.

Want your voice heard? ParentalRights.org wants to hear from you. If you have experienced any assault or threat to your parental rights, make your story known by emailing ParentalRights. . .

Homeschooling is a parental right…Let’s keep it that way!

Source: ParentalRights dot org

For more of JJ’s thoughts on the UN and this political meme setting up “parental rights” in opposition to child and human rights, start with:

Homeschool freedom fighting: It’s so not about the UN

Parental Rights and responsibilities: Parenting sex and parenthood

Latest Homeschool Freak-out from World Net Daily

Tough case: Church v State for the life of Daniel Hauser

Mike Lux on America’s “Historical, Hysterical Conservatives”

They have used the same arguments — for tradition and states rights, against “big government socialism” — in every era. In those past eras, history was not on their side. It is not in our time, either.

. . .These conservative arguments have always been tinged with more than a little hysteria, just like today. And no matter what, conservatives always insisted they owned the moral high ground.

Related news reinforces the Lux WorldView: the former governor of my state now accuses President Obama of attacking American capitalism. Jeb Bush does this not just publicly but apparently for calculated effect not on capitalism or the economy’s current crisis, but his own political prospects.

He needed to make the news he’s been so out of and must re-control if his plan to resurrect any of his traditional dynasties — the Bush family, GOP, Roman Catholic Church — with himself anointed to lead, has a prayer.

How Do You Define What’s Up (at pussy)Cat’s?

The latest round of thinking parents playing “What’s in a Name?” as a floating blog-game of religion and politics costumed as each other for Halloween, apparently started with Lynn and JJ and many commenters both places, riffing on Frank Schaeffer’s books and his new MSNBC repudiation of the evangelical radicalism he was weaned on, taught to use as a weapon of mass destruction in mainstream politics and governance, back in mid-century America. He used some very colorful and contentious language to make his case that this was a bad thing then and a worse thing now.

Cat linked that video and the posts, used it as a mirror exercise in fallacious argument with her kids, which interested JJ enough to keep her playing over there instead of here for a couple of days.

Oh,and Monty Python got involved because isn’t it axiomatic that satisfying intercourse between smart people just does revert to Monty Python sooner or later?

And here we are. My last comment at Cat’s is reproduced below as an invitation if you’re so inclined, to take on the Python persona of your choice and join the improv, here or there across artificial boundaries and dubious definitions as you prefer:

Well, let’s define terms immediately upon using them, or far better, stick to dictionary definitions. A good argument needs no redefinitions, right?

Or a good argument is almost entirely redefinitions. Need we first argue to define good argument?

To that point, I’m surprised you missed this Python definition of argument!

I laughed at that in the 70s because it was really absurd while Bill Buckley was doing Firing Line on PBS for real — breathing life into intellect and intellect into argument and argument into television.

Initially, Cleese simply contradicts everything that Palin says. Palin insists that it is not an argument but merely contradiction and asserts that “argument’s an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gain-saying of anything the other person says.” Cleese asserts that, to have an argument, he must “take up a contrary position.” Palin is frustrated until he realises that Cleese is actually engaging him in a sort of meta-argument about what constitutes an argument.

But it’s not so funny when television and real life become one big intellectually bankrupt contradiction clinic 24-7.

I think of “good argumentation” much like, ahem, other forms of healthy human intercourse.

It is meant as a creative force to uplift, connect and sustain virtues rather than do harm to anyone directly or indirectly through vice and self-indulgence. It is “good” intercourse and fun to share with the right person for the right reasons, when it’s

Smartest Two Percent Use It to Conclude Home Education is Smart

Spunky is blogging a Mensa study done by that organization’s foundation to research the nature of intelligence:

First-year college performance:
A study of home school graduates and traditional school graduates

The academic performance analyses indicate that home school graduates are as ready for college as traditional high school graduates and that they perform as well on national college assessment tests as traditional high school graduates.

The results of this study are also consistent with other studies on the academic performance of home school students compared to traditional high school graduates (Galloway 1995, Gray 1998, Jenkins 1998, Mexcur 1993). These results also suggest that a parent-guided K-12 education does not have a negative effect on a student’s college success.

For those of you needing traditional research to show an uneasy spouse, mother-in-law or the FSM forbid, a custody judge, keep this handy. I don’t need it though. I am my own case study, from a unique perspective as a school professional who unschools, also Mensa mom of Mensa kids including one proving the conclusion as we speak, on campus.

The conversation among Spunky readers is from a different angle than what I tend to see, so I thought I’d open it up here too. I’m not sure what any of this means (the study or the reactions to it) or what to think is smart or stupid or self-validating, except that being really intelligent is understanding that “what we know” — at any age — isn’t as important as “how we think.”

And that, as some of you already know, in 2000 when Favorite Daughter was nine-turning-ten, Mensa referred us to a mainstream but stupid “reality” show to find “the smartest kid in America.” (Since reality shows and kids are in the news this week, y’all might find it particularly interesting.)

Here’s the correspondence we had with the tv producer.

Never Mind That Using Kids Is Immoral in Any Belief System

Including Church. Including School. Including journalism and media coverage. Including “entrepreneurial” or “abstinence” or “extraterrestrial” or “family values” beliefs. Including political arguments about saving liberty or avoiding debt for the next generation.

Just for today, never mind the real horrors and outright tragedies — maybe if we stop to sweat some smaller stuff, we’ll adjust our eyes to better see how the big stuff got so big that we no longer even see it, and when we do catch a glimpse, why we usually can’t believe our own eyes.

If I write a blog essay on this topic today, I think I’ll somehow weave together these power of story posts:

Wife Swap Family’s Six-Year-Old Balloon Boy Doesn’t Homeschool (never mind whatever’s wrong with Jon and Kate)

She’s the shusher

Begin with the Beginning

Never Mind the Children’s Screams

Brand-New Homeschooling Video That Will Inspire

Cock of the snook to Pam Sorooshian for sharing this — and look for her in it! Then share everywhere with everyone you think of. I am thinking of Alpha and Beta right now, but maybe you have a mother-in-law or a neighbor or co-worker you want to send it to . . .

How Our Unschooling is Like Charlotte Mason Homeschool Method

A new home-educating mom (okay, it’s Beta, hi Beta!) has been doing lots of reading and thinking about education methods, as our older-in-educating-herself-on education friend, the New Unschooler (hi Colleen!) did last year.

I just added this comment to Beta’s mix:

I was reading a little about Charlotte Mason homeschooling and I see much that reflects our unschooled education methods (real books, no lectures, etc) but I was never a big Nature Girl — more inside the library or kitchen or theatre type — so it hadn’t appealed to me years ago for that reason and I’d forgotten about it.

Then here in the US, Ken Burns’ new documentary series for PBS started airing, called National Parks: America’s Best Idea.

Young Son (age 14) and I got absorbed in it, recording and watching in the afternoons before his own natural most active time (evening) and about halfway through the series, he got his dad watching with him for a couple of weekend afternoons. We all know a lot more about Nature now than we did! It’s historically riveting but also gorgeous and serene and it moves at a naturalist’s graceful, outdoor-majestic pace — just wonderful Power of Story all around.

Without having to actually go outside.

So it reminded me that we too are eclectic in many good ways. The biggest difference between what we do and the CM method is that what we do is no method, with (what personally is found to be) nasty bits included like it or not . . .

Obviously we unschoolers despite eschewing curriculum and training of children’s habits, nevertheless NATURALLY integrate the philosophical cornerstones of “education as life” and “education as the science of relation” while one bit from wikipedia on Charlotte Mason’s teaching philosophy even sounds Obama-inspired, hmmm, and didn’t his mother teach him at home in the early mornings, wonder if she was a secret CM disciple and he its able pupil . . .

Georgia Boy Says He’s Not Cross-Dresser, Just Creative — So Far Still Alive

Atlanta Journal-Constitution in its news coverage:

. . .the 16-year-old says an assistant principal at North Cobb High School told him last week he needed to dress more “manly” for school, or consider being home-schooled. . .On his second day of school, Escobar says he was pulled out of class to speak with a police officer who told him he was concerned about the student’s safety.

No religious issue for once, at least:

Bryan Killian says that he follows the Pastafarian religion, and that as a crucial part of his faith, he must wear ‘full pirate regalia’ as prescribed in the holy texts of Pastafarianism.

The school, however, say that his pirate garb was disruptive.

For my son it would have been the kilt. Good thing we just homeschooled without being sent home by authorities:
Salute when you call my son a cross-dresser!

A kilt IS manly attire, inarguably NOT cross-dressing, yet this same dress code argument could be made — it’s disruptive because it’s unusual and might be misunderstood — thus it would jeopardize his own safety in the thuggishly conformist school environment. (If not from the other students, then jeopardy from fearful and/or frightfully ignorant adults.)

Kids get beaten up for being in the honors club instead of in a gang, no matter what they wear or how much they all look the same. Not for cross-dressing but just for crossing the street. Even to death.

And sending them home from school can get them killed, not keep them safe.

Just Had a Long Talk With My Sister. . .

and I realize all over again how personal and individual power of story is, how it’s different for my nephews than for my own children (their cousins) not to mention other children I don’t even know . . .

How Humans Are Hard-Wired to Treat Each Other

“So easy a caveman could do it” sells insurance on tv as laissez faire capitalism good for us all. A new congressman boldly goes where no Dem has gone before, calling out GOP obstructionists and greedy antisocial insurance companies as “foot-dragging, knuckle-dragging Neanderthals” this week. [see six-minute mark into video]

And today, the Wall Street Journal takes on the killer-ape “survival of the fittest” theory as unfit to intelligently explain human behavior.
[see 11 new Science papers on these 4.4 million year old hominid fossils here]

Are humans hard-wired to be ruthlessly competitive or supportive of one another?
. . .The once-popular killer ape theory is crumbling under its own lack of evidence . . . towards increasing evidence for humans as cooperative and empathic. . . people do not always adhere to the profit principle.

We care about fairness and justice and sometimes let these concerns override the desire to make as much money as possible.

JJ is having some Saturday morning conjecture with her coffee:

Education Freedom and Religious Freedom In Conflict?

Power of story worthy to lead education:

“It’s really wrong to assume that there is an inconsistency between seeing complexity and taking a strong position. . .In a society committed to free speech . . . we are called on to maintain our courage to confront bad words with better words. That is the hallmark of a university and of our democratic society.”

Suppose religious freedom and education freedom — indeed real education of any kind — are not only not the same thing, but can be shown to be in conflict.

New Dossier of Evidence Against Faith Schools:

A point that needs to be made more often is that religious schools suppress freedom of religion.

“Three in five (60%) of the general population and two in three (66%) of those in ethnic minority groups think religion is more divisive than race today.”

Fat kids, skinny kids, their heads are full of rocks?

What do kids get taught by public universities these days, particularly political science, history, journalism (and religion?) majors, about how human power of story plays out in real life?

Thinking Parents are quick to see family decision-making freedom at the center of both education and religion, to draw Venn diagrams with giant overlap or intersection between the two freedom sets.

But are we as clear-thinking as our own good minds should require, when it comes to accurately representing and defending society’s sets, those freedom circles we all move in and cannot move between except when that’s how we’re drawn?

Jessica Rabbit: “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way!”

We live in a 21st century, multicultural society, and yet we allow a significant proportion of our school system to be run by followers of supernatural faiths.

If this had no impact on our society then it would be fine, albeit unsettling on principle. But the evidence shown here

“Confessions of a Home-schooler”: Salon

Cock of the snook for this to COD:

. . .Some people seem genuinely disturbed by our decision, on philosophical or political grounds, as if by keeping a couple of 5-year-olds out of kindergarten we have violated the social contract. Specifically, we have rejected the mainstream consensus that since education is a good thing, more of it — more formal, more “academic,” reaching ever deeper into early childhood and filling up more of the day and more of the year — is better for society and better for all children. This is almost an article of faith in contemporary America, but it’s also one that’s debatable at best and remains largely unsupported by research data.

In a related vein, some people suspect we have a hidden ideological or religious agenda we’re not telling them about. We may look like your standard-issue Brooklyn creative-class family — two 40-something parents, two kids, two pet rabbits and a battered Chrysler minivan — but who are we really? Home schooling has become a lot more mainstream and diverse in recent years, but familiar stereotypes endure. . .

In order to avoid one or more of these discomfort zones, we try to answer all well-meaning interlocutors with bland, diplomatic and totally unspecific generalities. Not quite lies, but well short of what you’d call the truth. This is a phenomenon known to almost all home-schoolers, from Mormon separatists to off-the-grid hippie anarchists, and a frequent discussion starter in online home-school groups. . .