Public Schools: Part Two

In a previous post, I said that the public schools are controlled by the ultra-leftists in the NEA and the universities.

Here, in an article by Sol Stern, is just one bit of evidence for that claim:

As I have shown elsewhere in City Journal, [William] Ayers’s politics have hardly changed since his Weatherman days. He still boasts about working full-time to bring down American capitalism and imperialism. This time, however, he does it from his tenured perch as Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Instead of planting bombs in public buildings, Ayers now works to indoctrinate America’s future teachers in the revolutionary cause, urging them to pass on the lessons to their public school students.

[snip]

Ayers’s influence on what is taught in the nation’s public schools is likely to grow in the future. Last month, he was elected vice president for curriculum of the 25,000-member American Educational Research Association (AERA), the nation’s largest organization of education-school professors and researchers. Ayers won the election handily, and there is no doubt that his fellow education professors knew whom they were voting for. In the short biographical statement distributed to prospective voters beforehand, Ayers listed among his scholarly books Fugitive Days, an unapologetic memoir about his ten years in the Weather Underground. The book includes dramatic accounts of how he bombed the Pentagon and other public buildings. (emphasis added)

More to come.

Today

So last night I wasn't ashamed to admit I cried. Well, today, of course, I'm embarrassed that I admitted it! Oh well. Chalk it up to the 1/4 Irish in my blood, along with a glass of red wine which helped drown my sorrows.

I still believe what I said, however: America is lost. We've lost our understanding of freedom and what it means to be an American. We've lost our moral bearings completely (well, not completely, as gay "marriage" bans passed in California and Florida). We've lost our economic freedom because we're indebted to the tune of trillions of dollars.

Today, it's time to figure out what we're doing next.

Michele Malkin says "gird your loins, conservatives".

Feminine-Genius says "God's will in all things", and also encourages us to:

• Pray and work to defend the marriage bond;
• Pray and work to defend the sanctity of all human life;
• Pray and work to restore life-giving collaboration between men and women;
• Pray and work to restore cherished devotions and a Catholic culture.
• Stay close to the sacraments and allow God to use use you as He will.

The Anchoress has a huge round-up of reactions.

My thoughts:

• I'm thankful that we had a peaceful election (though I can't say I'm sure it would have been that way had the outcome been reversed, based on the attacks, bullying, and intimidation that happened during the campaign).
  

• Since we might not always have talk radio or conservative blogs, we should start planning other ways for conservatives to stay connected to each other.

• If you still have your kids in public school, take them out immediately. We simply cannot have any more children brainwashed by the leftists in charge of government schools and textbooks. Send them to private schools, or better yet, homeschool them. You can do it, trust me. You certainly won't do any worse than most of the public schools, and you'll probably do much better at teaching your children the truths of faith and freedom. More about this later.

• Figure out what you personally can do to build a culture of love and life. More about this later, too.
  

Back to work here ... a house to clean, kids to take to various things, and supper to cook... the beauty of quotidian activities.

It's Conference Season!

It's the time of year when Catholic Homeschool conferences sprout up all across the country.

I highly recommend two of them in the Midwest:

First, "Teaching the Truth: The Illinois Catholic Homeschool Conference and Vendor Fair", at the University of St. Francis in Joliet, Illinois, on May 23-24. I plan to be attend this year, so if any of you will be there, be sure to let me know!

Second, the Minnesota Catholic Home Education Conference, at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, May 30 - 31. I wish I could be at this one, too, but it's just not possible. I attended last year and it was terrific (as was the Chicago conference two years ago).

This year, my friend Ana will be presenting a "Fireside Session" on homeschool blogging, which should be a great conversation. If you make it there, be sure to tell Ana hello from me.



By the way, our homeschool support group, GMCHE, alternates sponsorship of an annual homeschool conference with the Our Lady of Good Hope group in the Chicago area. Next year will be our turn again... so please put a little note at the end of your 2008 calendar for April 24-25, 2009. How's that for advance planning?!?

And more good news today!

This time, it's about that California homeschooling case. From Michele Malkin:

A state appeals court will reconsider last month’s controversial decision that said parents who home-school their children must have a teaching credential.

The 2nd District Court of Appeal in Los Angeles granted a rehearing Tuesday, essentially voiding the 3-0 decision until it rules again. The decision will now allow home-schooling organizations that had blasted the decision to weigh in.

Read the whole article here in the Mercury News.

And you've gotta love this bon mot from one of the links at Michele's post:

When I told one of my sons [who had been homeschooled] about the California ruling, he said, “That’s just stupid! What are they going to do next? Say you can’t cook for your family unless you’re a licensed chef?

Media bias? What media bias?

I got another email from my homeschool friend who'd alerted me to the Reuters "article" by the "reporter" that I posted about "yesterday". (Oops, sorry, got a little carried away with those sneer quotes.)

She said a friend wrote to her, saying,

It does make one wonder how a story in the opposite direction would go. Do you think we'd ever see something like this in the Star Tribune?

The Clinton machine included "bitter, aging feminists" who volunteered for her in droves. Liberal secularists who pay other people to "raise" their children away from home, they could easily be spotted at her campaign stops: Angry mothers in designer clothes accompanied by brow-beaten male partners, occasionally toting one child. They sometimes swore out loud upon hearing of Obama's success.

May I just say: Heh.

How does Mainstream Media view homeschoolers?

For a hint, just read this, from a Reuters story:

The Huckabee machine included "homeschoolers" who volunteered for him in droves. Conservative Christians who "school" their children at home, they could easily be spotted at his campaign stops: mothers with long hair and home-made dresses and fathers with crew-cuts surrounded by mobs of children with Huckabee signs. They sometimes prayed aloud for his success.

The rubes. They prayed for him.

And don't you love the sneerquotes around "homeschoolers" and "school"?

Just for fun, the reporter threw in some gratuitous remarks about hair style, clothing, and the "mobs" of children.

So, that's our lesson for today on "How MSM views homeschoolers, Christians and conservatives".

Stop by soon for a lesson in "How MSM views liberals, atheists, and government schoolers".

Oh, wait, we don't really need a lesson in that, do we?

H/T to a "homeschool" friend

Bad news for homeschoolers in California is bad news for all of us

A California appeals court just ruled that parents do not have a constitutional right to home school their own children. They ordered the children to be enrolled in a government school. [Update: The option for a private school remained open as well.]

The appeals court cited a U.S. Supreme Court case (Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 [45 S.Ct. 571, 69 L.Ed. 1070, 39 A.L.R. 468],

No question is raised concerning the power of the state reasonably to regulate all schools, to inspect, supervise and examine them, their teachers and pupils; to require that all children of proper age attend some school, that teachers shall be of good moral character and patriotic disposition, that certain studies plainly essential to good citizenship must be taught, and that nothing be taught which is manifestly inimical to the public welfare.

The Supreme Court said this applied to all schools, so, I'm assuming that it would apply to public as well as private schools.

Thus, a couple of questions:

• "That teachers shall be of good moral character and patriotic disposition". If this was enforced, what percentage of current public school teachers do you think would be summarily dismissed?
  

• "That nothing be taught which is manifestly inimical to the public welfare". If this was enforced, what percentage of social studies (read: revisionist history and fraudulent global warming "science") and sex education classes (read: education in promiscuity and perversion) do you think would be summarily dropped?

Back to the California case. The judges cited the paragraph above from Pierce v. Society of Sisters, but failed to quote a subsequent section which was really the key to that ruling:

The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations. [Emphasis mine]

Pierce v. Society of Sisters overturned a 1922 referendum in Oregon that mandated attendance at public schools. The California appeals court misused that decision by taking one paragraph from it to buttress their weak argument against the religious and educational freedom of California parents.

The California judges' hostility to home schooling and religious freedom is manifest. The decision includes:

• repeated references to "uncredentialed" parents, as though being credentialed by the state guarantees that one will be a good teacher.
  
• a slap at the Christian home study program the parents had used, saying it had participated in "the deprivation of the children’s right to a legal education".
• a snide reference to the family "history" when forbidding the parents to hire a private tutor, saying it would "pose too many difficulties" for the tutor. The family apparently doesn't meet the judges' standards for a "quality" family; should the state credential parents just to be parents, too? Does having a less-than-perfect family life mean you give up your First Amendment rights?
• a sneer at those parents, and thus any parent, who holds religious reasons for homeschooling: "Moreover, such sparse representations [of religious beliefs] are too easily asserted by any parent who wishes to home school his or her child". Since when do religious beliefs have to meet some arbitrary standard of "difficulty of assertion" to be legitimate? And if home schooling is a fundamental right (as I believe it is), since when does a parent need any kind of religious belief, sparse or not, to educate his children at home?
  

Some have said that the parents involved in the California case are hardly poster children for the homeschool movement. Even if that's true (and I'm not totally willing to concede the point, as California child welfare authorities had determined that the children were not being abused and were doing fine), it doesn't matter.

Hard cases make bad law. This is particularly bad law, hard case or not.

For more, see Bending the Twig, (check that post and then others posted after it),World Net Daily, and Principled Discovery.

"Homer, whoever he was, still speaks to us"

As you know if you've read some of the posts here lately, we are deep into Greek history and literature this year.

So, I was happy to see this article in the Weekly Standard: "Greeks Bearing Gifts." (Most of the article is behind a subscriber wall... and I highly recommend subscribing!)

A few excerpts:

Children are enthralled by Odysseus's adventures with bizarre monsters; warriors are drawn to the violence of the Trojan battlefield; sentimentalists like the affair of Helen and Paris, or the tragic marital love of Hector and Andromache. Feminists, ancient and modern, are attracted to the clever ways that Penelope exercises sexual power over the suitors, and to the whiffs of a prehistoric matriarchy in the poems. (Why, after all, do the suitors think they have to marry Penelope in order to become king?) And entrepreneurial types like Odysseus's indomitable spirit and problem-solving techniques.

Yes! Exactly!

I read this passage aloud to the kids (making a subtle change from "sexual power" to "feminine power" for the sake of the younger ones), and it made me inordinately happy that they knew each of the characters named and could identify with the thoughts expressed by the author. They, too, had been touched by the tenderness of Hector toward his baby son, who cried from fright at the sight of Hector's helmet, and by the devotion of Andromache, his heartbroken wife; they had admired Penelope for her faithfulness and resourcefulness; they had delighted in the cleverness of Odysseus.

There is so much to love about these stories for those reasons alone, but there's more, of course:

The Odyssey, too, asserts the deep value of living a human life. Odysseus, offered the possibility of blissful immortality with the goddess Calypso, is inexorably drawn to return to his home, his son, and his wife. Homer presents us with no transcendent values, but he does celebrate this-world, human ones: the value of achieving excellence, and the value of love--of husband and wife, of father and son, and of one friend for another. Achilles, like most soldiers before and since Troy, finally faced battle not for some glorious, abstract cause, but out of intense devotion to a brother in arms.

At a time when the value of living an earthly life is under attack by violent, death-loving and suicidal religious totalitarians, when a twisted honor/shame culture drives fathers and brothers to murder their daughters and sisters because of perceived violations of family honor, we could do worse than to contemplate with Achilles and Odysseus--the founders of our own culture--what makes this life worth living.

This is why these great works should be part of every curriculum. We have the obligation to hand on the treasures of the past to the next generation; we put our own civilization in peril if we fail in that duty.

The Volcano

Awhile back I promised some pictures of the kids making a kitchen-table volcano.

So, here are the pics!

First, the kids made their salt dough mountain around an old glass jar. Then they carefully measured and poured in water, dish soap, a little red food coloring, and baking soda...



Then, the vinegar, and... LOOK OUT!

I love how they both sort of jumped back, not sure what to expect from this volcano.

Of course, we then had to re-do it several times, just to see the bubbling, overflowing "lava".

Notes on the background: See the plain kitchen walls? We just stripped off all the old wallpaper but haven't gotten around to putting up anything in its place. We will before summer, I hope.

This is SO cool!

Well, to me, it was cool. I love when stuff like this happens; one of those great coincidences that you just know is not blind coincidence at all.

Here's the deal: Two separate streams of reading and learning converged in a very neat way today.

First stream: This summer, we finally decided to start reading Harry Potter. We'd successfully avoided the books and movies for all these years because we were trying to be prudent about what our children were reading, since we'd heard how eeeeeeevil the HP books were.

But this summer, thanks to Nancy Brown and other Catholics saying that the books were actually good, perhaps akin to Lewis's Narnia books or the science fiction of J.P. Tolkien, we decided to let our teens read them. I, too, started reading, and it was at the end of the second book that I decided these books were not just good, but great. (It was that transcendently beautiful scene with the Phoenix at the end of Chamber of Secrets that convinced me.)

The girls, of course, finished the books long before I did (they being teens with plenty of time to do nothing but read for hours on end, and me being a mom with stretches of, say, five minutes at a time), and I have only just started the 7th book. But ever since I started reading them, I've been driving the girls nuts by searching them out in the house to say, "Oh wow, did you see THIS cool bit of mythology that Rowling worked into the plot??" or, apropos of nothing, "Oh, this is so cool, look at this SYMBOLISM!" Stuff like that.

The second stream: We've been studying Greek drama. According to our syllabus, we were supposed to read just the first play of Aechylus's trilogy (Agamemnon), then move on to some other works. However, a mistake in the syllabus meant that we didn't have the correct edition that included those other works, so we decided to just go on reading the trilogy: The Libation Bearers, and then Eumenides. We finished yesterday.

The convergence of the streams happened today. (Oh, isn't this just so cool?!?) I open "Deathly Hallows" to find this incription:

The Libation Bearers

Oh, the torment bred in the race,
the grinding scream of death and the stroke that hits the vein,
the haemorrhage none can staunch,
the grief, the curse no man can bear.

But there is a cure in the house and not outside it,
no, not from others but from them,
their bloody strife.

We sing to you, dark gods beneath the earth.
Now hear, you blissful powers underground—
answer the call, send help.
Bless the children, give them triumph now.

—Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers

The Libation Bearers!! and Harry Potter!! Imagine my excitement. (Yes, I do get really excited about stuff like this!) Of course, I immediately ran over to my oldest daughter, in the family room: "Here, listen to this! Does it sound familiar?!?" She, thoughfully, "Ummm, I think it's.... Aeschylus!" "Yes, yes, isn't that cool!!" A smile, a somewhat surprised look, which I took to mean, "Wow, so maybe reading these dusty old Greek playwrights is more 21st century than I thought..." Next, run upstairs, repeat scenario with second eldest. Same reaction, which again I took to mean, "Hmmmm, if J.K. Rowling studied the classics and read Aeschylus, maybe it's not hopelessly dopey that I'm doing that, too."

For me, that's a very cool thing.

Geography

We're going to do "Mapping the World by Heart" this year, and as a little warmup I'm using some colorful, blank U.S. maps I found at American Science and Surplus. I bought just a single pad of 50 blank maps at my local store, but the online store has them bundled with a 30-sheet pack of filled-in maps.


Anyway, this morning during homeroom: POP QUIZ! The kids had to complete as much of the US map as they could, from memory. State names were the minimum requirement; bonus points for capitals, lakes, rivers, mountains, neighboring countries and bodies of water. They did pretty well! And so did Mom (whew), although my 8 yo daughter was tickled to point out that I'd inadvertantly swapped New Mexico and Arizona.

Anyway, it's just a warmup. By the end of this year they'll have to draw the whole country free-hand and fill in everything listed above. At least, that's my hope.