Tag Archives: Homeschooling

Commentary

Dennis Prager: Does a full-time homemaker swap her mind for a mop?

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On National Review, Dennis Prager argues that going to work full-time is not as intellectually fulfilling as being a stay-at-home mother – if it’s done right.

Excerpt:

I seek to refute the idea that full-time home making is intellectually vapid and a waste of a college education.

Let me first state that I have no argument with those mothers who need or even just wish to work outside the home. My argument is with those who believe that staying at home is necessarily mind-numbing.

Nor do I wish to romanticize child rearing. As a rule, little children don’t contribute much to the intellectual life of a parent (although older children who are intellectually curious can spur a parent to seek answers to challenging questions they may not have considered before). Any intellectually alive woman who is a full-time mother must therefore find intellectual stimulation elsewhere.

The point is that she can find such stimulation without leaving her house. Furthermore, the intellectual input she can find is likely to be greater than most women (or men) find working outside the home. There is a reason that about half the audience of my national radio show is female — they listen to talk radio for hours a day and broaden their knowledge considerably. To the Left, the notion that talk radio enhances intellectual development is akin to fish needing bicycles. But that is because the Left’s greatest achievement is demonizing the Right, and because they never actually listen to the best of us.

I am syndicated by the Salem Radio Network. My colleagues are Bill Bennett, Mike Gallagher, Michael Medved, and Hugh Hewitt. Two of us attended Harvard, one Yale, and one Columbia; one of us taught at Harvard, another at the City University of New York, and a third teaches constitutional law at a law school. In addition to reviewing the news and discussing our own views, we all routinely interview authors and experts — left and right — in almost every field. The woman who listens to us regularly will know more about economics, politics, current events, world affairs, American history, and religion than the great majority of men and women who work full-time outside of the home.

Lest the latter seem a self-serving suggestion, there are many other opportunities for full-time homemakers to broaden their intellectual horizons: recorded books and a few television networks, for example. And if a woman can get help from grandparents, neighbors, older children, or a baby sitter, there are also myriad opportunities for study outside the house — such as community-college classes, book clubs, etc. — and for volunteer work in intellectually more stimulating areas than most paid work.

Let me give an example of the woman I know best, my wife. She is a non-practicing lawyer with a particular interest in, and knowledge of, taxation and the economy. She decided to stay home to be a full-time mother to her two boys (one of whom is autistic) and her two nieces (who lost their mother, my wife’s sister, to cancer when they were very young). Between talk radio, History Channel documentaries, BookTV on C-SPAN2, recorded lectures from The Teaching Company/The Great Courses, and constant reading, she has led a first class intellectual life while shuttling kids, folding laundry, and making family dinners.

I guess by now everyone knows my view on this. I expect a good wife to have a college degree, and preferably a graduate degree, and then a couple of  years experience before the children start to arrive. At that point, her job becomes the most important job in the world: making sure that the children that the husband entrusts her with are able to have more of an impact for Christian than either the wife or the husband. That is one of the major reasons why Christians get married in the first place, in my view.

The husband’s job is to go to work and do mindless, useless drudgery in exchange for money. This is the more self-sacrificial role in marriage. He does this so that he can afford to keep a professional teacher in the house to bond with the young children, make sure that they learn empathy and relational skills, and then go on to get bachelor and graduate degrees and influential jobs. She has to plan all of this out and then navigate their path to success – which means she has to know how to follow the path, and how to neutralize any obstacles that may appear. The woman’s role in the home is a massive undertaking, and more significant (ultimately) than the man’s role outside the home.

It’s very important for a woman to choose a man to marry who has this vision for what a woman does in the home. He has to have set the pattern in courtship that it is his responsibility to help her to know as much as possible about all kinds of different subjects. She has to study more than the man, and then impart the knowledge the children. The man only has to have an overall big picture, but the woman has to know the details. In order for the woman to get the details of math, science, foreign policy, economics, etc., she needs to have a constant feed of intellectually challenging materials, and quiet time for study. And it’s the man’s job to provide these materials and that time, so that she can produce influential children.

Please note that I do not endorse any of the other hosts on the Salem Radio Network. In particular, Medved, Bennett and Hewitt are center-left and support Mitt Romney, with all that that entails.

News

New study: total compensation of public school teachers is 52% greater than fair market value

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Whenever advocates of greater spending on education try to argue that teachers are not paid enough, they always compare teachers to other workers to other workers in terms of years spent in college. On that view, a software engineer with 6 years of college (B.S. and M.S. in computer science) is the same as an English teacher with 6 years of “Education college” (B.Ed and M.Ed in education). But is the ability to write code to perform real-time commercial transactions in a distributed database environment really deserving of the same total compensation as teaching 6-year olds how to read Dr. Seuss books? Is the supply of each skill set the same? Is the demand for each skill set the same? What should the price of each kind of labor be?

Let’s see what this new study from the American Enterprise Institute says.

Excerpt:

The teaching profession is crucial to America’s society and economy, but public-school teachers should receive compensation that is neither higher nor lower than market rates. Do teachers currently receive the proper level of compensation? Standard analytical approaches to this question compare teacher salaries to the salaries of similarly educated and experienced private-sector workers, and then add the value of employer contributions toward fringe benefits. These simple comparisons would indicate that public-school teachers are undercompensated. However, comparing teachers to non-teachers presents special challenges not accounted for in the existing literature.

First, formal educational attainment, such as a degree acquired or years of education completed, is not a good proxy for the earnings potential of school teachers. Public-school teachers earn less in wages on average than non-teachers with the same level of education, but teacher skills generally lag behind those of other workers with similar “paper” qualifications.

Here’s what the study shows:

  • The wage gap between teachers and non-teachers disappears when both groups are matched on an objective measure of cognitive ability rather than on years of education.
  • Public-school teachers earn higher wages than private- school teachers, even when the comparison is limited to secular schools with standard curriculums.
  • Workers who switch from non-teaching jobs to teaching jobs receive a wage increase of roughly 9 percent. Teachers who change to non-teaching jobs, on the other hand, see their wages decrease by roughly 3 percent. This is the opposite of what one would expect if teachers were underpaid.
  • Pension programs for public-school teachers are significantly more generous than the typical private sector retirement plan, but this generosity is hidden by public-sector accounting practices that allow lower employer contributions than a private-sector plan promising the same retirement benefits.
  • Most teachers accrue generous retiree health benefits as they work, but retiree health care is excluded from Bureau of Labor Statistics benefits data and thus frequently overlooked. While rarely offered in the private sector, retiree health coverage for teachers is worth roughly an additional 10 percent of wages.
  • Job security for teachers is considerably greater than in comparable professions. Using a model to calculate the welfare value of job security, we find that job security for typical teachers is worth about an extra 1 percent of wages, rising to 8.6 percent when considering that extra job security protects a premium paid in terms of salaries and benefits.

And they conclude:

We conclude that public-school teacher salaries are comparable to those paid to similarly skilled private sector workers, but that more generous fringe benefits for public-school teachers, including greater job security, make total compensation 52 percent greater than fair market levels, equivalent to more than $120 billion overcharged to taxpayers each year.

Well, maybe teachers are overpaid – but that would be OK if they were somehow super intelligent and productive.

Are teachers intelligent?

CBS Moneywatch explains what the research shows about teachers.

Excerpt:

Research over the years has indicated that education majors, who enter college with the lowest average SAT scores, leave with the highest grades.   Some of academic evidence documenting easy A’s for future teachers goes back more than 50 years!

The latest damning report on the ease of majoring in education comes from research at the University of Missouri, my alma mater.  The study, conducted by economist Cory Koedel shows that education majors receive “substantially higher” grades than students in every other department.

Koedel examined the grades earned by undergraduates during the 2007-2008 school year at three large state universities that include sizable education programs — University of Missouri, Miami (OH) University and Indiana University.  The researcher compared the grades earned by education majors with the grades earned by students in 12 other majors including biology, economics, English, history, philosophy, mathematics, chemistry, psychology and sociology.

Education majors enjoyed grade point averages that were .5 to .8 grade points higher than students in the other college majors. At the University of Missouri, for instance, the average education major has a 3.80 GPA versus 2.99 GPA (science, math, econ majors), 3.12 GPA (social science majors) and 3.16 GPA (humanities majors).

So it is easy for teachers with lower SAT scores to get much higher grades than other applicants to non-teaching programs with much higher SAT scores. It doesn’t sound like the smartest people go to teachers college. Nor does it sound as if they learn anything very challenging when they are there.

Are teachers doing a good job of teaching useful skills?

CNN sheds some light on how well teachers perform.

Excerpt:

Last week, the College Board dealt parents, teachers and the education world a serious blow. According to its latest test results, “SAT reading scores for the high school class of 2011 were the lowest on record, and combined reading and math scores fell to their lowest point since 1995.”

The reading scores, which stand at 497, are noticeably lower than just six years ago, when they stood at 508. And it’s just the second time in the last 20 years that reading scores have dropped so precipitously in a single year.

[…]The 2011 budget for the Department of Education is estimated to top $70 billion, while overall spending on public elementary and secondary education is about $600 billion a year. By comparison, in 1972, before the Department of Education even existed, SAT critical reading scores for college-bound seniors were above 525, more than 20 points higher than they are today, while today’s math scores are only slightly better than in 1972.

So, not only are these highly-paid teachers less intelligent (on average) than other college applicants, but they also fail to educate our children properly. And we are forced to pay them, through taxes, regardless of how they perform. Our children who are suffering from this failed monopoly.

Do teacher unions improve teacher quality?

And do you know who protects bad teachers from being fired, and prevents good teachers from being paid more?

This is why we need to abolish the federal Department of Education and teacher unions. Why are we paying these people ridiculous salaries and benefits to fail our children?

Must-see videos on education policy

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Mentoring

Does contemporary Christian music build up a lasting Christian faith?

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Here’s an interesting account by a young woman who became secular by becoming very involved in Christian music and then jumped to secular music because it was better music.

Excerpt:

“Who’s in the House” is a hip-hop track about the presence of the Lord. Through megaphone distortion, Carman rapped a few lines: “You take him high / you take him low / you take JC wherever you go,” then led into a call and response hook reminiscent of ’80s-era De La Soul. “Tell me who’s in the house? JC!”

If you’re wondering what teenager in her right mind would listen to a forty-year-old Vegas showman with a Jersey accent rap about Jesus, the answer is: me. In junior high, I saw Carman in concert three times. The Standard was the first CD I ever bought. I rocked out to Carman on my Walkman on the way to youth group and dished with my girlfriends about what a hottie he was. At the concerts, I bought his T-shirts and posters, and when he called out “Who’s in the House?” I made my arms into letters, YMCA-style, with the rest of the crowd and shouted “JC!”

I was homeschooled up until tenth grade, and my social life revolved around church. I grew up submersed in evangelical youth culture: reading Brio magazine, doing devotions in my Youth Walk Bible, eagerly awaiting the next installment of the Left Behind series, and developing a taste in music that ran the gamut from Christian rap to Christian pop to Christian rock.

And she ends with this:

Basically, CCM caught on to the number one rule of coolness: don’t let your marketing show. The best bands—the successful ones, at least—learned to gloss over the gospel message the same way TV producers camouflaged corporate sponsorship. Explicitly Christian lyrics prevented DC Talk from crossing over to the secular market in the ’90s; today it’s difficult to imagine their unapologetic faith making it in the Christian circuit.

This trend spreads beyond CCM into many areas of evangelical culture. The church is becoming increasingly consumer-friendly. Jacob Hill, director of “worship arts” at New Walk Church, describes the Sunday service music as “exciting, loud, powerful, and relevant,” and boasts that “a lot of people say they feel like they’ve just been at a rock concert.” Over the past ten years, I’ve visited churches that have Starbucks kiosks in the foyer and youth wings decked out with air hockey tables. I’ve witnessed a preacher stop his sermon to play a five-minute clip from Billy Madison. I’ve walked into a sanctuary that was blasting the Black Eyed Peas’s “Let’s Get it Started” to get the congregation pumped for the morning’s message, which was on joy. I have heard a pastor say, from a pulpit, “Hey, I’m not here to preach at anyone.” And yet, in spite of these efforts, churches are retaining only 4 percent of the young people raised in their congregations.

Despite all the affected teenage rebellion, I continued to call myself a Christian into my early twenties. When I finally stopped, it wasn’t because being a believer made me uncool or outdated or freakish. It was because being a Christian no longer meant anything. It was a label to slap on my Facebook page, next to my music preferences. The gospel became just another product someone was trying to sell me, and a paltry one at that because the church isn’t Viacom: it doesn’t have a Department of Brand Strategy and Planning. Staying relevant in late consumer capitalism requires highly sophisticated resources and the willingness to tailor your values to whatever your audience wants. In trying to compete in this market, the church has forfeited the one advantage it had in the game to attract disillusioned youth: authenticity. When it comes to intransigent values, the profit-driven world has zilch to offer. If Christian leaders weren’t so ashamed of those unvarnished values, they might have something more attractive than anything on today’s bleak moral market. In the meantime, they’ve lost one more kid to the competition.

So, I’d like to look at whether listening to contemporary Christian music is a good way to build a strong faith that lasts.

Should people sing about things that they don’t know are true?

I would not be comfortable singing about a state of affairs that I did not know was true. And yet, that is exactly what happens in churches and youth groups. Young people are brought up to sing about a story without any evidence that the story is true. Imagine what that does to a person – what are they thinking about the purpose of the singing? They don’t know these things are true, but they sing anyway! And as they grow up, the church makes it a badge of honor to speak only about what the Bible says, and never links what the Bible says to anything in the real world. Naturally, as soon as children hit the university, they fall away. Their questions about the problem of evil, the problem of suffering, the problem of world of religious pluralism, the hiddenness of God, justice of Hell, etc. were never answered.

I think this anti-intellectual approach is really damaging. The impression of Christianity that young people will have is that truth doesn’t matter, that you can sing about something just to be part of a group, and for emotional pleasure. Then with the end-of-the-world fiction and other Christian fiction – all for enjoyment, and all not connected to knowledge. How does any of that connect to the real world? When young people are taught that being a Christian has no connection to reason, evidence or the real world, then their Christianity doesn’t survive leaving the safety of their home and church. If Christian parents wanted their children to be able to integrate their faith with what is taught at the university, then they would have to do better than singing, end-of-the-world fiction, praying about romantic relationships, and so on.

Christian music reinforces the idea that Christianity makes you feel good

The problem with Christian music is that a person listening to it can quickly develop the idea that what Christianity is about is having happy feelings, because people feel happy when listening to music. I’ve noticed that a lot of Christians leave the faith because they have this idealized notion that the world should be a happy place, where no one ever feels bad. Then they find verses in the Bible that are exclusive and judgmental, and they leave the faith because Christianity is too “mean”. This is especially the case with young women who are inclined to doubt God’s existence because of the problem of evil and the doctrine of Hell. If young women are not aware of the reasons why Christianity is true, then the experience of being perceived by others as “mean” can cause them to abandon their faith. Social pressure is an enormous factor in the behavior of women – they want to be accepted and liked by everyone.

Those emotions of compassion and intuitions about happiness are not compatible with hard verses of the Bible and exclusive Christian doctrines. Many people If we teach children that happiness and doing good things are what Christianity is about, then eventually they will dump it when the open profession of their faith causes them to have bad feelings and to lose friends. I think Christian women especially feel pressure to jettison Christian rules when it comes to dating and marriage – because they want to be happy, and they think that the rules shouldn’t stop them from pursuing happiness. If they don’t know why the rules are there (truth) then they will just reject anything that conflicts with their intuitions, emotions and desire to be happy. If the purpose of life is to have good feelings about yourself, and to have everyone like you, then Christianity is not the answer. If the purpose of life is to know the truth and to live according to it, then Christianity is the answer.

English is not a subject that is very friendly to Christian beliefs

I note that she seems to have studied English at the undergraduate level and is currently studying it at graduate level, which I think is significant. English is well known to be a hotbed of postmodernism, deconstructionism, feminism and socialism on campuses. She would therefore be under enormous pressure there to abandon her faith, especially in order to get good grades. Nothing that she did as a young person would equip her to deal with the pressure from peers and teachers when challenged on her Christian faith. Singing, reading fiction, Bible reading and prayer do not help a young person who is confronted by peer pressure and secular left professors holding the grading pen – especially in English where marking of essays is subjective.

My first career choice was to be an English teacher – I won simultaneous awards for English and Computer Programming in high school (public school, not homeschool). But then I took an early university course in English, while still a high school student, and realized that it had been compromised by feminism and postmodernism and other untestable ideologies. Personally, I think that mathematics, computer science and engineering are much safer fields for Christians to study. My background is in computer science, and I have an undergraduate and graduate degree in that area. These areas are safer because it is much harder for the professors to inject politics into the curriculum, so that students don’t have to be forced to accept things on faith, without any critical thinking or debate. Math features answers that are right or wrong regardless of politics, and programming features programs that either run or not, regardless of religion.

It’s not a good idea to stay a student all your life

To be a Christian, it helps to be able to have your own source of income so that you can buy books and debates to learn with. I have been working in the field of computer science for 15 years, starting in middle school, and have saved pretty much everything I’ve earned. I saved about half of what I make. I never take money from the government, although I accepted scholarships from the university because I just considered it a reduction in tuition. The problem with getting things for free is that you get what other people give you – in this case, the government and the university. If you want to rebel against the secular leftist zeitgeist, you have to have arms to rebel with – and arms cost money. William Lane Craig debates and F.A. Hayek books cost money. And you can’t depend on the government or the university to provide you with those.

Our CCM woman seems to have been a student all her life. She doesn’t have the skills or the money to make it on her own. She has to agree with them in order to get tuition, student loans, etc. – in order to live away from her parents. This would be another pressure on her to turn away from her Christian faith. She is trapped by not having any marketable skills that would allow her to earn a living without having to agree with anyone’s views. Students also have the things they read handed to them – it’s much harder for her to find the time to read things that the professors don’t want her to read – and she could never bring those things up in class safely anyway. A lot of people who thrive on being told that they are good prefer to stay in school where it is easy to just do whatever the (secular left) teacher says in order to get good grades.

Avoid women who do not know why they believe what they say they believe

I just want to reiterate to Christian men that they should be asking questions of Christian women before falling in love with them, to make sure they know why they believe what they say they believe. Here are some questions to ask to find out if a woman is a solid Christian that should help men to detect women like the one who wrote the essay. This post may also be useful. Christian men: be careful with women like this who look good, but who fall away. Don’t get hurt.

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