Tag Archives: School Choice

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Homeschooling and vertical socialization

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Here’s a post on homeschooling from Caffeinated Thoughts. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

When people ask about socialization they are usually wondering about “horizontal socialization.”  How much time are your kids interacting with children of their own age.  It is like some think that we cage our kids up and never let them be around other children.

If you wonder about this type of socialization, let me ask you a question…

If you stick a 6th grade boy with a bunch of 6th graders what is he going to learn to become?  Who will he be best equipped to interact with?

He will learn to be a “better 6th grader.”  He’ll be comfortable interacting with kids his own age.  How does that prepare him for life?  When else in life will he ever be faced with the same type of homogeneous age groupings?

Never.

You see my kids are socialized – “vertical socialization.”  My wife and I are the primary influencers, not their peer group.  Does anybody want to dispute that as not being a good thing?  You see my kids, and other homeschoolers don’t mold to the groupthink that says, “adults in general and parents in particular aren’t cool to talk to.”

Most homeschoolers naturally can carry on conversations with adults and are comfortable doing so.  I’ve gotten positive feedback from numerous adults about how my kids interact with them (as well as their behavior).  I’ve noticed that with other homeschooled children as well, you can easily carry on a conversation with them.  Why?

Because they are spending a lot of time with parents, other adults, older children, and younger children.  They are rarely in social settings where it is entirely kids of their own age.  I think this is a good thing, that’s life!  The homogenous age groupings you see in schools (which usually gets reinforced in church) isn’t real life, and does little to prepare a kid for the real world.

I wish that somehow parents were able to opt out of the public school system and get a voucher so that parents could use that money to purchase whatever education they think is a appropriate for their children, including homeschooling. I think that getting kids into the habit of interacting with adults is a good thing.

News

Sex-education video prompts mother to transfer out 7-year old daughter

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Story (and pictures) from UK Daily Mail. (H/T Andrew)

Excerpt:

A mother has taken her seven-year-old daughter out of school after she was made to watch a cartoon showing a couple chasing each other around a bed and having sex.

Seven and eight-year-old pupils watched the controversial Channel 4 sex education DVD, Living and Growing, at their village primary school.

A voice-over on the DVD describes the sex as ‘exciting’.

Mrs Bullivant said: ‘The cartoon was very graphic. My daughter was frightened and children have unfortunately been copying what they have seen. Parents should have been given the decision of whether the video should have been shown or not.

I think that the cause of this push for sex education is feminism. Feminists want women to learn to desire commitment-free sex, (c.f. – the sexual revolution), because they think that women should be identical to men. That is also why feminists support taxpayer-funded contraception and abortion – which reduces the costs and risks of premarital sex. Single-payer health care is also great for lowering the costs of risky sexual behavior by passing them on to taxpayers.

And there are other lessons to be learned from this story for left-of-center “Christians” who think that teachers have the best interests of the children at heart.

  • Sex education causes young people to have sex earlier, to get pregnant out-of-wedlock and to abort innocent children
  • Having your children or your neighbor’s children engage in sex before they are married is not pleasing to Jesus
  • The more money is taxed away for public schools, the less each family has for homeschooling and private schools
  • Even if YOU can afford homeschooling or private education, your neighbors can’t, and their behaviors drive up social costs
  • The goal of teacher unions is to outlaw school choice, so that this indoctrination of children becomes unavoidable

You can read about the results of the Labour Party’s aggressive push for sex education for young children here: Most children of British mothers born out of wedlock – UK Telegraph.

Here’s an editorial in the UK Daily Mail that agrees with me that sex education is causing the teen pregnancy epidemic. (H/T Betsy at RuthBlog)

News

Fiscal and social conservatives unite in new free e-book “Indivisible”

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There’s a new book that just came out from the Heritage Foundation, my favorite think tank.

Here’s an excerpt from the introduction by Jay Richards:

To listen to media and political strategists is to get the impression that American public life is a checklist of issues. Some are known as “social” issues (marriage, family) and some are known as “economic” (international trade, wages). There may be some good reasons for this distinction, but when we itemize and divide these topics into two separate categories, we fail to convey the underlying unity of the principles behind the American Experiment in ordered liberty. In reality, the two groups of issues are interdependent. For instance, a free economy cannot long exist in a culture that is hostile to it. The success of free market economic policies depends on important cultural and moral factors such as thrift, delayed gratification, hard work, and respect for the property of others. A virtuous and responsible populace derives, in turn, from strong families, churches, and other civil institutions.

Conversely, economic issues have a strong influence on culture and the institutions of civil society. High taxes, for example, put pressure on families and force parents to spend more time in the workforce, leaving less time to devote to their spouses and children. When government expands spending and control in education, it crowds out parental responsibility; when it expands its role in providing social welfare services, it tends to erode a sense of responsibility among churches and other groups doing good work to help neighbors in need.

The connections are such that the individual issues rarely fit neatly and exclusively into one set or the other. An “economic” issue is rarely exclusively about economics. For instance, poverty in America is often as much a moral and cultural problem as an economic problem. Reducing such poverty depends on civil institutions that inculcate virtue and responsibility as well as policies that promote economic freedom and discourage dependency. Most poverty among children in America is not caused by a lack of jobs but rather by factors such as family breakdown, negligent or absentee parents, substance abuse, or other social pathologies. To consider American poverty in strictly economic terms is to fail to see the full scale of issues involved in this problem.

[…]The following essays are intended as a concise exploration of the link between liberty and human dignity and of the policy issues that tend to cluster around these two themes in American life. This collection brings together a number of well-known social and economic conservatives. To encourage cross-fertilization of their ideas, those known as social conservatives have written on themes normally identified with economic conservatives, and vice versa. The authors highlight economic arguments for issues typically categorized as “social” and social/moral arguments for “economic” issues. Each author focuses on a single topic, briefly summarized below, that is associated with either social or economic conservatives or, in some cases, both.

That’s also one of the main purposes of my blog, to show how fiscal conservatives and social conservatives depend on each other.

Here are the essays and authors:

  • Civil Society: Moral Arguments for Limiting Government – Joseph G. Lehman
  • Rule of Law: Economic Prosperity Requires the Rule of Law – J. Kenneth Blackwell
  • Life: The Cause of Life Can’t be Severed from the Cause of Freedom – Representative Paul Ryan
  • Free Exchange: Morality and Economic Freedom – Jim Daly with Glenn T. Stanton
  • Marriage: The Limited-Government Case for Marriage – Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D.
  • Profit: Prophets and Profit – Marvin Olasky, Ph.D.
  • Family: Washington’s War on the Family and Free Enterprise – Stephen Moore
  • Wages: The Value of Wages – Bishop Harry R. Jackson, Jr.
  • Religion:  Why Faith Is a Good Investment – Arthur Brooks, Ph.D., and Robin Currie
  • International Trade: Why Trade Works for Family, Community, and Sovereignty – Ramesh Ponnuru
  • Culture: A Culture of Responsibility – Edwin J. Feulner, Ph.D.
  • Property: Property and the Pursuit of Happiness – Representative Michele Bachmann
  • Environment: Conserving Creation – Tony Perkins
  • Education: A Unified Vision for Education Choice – Randy Hicks

Seeing the names of people paired with these topics just blows my mind. It would be as though William Lane Craig were suddenly to write a book defending free market capitalism or the war on Islamic terrorism. It’s just WEIRD. And you’ll notice that many of the Wintery Knight’s favorite people are in there; Paul Ryan, Michele Bachmann, Jennifer Roback Morse.  I also like Stephen Moore’s writing a lot.

The entire book is available for free as a PDF download, or you can order it from the Heritage Foundation. I ordered 10 copies of everything at the store, because I wanted a bunch to give away to all my friends. I think this is the perfect gift to give someone who doesn’t see the relevance of public policy to Christianity, marriage and parenting. There is no such thing as an informed Christian who is fiscally liberally or socially liberal.

Oh, and by the way: Ryan/Bachmann 2012 for the win!