Homeschoolers learning

via Bookworm

Do homeschooling parents have only the Left to fear?

Apparently not. No less a man of the right than Antonin Scalia recently expressed his view that

there is no U.S. constitutional right of parents to direct the education and upbringing of their children.

The nation's charter document is "not a perfect Constitution," and many "important rights are not contained there," Scalia told an auditorium of first-year law students at Georgetown University Law Center here.

"For example, my right to raise my children the way I want," he said. "To teach them what I want them taught, not what Big Brother says. That is not there."

..."The notion that everything you care a lot about has to be in the Constitution is a very dangerous notion," Scalia continued. "Because it begins with stuff we all agree upon. 'Oh, sure, we ought to be able to educate our children the way we want.'

Read more here.

Child Pornographer Suffers The Embarrassment and Shame of Admitting He’s a Lawyer

The title for this post is found at The Rumford Meteor, which specializes in hilarious headlines he writes about news stories he reads in various newspapers. The actual story was written by Scott Dolan in the Portland Press Herald:

A Portland lawyer who lives in Falmouth has been sentenced to 90 days in jail as part of a plea agreement on a felony child pornography charge.

Lawrence Winger, 64, was taken into custody immediately Wednesday in the Cumberland County Courthouse in Portland after pleading guilty to possession of sexually explicit images of children younger than 12.

Here's another recent one: Old Town Educators Worry That Local Homeschoolers Are Missing Out on the Educational and Socializing Benefits of Drug Deals and Weapons in Middle School Bathrooms

and this one: Edgecomb Eddy School Show Off Its Incredibly Diverse Staff. One of Them Met a Man Once, for Instance. Didn’t Care for Him

Home education: a bright star in America's future

When a family of home educated kids comes into the store where I work, I can usually tell that they are homeschooled. The kids are not whiney and demanding. They seem contented. They help mom load the groceries into the cart. They are polite.

Kevin Swanson writes:

While the cost of education in the United States has increased and academic performance has fallen, a bright star shines over America's academic landscape: home education.

While government schools spend an average of $5,325 per student per year to attain a 50th percentile performance ranking among the states, $1.5 million home-schooled children cost U.S. families only about $400 per student annually, to achieve test scores averaging 25 percent higher at the 75th percentile.

A large research study completed last year found that the average eighth grade homeschooled student performs four grade levels above the national average.

A major factor in this achievement is intense parental involvement - a known key to exceptional academic performance.

Cutting-edge technologies like CDROM, interactive video, satellite feeds, and on-line tutoring are bringing the best teaching tools and methods right into the home, increasing parental options exponentially. Home education may be a tried and true historical method of teaching, but it is now the wave of the future. Our top universities are actively recruiting home-educated students because of their love of learning and mature study habits.

A third advantage to home education is the opportunity to maximize the individuality of each child. As government education becomes increasingly centralized and bureaucratized, the inevitable result becomes a one-size-fits-all curriculum and classroom structure. Conversely, just as the small business can be more responsive to consumer needs, the home school can be incredibly flexible and adaptable to meet the needs of each child. Every individual child has his or her learning style, interests and abilities. With the individual attention provided by a home education, each student's curriculum can be tailored to help him reach his fullest potential. There need not be any common denominator to which all students are reduced.

The predominant view of modern education places man as supreme over his own destiny, with a relative and changing set of ethics. For many families this undermines a strong faith in God. For them, home education provides the opportunity to pass on their family's faith and values to the next generation.

Home education is setting the new standards for academic achievement, character development, social skills, creativity, family, and responsible citizenship. The true impact of home education on our country's social, business, and political institutions will only be felt 20 years from now. Home education is definitely a bright star in America's future!

Read more here.

Tea Party "darling"

AP writer Will Weissert, supposedly writing a straight new story, mocks Ted Cruz in this article about him being a "Tea Party darling." What does Weissert call President Obama? Whose "darling" is Obama? Would that be worth looking into?

Cruz was in Iowa for the fourth time "in barely eight months," speaking to home schooling parents. Maybe the real reason Weissert mocked Cruz is that Cruz said that,

"This nation was founded by men and women fleeing religious oppression and coming here seeking the freedom to seek out our lord God almighty with all of our hearts, minds and souls, free of the government getting in the way."

Weissert points out that

The support of home school advocates helped the last two Republicans win Iowa's presidential caucus: former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee in 2008 and former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania in 2012.

Jamie Johnson, a member of the Iowa GOP's State Central Committee and former top Iowa adviser to Santorum in 2012, said he spoke with Cruz about tweaking his economics-heavy message to best win over Iowa conservatives.

"You've got to enunciate the moral themes here," Johnson said, "and if you don't, you lose."

Are Iowans more moral than other Americans?

Parental rights

You don't homeschool your children? Then why should you care about homeschooling rights? Matt Walsh answers,

Because we don’t have any rights at all if we don’t have the unquestioned and absolute right to teach and raise our own children. In a country where you do not have a right to your own offspring, to what else could you possibly have a right? Your home? Your car? Your body? Not in a nation ruled by bureaucratic deities so powerful that they may deign the very fruit of your loin to be their property.

How could it be that so many who describe themselves as “pro-choice” would then turn around and argue against homeschooling rights? As terrifying as it may be, we need to confront the fact that our society is filled with people who honestly believe that you ought to have the right to kill your child, but you shouldn’t have the right to educate him.

When I call such people “lunatics,” I do so with great optimism. I’d prefer to be surrounded by delusional maniacs than to be surrounded by rational individuals who have actually reached the conclusion that a person’s only fundamental parental right is to butcher their children.

So, if liberty — true, God given liberty — is your thing, you might take a particular interest in the story of an Ohio Democrat who wants to require all homeschool parents to undergo a Social Services investigation. To make his case, Senator Capri Cafaro is repulsively exploiting the child abuse death of a 14 year old kid. Teddy Foltz-Tedesco died last year after his mother pulled him out of school to hide his abuse from authorities. The boy was finally beaten to death by the mother’s boyfriend.

In keeping with the government’s long tradition of being incompetent in every possible facet of existence, this young child’s abuse was already reported to Social Services. Social Services failed to act, and now, in response to THEIR OWN failures, politicians want to give them MORE power. This is a brand of mania that you can only find in government: an agency bungles its authority, and the solution is to give them more of it.

Moreover, if the rare case of an abusive homeschool parent can serve as an indictment of homeschooling, why can’t the more common case of a sexually abusive teacher serve as an indictment of public schools? By this politician’s own logic, all government schools should have been shutdown long ago. In fact, there was a 2004 study titled, “Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Synthesis of Existing Literature,” commissioned by the Department of Education. It received no attention from anyone, but the findings were terrifying: nearly 10 percent of all public schooled students had been raped, abused, or sexually harassed by teachers.

TEN PERCENT.

That makes the sex scandal in public schools many, many, many times more prevalent than the abuse epidemic in the Catholic Church. It’s not even close, actually. The Hofstra researcher who conducted the study had this to say: “The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.”

And homeschool kids are the ones at risk?

Add school shootings, gang violence, fights, bullying, and administrative abuse in the form of zero tolerance policies that brand and label young kids as criminals, and public school is clearly a much more dangerous proposition.

Thanks to April Kellman for telling me about this piece.

Do you think that ten percent figure is accurate? It seems outrageously high to me.