So the liberals have been teaching our children that we are only one kind of animal, no wonder kids and adults act that way.  Now we find that we must teach them that they are really only large ants!

Adolph Hitler was just sixty years too early.  Today he could run for office on a major party ticked or even as an archbishop.  Whoever educates the children controlls the nation and its history.  Must stop that home schooling and Christian schools.

Too bad the text didn’t mention that worker bees are chromosomally haploid (one set of chromosomes) while we mammals (and the queen bee) are diploid (two).  Hence worker bees are essentially clones of one another.  They can be thought of (and act like) more as cells in a single organism than as individual organisms, each with it’s own somewhat separate interests.  Hence each bee, of course, works for the “good of the group” just as our cells work for the good of our bodies, and our bodies willingly shed defective cells.  But hey...a minor point, and, as I recall, the Germans were not obsessed with the minor details of objective truth at that point in history.

Whoever educates the children controlls the nation and its history.  Must stop that home schooling and Christian schools.

Prophet Micaiah, you may be a prophet indeed, though I hope not here.  But Germany still has Nazi-era anti-homeschooling laws on the books, one of which was recently used to seize the children of a home-schooling family and place them in foster homes when the parents refused to send them to state schools.  Kyrie Eleison!

Nazi Logic 101:

a) Humans are like bees.

Okay, I haven’t gotten past this one yet.  But it does remind me of something from Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy (unsure of whether he is related to NRA+):

http://www.deepthoughtsbyjackhandey.com/yesterday-1.asp?DayW=4

Couldn’t find the one about “People are like onions, we are built up of many layers of concentric spheres.”

Milton, the courts essentially have outlawed home schooling in California.  Jimmy Carter started a vindetta against Christian schools in his regime and launched the Christian Right.  I am glad to have been a leader in the war to stop him.  Our church was featured on the cover of Christianity Today-----David vs. Goliath.  It was fun.

Very interesting.  My middle daughter, who was homeschooled, attended Calvin College.  California is not the only state after homeschoolers.  The laws in CT have always given the final say on education of children to their parents, but they are in the act of trying to take away that freedom right now with a bill in the state senate.  I’ll bet there are other states going in the same direction.  It could be a vast left-wing conspiracy.

While a high degree of division of labor is a hallmark of an advanced society, it’s laughable that any person or group thinks such a division can be brought about through a central bureaucracy.  Of course, this is the central organizing principle of today’s Left and it will have tragicomic consequences identical to those of the Third Reich and Soviet Union if it is attempted here.

And before you port-siders dust off your Adam Smith:

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

What is happening today to TEC already happened to the Lutheran Church in Germany a century ago.  I suggest interested readers Google “positive Christianity” to see what can happen when Christianity embraces socialism and morphs into the new gospel of social justice.  The quote below is just a teaser.  I’m afraid if you go searching, you’ll find a lot more just like it. 

“If positive Christianity means love of one’s neighbor, i.e. the tending of the sick, the clothing of the poor, the feeding of the hungry, the giving of drink to those who are thirsty, then it is we who are the more positive Christians. For in these spheres the community of the people of National Socialist Germany has accomplished a prodigious work. –Adolf Hitler, in his speech to the “Old Guard” at Munich on 24 Feb. 1939

Can you spell UN Millennium Goals?

PM, whether homeschooling is virtually outlawed in CA depends (if I understand correctly) on whether the Circuit Court’s (?) decision to require homeschool teachers to have a professional teaching license will be depublished, preventing it from being enforced or used as precedent.  Let’s pray that happens. 

Just last week here in TN a bill was killed in committee after massive protest that would have required homeschool students to take the same standardized state assessments as public schoolers.  Private school students would have remained exempt as before.  The problem with the state tests is that they test the state curiculuum, which is one thing homeschoolin gives one freedom from, to select more effective and appropriate texts.  As one commenter pointed out in the Tennessean paper, all students entering college DO take the same standardized achievement tests, the SAT and the ACT.  Somehow, homeschoolers in general score significantly higher on these than do public schoolers.  This inequity must be addressed at once!  Drag the homeschoolers down to the state schools level!  Uhh, NOT!!!

There is good homeschooling and not so good.  The quality tends to be better when the education involves one’s own children.  So does this mean that public schools would improve if parents actually were able to have input?

In my opinion (for what is may be worth) the best homeschooling and the best private schools are those with a classical approach.  Here are some essays that speak about this:

http://teachgoodwriting.blogspot.com/2008/01/dorothy-sayers-lost-tools-of-learning.html

http://teachgoodwriting.blogspot.com/2008/02/response-to-dorothy-l-sayers-lost-tools.html

http://teachgoodwriting.blogspot.com/2008/03/another-look-at-sayers-lost-tools-of_06.html

This was an interesting first paragraph of a Joseph Goebbels speech from 1943:

Nothing is more characteristic of the Jewish-plutocratic view of the world, life and history than its tendency to gradually but inevitably transform all values in a negative direction. We recall enough examples from the republican System Era in Germany [1918-1933]. It hardly seems necessary to add more. The hero was fool, the coward the honorable man. One preferred to live three lives as a slave than once as a free man. A father with many children was the target of jokes, and the homosexual boy was the model of Nordic manhood.

This same rhetoric can be easily found today on the lips of some Christians.

Alice, you are correct.  The classical education is best.  I believe every chuch of any size should provide school and almost for free.  We had the best of both worlds.  Parents taught their children at home and the church had a school that they could bring the kids in for special classes.  It gave the SAT and ACT tests also and regularly tested the students progress.  My wife tought Latin for years.  As a result our graduates had a 60% National Merit scholorship awards rate.  Sayers was on the money.  To bad that the professional educators don’t see it .  I don’t know of any government schools in our state that offer Latin and few private one either.  Some now offer Spanish which is better than nothing.

People today are surprised, shocked even, to learn that half a century ago in a tiny hamlet I received two years of Latin.  Yes, it was a public school.  Yes, the instruction was good.  And yes, I would take it again.  I only regret that more of my education wasn’t “classical”.

"The courts essentially have outlawed home schooling in California” [#5]

No, the courts have strictly and literally applied a misguided statute enacted decades ago. The California Legislature will surely revisit the statute; the only question is how workable the resulting home-schooling law will be. Meanwhile, home-schooling continues, as it should.

In my opinion (for what is may be worth) the best homeschooling and the best private schools are those with a classical approach.

I agree.  Both of my grandfathers were ordinary tradesmen, and yet they were experts in classical subjects.  They always had a few surprises up their sleeves. 

Why would a builder, be able to identify a zither? 

Why would a machinist, get exited about Latin? 

We have a two-year-old who would benefit greatly from education supplemental to Christian school (I’d prefer straight home-schooling, but it’s not going to happen).  Could you recommend anything for this?

Trinity Christian Academy here in Lexington, KY is the only classical education school in our area.  You might contact them to find out if there is a similiar school near you.  Here is the contact information:
Trinity Christian Academy
3900 Rapid Run Drive
Lexington, KY 40515
(859) 271-0079
(859) 887-2513