:eek:
Holy Zeus.
All in all, I have to say I prefer this to the alternative universe where they kept us on. With our small family, we’d always be pitied. Mom would be encouraged to marry another older man and procreate again before she got any older, and I would be married off as quickly as possible to get me out of the house of an unrelated man.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t have known any better, and all of that would be normal and expected, but still -
I like this life better.
Oh, I’m sure you’re better off. I’m just stunned at the lack of Christian charity such an attitude [del]suggests[/del] reveals. I’m no Christian myself, but I think many of the things Myth!Christ taught are fine lessons and that he himself was a fine fellow. And I also think that, if he were around and learned of people doing such a thing in his name, he would probably grab his whip, and start knocking over tables and kicking asses.
“I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.” - Susan B. Anthony
As an atheist who sometimes pretends to worship Athena, I call bullshit. Some religious folk are assholes who use their faith as a means of exploiting the weak; some are generally good people who try to make the world a better place.
(Emphasis mine.) And these latter ones are, in many cases, the ones being exploited by the former group.
I understand that few of the girls ended up in college. Of the boys, how many eventually attended an accredited college whose instructors generally accepted the theory of evolution? That would include Christian colleges such as Notre Dame, Trinity College or Fordham University, but not Bob Jones University. What share of the boys and girls entered adulthood with at least a high school diploma?
While I was there, the christian school they established graduated everyone, and it was a state-recognized high school diploma. As far as actual education goes, it pretty much entirely depended on the child and family temperament. Some kids graduated with pretty much an eight-grade education, perhaps less. Others were bright and motivated and interested, so they had the equivalent of college prep classes under their belts. I will say that boys were encouraged to be more scholastic and pointed towards the ministry. Girls weren’t discouraged, but weren’t really encouraged either.
A few boys ended up in Bob Jones, and one girl a few years older than me almost went, but her mom had a rough delivery and she delayed - I don’t know if she ended up going after we left or not. They were the only ones who seemed interested in going further in school while I was there. Most girls wanted to start their families, and most boys ended up working for someone in the group before they were done with school, usually around 14-15 years old.
Third party technique is a key (arguably the key) feature of religion. I won’t go into details of my thoughts on this subject here as it would mean hijacking Lasciel’s thread but suffice to say that it is a technique that can be used for encouraging children to brush their teeth, or husbands not to beat their wives or parents not to complain about church elders screwing their underage daughters.
I have a few friends who are associated with an Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) school, and it sounds similar. There is no concept of failing a class or being expelled due to low grades. If you don’t get a good enough grade on an assignment, you do it over…and over…and over…until you get the required grade. It’s a neat idea and one I wish I had had a few times, but giving little kids infinite repeats could be seen as not exactly encouraging them to at least try to get it right the first time. In a sense, you could theoretically get through without studying - just take the assessments over and over again until you pass by chance.
Ugh, this sounds like the “million monkeys X million typewriters = Shakespeare” quote, only YOU are all the monkeys.
That is my personal vision of hell. 
They do at least let you multitask, so you may be able to spend some time working on History (or what passes as history there) assignments while dreading having to go through another failed go at that quadratic equation test that you’ve been trying to pass since last March.
If ACE uses little paper booklets that are intended to be worked through by each student individually, with little ‘testlets’ at the end of each booklet, that built cumulatively on each other, then yes, that’s exactly what it was.
I actually kind of like the idea for motivated kids, or those with a passion or burning interest in a particular subject. It seems sort of Montessori in that way - just keep on trucking however long you’re interested!
The downside of course is that if you’re struggling, or just flat not interested, or not really motivated to advance, you can poke your way through one of those booklets forever, and still graduate with no real indication of your academic uselessness.
Have to say that public high school was a huge shock to the system after a childhood of that sort of academic shenanigans.
Yeah, that’s it. It also could make sense as part of a competency assessment program - sort of a cross between a traditional high school experience and taking the GED. You get to review the material before each test section, but if you already know enough of it, you can breeze through book after book. If you stumble on a few points, no sweat, take some time and work through it carefully, then go on when you’re ready. If you don’t know jack about the subject, you can expect to crawl along for the next few months or even years as you slowly go from book to book.
An ACE teacher (uhh, “supervisor”, they don’t like the word “teacher” because the kids are supposed to be teaching themselves, they will politely correct you) said that it’s reasonably possible for kids to get 1.5 school year-equivalency of booklets done in a year if the student tries hard. The high school program is broken up into four “years” worth of work, but any random kid might be a few months ahead on math and a few months behind on Bible. Or the other way around. One of the big points for them is that it doesn’t matter as long as the kid is learning. And yes they do allow early graduation if you somehow actually manage to finish all of it by age 16. In theory, yes, they can. In practice, no, they can’t, there’s too much to do.
Yeah, I was the other way around for sure. I was constantly behind and slow on math, and always upset because I didn’t understand it. That wasn’t pleasant, and remains one of the only bad memories of that school. I desperately wanted to succeed and even to exceed expectations, and the math was just beyond me, and I couldn’t figure it out on my own, no matter how long I spent on it. Very frustrating.
As an adult, I find that some people envy the number of siblings I have (5) and think it would be awesome to have a sister, etc.
But as a child? No one envied that. Well, okay, kids in orphanages probably would, but I didn’t go to school with Oliver.
ETA: Gah! Forgot to type my question and now have forgotten my question entirely!
astorian and Skald, sorry I wasn’t clearer. I didn’t mean that all religious men are out to bang a bunch of chickies; I meant it seems that pretty much all religions have gone through an important formative period, and/or contain a powerful structural element, where this is the driving force behind many of its “rules” and “customs.”
You may say that, for ANY cultural expression or organization, there will be men who exploit it to bang the chickies, and that’s true – but religions time and again are founded or redirected exactly for this purpose, more consistently than, say, labor unions or chess clubs.
But the groups being discussed here are monogamous. Unless there is some massive underground action going on, the “middle aged men” aren’t having “sex with as many young women as possible,” to use Princhester’s terms. It’s not like the FLDS, where the men continue to accumulate teenage brides. They’re marrying their daughters off not to their own cohort, but to young men, closer to their own daughters’ age.
You mean monogamous groups like the Roman Catholic Church? Need I mention its still ongoing efforts to shield their priests from the consequences of any number of sexual shenigans going back maybe as much or more than a century?
How do the LORD’s teachings in the Roman Catholic Church match the tendency of middle aged men to want to have sex with as many young women as possible?
Anyway, the quiverfull movement is a subset of evangelical Protestantism, not Roman Catholicism. Perhaps Lasciel can comment on the prevalence of middle aged men having sex with as many young women as possible within the quiverfull movement.