It’s brainwashing when they censor and/or manipulate issues and facts to put through an opinion, political stance, or religion. It is brainwashing when fundamentalists want to only teach their children their point of view of situations, events, and to the point of facts, they shouldn’t be able to force such things on their children otherwise their children will be incapable of accessing situations outside their parent’s opinions because that is all they know if that is all the parent provides.
There are arguments for parsimonious modeling, but it’s overstating the case to say that you can “make any result disappear”. If by disentangling the effect of parental involvement from home schooling (not necessarily an easy task) you find that most of the explanatory power comes from the former, the argument for home schooling becomes less compelling.
I would also like to second Manwich’s comment about socioeconomic status. I looked over the articles cited in your link and don’t seem to have access to the ones I tried to examine; the summary doesn’t mention what variables were controlled for.
That’s an eminently reasonable hypothesis. But perhaps the outcome/parental involvement trajectory is parabolic, and more involvement has a declining or potentially negative effect? That’s why more empirical investigation seems necessary.
The question here is whether homeschooling should be outlawed. We’ve seen the test scores; home-schooled students score better than public school students and the difference is not subtle. You then respond by pointing out that there’s an extremely tenuous, highly unlikely explanation for how homeschooling could still be bad. So apparently, if your side wins, we’ll outlaw the best option and make the worse option mandatory, based only on a far-fetched possibility that’s not supported by any data. Imagine if, upon seeing a correlation between smoking and cancer, the Surgeon General had decided that the relationship might be parabolic, and hence we needed to make chain-smoking mandatory. Pretty silly idea, isn’t it?
That definition strikes me as overly broad. Any educational curriculum is going to be slanted towards an opinion or political stance. Certainly I didn’t hear multiple points of view to many things while I attended public schools. I don’t believe they were brainwashing me though.
By that definition, public schools perform brainwashing. Do you favor outlawing public schools. I’ve already asked this question once and no one answered it? Why don’t you answer it, apollonius?
Second, you make claims about what fundamentalists are doing, but you offer no evidence. Why not? Do you have any evidence, or are you simply composing works of fiction?
Thomas Jefferson once asked, “If man cannot be trusted to govern himself, how can he be trusted to govern others?” I might as well ask, if parents are too inferior to educate their own children, how can they be trusted to educate a class of 30 of someone else’s children?
The bottom line is that public schools make children stupid, while homeschooling (and private schools) make children smart. Now Christians are uniformly in favor of parents rights to make decisions about their kids’ education, while to judge by this thread, most secular folks want to strip away those rights and force children to attend public schools. In other words, Christians want our children to become smart, while secular folks want our kids to become stupid. Why do you suppose that is?
So how 'bout it, apollonius? Do you have any answers?
Actually, no, they don’t. Schools neither censor nor manipulate facts or issues in order to put through an opinion, political stance, or religion. At least, it’s not in the curriculum or educational standards of any state in the nation. I suppose it’s possible that a non-zero number of schools and/or school teachers do this, but to say that all public schools do, by definition, betrays either ignorance or error.
Because offering evidence that water is wet is also kinda silly. When a parent teaches their child, for instance, that evolution is “just a theory” but that Intelligent Design is scientific, they are deliberately censoring and manipulating facts and issues in order to put through bogus, fallacious, fictional claims.
Fallacy of equivocation.
Some parents are unable to properly educate their children (ya know, many of us go to school for quite a long time in order to learn how to become educators). Just like some people are unable to properly pilot a space shuttle. This does not mean that nobody is capable to teach or that nobody is capable to fly a space shuttle.
You have confused “bottom line” with “bizarre fiction”.
Oh oh oh, I know, I know!
It’s because secularists are evil and dumb but Christians are virtuous and wise.
What do I win?
I think the homeschooling results are directly linked as several people above have mentioned, the ration of students to teachers. THe fewer students, the more direct attention the teacher can pay to the student.
FREX … I went to a Montessori private school that had a language requirement for fluency in a second language I was already fluent in. They found a teacher that spoke spanish, got the textbooks and gave us a period 3 days a week.
I cruised through 3 levels of spanish in 1 scholastic year, and passed all the tests. 1:1 student teacher ratio. I didn’t have to ‘wait my turn’ for attention.
That school was fantastic, the average class was 5 students to 1 teacher except for athletics. I think the one semester I took standard ‘gym’ class we had 20 kids, mainly so we could do team sports. The school preferred that we actually do the after school team sports as our ‘gym’ class - I did cross country skiing, soccer and field hockey [and boy do my knees regret them :D] I much preferred getting all sweaty and going home in my uniform rather than get sweaty in the middle of the day and have to deal with getting showered up and back into the school scholastic uniform in the allotted time.
If you have a small class load, the individual attention makes a stronger bond between student and teacher, and leads to a more motivated student. If a kid figures that he is there filling a seat, and the teacher only interacts with him a few minutes of the day, there is no great bond and no desire to perform. THat bond is present in homeschooling.
My mother actually would have been qualified to homeschool - she had a degree in education oddly enough. Other than some really religious fundies, homeschooling simply was not done in general in the US back in the 60s and 70s when I was going to school. I did however get taught to read by the time I was 4 by my governess [real books, not that dick and jane crap]
Really? Are you honestly willing to defend that claim? When D.A.R.E. officers repeat erroneous facts about the effects of marijuana, is it merely a random error? Does everybody in the government honestly want kids to know the truth about how marijuana? When American history textbooks make no mention of the CIA interventions in Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, and many other countries, is it merely an accidental omission? Does our government want children to know exactly what it did in Latin America? When world history textbooks make no mention of Afonso Costa, the Portugese Parlimentary Republic and its violent persecution of the Catholic Church, is that yet another innocent mistake? Do the left-wingers who dominate education really want to tell the truth about what left-wing movements did during the last century? And if you answered yes to all those questions, what evidence can you offer to support it?
Your stance appears to be that individual people people can’t be trusted to raise their own children because they’ll lie, but that the government can be trusted because it always tells the truth, save a few unintentional mistakes. What grounds do you actually have for such a stance?
The good, old ‘I don’t have to offer evidence because everyone knows it’s true’ line. The same argument by which Saddam’s WMDs were proven to exist. If what you say about homeschoolers is so obviously true, then it should be easy for you to link to an outside source which proves it. Please do so.
And let me guess: it just happens to be the government that gets to decide whether anyone other than itself can “properly” educate a person? Kind of like letting the Coke Corporation decide whether Pepsi is proper, isn’t it? Nothing’s better than shutting down your competitors by force.
I’ve backed up my claims with cites, unlike you. See my first post in the thread.
I can’t answer all your questions, but I think you have been misled about what is taught in public schools. The CIA interventions in Latin America were taught in my very public school in the early 2000’s. I guess the government does want us to hear about that.
Besides Henry the Navigator and Vasco de Gama, Portugal wasn’t really mentioned ever. While the persecution by Afonso Costa is important, it doesn’t seem especially relevant for a general world history course. If you could show that a History of Portugal course skipped him you may have a point, but I don’t think you can.
Against your distortions? Yeah, it’s pretty easy.
D.A.R.E. officers are not, in fact, schools. The fact that makes it clear is that they’re D.A.R.E. officers. Nor is it in any way an essential tenet of public schooling that each school shall have a D.A.R.E officer. Nor is choosing certain historical foci “censoring or manipulating facts.” You could run, and many professors have run, an entire college course on the early labor movement in the US alone. Claiming that if a specific history textbook (which can always be supplemented by teacher selected materials) doesn’t teach what you’d like to be taught is simply a non sequitur.
You also seem to be ignorant of how textbooks are selected. “The government” does not get to choose. The demands of the majority of school boards in Texas and California determine the market conditions for textbook publishers in the United States.
Do you generally find that outrageously obvious, laughably impotent strawmen serve a debate well? Should I now try to justify this truly hilarious schtick that you’ve made up and applied to me? Do you think that I somehow will have forgotten what I was actually saying and, gorsh, figure I might as well defend whatever strawman you poke at?
Yet again, you are rather aggressively missing the point.
We know that the majority of fundamentalists teach their children that evolution is wrong and/or that creationism/ID are scientific. We know that this consists of various lies, mistakes, distortions, evasions and fabrications. Thus, we know that parents who teach their children this are engaged in those activities.
You need practice guessing.
Actually no, you haven’t. You’ve displayed an ignorance of the fundamental issues and cited material that while failing to understand why it doesn’t prove your case. To begin with, test scores do not show if someone is “dumb” or “smart”. This is the sort of basic knowledge that you might gain from understanding the first things about teaching and learning.
For instance, you cite a very sloppy study which talks about students who were homeschooled for “at least seven years” meaning that some of them did indeed get time to socialize with public school classes. You also ignore that going to college in and of itself is a socializing experience. Numerous other metrics were so useless and leading as to expose the drive of the study itself, like asking students if they felt that they understood politics without any confusion but not seeing if that was a false confidence and/or surveying what their actual worldviews were and how they matched reality. Etc…
Likewise you ignore that 1:1 teacher student ratios allow greater test preparation and increased time for students to go at their own pace. Which, of course, has nothing at all to do with your fiction of “smart” and “dumb” students. You also cite fallacious arguments based on self-selected cohorts competing against the entire average of all American students.
In short, you offered cherypicked, misleading, misinterpreted data that you then used in error to justify conclusions that it could not support.
I don’t understand how you believe that. Open up a U.S. history book and see how much it mentions anything about class in the United States, the labor movement, sundown towns, or lynchings. Lynching blacks between 1877 and the 1930s was about as American as apple pie but you wouldn’t know it from opening a your typical high school history book. That, my friend, is an example of putting through an opinion and it produces a whole class of people that feel as though their history has been marginalized. Let’s bring up other school activities such as D.A.R.E. or S.A.D.D. Both have school backing with the former telling me that all drugs are bad and the latter being ostensibly to tell me not to drink and drive telling me in practice that all drinking would lead to alcoholism. That doesn’t count as a manipulation of facts in order to put through an opinion or a political stance?
Odesio
Probably because it’s a fact.
I just addressed your specific mistake in the post right above yours.
No, that is not an example of putting through an opinion. That is an example of not teaching absolutely everything about American history in a certain time period. You also are rather significantly distorting the actual topic of conversation. It was not “putting forward an opinion”, but
"Schools neither censor nor manipulate facts in order to put through an opinion, political stance, or religion. "
And they don’t. No facts were manipulated. Nothing was censored. There simply is limited time and not everything gets mentioned. As I already pointed out, you can spend an entire college semester studying just the beginnings of the American labor movement. That’s it, all semester. Saying that textbooks don’t include all the things you want is a non sequitur, and the next guy down the road will want different stuff covered anyways. The schools aren’t “censoring or manipulating facts” by not providing an absolutely encyclopedic recitation of every single good and bad thing that America ever did. There wouldn’t be time in the school year for just America’s history, let alone the entire world’s.
And blah upon those who whine about being “marginalized”. Every single immigrant group has its own stories and its own struggles, and they vary from age to age and city to city and state to state and so on. Complaining that you cannot discuss absolutely everything is nonsensical, and certainly doesn’t point to censorship.
Especially since, yet again as I pointed out, teachers are free to add whatever supplemental material they see fit to add. Textbooks, by necessity, appeal to the largest market possible. There’s nothing stopping teachers running their own “oppression of eastern European immigrants in New York State during 1920-1945” unit.
I already did. Again, what I just said:
And, again, the point wasn’t the same schools use D.A.R.E. But that public schools, as a group, “brainwash” children. Again, what I said right above
Mine discussed the cases of blacks being lynched in the 1900s.
Here’s an overview of various high school history text books:
http://www.edexcellence.net/doc/Historytextbooks[02-06-04].pdf (PDF)
I think you’ll find that they do a decent job of covering a variety of topics. Of course they can’t hit every one, but it would be unreasonable to expect otherwise.
Just choosing to mention one thing over another is a sign of manipulation in my opinion. It’s essentially saying that this bit of information is more important than that bit of information. Granted, I don’t actually think public schools brainwash children. I just think some definitions of brainwashing used in this thread are so broad that they can be applied to public schools.
I didn’t say that.
I didn’t complain about that.
While it’s true that D.A.R.E. officers are not part of the school it’s a bit disingenuous to to pretend that the D.A.R.E. program is not part of the school. At least where I went to school the DARE program was omnipresent during certain parts of the year and it included classroom time, literature, free pencils, and was part of mandatory assemblies.
Odesio
One is not manipulating or censoring facts by not mentioning everything there is to mention. Again, textbooks have to appeal to the largest market possible, and there are limited numbers of hours in the school year. You simply cannot cover everything.
You did complain that if textbooks (and one would suppose, teacher) leave anything out that they manipulating the facts. And as there will always be significant content areas that are left out, you can always claim that the correct things to avoid people being marginilized aren’t being taught. No unit about the Lavender Panic, eh? Okay, but then the month on women’s suffrage will have to be cut down a bit, guess they’ll miss out on some key events there. Spend three weeks talking and writing about early Irish history in the US? Okay, you just missed the ability to talk about US imperialism in the Banana Republics. Talk about that and Irish immigration? Okay, now you have to drop the unit on the robber barons, or whatever.
It’s not manipulation.
Yet again, the argument I was responding to was that public schools, as a group, do this. I pointed out that a non-zero group may, that the schools have very little control over what D.A.R.E. officers actually say, or if an individual one focuses on pot or not, or if the resident health teacher has already offered different and accurate material on specific drugs.
That’s the point, there are a non-zero number of schools who use that sort of stuff, but the comment I was referring to was implying that it is somehow public schools, as a group, that engage in a certain sort of behavior.
About the inclusion or exclusion of information in textbooks …
Dudes, chill out. There is so much information available about everything that you cant put everything into a single book, or even series of books.
I know students working on their doctorates in a specific field, history. One in particular is doing her doctorate on wobblies. She has almost 700 books on the field of labor relations covering from [I believe she said] 1870 until 1940. That is one tiny tiny TINY part of the labor movement that normally gets maybe a page in most history books. I know we have a Canadian Wobbly on the board here. She isn’t even covering Canada or any other countries in her thesis.
My specific field of interest in SCA terms at one point of time was the life of an Alexandrian [Egyptian Colony] Roman woman of 10-45 AD. I went through every book I could get on interlibrary loan, not just on Egypt, but I had to cover classical greek and roman histories that would have been available, plays and poetry that would have been available, got both translations of De Re Coquinaria by Apicius … probably 500 assorted books and several thousand hours of reading and note taking. I think I have NEVER read anything about how a woman in Alexandria would have lived… I think the most that would have been said about a female in alexandria MIGHT have been a mention of Hyapatia, a female librarian that was killed when they burned the Library in Alexandria.
Hell, I would like to see a class made mandatory in basic life … how to plan a budget, plan meals, basic nutrition, basic first aid, basic home and car repair [how can you NOT know how to plunge a toilet or change a tire?!] basic home accounting [how can you not realize that something for 2.00 an ounce is cheaper than something 2.50 an ounce … do the math!] basic cooking, basic housecleaning, basic laundry doing, how to sew on a button or repair a zipper.
People are so caught up in book learning that life learning has gone to shit. Instead of bitching about learning about evolution, or creationism, how about going back to the trivium and quadrivium. Teach kids how to think and research, and make the tools available to them. Stop trying to cram all the kids into the university track and bring back vocational training. We need plumbers, and printers, and car mechanics… not more computer and customer service drones.
Divide the kids at 6th grade, send the ones that are interested and able to handle the work to the university track, send the ones that cant through the vocational track. There is nothing dishonorable in being a car mechanic. Not every kid is suited to go to a university and cant handle the work needed to pass the courses. This “no kid left behind” shit is going about it wrongly.
Maybe I’m confused… but wasn’t Hypatia of Alexandria lynched outside the city walls due to arguing against the prevailing religion of the day, and that didn’t coincide with the destruction of the Library? Or were there two Hypatias?
Isn’t there a similar debate going on in Venezuela (about the “indoctrination” of schoolchildren), whereby President Hugo Chavez wants to include (in schools), mandatory reading and study of the works of Karl Marx, etc.?
D.A.R.E. classes occur in public schools and are typically mandatory for students in those schools. Hence they serve as a counterexample to disprove your ridiculous claim that “Schools neither censor nor manipulate facts or issues in order to put through an opinion, political stance”. Even if we ignored D.A.R.E. classes, students receive the same misinformation in high school health classes, so your claim would still fall apart.
Yes, it is, if you carefully leave out important parts of American history that might lead students to question the government. That’s according to the definition of manipulate, “to manage skillfully, especially with unfair or deceptive aim”.
That’s fascinating, though I can’t fathom what on earth it has to do with anything that I posted.
You also seem to be ignorant of how textbooks are selected. In a typical subject there are dozens if not hundreds of textbooks on the market to choose from, and obviously not all of were somehow determined in Texas or California. State level boards can make recommendations, but ultimately the choice for what textbooks get purchased rests on local decisions makers. But regardless of whether it’s local or state, it’s still the government, to state the obvious.
“We” is a plural pronoun. You individually may be certain of something that you made up, but most other people including myself, want cites. Repeating a claim over and over does not constitute a cite. A cite would be confirmation from a reliable source. If what you said was as widely known as you claim, then finding a cite should be particularly easy; hence your inability to find one is particularly embarrassing.
Cite?
I don’t suppose you’d care to elaborate?
Nonetheless, a student who’s homeschooled at least 7 years out of the 12 gets more homeschooling than one homeschooled less than 7 seven years out of the 12. That’s how I would figure, perhaps public schools teach that 6 is greater than 7. Comparing figures for students who spent a majority of their time studying at home to those who didn’t is a perfectly reasonably way to learn about the effects of home-schooling, and in keeping with how surveys are generally done in the social sciences.
There is nothing wrong about asking people for self-assessment; it’s done in countless studies.
In any case, let’s compare how the studies that I’ve cited stack up to the ones you’ve cited. Oh, wait a minute…you haven’t cited a single thing yet. I wonder why not?
So let me get this straight. At long last, you’re acknowledging the undeniable benefits to homeschooling, yet you still apparently side with those who want it wiped out. (If not you personally, that still the clear goal of the left.) Why?