Waco hell…try burleson.
As you point out in your next paragraph, this isn’t exactly on-topic, and I’m not actually particularly ANTI-unschooling, so I’m not really inclined to argue your point. My point was supposed to be that, IMO there are worse things than telling children that God created math, and that BAD unschooling just might be one of those things.
How does it all of that, do you think? What I see in the paragraph quoted is basically a statement that math IS rational, and that God created that rationality. As Diogenes so eloquently said, it is a way of appreciating math, and I can’t see anything about it that opposes the natural realites that math represents or holds.
No way would that have gotten me into engineering school, where it was expected that we had at least a basic understanding of differential and integral calculus before we walked in the door.
Telling a kid that god did it or thinking that a person can learn all they need to know about math by baking cookies is fine if that’s all the education you ever intend to get.
That kind of foundation, though, would severely under prepare someone for higher education in sciences, mathematics or engineering.
That is an excellent point, and I have often wondered how homeschooled kids get their higher math & science education (at least, those homeschooled all the way though high school). I could probably get my kids through basic algebra and geometry…beyond that, it would be tough. And, of course, WhyNot’s cookie example is a fun way to get through basic math that a lot of parents could handle (even me! 
), but I’m not sure that there is a “fun” way to get though calculus. Some things you just have to sit down, crack books, and work through problems.
I do take slight issue with what you say about telling a kid God did it…I’m really not sure that hampers learning, even in math & science. In math and even physics, if you understand the principles and accept them, does it really matter if you believe God put those principles into place? I’m not sure it does. If the idea that God created something is replacing some important principle, then I agree there is a problem.
Sure, but that’s only where it starts with the little kids. Then one day your 8 year old shows a fascination with, say, machines and how they work and you explore that together - taking day trips to the museum, of course, but also to the auto plant to look at the robots and the mechanic’s to look at the innards of a car and anywhere else he’s interested in. If his math needs outgrow your own knowledge, you have three options: order books and learn together, enroll him in a calculus class at the local school, or enroll him in a home/unschooling group class taught by the parent who’s an engineer and loves to teach calculus.
And, of course, to set all that up, you teach him to write business letters to companies requesting tours, written records on what he’s seen, how to do research at the library, and how to create a Power Point presentation with oral report (to his other parent or his grandmother or the homeschool group) on what he’s been learning and how it impacts him.
I’m still toying with the idea myself. I’ve got a lot of friends who home or unschool (not the same thing - homeschoolers traditionally prepare or buy a curriculum and teach to that, unschoolers don’t) and most of them do it very well. Some of them not so well. The thing I really see as critical to doing it well is being part of a homeschool group - the kids get a much more well-rounded education than when mom’s trying to do it all alone. This fall, my two unschooled goddaughters are taking homeschool classes in Russian Literature, Theater History and something else I forget. They’re on target with Illinois standards in math, science and social studies just from what they’re doing at home with mom. (They took the state standardized tests last fall because they considered going to school for high school and wanted to see if they were behind in anything. They weren’t.)
ETA: Oh, right the girls also now want to learn how to sew, and their mom has enlisted me for that “unit”. I plan on doing lots of pattern alterations with them so they learn some amount of math and art skills with that one, and we’ll include an afternoon on draping and cutting. And I guess we’ll all learn how to put in a zipper together, since that’s something I’ve stubbornly avoided all these years!
Then…in your opinion, all religion constitutes “psychological scarring”? 
Because all religion entails a form of religious education–you teach the non-believers what the religion’s value system and what, for lack of a better word, its mythology is, and the non-believers either ascribe to it and become believers, or they don’t.
So all the folks at this school are doing is being upfront about their desire to include religious education–that is, the presentation of their religion’s value system–in their secular curriculum.
In the United States, “religious private school” means “a church-oriented school that will include religious education with their secular curriculum”. Catholic or Protestant. I don’t understand why you have a hard time accepting that; it’s a fact of life.
“School” doesn’t automatically mean “unbiased presentation of bare facts”. Every school is going to have its biases–right now, for example, the Illinois public school system has a clear bias towards “teaching that people with different skin colors are the same, and deserve to be treated the same”. Fifty years ago, they weren’t teaching that. 
That “unschooling” stuff sounds like a bad idea to me. Kids shuld not be allowed to dictate their own curricula. Kids are stupid and they’re lazy and they’re short-sighted and they’re immature. Whether they like it or not, they need to be force fed basic knowledge and skills that they might not have any interest in and it needs to be done in a structured setting, ideally with other kids. I think they also need to be taught that they aren’t special, they aren’t the center of the universe and the world does not conform to their little whims. Special interests should be indulged in addition to a legitimate education not in place of one.
I think homeschooling is already anti-social and isolating and self-important and this “unschooling” travesty sounds even worse. It sounds like a recipe for creating maladjusted, illiterate narcissists to me.
Totally depends on the kid. My kid chooses a lot of his own…other than math. It works. I know kids that I wouldn’t dream of doing that with.
And we home school because we have to.
As for the OP…If I am teaching a class about auto repair…we dissasemble a car completely showing how it works, how to repair it when it breaks, every detail of how it is put togeather and how it functions…
Would it make the student any less capable of a mechanic if I told the student it was designed by space aliens rather than human engineers?
I know that some people have to and that some people do it right. There’s a certain kind of homeschooling culture out there, though, that is distinctly anti-social, isolationist and overtly religionist. I wish there was more oversight for it. While I don’t doubt that you do fine, I fear that for every family who does it right there are five who are not.
I guess the “unschooling” thing doesn’t sound so much anti-social as insufferably precious.
At least five. Especially in states like mine that have no regulation over home school. I could give my son, at 14, a high school diploma today on a whim. Hell, I could have given it to him 3 years ago when we started home schooling.
I’m the biggest supporter of separation of church and state you’ll find here, but um, it’s a Baptist school. They get to do what they want. That’s what happens in America when you pay for your own school. If that rubs you the wrong way, you might want to consider moving to Myanmar, where the government gets to tell private citizens how to run their lives and businesses.
I’m becoming more and more convinced that journalism is a fraud by definition, especially science journalism. Either you have the private media, whose goal is to sell, not to inform; or you have state media, who can be used as a tool of the state to do terrifying things to the public conscience; or you have the amateurs in the Interblag (who only qualify under “journalism” by analogue), who have no incentive to research their topics before going off half-cocked, and may actually have more incentive to attack outrageous strawmen. It’s just the state of the world today: you gotta figure things out for yourself. Thankfully, we have the Internet for that–assuming you know how to weed out the bullshit from the science, that is.
Agh! The inappropriate prepositions and auxiliaries! It burns!
You mean kibbutzim (singular: kibbutz). There’s nothing wrong with them, and they’re not state-run, nor were they ever. They’re entirely self-sustaining communities that serve as hostels and tourist-friendly work environments for people from around the world, and IMO you haven’t lived until you’ve stayed in a couple of them. What you’re talking about is that disaster when it became fashionable for kibbutzim to separate children born in the kibbutz from their parents and raise the kids communally. Please keep that separate from the concept of the kibbutz itself. Otherwise, you sound like someone saying “If we reinstate slavery, then we’ll be like America!” Technically true, yes, but some historical context is in order.
Texans ain’t that bad. A little weird, maybe, but not that bad. It’s the humidity that I can’t stand.
WhyNot, I also just realized why it may sound like “kibbutzum” to you…it’s actually pronounced kib as in kibble, but as in butcher, z, im rhymes with team.
Hey, thanks! Yes, before I die, I want to work at a kibbutz, and yes, what I fear is not the idea or institution itself, it’s the, as you describe it, “fashion” of separating children from their parents. And I *was *under the impression that they were state-run, so thank you for correcting my ignorance. I’m actually a great fan of communal child rearing, so that was, I realize now that I’m more enlightened, a singularly shitty example for me to use! Thank you for being generous enough to understand what I was getting at anyway.
FTR: Just so everyone’s clear, the aforementioned “fashion” is not much more than a historical curiosity at this point. The children were not entirely separated from their parents–they saw them for about three hours a day–but beginning in the 1920s, kids born on or brought into kibbutzim weren’t raised by their parents. A few generations of these kids have grown up to serve Israeli society just like their more traditionally-raised brethren. It turned out that kids weren’t better off raised by “professionals” (nurses and teachers) rather than “amateurs” (their parents), but the issue with this is the emotional, not academic, development of those children. Various studies have found that they grew up with some hangups about sex (having viewed every member of their community as ersatz siblings, parental figures or teachers) and a difficulty in forming strong one-on-one attachments, but came out of it with better social lives and a better ability to make friends than the average bear. It’s a complex issue that’s covered more thoroughly here.
ETA: Each kibbutz markets some particular product and most also act as hotels for more temporary visitors, and it’s a defining characteristic of kibbutzim that each one subsists on some arbitrary manufacturing business. IIRC, Kibbutz Hagoshrim near the Golan Heights, right on the border of Lebanon and not far from Syria, is the leading manufacturer of razorblades, or some such things. Others make everything from lenses to spark plugs, and I’ve even heard of one with a pig farm.
Sorry for the hijack.
I do not think we need to say we will become akin to Myanmar if there is some regulation.
Like it or not we are a society and as a society I think it is appropriate to look out for how our children are being taught. They will be full-fledged members of it soon enough.
Others have pointed out how there is no regulation of private schools. Would you be ok with a school that taught bigotry or racism as part of its curriculum? If their biology description included a piece on how they would prove a black person is sub-standard or a history class that said it would show the Holocaust was a forgery or how the Inquisition did not go far enough?
I think my issue with the school in the OP is its overt indoctrination. I just do not think that should be in schools…any schools. If they want to include a theology class n their curriculum that propounds their particular dogma then fine. The kids can also go to church and get it. But in math class?
As long as they are not claiming that pi = 3, I am afraid that I do not see the issue. Would you have had as much trouble with a Quaker school in 1850 “indoctrinating” its students with anti-societal views such as abolition? How about Quaker schools in the late 1960s “indoctrinating” their students with anti-societal views of the immorality of war? Perhaps an Episcopal or other Liberal Protestant school, today, taking the anti-societal view that same sex marriage should be a human right? (Each of these issues is a matter of religious morality as approached by the adherents of those beliefs.)
Yes I would.
I do not think schools should be indoctrinating anybody. Ideally they are there to provide the facts and let the students sort it out for themselves. Rather than be told abolition is right or wrong provide them a place to discuss the issues surrounding it. Have discussions on morality and philosophy in appropriate classes for that. Have them write a paper with their own thoughts pulling all that together.
I realize it is not possible to completely separate some biases out. How can you teach history without bias? Were Europeans who came to North America valiant explorers or evil conquerors or something else? How do you portray the US when they dealt with Japanese Americans in WWII? My point is whichever way you go on those there will be some bias or slant. Leave it to the historical revisionists to sort out. Discussions of morality would necessarily skew to your society’s morality.
However I see no place for discussions of God or Abolition or anything else but math in a math class. If in their Bible study the teacher wants to rope in math and use it as an example of the hand of God at work fine. That is the place for it.
To place God so centrally in a math class I think is inappropriate. If that is just how the curriculum reads and all they do is start class with a prayer then it is all circles and squares fine but it sounds as if they are throwing God in there a bit more than that (I could be wrong).
Who said that? I certainly didn’t.
There’s an argument for that. There’s also an argument that as a society, we need to stand behind our country and agree with all of its military decisions, which led to free speech disasters like the one that happened in World War I, when it became illegal to badmouth the war or the President.
You can’t tell me that the KKK and various neo-Nazi groups don’t indoctrinate children. They have a right to, because this is America and we have a Constitution to uphold. It’s not nice, it’s not pleasant, but it’s reality.
In Austria, it’s illegal to deny the Holocaust happened. What do you think about that? As a Jew, I think it’s horrible. It only justifies the European neo-Nazi persecution complex, and legitimizes Holocaust denial by making it a forbidden fruit. Creationism etc. is the same way: we can throw private citizens in jail for talking about it, but that will only legitimize it.
Indoctrination is everywhere, especially when it comes to people who teach and raise children. The very act of raising religious children inherently involves indoctrination. So does the act of raising children who vote, abstain from cigarettes, or support equality. If you intend to stop America’s schools from indoctrinating children, I, for one, would fight tooth and nail to stop you.
ETA: To bring this back to the realm of things that are actually appropriate in education, science teachers indoctrinate students to make them apply the Scientific Method to stuff. It’s what they do. It’s their job.
I don’t either, but in the immortal words of Kurtis Blow, these are the breaks.
It is hard to understand how featuring God prominently in a religious curriculum would be “inappropriate”. Maybe you intended to use some other word.