So you disagree with the concept of freedom of religion? Very interesting.
If you, and the writer of the article you cited, actually attended a math class in one of these schools, I think you’d see that math is taught in math class. In fact, if you simply looked at the statistics, you’d see that private schools, even with all that God business, do an excellent job educating kids.
Here are the stats on my daughter’s school, which averages 160 kids per grade:
Averages 9 National Merit Finalists per year.
Semi-Finalists average 9 per year.
Achievement Scholars are 1-2 a year.
Between 10-20 commended students per year.
98%-100% of graduates enroll in college.
83% of the class of 2007 won scholarships totaling more than $13 million.
Whether they start the class with a prayer or recite psalms in between postulates is none. of. your. business.
If you are going to make this accusation would you care to cite where I said or even implied this? Indeed I have stipulated I have NO issue with kids being taught religion…just not in a math classroom.
I think it absolutely IS my business. I am tired of people hiding behind this or that “freedom” to say I need to shut the fuck up about it. They may indeed have a particular freedom and in general I AGREE with the freedom in question but I am likewise free to speak my mind.
I find the lack of oversight of private schools (as discussed in this thread) appalling. To suggest that I have no stake or no right to comment or be concerned is wrongheaded. If they offered “Kitten Burning 101: An Exploration into the Nuances of Kitten Torture” that is ok? Yes it is an absurd example but it is there to illustrate the absurdity of the apparent position most are taking here (that as long as they teach math whatever else they are on about is none of our business).
I’m free to speak my mind too. I’m the biggest anti fundamentalist, republican hating, religion reviling human there is. And yet, this is a private Baptist school. Not subsidized by my tax dollars. That means they can teach anything they like. The world is flat? Okay. If you say so. Not my dime.
Don’t like it? Don’t send your kids there. Really, don’t send your kids there.
I’d like to inspect your home, if you don’t mind. I want to know what kind of movies you watch, and what kind of stories you read to your children. For all I know, you could be teaching them to poison Christian children. Does your wife wear a bra? Is she submissive to you, and do you hurt her? Those might sound like crazy concerns, but I think the community has a stake in just how qualified you are to decide how our kids should be taught.
What right do the kids have to an education that is scientifically, historically, and mathematically accurate? Keeping in mind that decisions made for them when they’re young will likely have dramatic impact on where they end up when they’re older, it might be too late to undo the damage once the kid who was taught the earth was flat and a bunch of other kooky shit wants to go on to college.
Does it mean all private schools or home schools are necessarily bad? No. But I’ve seen first hand what can happen when a parent’s choice to teach their kids things that aren’t even close to being recognized science keeps that kid out of higher education - a friend of mine whose mother homeschooled all of the kids and taught them that antibiotics are hoodooo magic but waving a piece of amethyst over ear infections makes it go away is still at age 26 finding out just how bad his education was.
He’s been rejected from university after university because he quite simply does not know the basics. He doesn’t know trig, has never had a foreign language class, is pretty well ignorant of art (never heard of DaVinci until he was 20) … the problems go on and on. He has talked at length about how isolated he and his siblings were, and how the only contact that they had with other kids were rare trips to see ‘other homeschoolers in the homeschool group’.
He was done an incredible disservice because parents have the right to fill their kid’s head with any kind of muckity-muck they want, but he had no right to get an education that would prepare him for college.
That is heartening, at best. I don’t want students with no basic knowledge of science or language to ever pass any college exam. I certainly don’t want them to be in charge of my medical care.
Ok, that sucks for him, but at 26 why hasn’t he enrolled in a community college in, say, art history, trig and basic sciences? They even have remedial science courses that pretty much start with, “This is an atom,” and go from there. It’d take two or three semesters to get himself up to speed - less than the apparent eight years he’s wasted applying to colleges he’s not qualified for.
Same for the kid coming from the crappy public school.
One can only get so old and legitimately hold their current experiences against their parents’ old actions, IMHO.
In fact, if there’s reason to believe you can’t or won’t provide a fit home, CPS can inspect your home and even remove your children if the allegations are true.
I don’t see the problem with making schools conform to some minimal standards before they’re allowed to educate children, who cannot themselves choose to be there or not.
Children aren’t your property. Your rights over them may be vast, but they are not absolute.
Needless to say, this has nothing to do with religious schools per se. I’m sure many of them do a fine job of educating children.
False analogy. Kitten torture is illegal and violent, whereas freedom of religious expression in all available channels, as long as it is not presented as a government endorsement of a particular belief system, is a right guaranteed by the Constitution. The same right, BTW, that allows you to raise your kids without man-in-the-sky stories if you so choose. You can’t do that in every country in the world, so if I were you I’d be thankful for it.
Next.
I’m sure that’s true, and it’s a sad story. But it has nothing at all to do with private schools.
Colleges and universities in PA do not recognize that he has ever completed high school because there was no requirement that any sort of curriculum exist where he was home schooled. That puts him in the process of trying to get a GED so that he can get into a community college.
For-profit diploma mills will take him, but they don’t really provide much benefit in terms of getting a worthwhile, respected degree.
You can argue all you want that at 26 he’s too old to place the blame with his parents, but they sure as hell set him up with a huge disadvantage.
It has everything to do with parents having the right to teach their kids (either through themselves, or someone they pay to do it) things that are completely at odds with the knowledge they need to have to be successful in college.
Remember, not every private school was your prep-school where it’s easy to boast high numbers on college acceptance and scholarship if you kick out the under-performers.
The Pomfret Prep type schools have the stats they do specifically because they get to choose who gets in and who doesn’t.
There are plenty of private schools that aren’t of that type, either. The kind where kids will be taught that evolution is a myth, that the dinosaurs were killed in the flood, etc. Your kid might be lucky enough to have rich parents and a seat at Pomfret, but what about the rights of the kid whose parents want him to learn hellfire and brimstone, education be damned?
Bullshit. Granted the education system is pretty uneven but no way a kid comes out of a public school that misinformed unless they willfully ignored all their lessons (which would be the student’s fault…not the school’s fault).
Well, IF you are homeschooling your child then yeah. At least there should be SOME oversight (bra wearing is probably not relevant).
You are essentially telling me fill a child’s ear with anything you like. Keep them out of school and deal with them as you please. You are the parent so anything goes that you see fit. Society has no stake in it.
OK, so he needs a GED prep book and/or classes, which are free throughout the state. I’m still not seeing the problem here. IF he wants to go to college (not everyone does), then yeah, his parents were sucky homeschoolers for not making sure he had the skills and requirements in the state where he grew up to be able to do that. But you’re still letting this specific example of bad homeschooling inform you that homeschooling is bad. It’s as illogical as me arguing that a bad public school is evidence that public schooling is bad, or that an overripe banana is evidence that all bananas are brown and mushy.
Absolutely they did, I’m not arguing that. But, arguably, so have thousands of families in the Chicago Public School system who send their kids to shitty public schools.
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Whack-a-Mole**, I think you seriously underestimate just how bad some public schools are. My freshman (in high school) was just moved from the regular Literature class to the Honors Literature class because he correctly and spontaneously identified irony in a story. Knowing what “irony” is at 14 years old is Honors level material in some public schools! :eek: There are kids there who are proud of never opening a book, and yet the schools pass them. That’s NOT the kids’ fault, that’s the school’s fault that they “graduate” not knowing jack.
Actually I do have a pretty good idea. I worked with Ron Gidwitz for awhile and I worked for Planned Parenthood for awhile (Planned Parenthood was not about schools of course but their mission saw them in some of the worst schools to do their thing). I do not have the insider’s view you do but I am not wholly uninformed. Certainly some schools are a disaster. Some are great. Some homeschooled kids are a disaster. Some are great.
How to “fix” education is a topic of rancorous debate and one that has been done here and could be done again. Not an easy topic. But I stand by my opinion that there should be some base standards applied to ALL schooling. Be it home school, private schools or public schools. We can go round and round over what those standards should be of course but they should exist.
To say, “Hey, it’s a private school…they can do as they please” is bogus. We as a society do have a stake in these kids. Being a parent I do not think should give you carte blanche on everything that happens to that kid. Yeah we need to be super careful of the nanny state and/or Big Brother but that does not mean it should be ignored either.
What I am essentially telling you is that I no more trust your judgment in deciding what’s best for my child than you trust mine. So fucko off.
“If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life…” Henry David Thoreau, Walden
