Education
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Consider this from the draft of the course’s proposed “achievement indicators”:
Demonstrate an understanding of the need to undertake informed action while at the same time not necessarily waiting until having “all the information.”
Oddly (though hardly surprisingly), this particular phrase was amended to an almost opposite meaning (”demonstrate an understanding of the need to undertake informed action”), as were a couple of the other more blatantly terrifying of the course’s expectations. But see what remains:
… Identify and describe specific practices of solving conflict and promoting social justice, including … coups [and] revolutions …
… Identify a range of ways in which social injustice is manifested (e.g. … reduced self-worth) …
… Demonstrate an understanding of the role of language in oppression (e.g. non-gender inclusive language, use of euphemism) … edward michael george
Occasionally I am asked why we home school our boys. Well, frankly, I would prefer they take decisions when they have “all the information” and I would hope that their exposure to lunatics like the people who wrote up this curriculum will consist of meetings in which they say, “Miss Sirianni, you’re fired.”
Sadly I doubt that will happen so, instead, the best I can do is make sure my own children are isolated from this infection.
Written by jay on September 24th, 2008 with 11 comments.
Read more articles on Canadian Politics and Education and Homeschooling and culture.
WASP children - at least those whose parents were raised after the 1960s - ignored their parents from a very young age, and were consequently loutish and ill-breed. My bunch were terrified neurotics who, even to this day, drop out of high school in record numbers. The middle way is respect. That extraordinarily difficult balancing act the best parents try to achieve, between making children understand that they must, from their immaturity, trust to your authority and yet not using fear as a weapon. Fear is crippling and produces obvious reactions. In the smallest children fear does work. Once a child reaches a fairly advanced stage of conceptual development, and as such is able to distinguish between basic right and wrong, there are few things more crippling than random violence. The impact of corporeal punishment, whatever its vices, is trivial compared to random violence. If a child knows what is right and wrong, yet is too young to understand the why, then at least there is predictability. I do this, then this will happen. When there is no why or wherefore, when terror comes regardless of action or the severity of the violation, then no planning or decision making is possible. One simply endures. Gods of Copybook Headings
Possibly the hardest job in the world is to be a good parent. On the one hand you want your kids to grow, to be confident, to have a spine; on the other your want them to pay attention, to mind what you say, to actually listen.
No child should ever experience random violence from his mother or father. However, the idea of consequences, verbal, physical or at some other level needs to be ingrained from the go. Children are very basic: from a very early age they are aware of right and wrong. Which does not mean they cleave to the right. Rather it means that they test the rules their parents make. And a rule without consequence is no rule at all.
Go read the whole post.
Written by jay on August 21st, 2008 with no comments.
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A goodly number of pixels have been spilt on the allegedly political removal of two children from their white supremacist mother after the elder was sent to school with a swasika drawn on her arm. Dawg went to the wall in his comments:
“Teaching kids to hate is harmful per se. It seems to me, based upon the precautionary principle, that it’s up to you to prove otherwise.” dr dawg
I think this is an exceptionally dangerous view of the nature of the role of parents, the state and the culture. First off it opens parents to losing their children as the result of thought crime. While these poor kids’ mother is hardly a brilliant parent, if, as Dawg conjectures, the rule is “teach hate, lose kids” then her capacity as a parent is not in issue one way or another. So on that basis the Khadr’s would have lost their kids the instant the authorities became aware of the jihadi views of the parents. I certainly hope Mohamed Elmasry doesn’t have kids because his political/religious views might count as hatred. Anti-Zionist? Lose your kids. Black mother in the Jane Finch corridor blaming whitey for black peoples’ problems - better watch her step. Catholics and fundamentalist who teach their children that abortion is murder and abortionists murderers…no kids for you! Environmentalists who tell their children that the people who run big corporations are killing the Earth and should go to jail…kidless.
But, and one cannot help but notice what this lame brained mum did, maybe we should set the standard higher. Perhaps the test should be that you have to actually do something like draw on your kids. (Frankly I’d start with the parents of the cringing little moppets who are stuck having their faces painted for National holidays.) For example telling your female children that they have to wear a head scarf (or a sack) or Uncle Ali will be over to behead them? Perhaps it would make sense for teachers, as soon as they see a little Muslim girl wearing the hajib to ask if Fatima really wants to wear it and to keep pushing until they are absolutely certain Fatima is not being coerced at home.
Written by jay on July 8th, 2008 with 28 comments.
Read more articles on Education and Homeschooling and Islam and culture and free speech and idiot lefties.
Edward Michael George favours us with a tale of just how far the rot has set in. (Warning, includes the “N” word.)
Written by jay on February 16th, 2008 with 3 comments.
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An elementary school in Ottawa was flooded with hateful and threatening e-mails and phone calls after media reports that it had removed the word “Christmas” from a song to be performed at its Christmas concert.
The choir at Elmdale Public School did not sing its controversial version of the song Silver Bells at its closed-door concert Thursday after receiving dozens of angry reponses, including some containing foul language.
Lynn Scott, chair of the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, said some callers accused the school of being anti-Christian and some threatened teachers and officials at the school.
“It’s appalling to me that people could be so intolerant and disrespectful and hateful at a time of the year like this when we’re supposed to be thinking about generosity and peace and good will,” she said. “I’m not seeing very many Christian values in the reaction we’ve had.”
Teachers had originally intended to replace “Christmas time” and other Christmas references from the song’s original 1951 lyrics with words referring to “a festive time.” cbc
And pray why was there a need to replace a perfectly good lyric with a PC lyric?
“intolerant and disrespectful and hateful at a time of the year like this”. Honey, this is not the emailers’ problem, it is your problem for being stupid, provocative and tone deaf at this very time of year.
Of course this is anti-Christian in the sense that Christmas is a profoundly Christian holiday. Deleting all references to it in a “Christmas concert” quite rightly outrages people. As for Christian values - they only go so far and when PC driven secularists take it upon themselves to take the Christmas out of “Festive Time” it is well past time to go Crusader on the dolts who come up with this sort of loonieness.
And people wonder why I homeschool.
Update: I wonder if a complaint to the HRCC might lie in this matter. Personally, as a Christian - albeit of the Anglican sort - I feel demeaned. Hurt. Offended. Hmmmm.
Written by jay on December 22nd, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on Canadian Politics and Education and Homeschooling and culture and idiot lefties.
Dalrymple: The idea that one’s pleasure or desire of the moment is the only thing that counts leads to antisocial behaviour. Let me give a small and seemingly trivial example of this.
About half of British homes no longer have a dining table. People do not eat meals together - they graze, finding what they want in the fridge, and eating in a solitary fashion whenever they feel like it (which is usually often), irrespective of the other people in the household.
This means that they never learn that eating is a social activity (many of the prisoners in the prison in which I worked had never in their entire lives eaten at a table with another person); they never learn to discipline their conduct; they never learn that the state of their appetite at any given moment should not be the sole consideration in deciding whether to eat or not. In other words, one’s own interior state is all-important in deciding when to eat. And this is the model of all their behaviour.
Young patients now eat in doctors’ offices; they eat above all in the street, where of course they drop litter as unselfconsciously as horses defecate. This is not evil, though it is antisocial, but you can easily see how people who attach such importance to their own desires, and lack any other criteria to help them decide to behave, come to do evil. front page via Edward Michael George
At our house we have a dinner table. And around that dinner table we have rules. Some are about using utensils - which is a bit tough for Max at just four but he tries and that is what counts - others are about conversation and the general idea that talking and listening are both required. Some are about wearing a shirt and, well, pants, some are about saying “thank you” and “please”. When we can we dim the lights and light candles. And, for, say, twenty minutes, a certain culture, a particular set of manners, are passed from our parents to our children.
Written by jay on November 15th, 2007 with 7 comments.
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When I was growing up, I remember putting up flags on the lawn for Remembrance Day and attending parades. As a young boy, I didn’t fully understand the meaning of the day. My father, Richard Greene, a retired RCMP staff sergeant, would stand at attention with fingers curled, thumbs pointing down the seams of his trousers, honouring his father, Enoch Greene, a member of the 108th Battalion (New Brunswick) of the Canadian Expeditionary Forces in the First World War. I gradually came to learn that Canada was honouring its war dead. CAPT. TREVOR GREENE
Captain Greene dictated this from his wheelchair. Alan, at GenX at 40 has been updating Captain Green’s astonishing progress since he had his head split open by a Taliban wielding an axe.
My little boys and I will be spending a bit of time today remembering the sacrifices of their grandfathers and their great grandfathers. But we will also take some time to remember the Canadian soldiers who are fighting in Afghanistan. And we will start with Captain Greene’s article.
Written by jay on November 11th, 2007 with 1 comment.
Read more articles on Canadian Politics and Education and culture.
Ontario Progressive Conservative leader John Tory is dismissing polls suggesting he has handed the Liberals another majority victory with his call to fund religious schools. national post
So if you go whoring after minorities, big surprise, you end up in a minority. All the more so if you are a Tory.
The school funding issue was a classic unforced error. Other than a few zealots there were not gazillions of Ontarians dying to fund madrassas.
Had Tory gone with a voucher approach he could have achieved the same end without stirring up the growing resentment of particularist sects within Canada. While the ethnic vote may be important the truth is that the parallel school system constitutionally entrenched in Ontario does a pretty good job of dealing with the Canadian reality of a Protestant/Catholic split. Adding Muslims, Hindus and Lord knows who else to the mix was not going to be attractive.
Why Tory felt he needed to suck up to noisy newcomers in such a spectacularly suicidal fashion beats the Hell out of me. It is not as if his kids are likely to see the inside of a publicly funded school. Nope, this was just dumb.
Written by jay on October 2nd, 2007 with 2 comments.
Read more articles on Canadian Politics and Education and culture.
KMG and I were having a chat about the way children are raised presently. He sent along an article from the Daily Mail,
When George Thomas was eight he walked everywhere.
It was 1926 and his parents were unable to afford the fare for a tram, let alone the cost of a bike and he regularly walked six miles to his favourite fishing haunt without adult supervision.
Fast forward to 2007 and Mr Thomas’s eight-year-old great-grandson Edward enjoys none of that freedom.
He is driven the few minutes to school, is taken by car to a safe place to ride his bike and can roam no more than 300 yards from home. daily mail
It’s a depressing read.
My partner and - in theory - free range kid raiser (I say in theory because as the boys are six and three the issue has yet to come to a head) pointed me to this lovely article,
TO ALL THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED the 1930’s 40’s, 50’s, 60’s and 70’s !!
First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant. They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn’t get tested for diabetes.
Then after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-based paints.
We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking. As infants & children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, booster seats, seat belts or air bags.
Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat.
We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle. the silly wagon
On the one hand I am delighted we now know enough to get rid of the lead based paint and I think car seats are smart; but the point is generally well taken.
The right to roam, the ability of kids to engage with the world, is worth a bit of risk. The problem is that with tiny families of one and two children, parents have a huge incentive and the time to micro manage that engagement. Which means children have lost several degrees of the freedom which makes childhood so amazing.
Written by jay on June 17th, 2007 with no comments.
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Edward Michael George makes a rather telling point in the wake of the kid on kid shooting in Toronto and the predictable demand for the immediate elimination of hand guns:
In response to the accumulation of evidence provided the citizens of France since November 2005 of serious societal decline, President Nicholas Sarkozy condemns as responsible–get this–the French themselves! Now this is a novelty, isn’t it? Imagine suggesting that a country is responsible for the things that happen within its own borders! That its citizens take responsibility for the consequences of their own actions! Scandalous!
To elaborate: Monsieur Sarkozy apparently believes that neither gasoline nor matches are the determining factors in, say, a nationwide blight of car burnings. Rather, he’s under this weird impression that a preponderance of bad behaviour has something to do with the fact that good behaviour isn’t being encouraged or even taught. (For those who don’t know our other official language see here). edward michael george
Indeed.
Written by jay on May 29th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on Canadian Politics and Education and culture and law.
A debate raging over the morals of Hong Kong’s racy media took a bizarre twist Wednesday with revelations that a decency watchdog had been flooded with obscenity complaints about the Bible.
The Television and Entertainments Licensing Authority (Tela), which oversees the publishing industry, said it had received 208 complaints that text within the holy book was indecent. religious news blog via magic stats
Quick, call Kate. Lot’s daughters??
Of course, to be fair, there is not much chance of the Bible being an assigned text in a Canadian public school so our children are safe.
Written by jay on May 17th, 2007 with no comments.
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I’ve been commenting around on Canadian blogs on the assorted commentaries about the slaughter at Virgina Tech.
A few general points:
- deadbolts - good deadbolts would have saved dozens of lives
- metal doors - a locked metal door keeps the people behind it safe
- escape methods - a roll up rope ladder would have saved lives. Hell, a decent piece of rope tied to a radiator would have saved lives.
- training - every person who is attending a school of any sort (and who is in a likely to be targeted building of any sort) should receive a basic training as to what to do if they hear gun fire. Lock the door, pile up the furniture figure out how to get out of the area.
- advanced training - basic take down strategies. Three guys beside the door to jump the attacker with the rest of the class piling on.
My point being that there is no reason that 32 innocent people needed to die. But, and here is the hard thing, preparation requires that we actually acknowledge the possibility of evil and train ourselves and our children to deal with it. That, I’m afraid, contradicts the happy chat view of the world which our universities and, indeed, our governments seem intent on propagating.
Written by jay on April 21st, 2007 with 1 comment.
Read more articles on Canadian Politics and Education and Terror and culture and media.
Harper’s idea of just giving money to parents to do with as they please is nothing but a shirking of responsibility as a democratically elected government to ensure that our tax dollars are spent properly. jason cherniak
It is unlikely that Cherniak is actually as dumb as this sounds. Law degree and all that. So I have to think he believes it.
In which case he pretty much underscores the difference between the Liberal and liberal conceptions of the world. For Jason the idea is that people, parents in this case, cannot be trusted to spend money wisely on their children. (I personally bought beer and, well, food, with today’s $100.00 for Max. Max likes beer.)
For us small “l” liberals the idea that government has anything whatsoever to do with raising our children is anathema. If the Feds want to send money for whatever inscrutable reason, I’ll take it; but save me from the idea that government knows anything, much less, “best” about my kids.
Jason, perhaps because he’s single and not blessed with children, seems to be under the impression that the feds and their union daycare buddies know best. It never occurs to the man to wonder if this is a paradigm to be supported or one to be questioned at its very foundation. Because that foundation is that kids do just fine without their parents. That daycare workers - well, union daycare workers - are really a positive substitute for Mum. Mum+ as it were.
The sheer implausibility of that position is what makes me wonder if Cherniak wasn’t a legacy to some poor law school. Seriously, are there people who really believe this??
Written by jay on March 24th, 2007 with 1 comment.
Read more articles on Canadian Politics and Education and Liberals and culture.
Phil Hope, skills minister for the DfES, is keen to point out that most of those who have been seen to struggle with such baffling riddles as “25 per cent off” are in their forties, and that the current government is therefore not to blame. But the reason those in early middle age are so statistically conspicuous here is not only that they command most of the spending power, but also that they were the first victims of the very comprehensive system that is now failing their children: the over-fifties exhibit no such difficulties. the telegraph
In a gentler age my granny came home from school at about 14 and told her father that she would like to leave school as they were now delving into these “percentages” and why would she possibly need to learn such useless things. Her father agreed so she stayed at home becoming one of the best read people I have ever had the honour to know. Great rafts of Keats and Byron and Dickens by heart.
She would not, however, have had a clue what 40% off could possibly mean. Boxing Day would have been wasted on the woman.
Written by jay on December 27th, 2006 with no comments.
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Part of the reason susan and I want to homeschool Sam and Max lies in the way that the education system has become one of the last holdouts of the industrial era. You put raw material (your kids) in at one end and, thirteen years later, out they pop. Educated. Socialized.
Er, well, no.
In fact education is at one of its more basic crossroads. The internet is here and that, as ever, changes everything. The Tyee is exploring the issue of distributed education, that is where kids can sign up for courses online. Not seen as good news by the teachers’ unions. It is, however, potentially, great news for the actual process of learning.
Imagine for a moment that distributed education became the norm with kids taking a significant portion of their course work online. Would that abolish schools and teachers?
No. What it would do is free teachers to actually teach in small groups where learning rather than custody was the goal. If students were taking courses online with schools offering tutorials and one on on help to those students the entire system would become more flexible and far more responsive. And, I suspect, more interesting for students and teachers alike.
The tradional classroom and curriculum become less relevant as the world changes ever more quickly. While being able to read well, write fluently and actually know multiplication tables are still crucial, almost everything beyond these basics can be approached in a huge variety of ways.
Education - public, private and home based - have as their goal adults who can function well in the society. The problem is that this society has radically shifted. “Knowing” things is largely irrelevant in a world with Google and Wikipedia available on your cell phone. Instead, being able to define a problem and set about solving it is increasingly important.
Schools are going to change or simply cease to be relevant to an increasing portion of the population. Change is hard; but it will happen in any event.
Written by jay on September 8th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Education and Homeschooling and Uncategorized and culture.
September 5 arrived. First day of school.
Six months of research and reflection have convinced us that home schooling Sam is pretty much the way to go. We’ll review the decision at the end of the year.
What it comes down to is not the quality of the schools - in Victoria most of the schools are good to excellent. Nor is it a particular desire to inculcate our values and only our values. We have values but they are pretty mainstream and we could tolerate the assorrted bits of pc nuttieness which are dropped into the school day.
No, when it comes right down to it our decision is based on the simple logic of the numbers and the nature of the system.
Industrial schooling requires a relatively high student teacher ratio. In a good school you might find a ratio of 20-25 kids to one teacher. Which means next to no one on one instruction. It also means a child spending time - a lot of time - with other kids more or less exactly his or her own age.
Neither is particularily conducive to learning.
At the moment we are blessed with a little boy who is keenly eager to learn. He want’s more arithmetic questions and is practicing making his “3’s” which keeep looking like “S’s”. He’s a bit shy abbout reading aloud but loves playing with the assorted flash card sets. He wants to go to the Provincial museum today, tomorrow and everyday.
We think this is too good to risk.
Written by jay on September 7th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Education and Homeschooling and Uncategorized.
At one point my daughter and some of the other kids were playing tag with one of the adults, when one of the older kids asked him what his job was. He responded that he was in the Canadian Army (CFB Wainwright).
One boy shouted, “he’s a killer — he kills people — he kills little kids!”
My four year old was present so I stepped in at that point to explain that people in the army protect us from bad people, and while this sometimes means killing these bad people, they’re usually the grown-ups who picked the fight in the first place.
urban refugee
In the Axworthian paradigm Canadian Forces personel are our Kumbaya singers in chief. This being the received wisdom in schools, universities, churches and - God help us - legislatures and Parliament this idea of an actual army which uses main force to win wars is simply beyond the comprehension of many children.
This is one big reason why we are homeschooling Max and Sam.
Good for Sean!
Written by jay on July 23rd, 2006 with 3 comments.
Read more articles on Canadian Politics and Education and Homeschooling and Terror and culture.
It is rare for a person to have the influence to change entire cities. Jane Jacobs who died yesterday did. Jacobs understood urban planning, design, economics and the nature of communities in a broad, wholistic way.
Jacobs was largely self educated which meant she seldom knew the “received wisdom” when she set out to write her books. Instead she went and looked at what worked and what did not.
To give a simple example, in the Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) she looked at the difference between vibrant parts of a city and its dead zones. While many commentators would cite income levels or on street parking or building height, Jacobs noticed that the length of the blocks themselves determined much of the activity on those blocks. Short blocks, with lots of corners and intersections created enough interest that people would flock to the street and the neighbourhood. Long blocks had exactly the opposite effect.
Jacobs had literally hundreds off these sorts of examples and insights. If you want to explain economies Jacobs thought you had to start at the level of what people actually did and how they acquired the knowledge to do more. If you want to understand why downtowns died you had to look at the effects of freeways and skyscrapers which were only occupied eight hours a day.
For Jacobs, the issues in urban planning or economic management were first and foremost questions about what actual people actually did. She had little time for theory or concepts of economic rationality and none at all for the conceits of planners.
Politically she always struck me as an agnostic. Some of her ideas - for example that freeways were a garrot at the neck of cities - were adopted by the center left; others, a belief in radical decentralization and an inherent scepticism about the ability of government to “get it right” are the staples of the libertarian right. Over the years I’ve found that in conversations with smart people on the left and the right her name often comes up. Not as an authority to buttress a particular argument; rather as a touchstone of rational, observational, political thinking.
Over the last half century her ideas have shaped urban planning models and developments. Places which work - and here I am thinking of Vancouver’s Granville Island and downtown in general, have implicitly adopted her short blocks, mixed use, people before cars, view of the world.
In the last few years Jacobs has been writing increasingly bleak books foreseeing enviornmental disaster and the destruction of the norms which allow professionals and an educated middle class to thrive. She may very well be right; but as more and more cities adopt Jacobs’ strategies there is every possibility that a marriage of the enviornment and what might be called a profoundly human life will emerge.
It was Canada’s great good fortune that Jacobs left the United States as her sons neared draft age during the Viet Nam war. As well as her tremendous body of work, Jacobs provided Canadians with a model of how an intellectual can work in public. Her influence and her ideas have been adopted in many of Canada’s cities. More importantly, her committment to examining how people actually go about their daily lives provides a model for people who want to think clearly about the issues which we grapple with in the 21st century.
Update: James Bow has an appreciation of Jane Jacobs at his site.
Update 2: The New York Times gives us a four web page appreciation of Jacobs which includes this quote from Robert Fulford:
Her complete dismissal of zoning in cities caused Robert Fulford, a columnist for The Financial Times of Canada, to observe in The New York Times Book Review that single-use zoning was the principal activity of city planners.
“It was as if she had somehow tried to persuade dentists that filling teeth did more harm than good,” he wrote.
the new york times
Update 3: Rational Reasons has an appreciation of Jacobs from a leftish position which is well worth reading. And Michael Stickings writes,
she was truly one of our greatest and most humane advocates for a fuller, richer existence amid the din of modern life.
the reaction
Update 4: And Andrew Spicer links to his own delightful description of an evening with the then 88 year old Jane Jacobs reading from The Dark Age Ahead:
Jacobs slammed New Urbanism, saying that it only produces more urban sprawl, but with porches.
This is as a result of the 3 rules of planners, that she says have come down as unsubstantiated dogma, contrary to the evidence of experience:
1. High ground coverages are bad
2. High densities are bad
3. The mingling of commercial or other work uses with residences is bad
andrew spicer
Mark at Section 15 writes:
Jane’s most influential book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is likely what launched me on my voyage to being a Green.
I first read it while in university back in 1987. Already interested in urban planning and design, the contents of that book knocked my brain out of first gear — heck, it broke my gear box –
section 15
Update 5: The folks in Jane Jacobs Toronto neighbourhood - the deepest Annex - have set up a blog and condolence book which you can find here: http://www.JaneJacobs.TYO.ca
Written by jay on April 26th, 2006 with 4 comments.
Read more articles on Canadian Politics and Education and Urban Design and culture.
Rebecca Eckler drove me nuts when she wrote for the Post and now she is doing it again blogging about baby:
The Dictator has to start school in September and we have yet to look around at any schools. Well, that’s not exactly true. We did pay one school almost $200 so we could fill out an application. We were then invited in to an “open house” where the headmistress told us that if we’re looking for a spot for our three year-old next September, they were already full. Thanks for nothing. Can I have my money back please? Needless to say, I left at the break.
The Dictator’s Toronto Boyfriend (an older man, aged two and a half) is already in a private school for next year. I honestly didn’t think it was that competitve in Canada. Apparently, it is.
the nine pound dictator
What really drives me crazy is that she writes so well while getting so much wrong.
Why would anyone even think of sending a just turning three year old to school, much less the sort of school which demands $200.00 just to apply. My friend Kevin Grace holds the theory that as moderne parents seem capable of having only one, or at most, two children they overinvest in the perfection of the only two they are ever going to have. Yup.
Worse, as Eckler blithers on about the little mite I can see the book deals swirling. “My Baby, My Hobby”, “The Stylish Girl’s Guide to Outsourcing your Offspring”, “You can’t be Yummy if you’re not a Mummy”, “Tell me who my Real Baby Is”, “Mummy wore Prada…”
Which, of course, begs the question why I am reading the blog….I blame the Zerb. I could have lived in blissful ignorance but, no, Antonia had to plug the blog and now I’m hooked. I see hours of my life melting away as I contemplate the ever more awful spectacle of Caanda’s contribution to the superficial enjoying motherhood…Way more fun to watch than a car crash.
Written by jay on March 12th, 2006 with 9 comments.
Read more articles on Education and Homeschooling and Uncategorized.
We have pretty much decided to homeschool our five year old, Sam. Believe it or not there is homeschool kindergarten. There is, however, rather more to homeschooling than just not sending your child to school and teaching him at home.
Teaching him what becomes a critical question. Or, put another way, what should a child know?
Assuming for a moment that we ignore the obvious: yes, it is a good thing for a child to know how to read, write, do sums. How old they are when they acqquire these techniques is a matter of some debate with plenty of very smart people suggesting a child can be taught to read at three while lots of equally smart people suggest that a child needs to be at least six and maybe eight before the knack of reading really takes hold. I am something of an agnostic on the question as Sam seems to be quite happily learning to read without a lot of push at our end.
No, what I am really interested in is what stories, what history, what science a very young child can become usefully acquainted with. Nursery rhymes are a starting point. they give a child a sense of the rhyme and the cadence of his language. (Something which Sam and now Max - at two - has in his bones. hearing Jack and Jill and Humpty Dumpty a couple of hundred times does that to a child.)
Classic, not Disney, Pooh. With black and white illustrations and good book design. Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little if only to expose the very youngest ear to the beauty of White’s prose.
One gazillion other kids books. Though we have become increasingly selective as virtually anything published after 1970 is filled with a sort of dismal preachiness and grim little morals. Worse, virtually all of the post 1970 little kids’ fiction seems to take the view that self esteem is really the only value. And you get to self esteem by sharing. Oh God….
Susan reads to the boys during the day but I tend to read to them for an hour or so before bed. On the bed. My test for kidlit worthiness is whether Sam or I am asleep first. Post 1970 books tend to down Dad - fast. The record belongs to Dennis Lee’s remarkably insipid Alligator Pie. Out in six minutes.
Very small children need, I think, real stories and real information. But they also need to begin the journey into the culture which they will inherit.
What we’ve been doing is reading mythology - classical and biblical (sorry Stock) and Celtic - along with lots and lots of non-fiction. Space, dinosaurs (not a favorite), buildings and how to build them, history cut away books, kitchen science, cooking, natural history (again aiming for pre-1970 so as to avoid the endless enviornmental preachiness).
One of the luxuries of home schooling is that because you are not stuck with crowd control and administration, you can cover the basics fairly quickly. You only have one or two children to teach so if someone is not getting something you can spend as long as you like making sure they grasp the concept before moving on. It also means that you can include a lot of material which would not otherwise be seen in a classroom.
So, dedicated readers, what do you remember reading when you were a kid? What do you read to your own kids?
More generally, by the time a child is nine, what should he know. Concepts, techniques, ideas, stories, knots (and I am not kidding about knots - learning the difference between a reef and a granny knot is tangible, useful skill), recipes - what should a, to use Sam’s description, “freerange kid”, know?
Written by jay on March 1st, 2006 with 9 comments.
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