Homeschooling
You are currently browsing the articles from Jay Currie matching the category Homeschooling.
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.
Read more articles on Education and Homeschooling and culture.
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.
Dr. Dawg is making fun of the IDers. Intellectually this is rather like little boys pulling the wings off flies: cruel, but inconsequential. Only the fundamentalist “no chancers” want to try and run the ID argument and when they do the billions of years and trillions of chemical interactions per year get in their way. However, the Dawg says something which I think suggests that, despite his trade union background and grad student foreground, he might finally be getting a picture of the sheer messiness of the real world.
“The social is simply too complex to attribute it entirely or even significantly to evolution.” Well Dawg I am delighted that you are willing to throw the fundamental premise of Marxism, namely that economics can be understood and even made to obey laws, into the ashcan of history. (Where it belongs.)
Once you have acknowledged that “the social” is too complex to be attributed to evolution you have begun a happy accent to a purely humanist understanding of the world. Science, per se, can only explain so much. (And I entirely agree with you on the looniness of the IDers and anyone else who thinks their particular Sky-God sat down and “created” in any but the most abstract, “lit the fuse for the Big Bang” sense.}
What is fun about your stand against socio-biology is that in taking that position you render absurd the claims of assorted socialists and utopians - not to mention St. Algore - who claim to have the economic, social and scientific answers to the world’s issues. The social, the economic and even the scientific are, indeed, complex. So complex that it would take the same sort of reductionism as the socio-biologists employed to come up with even an approximation of the true state of affairs.
We watched that reductionism play out in the failed states of Russia, fully Communist China, Cuba, the unlamented Warsaw Pact and, currently the delights of Zimbabwe. Poor buggers didn’t have a clue and, on your argument, couldn’t.
Part of the attraction of the libertarian right for me is its humility in the face of what we do not, and likely cannot, know. It is grand to see your gradual progression towards a deeper understanding of our ignorance.
Animals are complicated, humans are complex, populations are entirely unknowable. The fun of social science is to suspend one’s disbelief long enough to take a really close look at a particular belief or behaviour or trend. The danger of social science and economics - which is a social science dressed up in calculus - is that the practitioner is apt to think that he or she “understands” and therefore can “predict” the observed behaviour. This can go very well for quite sometime until, eventually, it doesn’t.
So long as it is an academic parlor game it is both interesting and valuable; but when it begins to encroach upon actual policy decisions it is a dangerous, anti-human, conceit. Which, happily, the Dawg has finally realized.
Written by jay on July 7th, 2008 with 9 comments.
Read more articles on Homeschooling and culture and free speech and idiot lefties.
On the eve of his retirement announcement over beer Monday night, Gen. Hillier nicely framed his military legacy in a single sentence: “We’re one of the big boys now.”
With air, ground and naval equipment upgrades on order or delivered to bolster an extended Afghanistan mission fortified with 1,000 fresh American troops, Gen. Hillier has put the force back into the military. national post
Hillier was and is a strategist. He leaves without the war in Afghanistan won but with the means in hand to win it.
He walked close to the line which divides the military from its civilian masters but he was surefooted enough to win those battles.
He took the Stanley Cup to the ‘Stan and the fight to the Taliban.
I hope his audacity, vision and intelligence are not lost to Canadians. We have a lot of work to do; Hillier is a man who has demonstrated he is a dog for work and a leader without rival in the Canadian government. He is certainly entitled to the potential corporate rewards his service has earned; but if Harper has the brains God gave a goat he will find General Hillier a place where he can continue to serve Canada.
Written by jay on April 16th, 2008 with 4 comments.
Read more articles on CPC and Canadian Bullet and Homeschooling.
Yitzhak Danon, a student, told Israel’s Channel 2 television that an Arab man wearing torn jeans fired for several minutes at students in the library, using an AK-47 assault rifle. globe and mail
I suspect the murderous bastard was following your boy Dr. Mohamed Elmasry of the Canadian Islamic Congress’s logic about any Israeli citizen over the age of 18 being legit targets. Though there is no word of the terrorist IDing his victims.
So, Warren, let’s get to cases. There are anti-Semites in Canada and they are very real and very dangerous. They operate openly on college campuses “Israel Apartheid Week”, from mosques and on the net. Many, but not all, are Islamists. And here is the deal, Warren, they expressly want to destroy the State of Israel and its supporters. And you don’t have to dig very deep to discover that Israel and some, but by no means all, of its supporters are Jews.
So rather than wasting your time slagging people for supporting free speech why don’t you start digging where the real anti-Semites are burrowed. Start with Dr. Mohamed Elmasry and the CIC (and its now irrelevant CHRC law student sock puppets.) Get in and dig Warren.
Written by jay on March 7th, 2008 with 22 comments.
Read more articles on Canadian Politics and Homeschooling and International and Islam and Liberals and Palestine and idiot lefties.
“human rights activist Vicky McPhee said an Africentric school “is a right,” and the only type of school to which she wants to send her 6-year-old child. She called for these schools in each of the city’s 22 wards.” toronto star
In other words, Ms. McPhee wants segregated schools for all of Toronto; and it is likely that activists in other Ontario and Canadian cities will demand the same. Last night’s decision in Toronto is a very flawed one that seems to have been granted to emotional pleas rather than good sense.
The price of this folly will be paid by the unfortunate students of this school when they realize that even if they graduate that their futures may still be dimmed by the fact they attended a segregated school - employers may well wonder how well the graduates are prepared to adapt to an integrated workplace. It is not an irrelevant question when the parents pushing for this school make claims that the students often fail due to the ‘European-centred’ system currently available.
This is civil rights backwards, you can imagine the outcry from the black community if white administrators had proposed this idea to ‘combat’ the high drop out rate amongst black students. Equally, the fact that this was demanded by black parents for black kids does NOT make it right. daily bayonet
I realize that the Jane/Finch people are desperate and that, in our society, a place to turn in desperation is the reshaping of education; but, seriously, how much influence would this sort of school have on the kids at risk as opposed to their gang affiliations?
The cultural pathologies which teenagers - black, white and every colour in between - are being bombarded with in music, movies, online and in games rather quickly overwhelm the not terribly interesting business of going to school. And that will only get worse if school loses its educational function to some sort of ill conceived social/cultural function. With the best will in the world it is difficult to see how an Afrocentric school is not going to become a sort of sheltered workshop for underachieving kids who will be taught a lot of self esteem re-enforcing half truths and have next to no discipline imposed. “Graduation” from such an institution will be seen as, and likely will be, meaningless. Kids going on to college or university will be admitted on racial preference grounds and very little will be expected of them.
This proposal is pretty much the epitome of the soft racism of low expectation.
Now, if the Toronto School Board was actually serious it would take a look at setting up a school which took these children out of their neighbourhood for good long stretches starting as early as possible. A month up in Algonquin Park, a week back in town, a month or two in real French Immersion in a little town in rural Quebec - treks, homestays, a seperate campus in Toronto. Anything to get these poor children out of the truely awful gang riven, largely fatherless “culture” they have been unlucky enough to have been born into.
Of course that would a) cost money, b) impose the hard reality of high expectations. Not going to happen.
Written by jay on January 30th, 2008 with 7 comments.
Read more articles on Canadian Politics and Homeschooling.
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.
Read more articles on Education and Homeschooling and culture.
As we think it would be a good thing for Sam, our six year old whom we home school, to learn a second language we have a delightful French student coming in to tutor/chat for an hour or two each week to get Sam’s feet wet.
They were just in my office as he had stumped her by asking for the French for “skid steer loader”. On the way out they called the dog. Sam asked, “How do you call Daisy in French”. I missed the answer but then Sam piped up, “So, do you think it would be possible to have a bilingual dog?”
Only in Canada.
Written by jay on September 20th, 2007 with 2 comments.
Read more articles on Canadian Politics and Homeschooling.
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.
Read more articles on Education and Homeschooling and culture.
« Older articles
No newer articles