Asked by a reporter, "What else should be done to protect people like your little girl?" Burchett replied, “Well, we homeschool her.” He shrugged and continued, “Some people don’t have that option, and frankly, some people don’t need to do it.” He turned to another reporter who had asked a question and said, “You good?
And therein lies the problem. The Christo-fascists think that public schools are dens of librul groomers, commie ideology, and OMG woke ideology. So they homeschool their spawn using curriculum provided by some right wing religious organization. And then when their children rebel, they claim they have been possessed by the Devil...and antifa.
All too few of these brain-washed children rebel. Some do, of course, but far too many remain welded to the ideology drummed into them in the christo-fascist homeschool curriculum. Thus their vicious racist, sexist ideology is perpetuated through generations.
And yet, the Planned Parenthood location in Colorado Springs, the hottest of Jesusland hotbeds, is one of the busiest in the country. The homeschooled brown shirt youth still have hormones and still have sex...and because of their ignorance, get pregnant or impregnate. And if they have the dreaded abortion, get kicked out of the family...unless the family covers it up. Or the child has been impregnated by the youth pastor or a family member, then the cover up is inevitable.
I taught H.S. students for 34 years. During that time there were parents who were adamantly opposed to abortion until their 14 yo daughters became pregnant. As usual, they can only support a change in injustice after it happens to them.
This also happens when a son or daughter comes out as gay or lesbian or even bisexual. It took several decades, but IMO that explains the "sudden" popular flip in favor of same-sex marriage. It wasn't all that sudden; it was just going on under the surface -- and it's what's above the surface that generally shows up in polling data. (I came out in 1977 and was very active and visible in lesbian and feminist activities well into the '90s so I saw a fair amount of this happening.)
I remember in the late '70s the partner of a friend of mine, lesbians, shaking her head over her brother imploring her to stay in the closet instead of taking "the easy way out" (his term).
Wow. I guess coming out was "easy" in that you didn't have to keep close track of what lies or half truths you told to whom, but the (big) tradeoff was that you didn't have to worry about getting fired or blackmailed or disowned by your parents (which did happen to a few out lesbians I knew).
As would be their perception of the world being small enough for them to dominate. (Assuming their peer group would be other homeschooled kids their parents have allowed them to associate with.)
I have a niece and nephew who were homeschooled for because their far right wing religious parents didn't want them exposed to the leftist, commie, sexualized, smut of the standard public school. They were only allowed to associate with church members and others in their homeschool community. When one went away to college the cognitive dissonance of the real world nearly did him in, but he managed to adjust after a time.
Study after study as well the raw statistics year after year affirm the correlation between education and health, income, and standard of living, and quality of life, to name a few. Unfortunately, the vast majority of parents who choose to home school their little ones ignore those facts.
A cursory glance at the next layer, what states measure highest on the education, health, income, standard of living, and quality of life scales would give those parents pause. And that doesn't include the socialization metric. Come to think about it, those parents prolly didn't give thought to socializing the family dog(s) iithah.
it's a very large problem. and, from what I've been seeing, it's getting worse all the time. I've been reading that it's become something of a status symbol in parts of the country I happily don't see myself frequenting a whole hell of a lot.
but I know for a certainty that there are pockets of "homeschooling" proliferating even in Midnight Blue NYC. fortunately, here (and it might have changed and if so, not for the better) the Board (or, excuse me, post-Bloomberg, the DEPARTMENT) of Education has a history of keeping the parents of homeschooled kids in some kind of line, at least regarding some kind of minimal levels of knowledge. god knows what it's like in, say, Mississippi, where they're too dumb to take Federal healthcare money when they desperately need it.
if you don't want to get sick in a particular state, the odds are pretty good you're not going to have very warm feelings about the educational standards of that state.
Consider the possibility that white-run states like Mississippi don't take federal health-care money because they believe it will generally go to people of color -- that that's generally fine with the white voters who elected them, even the white voters who would benefit from Medicaid and other federal programs.
It's also worth remembering that some people support homeschooling and, especially, charter schools because the public schools available in their neighborhood are pretty awful. Andrea Campbell, the new attorney general in my state (MA), got trashed in the primary campaign by some affluent liberals who live in suburbs where the public schools are excellent. Campbell, who represented a majority-Black district on the Boston City Council, had supported charters in her inner-city neighborhood, and the affluent liberals were using this as a litmus test.
Given that most of the remaining states who have refused Medicaid expansion are the states of the old Confederacy (Wisconsin and Wyoming being the exceptions), how can we have any doubt. We know that rural white voters in those (and most) states will cut off their noses to spite their faces if at the same time they can own the libs.
As for charters, they have their place when they offer unique educational experiences, but as a replacement for lousy public schools all they do is make that problem worse. Sadly, affluent liberals in the suburbs have little interest in addressing issues with inner city schools no matter what city we look at. I live one mile from the Syracuse city line. Precious few of the people in my suburban district give a thought, let alone a care, for the conditions across the line in many city schools. This is what happens when school funding is based on property taxes district by district. Affluent districts can afford to spend far more per student than city districts, and they do. Perhaps the solution is to change the funding model, or do like Massachusetts, allow parents to put their child in any district as long as they handle transportation. Of course, we'd need a way to subsidize transportation for those families who need help.
In the larger picture, charters may indeed make the problem worse, or at least sidestep it, but if I had to choose between sending my kid to a lousy neighborhood school or a reasonably competent charter, I like to think I'd choose the latter. Even if the charter was run by a for-profit corporation or a church-affiliated group.
Attending a school whose demographics are significantly different (e.g., whiter, more affluent) than one's own neighborhood presents its own challenges, but it's not hard to see why some students and their parents choose to go that route.
The shrug after he gave lip service to the fact that not everyone can homeschool their children was chilling. And telling. They don’t care about anyone else. Period.
My impression is that they view only other fundamentalist "Christians" as belonging to the same tribe as they do, the tribe that in their mythology will all be teleported straight to heaven when the "Rapture" comes, and everyone else are the damned who will be left behind, so they don't have to care about them. It's a "religious" excuse for ruthless selfishness: "I've got mine, I protect mine; (literally) to Hell with the rest of you because you're all heathen sinners and my god doesn't love you."
I think Hobbes at least had good intentions --- proposing that the State would offer some protection, etc.
Almost all of these people don't even have that, as you suggest. They aren't even close to the moral and intellectual integrity of Holly Golightly, who was at least a "real phony," who believed all the stories she had invented!
In what world is Congressman Tim Burchett living besides the world of Republican Public Relations? It all sounds good--keeping them home out of fear of all sorts of conduct besides shooters. A recent New Yorker article, however, says that children face danger at home: "Research has shown that homeschooled children are at higher risk for abuse and neglect, partly because they have less contact with mandated reporters such as teachers and social workers. Nor does this sympathy match what we know about gun violence. Eighty-five per cent of children ages twelve and under who are killed by a gun are shot in their own home. Almost two-thirds of child deaths involving domestic violence are caused by guns. Among children killed accidentally by firearms, the vast majority either shoot themselves or are shot by a peer, sibling, or parent, at their own home or at the home of a friend. Suicide deaths by children and teens, which typically involve a firearm kept in the home, have increased sixty-six per cent in the past decade." Oh, o.k. leave that magazine to the snowflakes, Congressman, now that you've explained that "some people don't need to do it" anyway. School shootings aren't that often...are they?
Odd/idiotic/typically inconsistent attitude of the MAGA/GOP crowd. The solution to school shootings? Everyone just stay home; easy, right? There are no school shootings when there is no school attendance. Wow! Great insight, dude. But when things shut down due to COVID, and people were asked to avoid gatherings, or school was conducted online, it was an assault on personal freedom of the highest magnitude. His attitude is "sucks to be you or your kids" if you don't keep your kids safe at home. And people vote for someone with a flippant attitude like that. Wow, again.
I have always believed in retribution. To be glib on this particular subject, on this particular day, is to court comeuppance. As the old cliché has it, He’ll get his.
You saw my previous comment on schools. Now on home schooling, it is an option but few people in our nation have the expertise, the time, and the resources to home school. And the kids once they reach middle school level have difficulties competing in subjects such as science. Yes, some are successful but for some fool congressperson to tell us to home school instead of using America's public and private schools is utterly ludicrous. And our people elect this fools.
Well, "book larning is ok as fur as it goes, but too much thinkin' leads to trouble," seems to be their notion. To heresy and questioning God's plan, so that can't be right.
It is the state that gave us the Scopes Monkey Trial, and I suspect a current poll of Tennesseans would find they "just don't cotton to the idea they wuz descended from monkeys, it t'aint the way the Bible says it is in the sacred and perfect for all eternity Book of Genesis, right?"
And the Right to Life means...WHAT? We would be shocked, astonished and sickened EXCEPT that as the layers of the Emperors clothing are peeled off we find them ALL to be Trump’s Mini-me. Who knew there would be such a large segment of the population with this crippling disability: complete lack of empathy! It makes me gag as well. There are no words.
From what I see about parents ability to teach their kids anything, forget it. Teaching isn't easy. You have to know stuff, and be able to convey that knowledge to your children in a way that sticks.
I know friends who home-schooled for several years before sending their kids to public school. Good outcomes but they were reasonably affluent. Not everyone lives in a family with well-educated parents and, like you, grandparents who can set the example.
What you describe, Doris, doesn't represent the capabilities - educationally or financially - of a vast number of Americans. Only those families with a family member - usually the wife & mother - who can afford to remain at home to teach the children can home-school. Even in that case, not everyone is capable of teaching, in the home or in a school. Your daughter's and your own experiences don't represent the reality for everyone.
What are families to do that have two working parents with two or more jobs to survive? What about single parents who must work in order to survive and raise their children and don't have a family support system to help with the children while they work. Who, in addition, may wish to seek an education in order to improve their work prospects? You know how costly childcare has become, even if it's available which in far too many places it is not.
And what about states which, unlike California, don't have strong home-schooling criteria and support systems? In sum, only those parents who can afford for one parent to remain at home to home-school can undertake the job of home-schooling. A preponderance of Americans cannot afford to do that.
So, I'm happy that your daughter successfully raised and educated children who are doing well in life but they represent only a small percentage of the American population.
You should be proud of her, her husband and their children. However, your family story is not representative of a huge proportion of the U.S. families with school-age children.
I grew up in a family where neither of my parents went to college; and I am the only one of three children who completed college. And I went to high school and college in Silicon Valley, California.
My wife and I, with two undergraduate degrees, and three professional degrees between us, send our two daughters to the best private colleges we could afford. The fact of the matter is that there are diseconomies of scale in getting one's self educated on the job. Even jobs requiring professional degrees, and state certification of competencies will not pay for post-degree continuing education. Continuing education is supposed to be part of an employee's career path, but I have rarely seen it happen. This is true even for people employed by universities. Once you get below the faculty and graduate student level, staff people are likely to get no post-employment educational benefits. People in government service often have the same dilemma. You need a professional degree to get a job, but anything beyond that, to stay competent, you get to pay for it yourself.
Homeschoolers are likely to be doubly disadvantaged. There are likely to be unfamiliar with institutional barriers to getting better educations. Not the least of which is cost. Worst of all, there are no incentives in most jobs to putting after-hours time into preparing for classes in university extension courses. From my own personal experience, I know that time is short, and a great deal of material is crammed into those extension courses. It takes extraordinary effort to make a go of it.
Retirees might have a little bit better, if they are not working part-time jobs. Nonetheless, it takes a great deal of mental effort when one is in their 70s to stay focused and learn what is in a course curriculum. And life has a way of interfering with even the best laid plans. A sick relative who requires constant care, or someone whose needs are a drain on time and energy, and school coursework takes the inevitable backseat. At best, unless the learner is willing to devote long hours to material that might not seem immediately germane to the coursework that got them into self-study programs, the learning is liable to be haphazard and is full of holes as a piece of Swiss cheese. It also requires a budget capable of supporting whatever self-teaching endeavor that an individual might choose to follow. I am a retired lawyer, and used to self-study, lots of it. I have both the basic Juris Doctor (JD) and Master of Laws degrees. In my retirement, I pursued knowledge in Complexity Science which required me to develop competencies and Statistics and Probability, and several other academic areas of inquiry that included systems analysis, network theory, and various other subsets of mathematical learning. My rule of thumb was what I called the Rule of Five, which basically meant acquiring no fewer than five authoritative books on the subject, and a close reading of all of them. The effect was that if I took the subject matter of each of those books, and multiplied them together (1 × 2 × 3 × 4 × 5) the net result was that I had 120 different ways of looking at the material I had been studying. In terms of the material studied, of those five texts that I was using, there was undoubtedly about 60 percent of subject matter overlap, but each of these presentations occurred in different ways, different ways of explaining things, different examples used, so that considering everything is a whole, I was getting a well-rounded picture of what the subject matter was all about. The remaining 40 percent was material we might call sidebar, but it opened the doors to other areas of knowledge that might be worth pursuing. I also took the outlining the material I was reading in those five books, translating into my own words and thoughts, what I took to be the main message I was reading. That process of reading, comprehending, writing down the information involved on a legal pad, or cue cards reinforce the learning. I seriously doubt that many undergraduates go through the rigor of that method. It also included copying down charts and graphs, assimilating what I was learning. I seriously doubt that any homeschool student goes through that level of rigor and learning new material. Much of the educational material that 'homeschool' service companies provide, is simply filling in the blanks. True homeschooling, in terms of self-education, requires quietude and discipline, with all distractions put away. How many homeschoolers can claim that they do that? When I married, I discovered that my wife had grown up in a household with a television set was the universal babysitter and home companion, and the TV set was always on. When children came along, that had to change, because of their inherent distractibility. Our older daughter had reading difficulties, which meant that she had to spend additional effort simply to be able to decipher what was on the page in front of her. She eventually succeeded, but my wife spent countless hours with her, coaching her in reading. How many parents with middling educations are willing to do that? My answer would be, very few; and new generations of cell phones and tablet computers have made the problem far worse. For today's homeschoolers, falling behind is easy to do, because testing and certification are episodic, and the standards tend to be minimal in deference to the power of conservative voters to raise the roof if their children are seen as failures to thrive in an educational environment. We are basically down to the level of educational attainment that Mark Twain's fictional Tom Sawyer would have gotten in the pre-Civil War South. It is ironic that conservative parents intent on protecting their children's 'delicate' psyches against the technological and social world we now live in, are condemning those selfsame children to a life of intellectual and educational poverty. A life at the bottom rungs of society's latter. Nobody will convince them of that, but that is the truth of the matter. It used to be that American society was upwardly mobile; but that is no longer true. In fact, some politicians are making a fetish of reducing the educational requirements of entry-level employees to remove the requirement that they have a four-year college degree behind them in order to apply for a job. That makes sense for entry-level positions, or jobs in the building trades or service industries where people can be readily trained on the rudiments of getting particular jobs done, but it is no path to advancement. As I mentioned above, if someone wants to get ahead and take evening and weekend courses to get some kind of a certificate or college degree, they do it on their own dime, and on their own time. This is creating class distinctions with educational handcuffs on, and it is just the kinds of things that our grandparents rebelled against from the 1920s through the 1960s. And now, because of student debt, and conservatives' refusal to countenance new taxing, the tide on educational attainment is going out, leaving a lot of people high and dry.
Persistence matters. You're to be commended. College opens doors to stuff we never thought about before. Part of my own self-study in complexity science took me on a path through evolutionary biology at the cellular level to study the phenomenon of emergence through mutation and genome expression of emergent characteristics, based on randomly occurring mutations that prove beneficial to survival rates among species.
I feel sorry for the little girl that she has a father like that. He might be a good father to her but should care equally for other little boys and girls whose schools are armed fortresses and the children have to be trained how to hide from adults who might try to kill them with machine guns like their fathers and grandfathers used in the war. When he himself eventually dies three little dead 9 year olds and all the dead children before them that had their little bodies shredded beyond recognition by high speed bullets that exploded inside them on impact. might be waiting to greet him and all his other Republican friends with blocks of ice where their heart should be. They will say Why? "Why? Why? Did you not love us as you love your own?"
I appreciate your comment, Ricard, I try not to talk about that subject unless I see that someone is curious about it as it's very difficult for a lot of people to accept and understandably so. Perhaps if it were not for my near death experience I might feel the same way but after that any doubt was completely t removed. I have also had very vivid recollections of past life incidents, mostly my deaths. I was never anyone famous. but different ethnic groups. So as a result I have a compassion for people who are discriminated against or hated because of their ethnicity or t religion. I believe we have all been everything as part of our learning and spiritual evolution so by hating another person just because of who they are we are really hating ourselves. It does no one any good. I wish these super right wing anti-Semites and anti black could have experienced these things and see how it holds them back from their own growth. They are stuck in a hell of their own making and will take that hellish state of mind with them when they die. (sorry for the long answer ) I'd say all the people here didn't need those experiences to become good people. They already are or they wouldn't be following people like Lucian. It doesn't matter if they believe in an afterlife or not or are religious or not . But I guarantee they are in for a very pleasant surprise
And therein lies the problem. The Christo-fascists think that public schools are dens of librul groomers, commie ideology, and OMG woke ideology. So they homeschool their spawn using curriculum provided by some right wing religious organization. And then when their children rebel, they claim they have been possessed by the Devil...and antifa.
All too few of these brain-washed children rebel. Some do, of course, but far too many remain welded to the ideology drummed into them in the christo-fascist homeschool curriculum. Thus their vicious racist, sexist ideology is perpetuated through generations.
And yet, the Planned Parenthood location in Colorado Springs, the hottest of Jesusland hotbeds, is one of the busiest in the country. The homeschooled brown shirt youth still have hormones and still have sex...and because of their ignorance, get pregnant or impregnate. And if they have the dreaded abortion, get kicked out of the family...unless the family covers it up. Or the child has been impregnated by the youth pastor or a family member, then the cover up is inevitable.
I taught H.S. students for 34 years. During that time there were parents who were adamantly opposed to abortion until their 14 yo daughters became pregnant. As usual, they can only support a change in injustice after it happens to them.
This also happens when a son or daughter comes out as gay or lesbian or even bisexual. It took several decades, but IMO that explains the "sudden" popular flip in favor of same-sex marriage. It wasn't all that sudden; it was just going on under the surface -- and it's what's above the surface that generally shows up in polling data. (I came out in 1977 and was very active and visible in lesbian and feminist activities well into the '90s so I saw a fair amount of this happening.)
I remember in the late '70s the partner of a friend of mine, lesbians, shaking her head over her brother imploring her to stay in the closet instead of taking "the easy way out" (his term).
That may be the the saddest thing I've read, in a long long time.
Wow. I guess coming out was "easy" in that you didn't have to keep close track of what lies or half truths you told to whom, but the (big) tradeoff was that you didn't have to worry about getting fired or blackmailed or disowned by your parents (which did happen to a few out lesbians I knew).
aka selective morality
"amen"
A half a step away from "so what" or "more please"
Agree. Attempts at fiction still fall far shaht of the reality these little ones face. Is heart breaking.
As would be their perception of the world being small enough for them to dominate. (Assuming their peer group would be other homeschooled kids their parents have allowed them to associate with.)
I have a niece and nephew who were homeschooled for because their far right wing religious parents didn't want them exposed to the leftist, commie, sexualized, smut of the standard public school. They were only allowed to associate with church members and others in their homeschool community. When one went away to college the cognitive dissonance of the real world nearly did him in, but he managed to adjust after a time.
Agree.
Study after study as well the raw statistics year after year affirm the correlation between education and health, income, and standard of living, and quality of life, to name a few. Unfortunately, the vast majority of parents who choose to home school their little ones ignore those facts.
A cursory glance at the next layer, what states measure highest on the education, health, income, standard of living, and quality of life scales would give those parents pause. And that doesn't include the socialization metric. Come to think about it, those parents prolly didn't give thought to socializing the family dog(s) iithah.
it's a very large problem. and, from what I've been seeing, it's getting worse all the time. I've been reading that it's become something of a status symbol in parts of the country I happily don't see myself frequenting a whole hell of a lot.
but I know for a certainty that there are pockets of "homeschooling" proliferating even in Midnight Blue NYC. fortunately, here (and it might have changed and if so, not for the better) the Board (or, excuse me, post-Bloomberg, the DEPARTMENT) of Education has a history of keeping the parents of homeschooled kids in some kind of line, at least regarding some kind of minimal levels of knowledge. god knows what it's like in, say, Mississippi, where they're too dumb to take Federal healthcare money when they desperately need it.
if you don't want to get sick in a particular state, the odds are pretty good you're not going to have very warm feelings about the educational standards of that state.
Homeschooling is the least of the problems the NYC Dept. of Education has.
Consider the possibility that white-run states like Mississippi don't take federal health-care money because they believe it will generally go to people of color -- that that's generally fine with the white voters who elected them, even the white voters who would benefit from Medicaid and other federal programs.
It's also worth remembering that some people support homeschooling and, especially, charter schools because the public schools available in their neighborhood are pretty awful. Andrea Campbell, the new attorney general in my state (MA), got trashed in the primary campaign by some affluent liberals who live in suburbs where the public schools are excellent. Campbell, who represented a majority-Black district on the Boston City Council, had supported charters in her inner-city neighborhood, and the affluent liberals were using this as a litmus test.
Given that most of the remaining states who have refused Medicaid expansion are the states of the old Confederacy (Wisconsin and Wyoming being the exceptions), how can we have any doubt. We know that rural white voters in those (and most) states will cut off their noses to spite their faces if at the same time they can own the libs.
As for charters, they have their place when they offer unique educational experiences, but as a replacement for lousy public schools all they do is make that problem worse. Sadly, affluent liberals in the suburbs have little interest in addressing issues with inner city schools no matter what city we look at. I live one mile from the Syracuse city line. Precious few of the people in my suburban district give a thought, let alone a care, for the conditions across the line in many city schools. This is what happens when school funding is based on property taxes district by district. Affluent districts can afford to spend far more per student than city districts, and they do. Perhaps the solution is to change the funding model, or do like Massachusetts, allow parents to put their child in any district as long as they handle transportation. Of course, we'd need a way to subsidize transportation for those families who need help.
In the larger picture, charters may indeed make the problem worse, or at least sidestep it, but if I had to choose between sending my kid to a lousy neighborhood school or a reasonably competent charter, I like to think I'd choose the latter. Even if the charter was run by a for-profit corporation or a church-affiliated group.
Attending a school whose demographics are significantly different (e.g., whiter, more affluent) than one's own neighborhood presents its own challenges, but it's not hard to see why some students and their parents choose to go that route.
mockery works
Asshole. Sorry but there's no other word to describe this incredibly stupid, uncaring man.
Asshole is far too kind a word for Burchett.
R.B.R. rat bastard Republicans.
Hmm, I suggest there exists a vast treasure hoard of invective that applies, but "asshole" works!
Ankle?
Three foot lower than an asshole.
That was exactly the first word that came to my mind when I saw the clip of that POS.
The shrug after he gave lip service to the fact that not everyone can homeschool their children was chilling. And telling. They don’t care about anyone else. Period.
Body language. "One thing you can't hide/ Is when you're crippled inside," as John Lennon put it.
My impression is that they view only other fundamentalist "Christians" as belonging to the same tribe as they do, the tribe that in their mythology will all be teleported straight to heaven when the "Rapture" comes, and everyone else are the damned who will be left behind, so they don't have to care about them. It's a "religious" excuse for ruthless selfishness: "I've got mine, I protect mine; (literally) to Hell with the rest of you because you're all heathen sinners and my god doesn't love you."
If only the rapture would come soon...
Hahahahaaaa! And take them all away! }-D
I don't want to be loved by their god
Nor do I.
Ms. Sallings, you 100% nailed it.
The stunning absence of humanity further reinforces my view of the GOP as sociopaths. Thomas Hobbes world
I think Hobbes at least had good intentions --- proposing that the State would offer some protection, etc.
Almost all of these people don't even have that, as you suggest. They aren't even close to the moral and intellectual integrity of Holly Golightly, who was at least a "real phony," who believed all the stories she had invented!
It appears Hobbes was an optimist.....
Psychopaths-- they are far beyond being mere sociopaths!
In what world is Congressman Tim Burchett living besides the world of Republican Public Relations? It all sounds good--keeping them home out of fear of all sorts of conduct besides shooters. A recent New Yorker article, however, says that children face danger at home: "Research has shown that homeschooled children are at higher risk for abuse and neglect, partly because they have less contact with mandated reporters such as teachers and social workers. Nor does this sympathy match what we know about gun violence. Eighty-five per cent of children ages twelve and under who are killed by a gun are shot in their own home. Almost two-thirds of child deaths involving domestic violence are caused by guns. Among children killed accidentally by firearms, the vast majority either shoot themselves or are shot by a peer, sibling, or parent, at their own home or at the home of a friend. Suicide deaths by children and teens, which typically involve a firearm kept in the home, have increased sixty-six per cent in the past decade." Oh, o.k. leave that magazine to the snowflakes, Congressman, now that you've explained that "some people don't need to do it" anyway. School shootings aren't that often...are they?
It's like having fiendish monster for a parent. Some day I bet some those kids of his will confront it.
Why do you think the Nashville shooting happened at all?
It wasn't because the shooter loved his school or parents.
I can guarantee both were responsible for more than a little of it.
Mental illness can be brought on by home and school, and sometimes is.
Because for a 'christian' that shooter sure had a lot of guns.
Whatever happened to "love thy neighbor"?
Has it changed to
"Blow away thy neighbor"? Probably.
Good grief. Reminds me of the people who built fallout shelters in their back yards and bought rifles to shoot their neighbors.
I had forgotten about that phenomenon, sheesh, how low can people go?
We used to think there was a bottom to the barrel - the Republicans are teaching us that there isn't one, as far as they are concerned.....
Odd/idiotic/typically inconsistent attitude of the MAGA/GOP crowd. The solution to school shootings? Everyone just stay home; easy, right? There are no school shootings when there is no school attendance. Wow! Great insight, dude. But when things shut down due to COVID, and people were asked to avoid gatherings, or school was conducted online, it was an assault on personal freedom of the highest magnitude. His attitude is "sucks to be you or your kids" if you don't keep your kids safe at home. And people vote for someone with a flippant attitude like that. Wow, again.
Since they have zero intellectual integrity, ad hoc spinning of the terms of the debate are no problem at all.
What will go down in history, or at least our viral world, as The Shrug, or better, The Shrug of Shame.
(Shrug) "Not my job, not my kids."
"Not my job, not my problem"
I have always believed in retribution. To be glib on this particular subject, on this particular day, is to court comeuppance. As the old cliché has it, He’ll get his.
Or “What goes around, comes around.”.
Or: "Wait until karma catches up with him. He'll get a lesson he won't forget."
They need to have their DNA checked to make sure it's actually human.
You saw my previous comment on schools. Now on home schooling, it is an option but few people in our nation have the expertise, the time, and the resources to home school. And the kids once they reach middle school level have difficulties competing in subjects such as science. Yes, some are successful but for some fool congressperson to tell us to home school instead of using America's public and private schools is utterly ludicrous. And our people elect this fools.
Well, "book larning is ok as fur as it goes, but too much thinkin' leads to trouble," seems to be their notion. To heresy and questioning God's plan, so that can't be right.
It is the state that gave us the Scopes Monkey Trial, and I suspect a current poll of Tennesseans would find they "just don't cotton to the idea they wuz descended from monkeys, it t'aint the way the Bible says it is in the sacred and perfect for all eternity Book of Genesis, right?"
I actually heard someone say that: "Don't read too many books, it'll make your crazy!"
Not from a republican, but definitely not a rocket scientist.
Madison Cawthorn was homeschooled—‘nuff said
Subsequently, that idiot managed to do the impossible:
He flunked out of the right-wing religious nuthouse Patrick Henry "University". Where does one go from there? Congress, of course.
EGADS!!
And the Right to Life means...WHAT? We would be shocked, astonished and sickened EXCEPT that as the layers of the Emperors clothing are peeled off we find them ALL to be Trump’s Mini-me. Who knew there would be such a large segment of the population with this crippling disability: complete lack of empathy! It makes me gag as well. There are no words.
That's exactly what they want. Home schooling with an emphasis on the home arts probably, Then they can marry them off asap.
A Handmaid's Tale as a blueprint for society, damn.
WTF
Homeschooling, huh.
From what I see about parents ability to teach their kids anything, forget it. Teaching isn't easy. You have to know stuff, and be able to convey that knowledge to your children in a way that sticks.
I know friends who home-schooled for several years before sending their kids to public school. Good outcomes but they were reasonably affluent. Not everyone lives in a family with well-educated parents and, like you, grandparents who can set the example.
What you describe, Doris, doesn't represent the capabilities - educationally or financially - of a vast number of Americans. Only those families with a family member - usually the wife & mother - who can afford to remain at home to teach the children can home-school. Even in that case, not everyone is capable of teaching, in the home or in a school. Your daughter's and your own experiences don't represent the reality for everyone.
What are families to do that have two working parents with two or more jobs to survive? What about single parents who must work in order to survive and raise their children and don't have a family support system to help with the children while they work. Who, in addition, may wish to seek an education in order to improve their work prospects? You know how costly childcare has become, even if it's available which in far too many places it is not.
And what about states which, unlike California, don't have strong home-schooling criteria and support systems? In sum, only those parents who can afford for one parent to remain at home to home-school can undertake the job of home-schooling. A preponderance of Americans cannot afford to do that.
So, I'm happy that your daughter successfully raised and educated children who are doing well in life but they represent only a small percentage of the American population.
You should be proud of her, her husband and their children. However, your family story is not representative of a huge proportion of the U.S. families with school-age children.
I grew up in a family where neither of my parents went to college; and I am the only one of three children who completed college. And I went to high school and college in Silicon Valley, California.
My wife and I, with two undergraduate degrees, and three professional degrees between us, send our two daughters to the best private colleges we could afford. The fact of the matter is that there are diseconomies of scale in getting one's self educated on the job. Even jobs requiring professional degrees, and state certification of competencies will not pay for post-degree continuing education. Continuing education is supposed to be part of an employee's career path, but I have rarely seen it happen. This is true even for people employed by universities. Once you get below the faculty and graduate student level, staff people are likely to get no post-employment educational benefits. People in government service often have the same dilemma. You need a professional degree to get a job, but anything beyond that, to stay competent, you get to pay for it yourself.
Homeschoolers are likely to be doubly disadvantaged. There are likely to be unfamiliar with institutional barriers to getting better educations. Not the least of which is cost. Worst of all, there are no incentives in most jobs to putting after-hours time into preparing for classes in university extension courses. From my own personal experience, I know that time is short, and a great deal of material is crammed into those extension courses. It takes extraordinary effort to make a go of it.
Retirees might have a little bit better, if they are not working part-time jobs. Nonetheless, it takes a great deal of mental effort when one is in their 70s to stay focused and learn what is in a course curriculum. And life has a way of interfering with even the best laid plans. A sick relative who requires constant care, or someone whose needs are a drain on time and energy, and school coursework takes the inevitable backseat. At best, unless the learner is willing to devote long hours to material that might not seem immediately germane to the coursework that got them into self-study programs, the learning is liable to be haphazard and is full of holes as a piece of Swiss cheese. It also requires a budget capable of supporting whatever self-teaching endeavor that an individual might choose to follow. I am a retired lawyer, and used to self-study, lots of it. I have both the basic Juris Doctor (JD) and Master of Laws degrees. In my retirement, I pursued knowledge in Complexity Science which required me to develop competencies and Statistics and Probability, and several other academic areas of inquiry that included systems analysis, network theory, and various other subsets of mathematical learning. My rule of thumb was what I called the Rule of Five, which basically meant acquiring no fewer than five authoritative books on the subject, and a close reading of all of them. The effect was that if I took the subject matter of each of those books, and multiplied them together (1 × 2 × 3 × 4 × 5) the net result was that I had 120 different ways of looking at the material I had been studying. In terms of the material studied, of those five texts that I was using, there was undoubtedly about 60 percent of subject matter overlap, but each of these presentations occurred in different ways, different ways of explaining things, different examples used, so that considering everything is a whole, I was getting a well-rounded picture of what the subject matter was all about. The remaining 40 percent was material we might call sidebar, but it opened the doors to other areas of knowledge that might be worth pursuing. I also took the outlining the material I was reading in those five books, translating into my own words and thoughts, what I took to be the main message I was reading. That process of reading, comprehending, writing down the information involved on a legal pad, or cue cards reinforce the learning. I seriously doubt that many undergraduates go through the rigor of that method. It also included copying down charts and graphs, assimilating what I was learning. I seriously doubt that any homeschool student goes through that level of rigor and learning new material. Much of the educational material that 'homeschool' service companies provide, is simply filling in the blanks. True homeschooling, in terms of self-education, requires quietude and discipline, with all distractions put away. How many homeschoolers can claim that they do that? When I married, I discovered that my wife had grown up in a household with a television set was the universal babysitter and home companion, and the TV set was always on. When children came along, that had to change, because of their inherent distractibility. Our older daughter had reading difficulties, which meant that she had to spend additional effort simply to be able to decipher what was on the page in front of her. She eventually succeeded, but my wife spent countless hours with her, coaching her in reading. How many parents with middling educations are willing to do that? My answer would be, very few; and new generations of cell phones and tablet computers have made the problem far worse. For today's homeschoolers, falling behind is easy to do, because testing and certification are episodic, and the standards tend to be minimal in deference to the power of conservative voters to raise the roof if their children are seen as failures to thrive in an educational environment. We are basically down to the level of educational attainment that Mark Twain's fictional Tom Sawyer would have gotten in the pre-Civil War South. It is ironic that conservative parents intent on protecting their children's 'delicate' psyches against the technological and social world we now live in, are condemning those selfsame children to a life of intellectual and educational poverty. A life at the bottom rungs of society's latter. Nobody will convince them of that, but that is the truth of the matter. It used to be that American society was upwardly mobile; but that is no longer true. In fact, some politicians are making a fetish of reducing the educational requirements of entry-level employees to remove the requirement that they have a four-year college degree behind them in order to apply for a job. That makes sense for entry-level positions, or jobs in the building trades or service industries where people can be readily trained on the rudiments of getting particular jobs done, but it is no path to advancement. As I mentioned above, if someone wants to get ahead and take evening and weekend courses to get some kind of a certificate or college degree, they do it on their own dime, and on their own time. This is creating class distinctions with educational handcuffs on, and it is just the kinds of things that our grandparents rebelled against from the 1920s through the 1960s. And now, because of student debt, and conservatives' refusal to countenance new taxing, the tide on educational attainment is going out, leaving a lot of people high and dry.
Persistence matters. You're to be commended. College opens doors to stuff we never thought about before. Part of my own self-study in complexity science took me on a path through evolutionary biology at the cellular level to study the phenomenon of emergence through mutation and genome expression of emergent characteristics, based on randomly occurring mutations that prove beneficial to survival rates among species.
I feel sorry for the little girl that she has a father like that. He might be a good father to her but should care equally for other little boys and girls whose schools are armed fortresses and the children have to be trained how to hide from adults who might try to kill them with machine guns like their fathers and grandfathers used in the war. When he himself eventually dies three little dead 9 year olds and all the dead children before them that had their little bodies shredded beyond recognition by high speed bullets that exploded inside them on impact. might be waiting to greet him and all his other Republican friends with blocks of ice where their heart should be. They will say Why? "Why? Why? Did you not love us as you love your own?"
Yes, I contend it is a mammoth act of effrontery to simply rule out an afterlife, reincarnation, etc.
It's no more remarkable to be born twice, than to be born once!
I appreciate your comment, Ricard, I try not to talk about that subject unless I see that someone is curious about it as it's very difficult for a lot of people to accept and understandably so. Perhaps if it were not for my near death experience I might feel the same way but after that any doubt was completely t removed. I have also had very vivid recollections of past life incidents, mostly my deaths. I was never anyone famous. but different ethnic groups. So as a result I have a compassion for people who are discriminated against or hated because of their ethnicity or t religion. I believe we have all been everything as part of our learning and spiritual evolution so by hating another person just because of who they are we are really hating ourselves. It does no one any good. I wish these super right wing anti-Semites and anti black could have experienced these things and see how it holds them back from their own growth. They are stuck in a hell of their own making and will take that hellish state of mind with them when they die. (sorry for the long answer ) I'd say all the people here didn't need those experiences to become good people. They already are or they wouldn't be following people like Lucian. It doesn't matter if they believe in an afterlife or not or are religious or not . But I guarantee they are in for a very pleasant surprise