O'DonnellWeb Monthly Archives

September 23, 2004

It starts, "Ok, look, I'm all for homeschooling"

...and very quickly goes downhill after that. Of course, anytime somebody starts their argument by assuring you that they are on your side, you can be pretty sure they are not.

But let's face it, a lot of people who homeschool are religious nuts who have bought into the hype that all public schools are attempting to liberally indoctrinate their kids. My kids have always gone to public school, and more often than not their teachers have been good Christian women. Many of my good friends are teachers in public schools and they tell me that there is no real 'lliberal threat' to my kids.

Let me see if I understand this. Religious homeschooler = nut, but religious teacher = good Christian women. Uh, yeah. Maybe he should ask those teacher friends about the tens of millions of dollars that the NEA is throwing into the democratic election efforts. They are not doing that as some sort of reverse psychology strategy to indoctrinate the kiddies with conservative ideals.

Now, my daughter just learned all about the dangers of second hand smoke in her 6th grade Health class. True, that is a bunch of junk science and so Halle and I had a long talk, (and watched Penn and Teller's Bullshit episode debunking the whole myth), and she now understands that while second hand smoke is truly annoying there is no scientific evidence that it does any harm to anyone. She also learned an important lesson that not everything she is taught in school is definitely true. Halle and I are closer for it. I think she will come to me and discuss other things she learned at school. Amazing how the parent has the power to shape the child's education, despite what the school does.

So, it's OK if your child spends all day in an oppressive environment being taught junk science? And what happens when said child is tested on this material? Either she follows the party line and gets an A, or speaks the truth and fails. Now there is valuable lesson for a 6th grader, the danger of independent thought.

Was the curriculum for second hand smoke education part of a vast Liberal conspiracy? Yes, it was. But it was once removed. What I mean is, the school board did not get together and decide that they want to give my daughter false information about the hazards of second hand smoke. They did, however, neglect to check into the validity of the 'research' cited by the Liberal anti-smoking activists who insisted they teach this stuff.

One removed liberal bias? This is exactly why the public schools have deteriated to their current state. When confronted with the facts, the American taxpayer has an amazing ability to engineer a Somebody Else's Problem field to explain away the problems in the local school district. Schoolie parents always insist that their school system is great, it's everybody else's schools that suck.

Ok, so maybe that's enough of a reason to homeschool. I don't know. My point is that teachers are not the problem, politicians are.

No real argument here - although that point isn't actually made in the rant. Individual teachers generally aren't the problem. Collectively unionized though, teachers are a huge problem because the union's primary interest is in the preservation of the union. Education of kids doesn't even factor into the equation.

So, when I read that a school in Michigan held an 'emergency preparedness drill' in which students and teachers had to respond to a mock terrorist attack by a group called, "Wackos Against Schools and Education" a militant home-schooling organization, I laughed. Come on, it was funny. It sounds like something I would have joked around about if I had been involved. Many of the pro-homeschoolers are pretty intense about their hatred of public schools. And perhaps just proving the point, the homeschoolers freaked out.

Is Michelle Malkin a homeschooler? I don't think so. Does she speak for homeschoolers? The answer is no. Actually, I think Malkin's "brand" is as a mainstream conservative Republican. She has way more in common with the author than she does with the typical HS'er (whatever that is). She has jumped on the HS'er bandwagon because we are apparently trendy right now. By the time Malkin's column went live people in Michigan were already apologizing the whole thing was essentially over.

The school and the agency that organized the event have publicly apologized. It is really sad that they were required to do so. Conservatives, like myself, are constantly complaining about the left's insistence that we use politically correct speech. The fact that conservatives got all upset about this is just plain hypocrisy.

All homeschoolers are not conservative - I'm not even sure a majority are. Many homeschoolers are the touchy feely type that are all for politically correct speech. Maybe they were the ones making the fuss? I know some of the HS'ers that wrote letters, but I could not tell you their politics without poking around their websites first. I don't care what their politics are.

But then, I was never that up in arms about this in the first place. As I have written on many occasions, I sort of like the right wing wacko label. If HS'ing is too mainstream government will feel compelled to pay a lot more attention to it. And that is not a good thing for any HS'er, liberal or conservative.