Posted on 06/09/2011 6:13:55 PM PDT by Clintonfatigued
Four children ages 9, 7, 5 and 3 from a homeschooling Catholic family in Notre-Dame-des-Bois in Québec, Canada have been ordered into public school for socialization and non-phonics reading instruction. As Lydia McGrew explains:
This case from Canada, which one would like to think couldnt happen in the U.S., is a fairly egregious example of judicial micromanagement: Judge Nicole Bernier (it would be a female judge!) ordered four children from a home schooling family into school and, in the case of children too young for school (down to age 3), into daycare so as to get what Judge Bernier calls socialization. To add injury to injury, Bernier wants the children to go to public school so that they will be taught to read (or, as the case may be, not taught to read) by non-phonics methods!
Now, this is crazy. The parents have not been accused of abusing or neglecting their children. Judge B. (by whatever ill fate she was brought into these innocent peoples lives) is just having a grand old time throwing around her weight and forcing them to raise their children as Judge B. would, presumably, raise her children. The notion of any sort of familial independence to make judgment calls about education is nowhere in the picture. (For the record, while I am a staunch advocate of phonics, I would consider laughable and pernicious the suggestion that some judge should interfere if parents were caught teaching their children to read by a look-say method.)
(Excerpt) Read more at firstthings.com ...
Sounds strange, but it's more than pictures ~ it's threads and trends ~ and the written language does not always mean exactly the same thing in one spoken language as it does another ~ usually because of idiomatic expressions ~ which are usually going to be different in each language.
In phonics you learn what "to", "too", and "two" mean in the same manner. In Look/Say you never really learn why they should be different ~ like growing up and every year they cut off a finger until you can't feel anything. Must be a horrible experience to be both genetically deficient and then get crippled by your teachers.
It was bad enough in my day (our day?), when the pace was set to accomodate the average student. Today I believe they attempt to set the pace for "no child left behind", but they do it at the expense of practically everybody else.
We campaigned to have our youngest put into first grade but were assured by the staff that such a move was rarely justified. Six weeks into the term we got a call that they were going to move her up because it was disrupting to the class to have her reading stories to the other children during breaks.
Our response was, "Really? Well if you think it best."
That seems true, Clintonfatigued.
What do you think TC?
I think Canada’s public schools started their educational decline later than the United States’s, and the operation of faith-based schools within the government system, as in Britain, helped to keep morally-solid public education available.
Now, the leftists are really pushing the radical agenda on all the schools, and cutting back on academic rigor. This is what drives the birth of a homeschooling movement. In the US, it’s been going on since the 1980s, and homeschoolers from the US are working with families in other countries to help establish a legal foundation for home education.
On the international front, things could go either way - toward more freedom, or toward a major crackdown. The UN is very opposed to home education: they want the One World drones programmed from birth, if they’re allowed to survive that long.
bump
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