Homeschoolers Disrespected on Ebert & Roeper

Ebert & Roeper ^ | 6/18/07

[LibertyRocks]

I was just watching Ebert & Roeper and would like to report to my fellow homeschoolers that the guest host taking Roger Ebert's place tonight, Robert Wilonsky, made a very disrespectful and rude comment in relation to homeschoolers...

While reviewing the upcoming movie "Nancy Drew" Roeper made a comment that Nancy was a 1950's girl in relation to what she thought constituted a birthday party. When Roeper said that this would be a good movie that would be liked by 12-year-old girls, Wilonsky replied, "Maybe Homeschooled 12-year-olds"...

I found this to be a very ignorant and disrespectful comment, and I am left wondering what Mr. Wilonsky thinks would be better suited for 12-year-old Public Schooled/Private Schooled students to be watching (Sex, Drinking & Drugs???)?

I would like to ask my fellow homeschool parents to write to both Ebert & Roeper (Buena Vista Entertainment) as well as Mr. Wilonsky himself, and express your displeasure with this disrespectful comment.

Here is how to contact the show & Mr. Wilonsky...

Ebert & Roeper Show: http://bventertainment.go.com/tv/buenavista/ebertandroeper/ Use the "Feedback" link at the top navigation bar to submit a comment.

Mr. Wilonsky: I could only find one email address online for Mr. Wilonsky (he also writes at RottenTomatoes.com, as well as the Village Voice, L.A. Weekly, and the Phoenix New Times). Here is his email address through his employer the Dallas Observer:

Robert.Wilonsky@dallasobserver.com

In my comment to the Ebert & Roeper show I requested not only that they do not bring Mr. Wilonsky back for any more co-hosting gigs, but also that they issue an on-air apology to all homeschooled students.

[BlackElk]

There was ONE abbreviation in #241: "PS 666." For those wedded to gummint skewels and those in Rio Linda, I could have abbreviated "gs" for gummint skewels but used PS instead to abbreviate, ummmm, "public schools." If you did not figure out that gummint skewels equals "public schools," OK, it does. If you went to Christian schools and Bob Jones University, you ought not to need an explanation of 666. I use the term "gummint skewels" to distinguish them from actual academic institutions where truth matters and teaching and learning occur and where those who pay for the program are not forced at the point of a gun or of a tax foreclosure to subsidize the indoctrination of others in anti-Christian, anti-life, anti-family, anti-American and anti-intellectual fantasies.

What keeps me in Illinois for now is the Roman Catholic bishop of Rockford, Bishop Thomas Doran, one of the most conservative Catholic bishops in this or any country (and one of seven judges on the Vatican's Signatura or Supreme Ecclesiastical Court), the easy availability of the Tridentine Mass at several locations, a lower cost of living than exists in most places. Are you actually suggesting that I would want to move to another location to subject my children generally to gummint skeweling????? Why on earth would I do that? When did I say that I did not like my surroundings? The surroundings are fine. Like everywhere else, however, the gummint skewels are the parochial skewels of the atheistic/agnostic/Darwinian ape-worshiping/second rate ignorance production beats actual education crowds who want to tax everyone to subsidize their evils and their ineptness.

Ronald Reagan once said that the one thing we may thank God for is that we are not getting all the government we are paying for. That is so much more true of gummint indoctrination centersposingas schools. If the parents of gummint skeweled kids had to pay the entire freight for the squandering inevitably associated with gummint skeweling, that would be that for the gummint skewels. No one in his/her right mind would be caught dead throwing their own money down such ratholes at the rate of $12,000 or more per year per misedjumakated kiddie. At best,gummint skewels are glorified taxpayer paid babysittingagencies with fancy and expensive sports programs and other entertainments to get SOME of the kids to accept gummint high school incarceration for four years to keep leftist teachers/administrators in the style to which they have become all too accustomed.

Do you teach your kids that their misbehavior is OK as long as "all the other kids are doing it?" I don't. I attended a state law school which had nothing to do with property taxes. My eldest daughter attended two years of gummint high skewel, which was (with the exception of my taking typing and astronomy as a 14-year-old babysittee) the first member of my family to submit to the shame of attending gummint primary or secondary skewels since my father dropped out as a high school sophomore in 1926. As opponents of gummint skewels, we have no obligation to avoid using what we pay for. Normally, we are delighted to homeschool or privately school our own kids. Free babysitting is not a function of conservative government

Prisons, police, courts, roads are NECESSARY governmental functions and do not need to indoctrinate anyone in leftist ideology, ape worship, Planned Barrenhood propaganda any more than your teachers "needed" to lift your skirt when you were 16 to spank your bare bottom in front of your fellow students. Apples...oranges!

When you attended Reformation-oriented Christian schools, where you were taught things with which I, as a Catholic, disagree. The original Bob Jones was no fan of my faith. I did not have to pay for your education in such things. When I have educated my kids in Catholicism, you did not have to pay for it. In each case, that is as it should be. When you place your kids in gummint skewels, apparently in response to what you (but not your own parents) regarded as mistreatment in Christian schools, you are expecting me to pay for it. When you start helping me earn money, you can start helping me spend it and not until. See the Ten Commandments: Thou Shalt Not Steal.

If the behavior of your teachers was as you describe, they belonged in jail and no permission from your parents would have saved them from prosecution. "In loco parentis" ("in place of parents" for those in Rio Linda or in gummint skewels) does not allow the school employees to do what the parents are not allowed to do. Determining whether the behavior amounted to sexual sadism probably is above your pay grade or mine. Recognizing such behavior as a criminal violation of assault and battery or even sexual assault is not beyond the difficulty level of even the graduates of PS 666.

If you have never previously heard of condom distribution to gummint skeweled fifth graders, you have now. Resolve any doubts by calling the New Haven Board of Education or its most liberal opponent: Catholic Auxiliary Bishop Peter Rosazza who courageously resisted the program to no avail.

Should all genuflect before the false god of "scientific information?" Is descent from apes "scientific information?" "Family Life Education????" Easily opted out of????? Maybe in your neighborhood. In Hamden, Connecticut, Hamden High School issued to its students confidential questionnaires (confidential from their parents, that is) asking about the details of the marital intimacy of those parents. That was in the 1980s and triggered a brief awakening of the parents of the gummint skeweled but they soon went to sleep again.

We live in a country where self-reliance was the watchword of even liberals like Thoreau and Emerson (New England abolitionists, anti-Mexican War nuts, ohhhh sooooo sensitive literati/culterati for the gummint skeweled and those in Rio Linda). You missed that memo too. Thoreau actually was a hermit (at Walden Pond). I will have my children read and understand Thoreau's Civil Disobedience while learning to rationally despise and work to abolish gummint edumakashun and other frauds.

Define civilization.

"Interdependency" is the leftist code word for socialism. We get along well with our neighbors, even the one who is chairman of the local gummint skewel board. We just do not expect them to pay our bills. Just because you got spanked in a non-gummint high school does not mean that my kids or family or anyone else should have to live in a gummint gulag (reference to former soviet prison camps as described by Solzhenitsyn) or pay for one.

[P-Marlowe]

When Roeper said that this would be a good movie that would be liked by 12-year-old girls, Wilonsky replied, "Maybe Homeschooled 12-year-olds"...

That, my friend, is a compliment!

It also sounds like a recommendation.

If Wilonksky hates it, I'm sure I'll enjoy it.

[P-Marlowe]

I realize from re-reading that you’re the parent of a homeschooled. Must be just a laugh-riot at home. I’ll pray for them.

To make that promise and then not follow through with it is a grave sin.

Let us hope you do pray for them.

I'm sure a lot of people will be praying for you.

[BlackElk]

No one suggests that you do not have the right to send your kids to gummint skewels so long as they exist. You know your personal and family circumstances as others cannot know them.

That does not sanitize the thievery, incompetence, propagandizing, and anti-intellectual prostitution and mediocrity that are the hallmarks of gummint skewels. You may or may not have choices. Those skewels do and their choices deserve no respect whatsoever nor a penny of tax money.

If telling the truth is bullying, so be it but I don't agree that it is. If the telling of truth causes guilt in the hearer, that is not the fault of the truth or of its telling. Again, you must know you far better than I know you. I don't have to justify my choices and neither do you.

[BlackElk]

OK, in that event (they were pioneers in homeschooling), the Apostles were pioneers in Christianity and in teaching and baptising all nations. They (except for St. John the Evangelist) paid a steeper price still. Judas does not count. Jude Thaddeus and ten others were martyred (according to Catholic teaching at least). If offered today the opportunity to decide again, I warrant that those who were martyred would accept being apostles despite the price. I suspect that your homeschool pioneering friends would do likewise.

Roman citizens who offered incense as an offering to emperors as gods were neither suspected nor arrested nor punished for it. Those who refused were sent to the Colisseum or other executions. We honor the second group and not the first.

Not long before he was murdered by agents of the First Triumvrate in about 44 BC, Cicero, a pious pagan, prophesied that the world was so mired in sin and iniquity that, though he knew not whom or where or precisely when, the world must surely await the imminent arrival of its savior. Virgil, the great pagan poet, predicted in about 15 BC that a virgin would soon enough bear a son who would be the savior of the world. Your friends had Someone other than themselves and probably knew that.

God bless you and yours.

[ariamne]

Threads like this depress me more and more as the years go by, not because I am against home schooling, but because I was unable to home school my daughter, and at ten, just finishing the 4th grade, the liberal indoctrination has already made firm inroads to her thinking despite my efforts to counteract the public school influence. Those of you who can homeschool, please, take a moment to thank God and congratulate yourselves for the choices you have made in life that enable you to homeschool, and one more moment to pray for my beautiful daughter, whose spirit has been incrementally doused by the public school influence. She knows being a conservative makes her different and she is embarassed by my constant complaints about liberal bias (example: she was told that the United States attacked Japan for no reason and that there is never a good excuse for war). I wish I had chosen more wisely when I married; I have to work outside the home and have no choice except public school. And it is as bad as you’ve heard and getting worse. I am truly happy for you and your children, but I am sad for mine.

[BlackElk]

At a Jesuit prep school in the 1960s, I earned the right to be arrogant. The Catholic system had little in the way of equivalent schools for girls and, in your case, it shows. I doubt you dare to specify what you regard as ignorance in my previous post to you.

That muggings in certain parts of our major cities occur regularly does not make them morally acceptable. Likewise the theft that is gummint skewel taxes. I have yet to see (understandably) your moral justification for the theft of tax money for the gummint skewels. Nor am I likely to see it for obvious reasons.

If ending gummint skewel thievery interferes with your "free" babysitting scheme, too bad.

[LowOiL]

Our prom was beautiful here at the church... most homeschool people now have proms that are free of the trash dressing found in most proms now days.

Unless you live under a rock, you perhaps have heard on radio etc... homeschool area wide proms are now very popular.

If I wanted my kids anymore school “socially developed” I would take them to the restroom and personally beat them and steal their lunch money. Otherwise I will trust their weekly field trips and gatherings to combat the isolation guilt trips that those not in the know dream of.

Even in this small town of ours, we have over 120 kids of all ages that gather in the weekly meetings. This does not take into account for field trips that often bring over 100 different kids from all over the state to a central point.

Obviously you need to update your views of homeschooling to todays standards. Homeschool kids have it made my fellow FReeper in the socialization areas, and it is quality time well spent that the Public school never come close to achieving.

[Gabz]

You are correct, I do not have to justify my choices to anyone. Particularly someone who refuses to see that broadbrushing other choices is just as intellectually dishonest as the broadbrushing claims to be exposing.

[Gabz]

I suggest you check all definitions of the words ignorance and iggnorant before you question my use of the term, although I doubt you will bother, considering the level of ignorance shown in this particular post.

[pray4liberty]

I do agree with you that bullies need to be put in their place. However. The PC group will imprison the victim before they imprison the bully. Bullies now are political. They get away with everything because Daddy or Mommy has money or some sort of favor with the administration.

The middle-class kid doesn't have a chance anymore. He, not the bully, will be the one expelled, charged with assault and be the latest inductee in the school-to-prison pipeline, all for defending himself. Zero tolerance is what is turning our kids to wusses, because whether they fight back or not, it's a lose-lose situation.

I've found the meanest people on earth are the school administrators. I don't know what it is they care about other than their power trips, but it sure isn't the kids.

[SoftballMominVA]

You do not wish to have a conversation/discussion - you wish to score points in a debate style give and take. That is not how I wish to spend my time. I don't have to explain my choices or my philosophy any more than you do. If you wish to share, then share, but don't be surprised if others disagree with you

I'm happy for you that you like Illinois, although if you are familiar with BJU you already know what I was taught there to think of Catholics.

If you attended a state school as you say you did, and your children attended public schools, you too drank at the government tit. Are you pot or kettle today? You are not in a position to lecture me or anyone else about the evils of government money.

As far as paying for my own children? Considering that my husband and I pay well over 10k a year in state taxes, we will have paid for them and several others many times before we retire

I'm done with this debate. It does not feed my soul in any way, nor have I learned anything from it, except disgust and distaste for a particular poster.

[BlackElk]

You have given no reason whatsoever to bother. Further, you support gummint skeweling which marks you for what you are. There is not a single valid argument expressed here or elsewhere for the continued existence of gummint skeweling other than that some think that, without mandatory "education" which necessitates gummint ignorance factories, some parents would let their badly behaved children run the streets. This is supposed to be somehow a recommendation for gummint skewels. If we don't want those bad ly behaving kids running the streets, why would any sane parent expose their own kids to being victimized by the feral children. Sorry, there I go again imagining that you may be rational when the evidence is utterly lacking that you are.

How liberal was your Kumbaya "Catholic" girls' high school? Never mind. I think that's obvious.

[Gabz]

You disgusting pig.............

[BlackElk]

Well, I will take that as a compliment, considering the source.

If Bob Jones University were not in disagreement with people like me, it would be a quite conservative Catholic University. Who knows? Bob Jones I publicly opposed Catholic Democrat Al Smith as a presidential candidate because Bob Jones I stated he would prefer to vote for a black rather than vote for a papist. It was then and now a free country. I regard that as his statement of rah-rah support for Sola Scriptura. When Bob Jones the I enthusiastically expressed his faith, that ought not to offend me as a Catholic. My faith does not depend on the opinions of others. So long as God agrees, I have nothing to fear. Bob Jones IV is now running the university. He cannot be too offended by the Catholic brand name since he holds an earned degree from Notre Dame University (not that Notre Dame has been actually Catholic in several decades but Bob IV probably thought it was). Some Catholics note that as progress in the Jones family over the last 7 or 8 generations. Maybe Bob Jones V, if there is one, will be educated at some actually Catholic institution or even become Catholic. Frankie Schaeffer became Russian Orthodox because of the Mass and the sacraments. Maybe Bob Jones IV's grandson will become better known as Robert Cardinal Jones. Whether or not that happens Bob Jones University is, on many fronts, fighting the good fight as you apparently are not. That Bob Jones University's leaders are quite Christian but quite non-Catholic does not bother me in the least. When your Savior and mine wept in the Garden at Gethsemani, He prayed to His Father that His Flock might be as one but He knew it was not to be. It is the enemies of Christianity who seek to divide Christians on matters of public policy (on denominational lines or otherwise) if and when those matters are of consequence.

ONE child attended gummint skewel by her choice and as a punishment thereafter for that choice. It taught her that choices have consquences. She was well enough grounded in her faith that we certainly had little to fear from her atheist and communist social studies teacher, her atheist but competent chemistry teacher, her socialbutterfly anatomy and physiology teacher. her cute blond but incompetent Spanish teacher who left to marry rather than continue embarrassing herself posing as a teacher even in a gummint skewel context. You stop stealing my money for the gummint skewels and I will gladly foreswear any use of them up to and including our local high school's semi-professional football team right up until those dens of educational iniquity and theft are abolished altogether. So long as we are forced to pay the bills, we will use the gummint educational latrine if and when and why we please but NEVER under the delusion that it constitutes actual education. Silly paper credentials like diplomas and other sheepskins might be an excuse. That's Entertainment!!! might be another since the local gummint skewel has a very good music director. I see no reason why those who pay taxes should not be able to put their kids on gummint skewel sports teams if they are qualified, or music ensembles or drama clubs or chemistry labs without being indoctrinated in atheism, agnosticism, ancestral monkey-worship or the other religious dogmas of secular humanism. Gummint skewels are like the old town greens in my native New England. Anyone should be able to graze their sheep on the commons.

You do not wish to be a conservative or even to make believe you are a conservative. Gummint skewels and conservatism are clean different things in the terms of blessed Charles I of England, king and martyr.

I shall agree with you on one thing. Your soul, regardless of denomination does seem to have been starved. Try Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis.

Buh-bye!!!

[BlackElk]

I guess I hit the nail on the head. Such elegance! Such eloquence!!!

I don't suppose you want to give actual arguments demonstrating that you are actually conservative rather than a gummint indocrtination center loving troll. Be comprehensive.

Sieg snort!

[Gabz]

I need not demonstrate anything to the likes of you.. Your “my way or the highway” position tells me all I need to know about YOUR alleged conservative credentials.

Good day.

[BlackElk]

Your lack of an answer coupled with your support for gummint skeweling and gummint thievery to support that skeweling tells us everything there is to know as to your conservative credentials: there are none.

Do you imagine that conservatism is some wishy-washy and feckless body of emotional self-indulgence that has no standards and no principles or that one person's mere opinion is as good as another's just because person #1 is too lazy or incompetent to articulate conservative standards? You have already demonstrated far more (none of it flattering to you) than you should have wished to demonstrate.

Kumbayah, dearie!

[SoftballMominVA]

FYI, Bob Jones IV is NOT running the university. He is a journalist. Stephen Jones is the current president. Thought you might want to get your facts straight.

Besides that, you are welcome to any opinion you wish to hold, as am I.

Have a good one

[BlackElk]

I stand corrected as to Bob Jones IV.

I am also, however, entitled to my opinion of your opinion and you know how low an opinion that is. Objectively and justifiably so since you actually have the temerity to defend the indefensible training ground of the leftists known as gummint skewels. Be sure to get back to us when your kids turn leftward. Meanwhile, you and other love slaves of the National Education Associaton pay all of the exorbitant bills for the gummint brainwashing of those kids abandoned to the gummint skewels and leave conservatives' earnings alone.