Posted on 03/11/2007 11:50:14 AM PDT by EternalVigilance
Unfortunately, by age 11, his confidence in his ability was permanently destroyed by the government school.
I'm sorry to hear that. We've had a child who was reading at a second grade level by her third birthday, another who is just now "getting it" at 9 1/2, and everything in between. It's amazing how quick children can learn to read when they are ready and amazing how hard it is for those who aren't ready yet. Government schools are terrible places for both the early and late readers.
Will he say, "Of course, there are going to be exceptions,"...?
If that is the case, the logic must cut both ways.
Which means you will find emotionally and educationally abused children within the public school system.
This jerk needs a big cup of stfu.
Good point. Zampino's comments speak volumes about judicial activism.
So how does judge Zampino explain the fact that an inordinate number of Scripps-Howard National Spelling Bee champs are home schooled students?
Obviously the kids are locked in closets with nothing but a dictionary and are beaten if they don't learn at least 100 new words a day.
Yes he was, and it goes much deeper than that. He attacks the very rights of parents to raise & educate their children the way they see fit.
By saying that he is not attacking homeschooling, this judge shows that his real aim is at parenting in general, making the state department of education the body that monitors and enforces the "safe and secure welfare" of all households. That is why anyone who values their rights as a parent but doesn't homeschool should still keep an eye on homeschooling legislation.
Good point. Also, the article appropriately cites HSLDA: " the organization did note that the judge's words did not change New Jersey law. "In order to protect individual freedoms, the founders of our nation wanted to be sure that governmental powers did not become overly concentrated. To prevent this, they wisely split power into three branches – legislative, judicial and executive. As the founders conceived it, the judicial branch has no power to make new laws. That power belongs to the legislature working through representatives elected by the people," the group said in a statement.
I am a Roman Catholic. My Church prohibits me from belonging to the Masonic Order. That having been said, don't you think that the crack about the judge being a "Lodge member" is a bit over the top and an unnecessary insult to many fine men who are members of the "Lodge?"
Most certainly the gummint is not entitled to require that my children or anyone else's be taught "fisting" techniques, taught the wonders of Heather has Two Mommies or Daddy's Roommate, or taught that sexual activity is some sort of constitutional right for 12-year-olds. Much less is the gummint's P.S. 666 entitled to sneak 14 year old Jezebel off to the nearest Planned Barrenhood abortion mill to "confidentially" cover up her P.S. 666 approved social behavior that led to her condition so that only the skewel officials and NOT her parents will know what she is up to.
The gummint and ITS skewels are also not entitled to keep the kids abandoned to those skewels in academic ignorance while providing all the bells and whistles (at taxpayers' expense) like football, basketball, hockey, swimming pools, polo ponies or whatever that makes gummint edjamakashun about 4 or 5 times as expensive as private education and no more than 20% as effective in the delivery of knowledge.
I have no right, even as a taxpayer, to force gummint skewels to teach Catholicism. Atheists have no right to force those skewels to teach atheism. That is in the nature of the commonly tax-funded monster known as gummint edjamakashun. By teaching nothing on religion (and what could the gummint skewels teach on religion short of civil war?), these skewels teach, by omission, that religion isn't very important. I don't want to subsidize that particular lie. Jefferson, not himself a very partisan denominationalist, did observe that there is no tyranny worse than one which forces a man to subsidize ideas which he hates. And no, that tyranny is no more justified than Catholics making Catholic education of non-Catholics in gummint skewels mandatory.
Fortunately there is an obvious solution to these problems without further subsidy of gummint administered ignorance. Erect a (what shall we call it? I know:) "wall of separation" between gummint and education. No one then forces me to pay to entertain their children. Nor do they have to pay for mine. Those without kids don't have to pay at all unless they wish to pay.
ME: Better a few cases of "education abuse" than the multitude of abuses certain to occur when the 900 pound bureaucratic gorilla is loosed on home schoolers.
THEE: Tell that to the little girl whose dad crawls into her bed every night. Tell that to the "homeschooled" kid whose mother didn't want to be torn away from her stories, so she let them run free without any schooling. Tell that to the kid who can't find a job because his education prepared him with no marketable skills. Lest you think I'm exaggerating, this goes on every day in America. It by no means is intended to be a slur against the overwhelming majority of homeschoolers who are good and decent folks - but it is a well-deserved slur upon those few who are monsters.
ME: I agree that there are abuses. The issue I tried to raise, and clearly failed to in terms which you would accept, was that beyond a certain point, we have to accept some failure in everything. Cars do sometimes turn over, planes do sometimes crash, and government just can't be perfected.
Come to think of it, people just refuse to be good all the time. What you are arguing is that we should be willing to trust government outside of the carefully crafted chains forged for it by the Founders. I am not willing to so do.
Better that a few daughters suffer "Daddy Dear" than a swarm of bureaucrats be allowed to take a multitude ofchildren from their homes and be put into the maw of Child Protective Services" where they will be physically and/or sexually abused more than if the state was kept within Constitutional boundaries.
Yes, some child abuse will occur. Better that than the vastly larger number of abuses from allowing government to interfere with family.
Sorry, I just don't believe that government can be effective in the realm of child raising as the final authority. The numbers also support my, not thee.
I wonder if you realize that you are attempting to advocate the perfectability of government?
By the way, I like the historical citations in your about page. 'Tis a pity that they can't be made required reading for the Democratic PArty members.
GG
I grew up across the street from a kid whose welfare mother used to lock him in his bedroom all day while she went out. As far as I know, "no one, such as a teacher or nurse, was able to observe any abuse in a school setting, it went undiscovered." She also raised him on Coke, so most of his baby teeth rotted out before they fell out.
"Here, [a witness in court] testified that approximately two million of today's fifty five million school age children are presently being homeschooled in the United States.
Wow! That's great news. 5% of school-age children are homeschooled. That compares to 10% of school-age children in private schools. So 15% are escaping the gov't school dragnet. That's better than 10%!
Stat of the day: Public school teachers send their kids to private school at twice the rate of the rest of the population; 20% to 10%.
This kind of abuse is far worse than physical abuse, since it can lead children into serious sin, which is why Jesus said, " But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea." (Matthew 18:6)
Children are also indoctrinated, in the most insidious way, into believing that religion is unimportant. The powerful unspoken message of the godless curriculum is, "do religion with the few minutes of the day not taken up with school and homework. God is not worth wasting class time on." A direct attack on religion would actually be less damaging to the spiritual lives of children.
They were required reading in a law school seminar on the law of war.
Demonizing parents!? What a lowlife.
{Wolfgang Drautz, consul general of the Federal Republic of Germany, has said that "the public has a legitimate interest in countering the rise of parallel societies that are based on religion or motivated by different worldviews and in integrating minorities into the population as a whole."}
That's all that needs to be seen.
It's no accident that Nazism arose in the most-schooled country in Europe, and the birthplace of compulsory gov't schooling.
Prussia was prepared to use bayonets on its own people as readily as it wielded them against others, so it’s not all that surprising the human race got its first effective secular compulsion schooling out of Prussia in 1819, the same year Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, set in the darkness of far-off Germany, was published in England. Schule came after more than a decade of deliberations, commissions, testimony, and debate. For a brief, hopeful moment, Humboldt’s brilliant arguments for a high-level no-holds-barred, free-swinging, universal, intellectual course of study for all, full of variety, free debate, rich experience, and personalized curricula almost won the day. What a different world we would have today if Humboldt had won the Prussian debate, but the forces backing Baron vom Stein won instead. And that has made all the difference.The Prussian mind, which carried the day, held a clear idea of what centralized schooling should deliver: 1) Obedient soldiers to the army; 2) Obedient workers for mines, factories, and farms; 3) Well-subordinated civil servants, trained in their function; 4) Well-subordinated clerks for industry; 5) Citizens who thought alike on most issues; 6) National uniformity in thought, word, and deed.
My blood pressure is sure up for this early in the morning.
Abortion compounds the tragedy of incest by forcing the mother to live with the fact that she's murdered her unborn child.
You could point your friend to these testimonies of post-abortive women.
Not really. It's just that intervening in child abuse is one of those proper roles of (state) government.
What you are arguing is that we should be willing to trust government outside of the carefully crafted chains forged for it by the Founders. I am not willing to so do.
The Founders left the States with broad discretion. Reviewing a parent's curriculum plan to enusre that parents who are taking their kids out of school are actually educating them, and not using it as a cover for allegations of abuse, is well within those bounds. Could it be abused? Probably. Should it therefore be rejected? Absolutely not - not when the possibility of abuse is weighed against the compelling interest the State has in ensuring educated citizens who are not abused, and in light of the minimal intrusion into the parent's privacy.
It should be noted that the slippery slope argument can be a logical fallacy.
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