Free Republic

As it becomes increasingly obvious that homeschoolers do significantly better than victims of government “education” on every academic metric, apologists for the public-school system often fall back on their “socialization” mantra. But under its true definition, “socialization” is hardly something to be desired. And under the commonly held understanding of socialization — gaining certain desirable social skills — the data show clearly that home-educated children outperform public school students on every key indicator. Before examining the issue of “socialization,” it helps to define the term itself. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, it is “the process whereby an individual learns to adjust...

Health professionals nationwide released statements in a Tea Party Patriots Action Second Opinion Project email on Thursday that they believe schools should reopen and that it is the safest option for kids. The consensus among the physicians, that kids would benefit academically, socially, and health-wise from schools reopening this fall, echoes a statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) released on July 10 addressing the issue of schools reopening in the fall. “We recognize that children learn best when physically present in the classroom. But children get much more than academics at school. They also learn social and emotional...

The Internet has enabled the flourishing of countless subcultures, from the harmless to the less so. Lately, one of the latter groups has begun to break into the mainstream: the “incels.” “Incel” is short for “involuntary celibate,” and as their self-imposed name implies, these mostly young men have come to define themselves by their inability to find a sexual or romantic partner. Men who identify as being #ForeverAlone have gathered online in forums such as Reddit to trade stories of woe. These communities tend to be self-reinforcing. Members believe that their looks or personal traits have consigned them to lifelong...

Football and baseball star Tim Tebow did not attend a single day in public school until his first day at the University of Florida, a school with nearly 50,000 students. Tebow, 30, instead spent his early education years working on his family’s farm and attending classes taught by his parents together with his siblings. "They wanted us to learn reading, writing and arithmetic, but it wasn't No. 1. It wasn't the most important thing," Tebow said. "They wanted to instill love in our hearts, love for God, love for one another. They wanted us to be able to learn a...

Standing in front of Francois Payard Bakery at Columbus Circle, Walter Piper shifts his weight nervously from one foot to the other. The 28-year-old is waiting for Jay, a bioengineering student whom he met online just days prior. To take the pressure off of their first meet-up, they planned to run the 10K loop in Central Park together before work. But this isn’t the beginning of a romance — the two men met through an online “friending” site, gofindfriends.com. Piper, despite having more than 300 friends on Facebook, found himself in a predicament shared by many millennials: He had no...

Every home schooling parent has been asked the S-Question: “What about socialization?” The implications (real or imagined) of the question are less than flattering: Students who attend schools outside the home are socialized better because they spend so much time with their immature peers, whereas students who attend school within the home are poorly socialized because they spend so much time with their mature parents. Home school families do not interact with one another. Socialization that occurs on the soccer field, during debate rounds, and in church doesn’t count (or is somehow inferior). Students who attend school outside the...

Quite simply, growing up with gay parents was very difficult, and not because of prejudice from neighbors. People in our community didn’t really know what was going on in the house. To most outside observers, I was a well-raised, high-achieving child, finishing high school with straight A’s. Inside, however, I was confused. When your home life is so drastically different from everyone around you, in a fundamental way striking at basic physical relations, you grow up weird. I have no mental health disorders or biological conditions. I just grew up in a house so unusual that I was destined to...

Four children ages 9, 7, 5 and 3 from a homeschooling family in Notre-Dame-des-Bois in Québec, Canada have been ordered into public school for socialization. The Roman Catholic family, who have been homeschooling their children for four years, were reported to the youth protection services (YPS) for neglect and had a four-day trial in November 2010. The judge in the case, Judge Nicole Bernier, ordered that the children remain in school or in day care until YPS officials approved a plan for socialization. However, because of apparent bias against homeschooling and these parents, this is unlikely to ever happen. HSLDA...

In 1992, I earned my "15 minutes of fame" with an MS thesis about "Social Maturity of Home School Children." I've decided to make it more widely available, starting with this extract (CLICK HERE to open the .pdf document). FReepers, this is my gift to you. I formatted it into a dozen or so attractive pages to read on screen, or to print out and give to worried friends and family. I found it interesting to cull trenchant observations on the state of public education from a variety of sources: Ayn Rand, the atheist capitalist. Ivan Illych, the Marxist Jesuit....

There is a struggle between the classes, we are told. The haves are dominating the have-nots. If only the oppressive wealthy would let up and allow the poor to rise, there would be social justice and equality. It has been an effective narrative. But it has ignored the tremendous social pressure placed upon "have-nots" by members of their own community. Consider Charles Payne. You might recognize him from his regular guest appearances on the Fox Business Network. Payne is the CEO and Chief Analyst of Wall Street Strategies, sought after for his market opinions. But he didn't start there. In...

After a White House session attended by President Barack Obama and several of the country's top health insurers, Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius questioned the industry's "jaw-dropping" rate hikes. "The meeting was really focused on what is happening with the kind of jaw-dropping rate increases that people are seeing," Sebelius said, calling on insurers to file requests for rate increases online along with financial data. The day after Obama launched a last-ditch drive to pass a sweeping healthcare overhaul, he also met at the White House with groups of liberal and moderate Democrats from the House of Representatives to seek their...

Congratulations. You're about to own $100 billion a year in student loans.The furor over President Obama's trillion-dollar restructuring of American health care has left his other trillion-dollar plan starved for attention. That's how much the federal balance sheet will expand over the next decade if Mr. Obama can convince Congress to approve his pending takeover of the student-loan market. The Obama plan calls for the U.S. Department of Education to move from its current 20% share of the student-loan origination market to 80% on July 1, 2010, when private lenders will be barred from making government-guaranteed loans. The remaining 20%...

The headlines are encouraging: The AP reports, “White House appears ready to drop ‘public option’.” Politico reads, “White House backs away from public health care option.” And the front page of USA Today says, “Obama may drop public option in health care.” These headers all stem from Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ comment on CNN Sunday Morning that the public option “is not the essential element” of President Barack Obama’s health care plan. But by Sunday night the White House was already walking back Sebelius’ statement. An anonymous administration official told The Atlantic that Sebelius “misspoke” and White...

The Department of Health and Human Services is almost certain to take on responsibility for creating the criteria used to decide what health records technologies qualify for billions of dollars in reimbursements to medical offices under a new stimulus program, officials said Friday. The decision represents a significant restriction of the role played by a private certification group, begun several years ago by the technology industry, which until recently had served as the government's gatekeeper for endorsing systems designed to improve the sharing of medical records. The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology, or CCHIT, came under sharp criticism in...

Click on the image to get to the Peoples CubeI've been on the Obama email list for months and yesterday received word that all of the activists who are currently demonstrating against Socialized Medicine are in the pay of the Insurance and Drug Companies. What I want to know is... Where is my check?

Welcome to Universal Health Care. According to a Swedish newspaper, "An 83-year-old woman from Östergötland in southern Sweden was forced to pay for back surgery out of her own pocket after doctors at her local public hospital told her she was too old for the treatment." The woman, Marianne Skogh, reportedly has had "pain and numbness" in her legs since 2004, and waited more than a year before being rejected. She suffered from pressure on her spine, causing the pain. "Without the operation, I might have lived another five years in incredible pain," said Skogh. "But what kind of life...

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Tuesday affirmed his support for the creation of a government-sponsored health insurance plan, but he acknowledged that such a plan would sharply reduce the chances for Republican support of legislation to overhaul the health care system, Democratic senators said.

Strong banks will be allowed to repay bail-out funds they received from the US government but only if such a move passes a test to determine whether it is in the national economic interest, a senior administration official has told the Financial Times. “Our general objective is going to be what is good for the system,” the senior official said. “We want the system to have enough capital.”

Obama’s team of despots has turned a Stimulus Bill into a Kill the Elderly bill And instead of using those views to gain acceptance to a mental institution of his choice, Tom Daschle wants them enacted as policy. We already know who was receptive to his views; some man who promised hope and change and who did not tell us that those involved killing seniors and the very ill. Obama’s team of despots has turned a Stimulus Bill into a Kill the Elderly bill. And the Democrats in the Senate, including Ben Nelson, Bill Nelson, Joe Lieberman, Arlen Specter and...

There has been a great push in this country by child rearing experts and the medical profession that children must be "socialized". It has been a pivotal buzzword for educators and parents alike. It is a main reason for the negative swell toward homeschooling. Yet, it is my contention that what we need to foster, from birth, is natural instinct. Natural instinct is what we understand as the survival instinct. It is an innate instinct of distrust. It is the instinct that alerts us as we start down a dark alleyway on our way home from work. It is the...