Or, Not Tired Of Winning Yet.
By Holly the Assistant
A few days ago there was a kerfuffle, minor, with the general opinion among my friends being “HSLDA is going to eat them for lunch.”
Wait, let me back up a few decades.
You see, I was home schooled, back in the ages when it wasn’t legal almost everywhere, and was widely regarded as suspicious. Everyone had opinions on how uneducated home schoolers were, back then, and how stupid our parents were. (Mine had more and higher degrees than their critics.) There was a need, some attorneys who wanted to home school their own kids formed a legal defense group, and Home School Legal Defense Association was created. (https://hslda.org/) Where it was legal, no one knew what to do with us. I had two colleges I applied to send the wrong application information. (One of them got written out of my then symphony stand partner’s will over it. She’d really hoped I’d go there, and the college screwing that up? She was not happy. Lovely lady, she translated the Kol Nidrei’s words for me when I was playing that. The other college was one two of my cousins went to. They’d gone to high school at Interlochen, however, which was at least a standard option.)
By the time my kids came along, home schooling was legal everywhere, though still difficult to comply with in some places, (NY, PA, CA, looking at you particularly) and the complaint had switched from academics to socialization, usually after ten minutes of chatting with my articulate kids. We walked into driver’s licensing, said “Traditional home school” and were handed the proper forms. College admissions, “Traditional home school”, handed proper forms. There was no fuss, no drama.
By and large, it’s somewhere between a non-issue and “My grand-kids are home schooled” today. And a lot of that is due to HSLDA, a legion of motivated home schoolers and retired home schoolers who pick up the phones to talk to legislators’ offices at the first email notification (last time I called on a state bill I got a very weary staffer who said “For or against?”) and a LOT of court cases. For the low price of less than a tank of gas a year, we fund HSLDA, as a group effort. (OK, I have a 36 gallon tank, but still.) When I was a child, it was postal mail and a phone tree (talk about a coordination job!), now it’s an email list.
So we went from CPS taking kids from families to CPS rolling eyes when someone reports kids being home schooled, by concentrated effort over multiple decades. And now, when the headline says: Firefighter’s Home Schooled Diploma rejected (https://www.firehouse.com/careers-education/video/55406408/homeschooled-diploma-rejected-by-freemont-ne-fire-department) we confidently expect that should the young man desire, the Home School Legal Defense Association will sic an attorney or three on the city, and eat them for lunch. Because that’s what OUR attorneys do: they’re good at it, and honestly, they probably wrote Nebraska’s home school laws, or a good chunk of them anyway, and Nebraska home schoolers hassled and cajoled their legislature into passing those laws.
I understand from my firearms activist friends that they’ve done much the same thing, over many decades. I just appreciate living in a Constitutional Carry state, and knowing that whatever happens at minimum ten percent of the people around me are carrying at any given time.
How far we’ve come, from the days of not being sure if it was safe to play outside in my own yard for a break from school work, lest someone report us, to the days where we can confidently say “Oooh, they screwed up, they’ll be paying,” when someone discriminates against a home schooled person.
This is what winning looks like: a long, slow slog, dismantling legal restrictions put in place by our do-gooder ancestors, who were sure that if they just controlled things the right way they’d make all those shady newcomers from places like Italy and Finland behave like proper Americans. We know better now: we know we can’t let the institutions of government have that kind of power over We the People, because the people in charge use it to destroy individualism, which is the basis of America. It’s the work of lifetimes. The home school pioneers, those still alive, have spent their entire adult lives at it. Now we carry their torches forward.
Be not afraid. In the end, they lose, we win.
Amen.
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Well, the current Public Schools aren’t even trying to turn US-born students into Americans let alone turning foreign born students into Americans. ☹️
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They’re not even trying to turn them into civilized humans; they’re letting them be savages and animals. 😡
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I started homeschooling in January of 2008, when the older of our two sons was in K4. We ended up homeschooling for a total of 15 years, from K4 all the way through high school graduation, for both boys. They did field trips, theater, and Key Club. They were and are better socialized than the thugs and miscreants we live among, and MUCH better socialized than the snotty country-club Saturn V doucherockets we also live among.
My younger son has spent this week training new employees at the coffee shop he manages, and it hasn’t been a question of teaching them policy or procedures; he’s had to try to teach them basic fractions. Because these people, his age and older, learned bugger-all in the abysmal local schools.
Georgia is, IIRC, the one state whose laws specifically exempt homeschoolers from jury duty, and you best believe I literally got “random” summonses every three months the whole time I was homeschooling, so I ended up siccing HSLDA on the county jury commission, who begrudgingly amended their forms. Oddly enough, the summonses dropped off all sharp-like once our younger son graduated.
A local woman was informed that her three kids (elementary age at the time) were in the 12th percentile academically, so she pulled them out of public school and sat them down in front of Georgia Public Television. They then started testing in the 19th percentile. Not a stellar improvement, mind you, but a marked improvement nonetheless.
My husband once spent about six months working with a local man in his forties who had graduated from Dougherty County public schools and could not read to save his life. When their lessons stopped, the guy was showing off his newfound literacy every chance he got to which was great–but he had been robbed of YEARS of reading, by the people responsible for “educating” him.
To hell with public schools.
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“For the low price of less than a tank of gas a year, we fund HSLDA, as a group effort. (OK, I have a 36 gallon tank, but still.)”
Super generous! ~:D
Here in the Demented Dominion diesel is $2.53 Snowbucks per liter. (That’s a quart, for the metrically challenged.) 36 US gallons is 136 liters, which today is $345.
Gas is “only” $1.84 per quart, so you’re going to be $250 to tank up.
Just so Americans understand what we’re dealing with here, 30% to 40% of that price is tax.
This does not include all the hidden taxes that are levied on the oil as it makes it’s way out of the ground, through the refining and shipping, and makes it to the gas station. That’s 30% to 40% levied at the pump.
#
To the subject of home schooling, both of mine were home schooled because Ontario public schools and high schools are A) scholastically questionable [Marxist] and B) not really all that safe, honestly.
Do not believe them when they say ‘the child needs socializiation’ because it is a self-serving lie. They don’t need that. What they do need is to be protected from some of the feral psychopath kids and wild-eyed fruitbat teachers. Particularly in the lower grades, but one of my kids was home for all of high school because the other brats came after her.
The school principal, in an official meeting, warned us that if we showed her the bullying messages (which were amazing in scope and vocabulary honestly) the police would become involved. She patiently explained that she knew what was going on and how bad it was, it had been going on for years, she had no ability to do anything about it, and if the cops got involved people would be going to jail. Which was bad, because they’d be back out again and back in school the same year. Like in a month or so.
This is rural Ontario by the way. Farm country/small town. Not Toronto, where the kids f-ing shoot each other in the stairwells when they’re not shooting up in the stairwells.
So yeah. Home schooling rocks. One’s an engineer, the other’s in art school.
Don’t send your kid to art school, btw. But that’s a different conversation.
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Phantom Phuel Update, it develops that after a hearty AI-slop search, the (roughly) total tax on gasoline including everything is about 43% to 45% based on current prices.
However the tax on diesel fuel is only ~22% at current prices, for a variety of reasons.
So while diesel is more expensive, less of my money is being pillaged by the various levels of government, which I consider a good thing. >:D
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Punish the innocent and reward the guilty. That’s a familiar refrain. 😡
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I was pretty shocked at the time, to be honest. Both by the -filthy- harassment my kid was getting, and by the “don’t make me go there” reaction from the school officials.
Like, are you kidding me? You can’t take little Johnny and little Jimmy aside for a stern talking to, maybe a nice week of suspension for being bad? Nope. Can’t do it. Gotta call the cops. If it isn’t -criminal- the cops won’t do anything, and if it is criminal then… well really they still won’t do much of anything, but you could end up getting your house vandalized and your kid beat up -more-. If you’re lucky that’s all that might happen.
I said “okay then,” and it was all home schooling from then on. What a fabulous waste of tax dollars.
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Heh. Want to vandalize my house? Don’t step inside unless you want to be carried out in a body bag. Try vandalizing the outside, and you’ll be 911 videoed up to the point you pose a real threat to life and limb (like trying to burn the place down, or shooting at the house), when the body bag option will be exercised.
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I didn’t “send” my oldest to art school. He wanted to go, and my wife encouraged him to do so. He failed out on his second year. Got a part-time job. Went to the nearby community college to repair his GPA and actually LEARN some basics he needed badly, went back to the art school and successfully graduated. HE works as a store manager, collectables appraiser, and an event organizer; not getting rich, but paying the bills enough to be getting married next month. CHEER!
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We were on the leading edge of the homeschool ‘movement,’ probably along with Holly’s parents (started homeschooling in 1983, I think), partly because I’d been briefly homeschooled as a child (growing up on a homestead in Alaska, where, at six years old, I would have had to walk four miles to get to the nearest school bus stop – in temperatures down to 50 below; it got colder, but they couldn’t keep the buses running, so closed the school at 50 below – with a pack of wolves in the area). So I knew homeschooling was possible, because we’d done it. And I didn’t like what I was seeing in school, especially by the time I graduated from high school with both of my younger brothers already having dropped out because they were bored and wanted something real to do. I didn’t become a Christian until the summer after I graduated, so that wasn’t a huge factor initially, but it became one as I became more aware of the public school attitude towards Christianity.
Now? If I had school-age children currently? Over my dead body would they attend public schools. Having taught in a private Christian school (a good one, using good-quality curriculum materials), I’d be very reluctant to even have them in one of those. There is something functionally wrong with putting young children into a classroom setting, in groups of many children the same age. That’s not how human young were meant to be raised, and it isn’t good for them, or for their families, or for their communities, or for our country. It’s also not good for the health of our churches, because the public school education is the primary reason so many young people leave the churches they grew up in (never mind the bad doctrine being taught in many churches – that’s a whole ‘nother rant).
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I watch a lot of K and C dramas. The socialization of which they speak is shown there. Whatever group you are with in school you are ‘friend’ with forever. Same with work. Everyone meddles in everyones business all the time. Parents run their 30 something kids as of they are children and the kids usually take it.
Plots that would vanish with phrases like MYOB and butt out go on for 12 episodes as they look for a solution where everyone is happy.
That is the socialization they speak of
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“Parents run their 30 something kids as of they are children and the kids usually take it.”
This is why Japan and Korea both have a marriage/demographic crisis. “The nail which sticks up will be hammered down.”
It’s hard to make that work if the kids haven’t been through thirteen years of relentless indoctrination since are 5. But even if they have, and even if the indoctrination holds, you can’t -make- them date, marry and have kids.
This is also why so much K-Drama is romance stuff. It’s propaganda to get the young people interested in each other again.
Because after all that school indoctrination and the pressure to get a job/get ahead, an awful lot of them just don’t care. Work, drink after work, go home late, puke, get up and do it all again tomorrow. Get married? Why, so they can lose their drinking money to a spouse? Lose their tiny amount of free time to raising children? Hell naw.
And that’s why there’s no little kids in Korea or Japan.
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How much of that is real, and how much of that is genre?
Yes, things are different in other countries. But it isn’t necessarily the same as what you see on-screen.
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Xi invited 100,000 US students to study in China where they would likely end up less pro Chinese than they get studying at US universities. The troll of the night though was the US Army Choir played Do You Hear the People Sing from Les Miserables. The tune is banned in China because it was used in the Hong Kong protests. Thet didn’t actually sing the song, mores the pity, but they did sing One Day More, which is the song sung right before the student revolutionaries rise.
I’m no fan of Les Mis, nor of Hugo as it happens, and certainly not French republicans, but this is trolling of the highest order. Some of the China shill press are saying this is ignorance, but I think it’s genius. TRump understands these things.
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Ranks right up there with serving bacon and beer for Ramadan. 🤣
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And the White House didn’t serve beef. Xi didn’t even get a good steak while he was here.
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She still thanks me periodically for teaching her logic in the 8th grade. Thank you Ms Holly!
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I’ve gotten double takes when people ask me about home schooling, and I say it’s great, and for some families better than private or public schools. Apparently teachers are not supposed to say things like that. If you can do it, and especially if there is a good home schooling support network in your area? Go for it! Whatever works best for the student, that’s what should be selected, in my opinion.
Yes, I’m Odd.
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It is so telling when they even say that the “primary purpose of schools is socialization, not education!” Yeah right. If that were the case, schools wouldn’t be doing things like separating kids from friends during class time to “limit talking” and they would allow more mixing across age boundaries.
But even if it was for socialization, my schools certainly did a piss-poor job of it, considering that much of my social anxiety can easily be traced back to bullying and verbal abuse that I received in public schools. From students and teachers alike! I’m still chipping away at that problem, thirteen years after finishing high school, and expect it will never go away completely.
Between that and poor academics at most schools nowadays, I absolutely intend to homeschool. I know I’m a good teacher; sending my kids to someone else is a dice roll with badly weighted odds.
And speaking of odds (or Odds), considering my own contributions and that of the man I chose to have children with, I figure there’s a near-certain guarantee that my kids will have the sorts of hyper-intelligent and inquisitive personalities that so many teachers simply don’t know what to do with.
But that’s more or less where we’re at. Oldest is still only two, so we have a few more years to go, but I think I’ll be up to it when we do get to schooling age. I am very grateful for the work put in by those before me to not only improve the laws, but also access to curricula and resources to make my job easier. Looking forward to it when we do get there!
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‘Schooling age’ is Yet Another construct of the Government-(mal)Education Establishment. Kids are ready to learn when they’re ready to learn and that age varies. Can’t say a lot about girls, but for the boys: do they build things? Make things? I’d encourage that. Work in some arithmetic/math by getting them to think about ‘How many parts do I need to build $PROJECT? How much space will it take up when finished?’ That sort of thing. Link learning to practical things they care about and they’ll be much more motivated.
Oh, if girls want to build things, encourage them too. 😁 Builders and makers got us where we are today. Lawyers and marketers mostly held us back.
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Well, yes, but he’s definitely not ready for school at age 2 and I kept to broad terms because was trying to not have my comment balloon even further! The best time to start formal schooling varies by child, and that’s another reason homeschool appeals to me. Even then, I love learn-through-play for younger ages. I don’t know yet when we’ll start transitioning him over to more structured lessons, because it’s too early to tell what’s right for him.
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A warning: I knew a home-schooling mother who found that the younger child refused to be shut out of the game when her mother started to teach the older structured lessons.
The mother ended up drilling her on colors and shapes and the like. To keep it age-appropriate, but it had to be a lesson.
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This post is bait for me, because I would salt the earth the public schools sit on if I could. For me it was a 12 year prison sentence, with no time off for good behavior, and my lawyers were in cahoots with the warden.
I never managed to convince my parents that schools weren’t what they remembered from the 40s, even when I came home with a concussion after being backhanded into a wall.(I didn’t throw hands first or last but at least i got a lick in.)
Public school is an existential threat to western civilization.
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The recent story from the 1695 Project chick after she purposely abandoned her daughter to even worse than average bad NYC public schools is illustrative. Her effectively racist theory was basically that poor minority parents are unable to exert pressure on their low income schools to make them improve as wealthier parents can on their wealthier public schools, so only the rich area schools ever improve. Since she was rillysmart unlike those dumb po minority folks she could be a proper Karen nuisance to the poor school to which she exiled her daughter and make it improve for everyone.
Yeah, that somehow didn’t work. The union school employees just ignored her, and her daughter’s education suffered from the base neglect of publicly funded daycare masquerading as education.
But even upper tier selective-admission public schools fall behind the private schools in test results. And kids from both regularly get outperformed by homeschooled kids.
Note the correlation between union teachers and lower scores. Correlation is not causation. Your mileage may vary. Objects in mirror are closer than they appear. Do not eat desiccant packet.
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I saw a guy who insisted that homeschooled kids can’t do math, and had links to a study to support his argument… which when you actually read it, showed homeschooled kids as outperforming students in all other types of schools other than the category that includes elite prep schools. The “math gap” that they were talking about? Homeschooled kids didn’t improve as much in math as they did in other subjects, especially language skills.
So, homeschooled kids still averaged better in all subjects than public school kids, and better than most private school kids.
And that was apparently his smoking gun!
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Or, they didn’t ‘improve as much’ because they were already so far ahead they were running up against the limits of the tests.
80% of children in government schools are failing because the schools are failing them. Most of the money we dump down that rat-hole is spent on overpaid bureaucratic deadwood.
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I’m seeing more and more bits about Crusader regalia and symbols being adopted by those in attendance at British protests.
1.) My understanding is that Christianity has been fading there (and in most other places in Europe). Does this signify a renewed interest in Christianity? Or is it merely an adoption of the symbols (likely because the government doesn’t like them)?
2.) If it does represent a renewed interest in Christianity, then where is that interest being directed? The Church of England is the official church there. But the CoE’s leadership is inimical to the protestors. It’s not likely that the protestors would voluntarily join themselves to the CoE without a nearly complete replacement of the church’s leadership. Assuming that view is accurate and there’s no such change, where would the protestors go, instead?
Just some things to ponder on.
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Note, there were/are other Christian groups in England.
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Yes, and that’s the case pretty much everywhere that there’s a Christian population. But the CoE is the proverbial 800 pound gorilla there. I would imagine that vast majority of the people protesting there who had a church affiliation (even if it’s largely lapsed) are members of the CoE.
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What is now the Global Methodist Church has been sending missionaries to Britain for a while. The Methodist Movement started in the mid-1700s as an offshoot of the C of E, so it is somewhat comfortable to people familiar with that branch. The Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox have also been pretty successful on a small scale.
I suspect the symbols are a combination of “irk the Establishment” and people who truly view the conflict as one of Christianity and the Western Tradition vs. other religions (since Communism is a religion, as is Islamism, and some forms of the Green movement have become religions.)
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