April 17, 2007

U.S. evangelicals aim to influence European law
posted by HawthorneWingo 17 years ago
  • Yeee haw! Like thats going to work. Home schooling is in many cases in the UK a joke. Unless you live in the Hebrides(!) I've often come accross families whove gone "off grid" thinking they can educate "persistant school refusers" but infact they end up as confused as the kids when it comes to delivering educational content. Leave it to the [cracked, cynical, blistered, jaded] teachers. We know how to mind control best! grrrr.
  • Let them pray. It'll keep 'em from invading other countries.
  • Ah, sorry, guys. Best of luck with 'em. *sticks head back in bucket* *pulls head back out* This statement hits a nerve: Her parents say that her classmates would mock her faith, kneeling in front of her with their hands pressed together in prayer and saying, "Hail Mary." (Though the Busekroses are evangelical Christians, the students in heavily Roman Catholic Bavaria didn't appear to recognize the distinction.) When kids want to pick on other kids, they'll find a reason. The kid who was the most abusive about my weight in grade school was about 20 pounds heavier than me. The kids aren't picking on her because she's religious; they're picking on her because they feel like it. It's the abusive behavior that should be addressed, not the particular theme about which they've chosen to behave that way. Yeah, it's hard on the victims, but I fail to see how segregation is the answer, as much as I would have found comfort in it myself as a child. I spent a couple of years in a Baptist parochial school, and we had more than our fair share of messed-up kids. Not teaching kids how to get along in the outside world doesn't do them any favors. Unless, as is starting to seem possible, the evangelicals succeed in taking over Western society and remaking it in their own image. *Digs battered copy of The Handmaid's Tale out of the closet, just in case* *sticks head back in bucket*
  • Grrrrrr. Can I hit 'em with a flounder? Please? Pleeeeeze?
  • In Denmark home schooling is legal, but the children are required to submit to mandatory and government stipulated tests and regulations to insure that the education they get is on par with that offered by the public schools. That, of course, makes no guarantie that the poor little brats are not crammed up to their little gullets with religious nonsense. Although most danes ( I believe around 89%) are members of the protestant State Church, most of them are what is jokingly referred to as "Four-wheel Christians", since they only see the inside of a church when they are baptized, when they are married and when they are dead! Religion is definitely not a big issue here, and most people do not bother with it at all. I do believe that the American Evangelical Right will find very infertile soil for their religious seeds in Denmark. Or else we will get BlueHorse to hit them with his flounder! Greybeard
  • Yaybeard!
  • Darn it, if you lived in Belgium we could make all sorts of plays on "flounders" and "Flanders."
  • In flounders fields the blowfish pop...
  • Ah Denmark, happiest nation in the world (and somewhat confused at the gender of BlueHorses). Nice to see you greybeard. As to the thing in Germany, much to dislike on both sides. These quotes stood out to me though:
    "We realized that if we didn't try to mold precedents abroad, they could come back to hurt us, and that the American legal system as we know might change," says Benjamin Bull, chief counsel for the ADF. ... Mr. Thornton, IHRG's president, has been meeting regularly with Melissa's parents and other German home-schooling families since the organization was founded in 2004. Often, he says, he encourages them to invite confrontation so that he can draw media attention to their cases.
    Even allowing for the journo's framing, at least the state bureaucracy is framing its arguments around the interests of the child.
  • Money and materials from the U.S. have been supporting the anti-choice/pro-life groups in Ireland for decades. I'm sorry that this girl has been taken from her parents, but can't they find a school that is more to their liking religious-education-wise? I live in Flanders, on the French side. Good beer country.
  • I love a good beer country! I am not what you'd call a spiritual man BUT it seems to me that those who are consistently run afoul when they attempt to take that sprituality out of the realm of the purely theological and begin inserting it into areas (science, education, politics, economics) for which theology is particularly unsuited. One can take two tacks here - the ancient call to render unto Caesar what is Caesar/God what is God's (Matthew 22:21) and the example of the Renaissance scientists, who were able to reconcile the spirital with the scientific under the philosophy that efforts to uncover the precepts of the latter were at their heart efforts to determine the nature of God's creation. At the same time, taking a 15-year-old from her parents for their refusal to enroll her in state school and lodge her in a psychiatric insitution seems, er, excessive. And potentially damaging to the girl.
  • a home-schooled girl was taken from her parents and put in psychiatric ward. I'm gonna go out on a limb here - gonna go a step farther and say yes, that's gonna damage the girl. Fortunately, years of drinking heavily will somewhat dull those effects. Plus I think they make a pill for that now. Hey greybeard!
  • Yeah, it's too bad that teaching her religion at home and in the church isn't an option. Or something radical like explaining to her that not everything she encounters in school is going to agree with their religion, but it's still worthwhile to know it even if they don't believe in it. For instance, I've had my share of conversations with people who don't believe in evolution. Most of them seem to have not had a clear grasp of the theory or of how it was arrived at, leading me to believe that they hadn't been taught about it in school. I'm gonna go out on another limb and guess that the girl isn't being placed in a psychiatric ward SOLELY because the authorities don;t want her homeschooled, but that she is having emotional problems (perhaps as a direct result of the parent's conflict with the school, or perhaps only complicating it) that led the authorities to believe she needs more care than she can get at home.
  • At the same time, taking a 15-year-old from her parents for their refusal to enroll her in state school and lodge her in a psychiatric insitution seems, er, excessive. And potentially damaging to the girl. Absolutely. Most homeschoolers stunt their kids' intellectual growth, but taking the kid away and institutionalizing her is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
  • I was under the impression that homeschooling stunted social growth more than intellectual growth, as seen in the overrepresentation of homeschoolers in spelling bees, science fairs, etc. I have no problem with the concept of homeschooling itself, so long as educational milestones get met.
  • Depends on who's doing the homeschooling. A huge chunk of US homeschoolers are evangelicals who don't want their kids getting a secular education with sex ed and evolution and all that stuff. The vast majority of these, so I understand it, aren't particularly qualified to be teachers. So their kids suffer. I've known one homeschooled kid who was legitimately well-educated, but both of his parents had doctorates. The rest I've known (just a handful) lacked pretty basic reasoning, math and language skills. hillbillyswamp would be far more qualified than I to address this issue, though. She's covered a lot of homeschooling-related stories.
  • It all comes down to the power of the state in regulating how parents raise their children. Why shouldn't evangelicals raise little evangelicals?
  • Nobody's saying they shouldn't. But what some evangelicals don't seem to get is that if they're doing their job as parents right, little evangelicals can be educated alongside, and to the same intellectual standards as, little non-evangelicals without becoming little non-evangelicals themselves. A lot of the kids we deal with throuh our outreach program are homeschoolers, and this area in general seems to have a lot of them. The ones we see tend to be more academically advanced than their public-schooled peers, and have a college-educated parent doing the teaching. The trouble is, as others have pointed out, that it's a mixed bag and hard to regulate.
  • ...don't want their kids getting a secular education with sex ed and evolution and all that stuff. Heaven forbid they should know what's going on in the rest of the world. I don't believe the bible, but the background is necessary for understanding history and literature in Western civilization. Shouldn't they know what they're fighting against? And you're right, MCT. Most creationists haven't a clue what evolution is, let alone how to teach it. For that matter, neither does the average secular joe--it's a difficult thing to grasp completely. As far as this girl is concerned, I'm thinking we don't know the full story. As reported, it appears that it's overkill by the government. But as TUM points out, she could be having developmental or emotional problems that the parents refuse to address. Of course, we can trust the news to be complete and fair in all its reporting.
  • Heaven forbid they should know what's going on in the rest of the world. I don't believe the bible, but the background is necessary for understanding history and literature in Western civilization. Shouldn't they know what they're fighting against? I agree, but I also believe that parents should have the right to choose their children's education, to an extent. If the fundies took over tomorrow and managed to ban the teaching of evolution in the classroom, I'd seriously consider homeschooling my kids as well.
  • At the same time, taking a 15-year-old from her parents for their refusal to enroll her in state school and lodge her in a psychiatric insitution seems, er, excessive. And potentially damaging to the girl. Well, yeah, but: A psychological evaluation that the office ordered said Melissa was suffering from emotional problems, including "school phobia," and had to be removed from her home for own well-being. We don't know what else her parents were doing to her apart from the homeschooling thing. They could have Biblical ideas about corporal punishment as well. We don't know the whole story, but Germany is a fairly conventional, conservative country and it's a fair bet that something fairly extreme must have been going on for the court to order this.
  • Please ask hillbillyswamp to comment if she's so inclined. My impressions of homeschooling in the US are mostly based around evangelical and fundamentalist Christians. In New Zealand homeschooling is gaining popularity (I'm not sure why, I'm just told it is) but the Education Review Office has to license the parent teacher and review their curriculum annually to ensure it fits in the national curriculum. I know a NZ family that's just moved to Austin and they plan to homeschool. Kids start school here at five and so their four-year-old daughter will miss a year of schooling, plus her birthday is in November so she won't be enrolled in an Austin school until two months before her 7th birthday (the only intake is apparently in September). Coincidentally, they are Christian and old-fashioned and both parents grew up in the backwoods, but both have degrees.
  • Please ask hillbillyswamp to comment if she's so inclined. Done. My impressions of homeschooling in the US are mostly based around evangelical and fundamentalist Christians. There is a contingent of genuinely bright parents who simply have the time to invest and feel they can do a better job, and frankly, they can. However, my reading of hillbillyswamp's characterization is that they comprise a small minority in the US. In New Zealand homeschooling is gaining popularity (I'm not sure why, I'm just told it is) but the Education Review Office has to license the parent teacher and review their curriculum annually to ensure it fits in the national curriculum. There's oversight in the US as well, but I don't think it goes as far as licensing parent teachers or scrutinizing curricula. Wouldn't surprise me to learn that it's not much more than standardized tests for the kids. Again, I'll have to defer to hs on this -- it almost certainly varies from state to state. I like the sound of the Kiwi plan.
  • I'll agree that homeschoolers tend to be prompted by religious fervor, but an equal, perhaps even greater, impetus is the poor performance of public school districts. Google "St. Louis School Board" for a truly egregious example. If public schools were meeting the needs of poorer and/or urban students with any sort of competence, I think the the homeschooling effort you really be truncated.
  • I have to disagree with you on that, Fes. From my experience, the vast majority of parents who want their kids out of public schools for purely educational reasons and would have the resources to home-school (meaning a parent who can stay at home) simply move to the suburbs or pay for private school. If nothing else, homeschooling is an enormous time commitment -- at least if you're going to try to do it right. I've met two kinds of homeschooling families over the years -- the evangelicals, who homeschool because they want absolute control over their children's environment, and the hippie-types (for lack of a better descriptor), who kind of go the other way and want their kids to have more freedom than traditional schools allow. Google "unschooling" for an extreme example of what I'm talking about. The homeschooled kids in spelling bees and that sort of thing are an anomaly, I think. And they're also an example of what probably most kids could do if they were able to structure their education any way they want to -- there's nothing to prevent a homeschooled kid from spending seven hours a day studying spelling words, for example. In general, though, especially among the evangelical community, from what I've observed they're much less concerned with intellectual development than with limiting what their children are exposed to. They tend to teach from evangelical curricular systems that are laughably unobjective, so the kids never learn the truth about evidence supporting evolution, or what the Constitution actually says about church and state, etc. And they only socialize with other evangelical kids. Laws in the U.S. vary widely state by state -- some keep a fairly tight rein and require standardized testing, and others have virtually no regulations at all. And of course the parents vary widely too -- some participate in co-ops, where parents who have advanced degrees in various subjects teach high-school level classes to all the kids in the co-op. That's at least better than having your high-school-diploma (or hell, even master's-degree-in-journalism) mom trying to teach you chemistry. But that's generally not going to be available to families who live in rural areas. That's a long rambly comment, sorry. Too sleepy this morning to arrange my thoughts more succinctly. :)
  • That's some nice commentin' there, h-swamp.
  • IIRC, I just found out today that my program is going to a homeschool association convention in the nearest large city, where we expect to reach 5,000 homeschooling parents. The parents we run across in this area (sort of a knot of college towns) are the hippie-types hillbillyswamp mantions (and it's a fairly accurate descriptor!) I don't think it's still open anymore, but the evangelicals in our area used to have the alternative of a small Baptist parochial school (went there myself for a few years when my parents got disgusted with the local PS). The teaching staff were made up of missionaries between gigs and preachers' wives.
  • 1.1 Million Homeschooled Students in the United States in 2003 More than 48 million children attend school in the U.S. The top reason is "can give child better education at home" with "Religious reasons" being second. However, respondents were allowed to choose multiple reasons. Which . . sorta diminishes the usefulness of the question. Guh.
  • I'm bothered by the whole concept of homeschooling. You may be qualified to teach your own kid about math, language, art, science, or whatever; but how the hell are they going to learn how to socialize with peers? How will they learn group collaboration skills? Any parent who believes they can "give child better education at home" isn't considering the entirety of the education process.
  • Exactly so. Where will they learn about wedgies, wet willies and hurtz donuts? From Mom? From Jesus? Not likely. Who's going to stuff them in a locker just before second period and leave them there until they wet their pants? Dad? Well, maybe Dad will.
  • Oy.
  • Thanks, Koko. "Better education" is also way too vague a term to be meaningful, I think. If I thought evolution and sex ed were sinful, I'd consider any education that didn't include them "better." Plus, it's sort of telling that over half of parents DIDN'T list "better education" as a reason to homeschool.
  • The top reason is "can give child better education at home" with "Religious reasons" being second. Well, yeah, those crappy secular schools won't give my extremely religious children the Christian education I want for them, so I'll give them a better one! "Better education" might as well be the same as "religious education" to parents of that mindset. Better education is supremely subjective and open to bazillions of interpretations.
  • Or what hillbillyswamp said, duh.
  • Well said, rocket88. I had a 10-year relationship (ended last summer) with a man who had been homeschooled. He has a lot of good qualities, but when it comes to socialising with others and emotional situations, relationships, etc., he was not at ease. (He was a 25-year-old who had never had a girlfriend, or sex, before I got my filthy hands on him.) I think a lot of the unease was because he missed out on the emotional boot camp that was school. I mean, who among us didn't spend their high school years miserable, angsty and falling in love with the wrong people? Would you want to wait until college to go through that? (Personal and anecdotal, I know, but still.)
  • Might the relationship have lasted if you'd at least washed your hands?
  • I'm bothered by the whole concept of homeschooling. You may be qualified to teach your own kid about math, language, art, science, or whatever; but how the hell are they going to learn how to socialize with peers? How will they learn group collaboration skills? Any parent who believes they can "give child better education at home" isn't considering the entirety of the education process. I'm gonna play resident lefty, here, and point out that our educational system is designed to produce good workers, not necessarily good thinkers or good creators. While it's true that socializing is a big part of school, homeschooling can quite possibly do a better job of teaching children, and it's quite possible that homeschooled children might get the social skills they need by taking part in a whole range of social situations (clubs, sports, camps, friendships with the other kids of the block, whatever). We have to be careful about "if it worked for me it's right for everyone" thinking.
  • Hmmm. maybe I can get that job as governess in the household o a handsome, brooding widower after all.
  • I'm gonna play resident lefty, here, and point out that our educational system is designed to produce good workers, not necessarily good thinkers or good creators. I might agree with that, but would also point out that if you have to pick one, that might be the one to pick. Functional skills are more useful to society than critical ones in a really bland, depressingly practical way of looking at it. Besides we have the radio and the movin' pictures to help us be thinkers. Those don't help so much with algebra and 17th century history.
  • vast majority of parents who want their kids out of public schools for purely educational reasons ... simply move to the suburbs or pay for private school You know, that's an excellent point. Here, upon reflection, that's exactly what's happened with SLPS. I stand corrected, thanks hillbillyswamp. I'm gonna play resident lefty, here, and point out that our educational system is designed to produce good workers, not necessarily good thinkers or good creators. I'd say that's more a university thing than a elementary or secondary school attribute. Elementary school is for the basics, secondary school separates the elohim from the morlocks, and the university segregates the elohim into silos of specialism. Few are the universities that emphasize a more classical liberal education (jesuit universities tend to a little more so than state schools).
  • Those don't help so much with algebra and 17th century history. Damn those Hollywood fat cats for not buying my screenplay about the life of John Wallis! It had lots of buggy chase scenes, too!
  • OK, I just filled out the contracts for the homeschool conference we're going to, and I noticed that the signature line reads "For the glory of the Lord." Guess that blows my theory!
  • Boy, if that's true, that was one stupid teacher.
  • Still... "Richardson said his granddaughter was traumatized by the movie and had to undergo psychological treatment and counseling. "
  • "I feel the lawsuit was necessary because of the warning I had already given them on the literature they were giving out to children to read. I told them it was against our faith." Any faith that can't hold up in the face of differing points of view is a bad faith. Or maybe it's just that the parents (or grandparents, as in this case) are too lazy to explain why the view point presented is adverse to their faith, and why their faith's views are the correct ones. Also, what MCT said.
  • A lesson taught by Dr Thomas Ice, Liberty University's senior theologian, focuses on headaches like Armageddon, salvation and the Second Coming. A man named Ice isn't concerned about global warming?