I think it’s more for dramatic effect than anything else. Those fundies with the money to
afford it are already in Christian schools or homeschooling. The rest of them (who don’t know about this guy, let alone follow them) are too poor to refuse free school, especially in this economy.

I suspect the whole thing is going to take a hit though. It takes money to keep paying tuition for private school and to homeschool and if the money is needed just to keep a roof over your head, then the kids will just have to go back into the heathen public school or rely on weekend/holiday tutoring instead.

“Bible Teacher, Army Reserve Chaplain, and Campaign Consultant.”

My old job! h/t Bill Maher.

My experience in public schools would have been so much better without my fundamentalist classmates.  Nobody leaving fliers on my car advocating school prayer.  Nobody whining about evolution in biology class or what books we were reading in English.  I’d like to think that there would have been less sexism, slut shaming, and homophobia, too, but those are pretty ubiquitous in our culture.

And yet, people get upset with atheists for saying religion is a form of child abuse.

Carol, homeschooling can be pretty inexpensive when compared to the part-time jobs that can be had in between taking children to school/childcare, the school/childcare, and the hassle of working a job as an employee who can’t commit to the regular work schedule because school schedules are arbitrary and damn near capricious.  It was much less of a hassle when my children were little, especially since we could barely afford the one car.  It was a compromise, but I don’t think homeschooling is necessarily just for those with money.  My family did it because of a lack, not a surplus, of money.  We also dislike public schools, not for the godlessness (which I consider a good thing,) but for the incredible waste of time so much of it is.  But you are right in saying that for most people, public schools are too much of a good thing to pass on, no matter how many flaws the Christers as well as the people like me find in them. 

As for the video: oh boy, what a fantastic load of Godwinian trash.  Imagery of civil rights, Nazis, Columbine, and good Christian mothers (not fathers) teaching good Christian values.  I guess if that’s all that’s out there in the world, I’ll be grateful I’m never having more children.  No, that’s not it, I’ll be grateful I’m not a nutcase with fears of some sort of Reactionary Conspiratorial Kid-oriented Secular Humanist Agenda Worldwide (RiCKSHAW, that thing those commies in Vietnam and China ride around in while throwing baptised babies atop mounds of burning Bibles.)

Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?

PRIUS: Progressive Reactionary Invader of the United States

I’m a little into raw foods, so I prefer to smoke the babies above the flames, cut the meat into strips, and serve with asparagus spears and a pinch of sea salt.  Goes well with either kombucha or a gentle syrah.

Jon, it may be cheaper in one sense that at least you aren’t paying the costs of daycare and transportation. But on the other hand, at least the system is paying for the books, the library, and a teacher to spend 8 hours a day with them. With homeschool, you have to pay the cost of all that, not to mention the opportunity cost of a job you can’t take fulltime. You also have to really have two incomes, one more stable than yours to make it work without risking the house.

Guys like Moore have no idea what it takes to keep a roof over your head when you are making less than $10 an hour and have kids, and live somewhere where decent housing can be hard to come by. The public school at least doesn’t charge tuition, and most systems try to provide transportation and free meals if needed. 

This reality has frustrated notions of a “Christian Nation” within a nation for years, where their children are hermetically sealed from any but Dominionist nonsense in preparation for the day when they will take over America and make it “godly” in their Southern Borderer image. (Look it up).

That’s OK.  The more of them that opt out of public schools, the fewer I have to deal with in my freshman intro to anthropology classes.  If I never hear “this stuff is really hard for me because I don’t believe in evolution” again, I will be a very happy man.

Oh, and I forgot.  If all the fundies leave the public schools, then they can go back to teaching evolution and my students will not be so freaking ignorant about biology and evolution.

The irony is that the very economics Moore also supports through the Republican Party undermines the very thing that could make his notion even modestly viable: a secure, well paying job that only takes 40 hours and can support a family on one income.  Without unions to enforce wage standards, who can afford to devote the time it takes to homeschool unless they are so wealthy that they might as well send the kids to boarding school?

I’m not a fan of American public schooling for different reasons, but I do think the situation would be a lot better without religious fantasist parents and students disrupting the efforts of reality-based teachers and students.

As long as they’re not asking for state funding for their supernatural foolishness or credibility amongst real academics, they’re welcome to their ignorance.

Goes well with either kombucha or a gentle syrah.

I prefer them a bit younger - fetuses, actually - with fava beans and a fine Chianti.

I don’t think homeschooling is for the majority.  Don’t believe it, don’t think it would be good, and I’d never widely advocate homeschooling to those not interested.  I was only saying it can actually make more sense than working, placing children in daycare, having an irregular work schedule, needing another vehicle, and that whole series of choices that meet various needs and wants.  My ex-wife really enjoyed it (she’s trying to figure out how to homeschool them for high school,) it cut down on our financial and other stress at a time we were living on debt (you don’t need a library at home if there’s a public one,) and the children are still better off for the experience.  But is it for everyone?  Hell, no.

The Republican/Christian nexus that promotes homeschooling (and private schools) works under a supposition that men earn money, women serve the (or “his”) children, and all is then right with the world.  That it can be unaffordable, unsatisfying, and that some parents can’t teach just doesn’t enter into their thinking, but that can be said of so many things when discussing rightwing minds.

Homeschooling can be dismissed as unworkable by many and for many reasons, but the legions of left-wing, thrifty, eco-centered, secularist, hippie, anti-authoritarian homeschoolers won’t stand by while it’s dismissed as expensive and Christianist.  It can be those things, but that’s only one part of the homeschooler population.

Carol - They’re expecting the rest of us to subsidize this crap, via school vouchers.

And I agree with Gracchus—as long as they do it on their own dime, fine. (If they weren’t disruptive, I wouldn’t even object to having home-schooled kids come to public school for subjects or resources their parents realize they can’t provide [math, say, or phys ed]; the home-schooled kids would at least get a chance to be around other kids.)

“Homeschooling can be dismissed as unworkable by many and for many reasons, but the legions of left-wing, thrifty, eco-centered, secularist, hippie, anti-authoritarian homeschoolers won’t stand by while it’s dismissed as expensive and Christianist.  It can be those things, but that’s only one part of the homeschooler population.”

I’m one of these, or at least will be. We’re planning on homeschooling because, amongst other issues, public school is far too close minded and isolationist. Quite the opposite of the fundie hide your children from all evil influences model of homeschooling.

And Carol, as jon says homeschooling doesn’t have to be that expensive. We’re pretty solidly middle class and will be able to easily afford it, but there’s no way in hell we could afford private school or your typical idea of boarding school (the husbandman did do boarding school for high school, but it was one of those public magnet schools where they charged a grand total of $1300/year for tuition, room, and board). We also live in a smaller city/large town with excellent public transportation, a wonderful public library (and a less wonderful one), a large homeschool community both secular and religious, and rather affordable housing, etc. Heck, most of the homeschoolers I know are significantly poorer than us, and they’re doing it.

It’s not something that would by any means work for every family, but it’s really nice for some.

One other thing about homeschooling: some children will do well under any circumstances, some will not.  The public school environment is not a suitable place for all children, if you ask me.  Hell, all the wasted time in and between class is what I hated the most about my own schooling.  And during that wasted time is when bored children do the awful things most of us remember about school.  I was offended and troubled by very little that was taught in school, but much of what was learned was pretty awful stuff.  “Socialization” is the worst reason to support public schooling.  The isolation and false community of children is not productive in the creation of adults who deal with adults on a daily basis.

End rant.

Evangelicals aren’t nearly as organized as the Catholics. The Catholics can pull it off because they have a church in pretty much every city in every state, members all over the place who pretty much keep in line at all times, etc. Most of those mega-churches don’t even have a denomination (thus, no oversight), so they don’t have any way of organizing outside of their own church, which means no system.

The larger ones will build their own school, but unless you have a membership in the 10s of 1000s you can’t really afford to keep a school open and populated. Thus, homeschool.

The thing that blows my mind is that these psycho-conservative churches aren’t interested in banding together in any meaningful way, and half the time if they DO have a denomination they do their best to hide it. I grew up in Naperville, IL, home of the 5th largest Assembly of God church in the country; of course I didn’t figure out it was AoG until I’d moved away for 5 years and that fact came up in a news story (Aurora PP, for the record). Poked the website, and it took 3+ pages in before I saw any link to the AoG, and they even buried that on the bottom of the page.

Same goes for the AoG church where I live now. It used to have a totally generic name, and now it’s simply called “name of town Assembly.” The one church in town that’s trying it’s best to become a mega-church is totally non-denominational, at least to my knowledge. It may have one hiding in their anyways, like the one in Naperville.

Homeschooling can be dismissed as unworkable by many and for many reasons, but the legions of left-wing, thrifty, eco-centered, secularist, hippie, anti-authoritarian homeschoolers won’t stand by while it’s dismissed as expensive and Christianist.  It can be those things, but that’s only one part of the homeschooler population.

One common complaint I hear from liberal and progressive friends considering homeschooling is that most curricula packages on the market have a definite Xtian fantasist bent.

I’d love to be able to provide them with some secular humanist and reality-based alternatives, so any suggestions would be appreciated.

I’m supposed to be teaching Marxism?  Crap, I better brush up!

I run into two types of homeschooled kids as a teacher.  The first group was homeschooled because of they were highly intelligent and creative, and needed an accelerated program that the public school system couldn’t afford.  They are later put back into public school for socialization (though re-entering public school during middle school years is certainly a trial by fire).  They usually socialize just fine. These students are usually scary-smart by the time I see them.  In one case, I advocated that the student be taken out of my class and enrolled in online high school classes because there was nothing new he would learn in my class.  In fact, his understanding of physics exceeded my own (luckily, I wasn’t teaching physics).

The other type of student is usually the child of fundamentalist Christians (odd that Muslims rarely worry about how my science class will ruin their child’s theological development).  Again, these students are usually returned to public school for socializing, but usually they don’t.  They have immense problems learning in my science class.  I usually offer these students the following deal: you have to learn the theories and understand them.  What you believe is up to you.  I had one blow up in my class about a discussion of human activities on local ecosystems, and she was removed from school the next day.

Look, stop talking about leaving public schools and get the fuck out.  And don’t let the door hit your ass…

Close to child abuse, though.

I wonder when we’ll see the first home schooler to sue their parents and/or their church for screwing up their education?

My experience in public schools would have been so much better without my fundamentalist classmates.  Nobody leaving fliers on my car advocating school prayer.  Nobody whining about evolution in biology class or what books we were reading in English.

Ah. The “Left Alone” scenario.

Gracchus, I’d avoid packaged curricula altogether.  Just stick to reading about all sorts of things, learning about all sorts of things, learn relevant math (cooking is a great way to learn about time, fractions, portions, and other concepts without relying on a mathbook, not to mention the math opportunities encountered while shopping) and all the history and social studies things they’ll need.  Curricula are like textbooks: handy, but filled with compromises.  I’d choose three or four nonfiction books over one textbook any day of the week, even those not ending with Y.

But if you feel you must have a curriculum (and some jurisdictions insist that homeschoolers follow one,) try looking into christopherushomeschool.org for a Steiner/Waldorf-inspired program*.  Other programs can easily be modeled on the What Your First Grader Should Know series of books, you can probably find some curricula on eBay or Amazon, and hopefully you won’t get so bogged down by what (insert name of PhD/maestro/yogi/whatever here) says that you can’t trust your own instincts as a parent/teacher.

*Not for everyone: some say it’s too basic, others too based on religion, while I found it to be stodgy but effective.

“(odd that Muslims rarely worry about how my science class will ruin their child’s theological development).  “

Don’t worry if Turkey is any indication the fundies will infect the Muslims over here in a few years time like they did in Turkey.  Harun Yahya is something you should google to learn more about how the American Intelligent Design movement and other anti-evolution groups got involved with Muslim Creationists. Of course Al-Qaeda also ties into this with a lot of the Muslim Creationists supporting Osama Bin Laden who hates Darwin and evolution.

These people give home-schooling a bad name.  Most of my (numerous) kids were home-schooled at least in part, and those who weren’t still got a lot of their eduction at home, as did most of the well-educated people I know.

I used to head a service for home-schoolers who wanted advice on curriculum and activities of a secular sort;  I assume there still are such services, although I don’t not know where to look for them now.

Just a word about “socialization”:  a conventional school, public or private, is no place to look to for “socialization.”  Home-schooled kids typically interact with people of all ages, in all sorts of places, and become comfortable conversing with anyone they may meet.  They learn to ask for information in person or over the phone with a confidence not usually shown by conventionally educated children, and their parents are diligent in searching out social opportunities for them.  The stereotype of the family of kids (ages, say, 6,8,10) and their mother huddling in a room in their house learning geography from the Bible represents a very small minority of home-schooling families.

Catholics have a whole school system, often praised as superior to their local public systems.  They don’t go pouting about it: they created it and support it.

It’s worth noting that, here in Eugene, OR, the local Catholic elementary is definitely the most diverse school in the city. In the whitest place I’ve ever lived, that’s something for me to consider for my son.

On the one hand, my own public schooling would have been better with the fundamentalist bullies. On the other hand, if even one of those kids gets exposed to ideas that make him or her get away from their parents’ beliefs, it’s probably worth it.

Gracchus, I agree to not go with a packaged curriculum. My plan is to take some ideas from classical education as shown in The Well-Trained Mind (kinda stodgy, but I think has some merit), work in my own ideas tailored to what the kids need at the time, and at higher levels if they don’t wind up in school work through Clonlara.

Most secular homeschoolers I know don’t use a curriculum but put it together either piecemeal or do unschooling to some extent. It’s typically the fundies who want the curriculum so they can force the approved program down their children’s throats.

I think Molly in NYC is right that fundy homeschooling means more pressure for vouchers and things like them.. Just see Pennsylvania and the “cyber charter schools” movement, where the homeschoolers essentially get all their costs picked up by the state, at a tidy profit to the curriculum providers.

Ashley, I spent some time in Naperville as a kid, and I got targeted as a potential convert to that very church by a jr. high school friend and her family. Had no idea until now that it was AoG, but that makes sense in retrospect. And confirms that I had reason to be terribly uncomfortable there.

They really don’t want to leave at all.  What they really want is for the schools to cater exclusively to them.

Or, failing that, for the government to hand over a wad of cash (aka “vouchers”) that they can use in unaccountable schools. And just how many of those schools, especially in the Deep South, do you think will have upward of 95% white enrollment?

odd that Muslims rarely worry about how my science class will ruin their child’s theological development

Traditionally, in Islam, the study of science and medicine is seen as a way of serving God.

It wouldn’t surprise me if the worst offenders (Taliban & Co.) run screaming from real science, but I would think that any moderate Muslim should have no problem with evolution.

“Look, stop talking about leaving public schools and get the fuck out.  And don’t let the door hit your ass…”

Just as long as the taxpayer money goes with them, you worthless pos. Unlike Amanda, some of us actually own property, and I would like to see that money directed toward a traditional education. That way, we would have more people of actual learning, instead of people like Pam, who only possess the pretense thereof.

“Carol - They’re expecting the rest of us to subsidize this crap, via school vouchers. “

There are way more of them than you, dumb ass.