CREEPY COMMON CORE!

by Michele Malkin Last week, I reported on the federal government’s massive new student-tracking database, which was created as part of the nationalized Common Core standards scheme. The bad news: GOP “leadership” continues to ignore or, worse, enable this Nanny State racket. (Hello, Jeb Bush.) The good news: A grassroots revolt outside the Beltway bubble is swelling. Families are taking their children’s academic and privacy matters out of the snoopercrats’ grip and into their own hands. You can now download a Common Core opt-out form to submit to your school district, courtesy of the group Truth in American Education. Parents caught off guard by the stealthy tracking racket are now mobilizing across the country. According to the New York Daily News, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, echoing parents across New York City, blasted the tracking database in a letter to government officials: “I don’t want my kids’ privacy bought and sold like this.” This Wednesday, prompted by parental objections, Oklahoma state representatives unanimously passed House Bill 1989 — the Student Data Accessibility, Transparency and Accountability Act — to prohibit the release of confidential student data without the written consent of the student’s parent or guardian. As I noted in last week’s column, the national Common Core student database was funded with Obama stimulus money. Grants also came from the liberal Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (which largely underwrote and promoted the top-down Common Core curricular scheme). A division of the conservative Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. built the database infrastructure. A nonprofit startup, “inBloom, Inc.,” evolved out of this strange-bedfellows partnership to operate the invasive database, which is compiling everything from health-care histories, income information, and religious affiliations to voting status, blood types, and homework completion. And it gets worse. Research fellow Joy Pullmann at the Heartland Institute points to a February Department of Education report on its data-mining plans that contemplates the use of creepy student-monitoring techniques such as “functional magnetic resonance imaging” and “using cameras to judge facial expressions, an electronic seat that judges posture, a pressure-sensitive computer mouse and a biometric wrap on kids’ wrists.” The DOE report exposes the big lie that Common Core is about raising academic standards. The report instead reveals Common Core’s progressive designs to measure and track children’s “competencies” in “recognizing bias in sources,” “flexibility,” “cultural awareness and competence,” “appreciation for diversity,” “empathy,” “perspective taking, trust, [and] service orientation.” That’s right. School districts and state governments are pimping out highly personal data on children’s feelings, beliefs, “biases,” and “flexibility” instead of doing their own jobs of imparting knowledge — and minding their own business. And yes, Republicans such as former Florida governor Jeb Bush continue to falsely defend the centralized Common Core regime as locally driven and non-coercive, while ignoring the database system’s circumvention of federal student-privacy laws. Why? Edu-tech nosybodies are using the Common Core assessment boondoggle as a Trojan horse to collect and crunch massive amounts of personal student data for their own social-justice or moneymaking ends. Reminder: Nine states have entered into contracts with inBloom: Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, and North Carolina. Countless other vendors are salivating at the business possibilities in exploiting public-school students. Google, for example, is peddling its Gmail platform to schools in a way that will allow it to harvest and access families’ information and preferences — which can then be sold in advertising profiles to marketers. The same changes to the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) of 1974 (also known as the Buckley Amendment, after its sponsor, Senator James L. Buckley) that paved the way for the Common Core tracking scheme also opened up private student information to Google. As FERPA expert Sheila Kaplan explains it, “Students are paying the cost to use Google’s ‘free’ servers by providing access to their sensitive data and communications.” It’s a Big Brother gold rush and an educational Faustian bargain. Fortunately, there is a way out. It starts with parents’ reasserting their rights, protecting their children, and adopting that motto from the Reagan years: Just say no.

Purposeful Blindness!

WHO WE ARE Lakewood uses a curriculum that is fully accredited by two different accrediting agencies. In order to get the full benefit of homeschooling, you must understand the philosophy undergirding it and be 100% behind that philosophy. First, Lakewood is not a stop-gap measure. It is not a place to bring your children for a couple of years in order to by-pass a school that you don’t like. Second, Lakewood is not a remedial school. We have a college-prep, highly aggressive, academic program. To be up front, after pre-entrance testing hundreds of local students; ALL students from public schools, private schools and Catholic schools test behind their current grade level. This is because the American academic system of herd learning is broken, and it has been broken for many years. We get eighth graders testing at fourth grade level and seniors testing at seventh and eighth grade levels and some even lower. Yet, in their previous school they were on the honor role. Many high school students already have multiple math credits, but can’t do simple, every day math. When those who are on honor rolls get to college, their parents are shocked to find out that they will have to take remedial courses the first year. You can thank the federal department of education, social brainwashing and entitlement mentality for that. Many who graduate at the top of their class have to have tutors to make it through the first year of college. That is a fact. But parents still put up with this; perhaps hanging on to archaic ideals of “high school experiences.” High school experiences today are street-smart experiences and dodging the bad guys. If that is what you want for your children, please seek it – it’s FREE. Research on local schools, shows that many students pass both math and English by getting extra points. Do they earn those extra points by doing extra academic work? No! They earn them by bringing things to the teacher and doing favors for him or her. This is documented. They even give the good student’s extra points away, since they are already passing the course, to those who won’t pass without them. It makes the teachers record look better to have more passing students. These kinds of things go on every day. But parents see only the good grades on the report card. Here is what I see; kids that can’t divide, can’t multiply without a calculator, can’t do fractions, can’t measure, can’t write, can’t spell, can’t punctuate and who don’t know what words mean that are longer than 5 letters. Yet, they’re making A’s and B’s in their school culture! Here’s what’s different at Lakewood: 1. A tough curriculum that actually improves annual test and college entrance scores. 2. A non-chaotic environment with pin-drop quiet classrooms. 3. A drug free, curse free, drama free atmosphere. 4. The possibility of graduating early and starting college early in non-remedial classes. 5. Credits for subjects and extra-curricular activities that are not offered anywhere else. This is education with a purpose – Academic excellence. If you are more concerned with experiences such as proms, sports, dances, fund-raisers, and fun, then please don’t waste our time by inquiring here. You must educate yourself about advantages of the homeschool environment and you must believe in them and desire them for your child in order to benefit. Homeschool is purpose driven, protective, nourishing, and proven academically sound. It is for students and parents, intent on gaining something valuable and useful for life, rather than for those worrying about their children ‘missing’ something.

COMMON CORE? WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT

The incorporation of this garbage into schools under the guise of higher accountability makes me wonder about the stability of the powers that be. It is not enough that the Department of Education puts new bandages on an ailing and failing school system every year, now they have insulted the intelligence of us all. This is not just a mistake, it is planned and propagated by those forming a new voting populace to indoctrinate our kids even further - academics be damned! Wake up parents and fight for your children because we are losing the battle right now! Please take the time to check out this web site www.monicaboyer.com under the story Common Core or Pornography? This is pure filth passing as higher-accountability curriculum supposedly intended to bring America in line with world standards. Sorry, all it does is make us the laughing stock of the world!

School is Prison - And Damaging our Kids

by Peter Gray Parents send their children to school with the best of intentions, believing that’s what they need to become productive and happy adults. Many have qualms about how well schools are performing, but the conventional wisdom is that these issues can be resolved with more money, better teachers, more challenging curricula and/or more rigorous tests. But what if the real problem is school itself? The unfortunate fact is that one of our most cherished institutions is, by its very nature, failing our children and our society. School is a place where children are compelled to be, and where their freedom is greatly restricted — far more restricted than most adults would tolerate in their workplaces. In recent decades, we have been compelling our children to spend ever more time in this kind of setting, and there is strong evidence (summarized in my recent book) that this is causing serious psychological damage to many of them. Moreover, the more scientists have learned about how children naturally learn, the more we have come to realize that children learn most deeply and fully, and with greatest enthusiasm, in conditions that are almost opposite to those of school. Compulsory schooling has been a fixture of our culture now for several generations. It’s hard today for most people to even imagine how children would learn what they must for success in our culture without it. President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan are so enamored with schooling that they want even longer school days and school years. Most people assume that the basic design of schools, as we know them today, emerged from scientific evidence about how children learn best. But, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Schools as we know them today are a product of history, not of research into how children learn. The blueprint still used for today’s schools was developed during the Protestant Reformation, when schools were created to teach children to read the Bible, to believe scripture without questioning it, and to obey authority figures without questioning them. The early founders of schools were quite clear about this in their writings. The idea that schools might be places for nurturing critical thought, creativity, self-initiative or ability to learn on one’s own — the kinds of skills most needed for success in today’s economy — was the furthest thing from their minds. To them, willfulness was sinfulness, to be drilled or beaten out of children, not encouraged. When schools were taken over by the state and made compulsory, and directed toward secular ends, the basic structure and methods of schooling remained unchanged. Subsequent attempts at reform have failed because, though they have tinkered some with the structure, they haven’t altered the basic blueprint. The top-down, teach-and-test method, in which learning is motivated by a system of rewards and punishments rather than by curiosity or by any real, felt desire to know, is well designed for indoctrination and obedience training but not much else. It’s no wonder that many of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs and innovators either left school early (like Thomas Edison), or said they hated school and learned despite it, not because of it (like Albert Einstein). It’s no wonder that, today, even the “best students” (maybe especially them) often report that they are “burned out” by the schooling process. One recent top graduate, explaining to a newspaper reporter why he was postponing college, put it this way: “I was consumed with doing well and didn’t sleep a lot the last two years. I would have five or six hours of homework each night. The last thing I wanted was more school.” Most students — whether A students, C students, or failing ones — have lost their zest for learning by the time they reach middle school or high school. In a recent research study, Mihaly Czikszentmihalyl and Jeremy Hunter fitted more than 800 sixth- through 12th-graders, from 33 different schools across the country, with special wristwatches that provided a signal at random times of day. Whenever the signal appeared, they were to fill out a questionnaire indicating where they were, what they were doing, and how happy or unhappy they were at the moment. The lowest levels of happiness, by far, occurred when they were in school and the highest levels occurred when they were out of school playing or talking with friends. In school, they were often bored, anxious or both. Other researchers have shown that, with each successive grade, students develop increasingly negative attitudes toward the subjects taught, especially math and science. As a society, we tend to shrug off such findings. We’re not surprised that learning is unpleasant. We think of it as bad-tasting medicine, tough to swallow but good for children in the long run. Some people even think that the very unpleasantness of school is good for children, so they will learn to tolerate unpleasantness, because life after school is unpleasant. Perhaps this sad view of life derives from schooling. Of course, life has its ups and downs, in adulthood and in childhood. But there are plenty of opportunities to learn to tolerate unpleasantness without adding unpleasant schooling to the mix. Research has shown that people of all ages learn best when they are self-motivated, pursuing questions that are their own real questions, and goals that are their own real-life goals. In such conditions, learning is usually joyful. I have spent much of my research career studying how children learn. Children come into the world beautifully designed to direct their own education. They are endowed by nature with powerful educative instincts, including curiosity, playfulness, sociability, attentiveness to the activities around them, desire to grow up and desire to do what older children and adults can do. The evidence for all this as it applies to little children lies before the eyes of anyone who has watched a child grow from birth up to school age. Through their own efforts, children learn to walk, run, jump and climb. They learn from scratch their native language, and with that, they learn to assert their will, argue, amuse, annoy, befriend, charm and ask questions. Through questioning and exploring, they acquire an enormous amount of knowledge about the physical and social world around them, and in their play, they practice skills that promote their physical, intellectual, social and emotional development. They do all this before anyone, in any systematic way, tries to teach them anything. This amazing drive and capacity to learn does not turn itself off when children turn 5 or 6. We turn it off with our coercive system of schooling. The biggest, most enduring lesson of our system of schooling is that learning is work, to be avoided when possible. The focus of my own research has been on learning in children who are of “school age,” but who aren’t sent to school, or not to school as conventionally understood. I’ve examined how children learn in cultures that don’t have schools, especially hunter-gatherer cultures, the kinds of cultures in which our species evolved. I’ve also studied learning in our culture by children who are trusted to take charge of their own education and are provided with the opportunity and means to educate themselves. In these settings, children’s natural curiosity and zest for learning persist all the way through childhood and adolescence, and into adulthood. Another researcher who has documented the power of self-directed learning is Sugata Mitra. He set up outdoor computers in very poor neighborhoods in India, where most children did not go to school and many were illiterate. Wherever he placed such a computer, dozens of children would gather around and, with no help from adults, figure out how to use it. Those who could not read began to do so through interacting with the computer and with other children around it. The computers gave the children access to the whole world’s knowledge — in one remote village, children who previously knew nothing about microorganisms learned about bacteria and viruses through their interactions with the computer and began to use this new knowledge appropriately in conversations. Mitra’s experiments illustrate how three core aspects of human nature — curiosity, playfulness and sociability — can combine beautifully to serve the purpose of education. Curiosity drew the children to the computer and motivated them to explore it; playfulness motivated them to practice many computer skills; and sociability allowed each child’s learning to spread like wildfire to dozens of other children. * * * In our culture today, there are many routes through which children can apply their natural drives and instincts to learn everything they need to know for a successful adulthood. More than 2 million children in the United States now base their education at home and in the larger community rather than at school, and an ever-increasing proportion of their families have scrapped set curricular approaches in favor of self-directed learning. These parents do not give lessons or tests, but provide a home environment that facilitates learning, and they help connect their children to community activities from which they learn. Some of these families began this approach long ago and have adult children who are now thriving in higher education and careers. My colleague Gina Riley and I recently surveyed 232 such families. According to these families’ reports, the main benefits of this approach lie in the children’s continued curiosity, creativity and zest for learning, and in the freedom and harmony the entire family experiences when relieved of the pressures and schedules of school and the burden of manipulating children into doing homework that doesn’t interest them. As one parent put it, “Our lives are essentially stress free … We have a very close relationship built on love, mutual trust, and mutual respect.” She went on to write: “As an educator I see that my daughter has amazing critical thinking skills that many of my adult college students lack … My daughter lives and learns in the real world and loves it. What more could I ask for?” Riley and I are currently completing a study of approximately 80 adults who themselves were home schooled in this self-directed way when they were of “school age.” The full results are not yet in, but it is clear that those who took this approach came from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds and have, as a whole, gone on very successfully into adulthood. As the self-directed approach to home education has increased in popularity, more and more centers and networks have popped up to offer resources, social connections and additional educational opportunities for children and families taking this approach (many are listed on a new compendium website, AlternativesToSchool.com). With these — along with libraries and other community resources that have always been available and, of course, the Internet — the educational opportunities are boundless. But not every family has the wherewithal or desire to facilitate children’s self-directed education at home. For many, a better option is a so-called democratic school, where children have charge of their own education in a setting that optimizes their educational opportunities and where there are many other children with whom to socialize and learn. (Such schools should not be confused with Montessori schools or other types of “progressive” schools that permit more play and offer more choices than do standard schools but nevertheless maintain a top-down, teacher-to-student system of authority and a relatively uniform curriculum that all students are expected to follow.) Over many years, I’ve observed learning at one such place, the Sudbury Valley School, in Framingham, Mass. It’s called a school, but is as different as you can imagine from what we usually think of as “school.” The students, who range in age from 4 to about 18, are free all day to do whatever they want, as long as they don’t break any of the school rules. The rules, which are created democratically at the School Meeting by students and staff together, have nothing to do with learning; they have to do with keeping peace and order and are enforced by a judicial system modeled after that of our larger society. The school currently has about 150 students and 10 staff members, and it operates on a per-student budget that is less than half that of the surrounding public schools. It accepts essentially all students who apply and whose parents agree to enroll them. Today approximately two dozen schools exist in the United States that are explicitly modeled after Sudbury Valley, and others exist that have most of its basic characteristics. Compared to other private schools, these schools charge low tuitions, and some have sliding tuition scales. Students come from a wide variety of backgrounds and with a wide variety of personalities. To people who haven’t witnessed it firsthand, it’s hard to imagine how such a school could work. Yet Sudbury Valley has been in existence now for 45 years and has hundreds of graduates, who are doing just fine in the real world. Many years ago, my colleague David Chanoff and I conducted a follow-up study of the school’s graduates. We found that those who had pursued higher education (about 75 percent) reported no particular difficulty getting into the schools of their choice and doing well there once admitted. Some, including a few who had never previously taken a formal course, had gone on successfully to highly prestigious colleges and universities. As a group, regardless of whether or not they had pursued higher education, they were remarkably successful in finding employment. They had gone into a wide range of occupations, including business, arts, science, medicine, other service professions, and skilled trades. Most said that a major benefit of their Sudbury Valley education was that they had acquired a sense of personal responsibility and capacity for self-control that served them well in all aspects of their lives. Many also commented on the importance of the democratic values that they had acquired, through practice, at the school. More recently, two larger studies of graduates, conducted by the school itself, have produced similar results and been published as books. Students in this setting learn to read, calculate and use computers in the same playful ways that kids in hunter-gatherer cultures learn to hunt and gather. They also develop more specialized interests and passions, which can lead directly or indirectly to careers. For example, a highly successful machinist and inventor spent his childhood playfully building things and taking things apart to see how they worked. Another graduate, who became a professor of mathematics, had played intensively and creatively with math. And yet another, a high-fashion pattern maker, had played at making doll clothes and then clothes for herself and friends. I’m convinced that Sudbury Valley works so well as an educational setting because it provides the conditions that optimize children’s natural abilities to educate themselves. These conditions include a) unlimited opportunity to play and explore (which allows them to discover and pursue their interests); b) access to a variety of caring and knowledgeable adults who are helpers, not judges; c) free age mixing among children and adolescents (age-mixed play is far more conducive to learning than is play among those who are all at the same level); and d) direct participation in a stable, moral, democratic community in which they acquire a sense of responsibility for others, not just for themselves. Think about it: None of these conditions are present in standard schools. I don’t mean to paint self-directed education as a panacea. Life is not always smooth, no matter what the conditions. But my research and others’ research in these settings has convinced me, beyond any doubt, that the natural drives and abilities of young people to learn are fully sufficient to motivate their entire education. When they want or need help from others, they ask for it. We don’t have to force people to learn; all we need to do is provide them the freedom and opportunities to do so. Of course, not everyone is going to learn the same things, in the same way, or at the same time. But that’s a good thing. Our society thrives on diversity. Our culture needs people with many different kinds of skills, interests and personalities. Most of all, we need people who are pursuing life with passion and who take responsibility for themselves throughout life. These are the common denominators of people who have taken charge of their own education. Peter Gray is a research professor of psychology at Boston College. His most recent book is "Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self Reliant, and Better Prepared for Life" (Basic Books, 2013). He is also author of an introductory psychology textbook ("Psychology," Worth Publishers, now in its sixth edition), a regular blog for Psychology Today magazine called Freedom to Learn, and many academic articles dealing with children’s natural ways of learning. Along with a number of colleagues, he recently launched a web site (AlternativesToSchool.com) designed to help families find or create settings for children’s self-directed learning.

TONGUE CONTROL!

The Custody of the Tongue Posted by: Dr. Mitchell Kalpakgian in 07-July, Culture, Dr Mitchell Kalpakgian, Latest Articles 4 hours ago 0 20 Views “Set a watch, Lord, beside my mouth and a door about my lips.” Psalm 38:1 The art of living is the knowledge of knowing when to speak and when to be silent, how much to say and how much not to reveal, how to enjoy conversation and how to resist gossip, how to be serious but not dour, and how to be lighthearted but not frivolous. For the sake of peace and out of charity the art of living demands the control of the tongue and the custody of speech. So many forms of strife arise from speaking indiscreetly, violating confidentiality, and exposing private information to public knowledge.The sins of the tongue are many and varied: blaspheming, swearing, and slandering; flattering, betraying secrets, and giving evil advice; babbling, scolding, and scorning. The loose tongue and unguarded speech destroy many friendships and ruin human relationships. In Chaucer’s “The Parson’s Tale,” a sermon on the seven deadly sins, the parson condemns the misuse of the tongue that especially follows from the sins of envy and wrath: envy producing backbiting, detraction, complaining, and “behind-the-back whispering” and wrath provoking quarreling, insulting, and cursing. One can never be too discreet in restraining speech and leaving unsaid many things that deserve no public utterance. “The Letter of James” warns of the deadliness of the tongue’s power to do harm: “And the tongue is a fire . . . For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed . . . but no human being can tame the tongue—a restless evil, full of deadly poison” (James 3:6-8). As the deadly sin of wrath releases the poisons of the tongue in the form of quarreling and threatening and the sin of envy in the form of murmuring and gossiping, these sins of the tongue always lead to divisions and separations in human relationships that thwart reconciliation and forgiveness. The sins of the tongue are infamous for spoiling social occasions and violating decorum, propriety, and courtesy as Jane Austen’s novels testify: the cold taciturnity of Darcy, the pompous blathering of Mr. Collins, and the mindless chatter of Mrs. Bennet give offense and detract from the genial atmosphere of the balls and assemblies in Pride and Prejudice. In Introduction to a Devout Life, St. Francis de Sales devotes several chapters to the custody of speech. After warning of the evils of “indecent speech,” he condemns scoffing at others in the form of derision and mockery as one of the worst sins against one’s neighbor. He especially denounces the evil of rash judgment. Charity dictates that “the most charitable opinion” and “most favorable judgments” must counteract the temptation of rash judgment: “If an action has many different aspects, we must always think of which is the best.” Because St. Joseph was a just man, he resisted the thought of attributing sin to the Virgin Mary when he learned that she was with child: “When a just man can no longer explain either the fact or the intention of someone whom he otherwise knows to be virtuous, he still will not pass judgment on him but puts it out of his mind and leaves the judgment to God.” The control of the tongue forbids the invention of lame excuses and clever equivocations to justify immoral deeds. The saint insists that “An honest explanation always has more grace and force to excuse us than a lie” and teaches that “the Holy Spirit does not dwell in a deceitful and tricky soul.” The human tongue is not designed to be a forked tongue in the practice of duplicity but to answer, as Christ teaches, “yes, yes,” or “no, no” with no intention of guile. De Sales identifies the many attributes of truthful speech: “restrained, frank, sincere, candid, unaffected, and honest.” Yet the love of truth does not resort to acrimonious argumentation. If, in the name of honesty, a person feels obligated to oppose error, he corrects false ideas with mildness, for “Nothing is gained by harshness.” The restraint or reserve of the tongue, de Sales explains, observes the golden mean and avoids the defect of cold aloofness and the excess of silly twaddle: “To be too reserved and to refuse to take part in conversation looks like lack of confidence in the others or some sort of disdain. To be always babbling or joking without giving others time or chance to speak when they wish is a mark of shallowness and levity.” The art of living, then, requires civilized speech that does not descend into gossip, slander, or character assassination; that does not stoop to uncharitable rash judgment; that takes measures to avoid giving offense by indecent language; that does not violate propriety by the boorishness of talking too much or too little; and that refuses to use the tongue as an agent of duplicity. In the words of Solomon, “An amiable tongue is the tree of life.”

The Pagans Are Happy To Socialize Your Children!

Ignitumtoday.com June, 2013 A few weeks ago I wrote something criticizing public schooling over this incident. It got the ire up of friends and family members, many of whom have spent decades of their lives teaching and working in public schools. They vehemently disagreed with my portrayal of public schooling. I reflected on what, exactly, bothered me about public schools and other activities or institutions like them, and I came up with a simple thesis: For many hours each day, you cede your authority and parental care to others while letting other children socialize your children. In the case of public school, those “others” are bus drivers, teachers, and principals. Many readers probably do not see any problem with this. And at one time I didn’t either. But I do now. First, a little background on my own education. A Product of Public Schools I went to middle-class, suburban public schools from first through twelfth grades, then to a public, State university. Full scholarship, National Merit Scholar, got over a 1500 on the SAT (this is back when 1600 was the highest), straight A’s, a model student. I was all about public schools, because I did well in school. For a long time, I remained an advocate of public schools. Only since becoming a Protestant Christian and then a Catholic did I begin to peel back the layers of the onion and start to realize the depth of the problems in our culture and how public schooling is one factor in them and serves to reinforce them. The Mis-socialization of Devyn Rose How can I succinctly describe the diverse and disturbing things I learned while at school–not in classes, but at recess, in gym, on the blacktop before school started, on the bus, in the locker room? It’s impossible, so I’ll mention only a few things. In elementary school classmates told me stories and jokes about homosexual acts. While they (nor I) probably understood all that we were saying, the gist of it was conveyed. In middle school, I learned that there were the cool kids, the popular ones, and that I wanted to be one of them. I ditched the first group of friends I made at my new school (in fifth grade) and ingratiated myself into the popular group. I played sports and was pretty good at most of them, so that helped me gain entrance. But Heaven forbid if you ran afoul of one of the leaders, or you were singled out for ridicule because of some way you looked or dressed. The popular kids could be brutal, and the harshest among them were the ones most admired. In sixth grade, one girl in my class was cruelly ostracized everyday, especially as we waited for the first bell to ring. She was mocked, insulted, physically hit, and despised. Why? Because she was not attractive, did not have good hygiene, and had been unpopular since elementary school. The adult monitors who were supposed to watch over us before school were MIA. I still think about this young woman and am ashamed of myself: instead of defending her, I joined in ridiculing her. In seventh grade one of my good friends told me (and whoever was near in the locker room) about sexual experiences he was having with a high school girl. Yes, he was about thirteen years old and having sexual intercourse. I was pressured by classmates to become sexually active so I could remain “cool.” By the time of high school, I had been exposed to so much vulgarity and perversion that there wasn’t much left to be learned or scandalized about. One of my favorite teachers in junior high and high school turned out to be a molester. There were rumors about him, but I always dismissed them because he was such a kind teacher. Only years later did I read a short article in the local paper that said he had lit his house on fire and torched himself to death. This was when a brave student had finally come forward and openly accused him of sexual abuse. He had moved from one school district to another over the years. Sound familiar? What I learned in school was this: it’s dog-eat-dog, or kid-eat-kid, and you have to learn to survive for yourself. Your parents are not there to protect you. Navigate the dangerous shoals of bullies, popular kid scorn, humiliation, sexuality, all while trying to learn who you were, and who you were supposed to be. All while being exposed to every foulness, perversion, and ugly side of human life. So today I wasn’t surprised, but I was grieved and disgusted, to read the latest horror story to come to light out of public schools: young men sodomizing their classmates as a hazing practice. Read the whole piece if you can; I only made it half-way through. Your Objection is Invalid Objection: “But these are isolated incidents!” The objection goes that these horror stories are isolated. No they’re not. Hundreds of them come to light every month, and those are just the ones we find out about. Ten times their number occur yet never make the news. Horrible things happened in my suburban, middle-class school, and very few saw the light of day. Now, I was never sodomized, or molested, or interrogated for two hours til I peed my pants for bringing a cap gun on the bus. Again, I am a public school “success” story. But as I described above, even the regular stuff that goes on in public schools is awful. Objection: “You can’t bunker down and isolate your children! They’ll learn about all this sooner or later.“ Then let it be later. And I’m not talking about isolating my children or bunkering down. That’s a strawman. Would you let some guy come up to your five year old and tell them stories about anal sex? Is that appropriate for your five year old? No. We shelter our children all the time. We choose not to take them to see that movie with intense violence that we as adults can stomach. Of course we shelter them, prudentially, from things they are not ready to understand, or from vile things that they should not be exposed to. There’s a time and a place for them to learn about certain things, and that time is not when they are in second grade, and that place is not from their peers at school. Objection: “Your children have to learn to deal with other people, even difficult ones” Sure they do. But they don’t have to be socialized by children whose parents are not rearing them properly. They don’t have to fear being sodomized by “difficult people” at school. And by adulthood, the kind of fish bowl Lord of the Flies stuff that goes on in middle school, junior high, and high school is gone. There’s other challenges that go on, naturally, but as an adult you are equipped to handle them. As an eight year old, you are not. Objection: “I’m going to let my children shine their light for Jesus!” If you were there with them through their school day, I may say “okay, go for it.” But you are not. And instead of shining their light for Jesus, a light that takes time to grow strong, much more likely is that the darkness of our pagan culture, as exhibited by their peers in overwhelming numbers, will snuff out the nascent flame that God has lit. I’ve seen it happen, again and again, even in good Catholic families (more on this later). If you lived in AD 100, would you be sending your children to the pagan Roman schooling system, to worship Caesar and be exposed to so many perverted people? No. You would not do that. No more should you send your children to the schools today, which would give any Roman institution a run for its money in terms of debauchery. An adult Christian, strong in the Spirit, can face such evil. Children cannot. Even George Lucas understood this when Yoda tells Luke he is not yet strong enough to face Darth Vader and his Emperor. As Mr. Miyagi said to Daniel-san: “First learn stand, then learn fly.” (See? Pop culture references from being being reared in the secular culture–I guess there are some good things about school!) Objection: “Your children won’t be socialized!” Oh yes they will. They will be socialized by mature adults who are faithful Christians. They will be taught the right way to live, and why they should live that way, and who God is, and why He is real and true and good and beautiful. They will be socialized by other faithful Christian families, with their children, in contexts where adults are present. The pagans are happy to socialize your children, and will gladly do so if you send them to public school. In all likelihood, they will be socialized to conform to the prevailing culture, the zeitgeist, and not to Christ. Why? Because the secular society offers a competing vision for life and happiness, one largely at odds to the Christian gospel. Morally relativistic, consumer-driven, materialistic hedonism is appealing in countless ways. Great Mr. Smarty-Pants. I Already Hate You, so what is your brilliant solution? You just know I’m going to say “homeschool,” don’t you? Or maybe “Catholic school”? I would propose, as a first step, any solution that avoids the pitfall described by my thesis: namely, don’t cede your authority and parental care. If you can avoid ceding your authority and parental care while your children are in public school, then send them to public school. If you can avoid ceding your authority and parental care while your children are in Catholic school, then send them to Catholic school. If you can do some combination of homeschool, homeschool co-op, cottage school, community school, Catholic school, and public school, all while not ceding your authority and parental care, great! do that. But note that many Catholic schools are little better, and in some ways worse, than public schools. And in both Catholic and public schools, the predominant model is that you cede your parental care over your children. You are not in charge while they are at school; the school administrators are. You do not know what teachers or other children are doing or saying to your child. You have ceded parental care of your child during the time they are at school. As a second step, I propose the solution that you offer a better culture to your children. A lively culture based on Christ and His Church, rooted in your family, in the milieu of a community of faith and love. Offer your children a place of beauty and truth, of warmth and welcome, of goodness and loveliness. Offer your children the truth of the Gospel as applied to every part of life. In practice, homeschooling offers a good way of doing this. And a good way of not ceding your parental care to others. Some combination of other types of schooling with homeschooling can also offer it. I have yet to see how a five-day-per-week, eight-hours-per-day, standard public school option can offer it. Mom and Dad aren’t allowed in the locker room, where the pagan kids are wanting to sodomize your son. A Word on Catholic Schools I have friends, faithful Catholics, daily Mass goers, who have children that were homeschooled for years then went to Catholic schools afterwards. And some of their children have left the Faith entirely. They’ve bought into the secular world’s allures. They will one day find those allures to be empty promises, but the sad thing is that they fell for them. They found that vision of life to be more attractive than the Catholic one offered by their parents, who are praying people. One of their children faced unbearable ridicule at a Catholic high school. Mean behavior to ostracize her, because she rubbed the popular girls the wrong way and was a threat to them in her faithfulness and guilelessness. In other words, the same sort of bullying and meanness found in public schools is also found in Catholic ones. And Catholic schools mostly follow the same model of parents ceding their parental care of their children, only to (at least nominally) Catholic administrators rather than secular ones. So I caution parents to be careful with any organization: Boy Scouts, their Catholic parish, the children’s sports teams, and so on. Know who the people are who will be watching your children. Ensure you are involved and it is a safe environment. That goes for altar server training, camping, the assistant coach giving your child a ride to the weekend tournament, etc. Now That You’re Feeling All Judged The standard disclaimers apply: lots of good people work at public schools. I’m related to some of them. I had many as teachers. Lots of kids come out of public school with their faith still intact. Schools have lots of good programs that can help kids with special needs (which we ourselves have taken advantage of and been grateful for). This post is not an indictment against everyone who works in public schools or parents who send their children to them. Many families have little choice but to do so. Money and jobs (or lack thereof) or special needs necessitate using the tax-funded public schooling option. But it is intended to provoke you into thinking about whether it is a safe and healthy environment for your child. Our country is firmly secular, and becoming more so everyday. Public schools are an indispensable apparatus of the state to indoctrinate children into a particular way of seeing the world, of seeing themselves, one that is in many ways antithetical to the Christian Faith. I want to offer my children a better way, and by God’s grace I hope I am able to. I plan to take the first step and be careful in what type of schooling I choose for my child. If anything other than homeschooling, I want my wife and I to be involved in the day-to-day goings-on at the school. We have one option for such a school in our area, and plan to try it out, along with homeschooling or a co-op type system with other families. I also plan to take the second step and foster a community of love and truth where my children can learn who they truly are, as beloved children of God, in a safe environment, where they can learn to face the ugly and trying things in life as they are able. If I have offended you, I apologize in advance. I was implored by a facebook friend to be much more careful in my critique. Instead, I have doubled-down, but in doing so I have been careful in crafting my thesis, which people are free to disagree with.

Critical Analysis!

These are the kinds of questions parents ask for their students at Seton. Really? "We have not finished up the book analyses due for the high school English course. Can my child be excused from this assignment?" Our answer: We very rarely excuse a student entirely from an assignment, especially one as important as a book analysis. One of the most important aspects of a good education is critical analysis. In our society today, when so many Christian ideas and values are being questioned and even attacked, we and our children need to think clearly about the teachings of Christ and how we can defend them. We can do this only if we “practice” such skills, which is our goal with the analysis skills being taught in the writing of the book reports and book analyses. Sometimes students want to take up the time doing other assignments and neglect this more intellectually demanding assignment. To facilitate completion, we suggest your student take a week off from the other assignments and read, study, take notes, outline, and write the book analysis. You might consider scheduling a week each quarter in which the book analysis is the one and only assignment. If you have a high school student, consider helping your student analyze current speeches or arguments by elected officials. Help your high school student become involved with the current issues in the public square. Some homeschooling high school students join the campaign for the local pro-life candidate. Such interaction with candidates, their followers, and their opposition helps students develop analysis skills to a higher degree, and helps us all to keep Christian values in our society.

Why French Kids Don't Have ADHD

Why French Kids Don't Have ADHD French children don't need medications to control their behavior. In the United States, at least 9% of school-aged children have been diagnosed with ADHD, and are taking pharmaceutical medications. In France, the percentage of kids diagnosed and medicated for ADHD is less than .5%. How come the epidemic of ADHD—which has become firmly established in the United States—has almost completely passed over children in France? Is ADHD a biological-neurological disorder? Surprisingly, the answer to this question depends on whether you live in France or in the United States. In the United States, child psychiatrists consider ADHD to be a biological disorder with biological causes. The preferred treatment is also biological--psycho stimulant medications such as Ritalin and Adderall. French child psychiatrists, on the other hand, view ADHD as a medical condition that has psycho-social and situational causes. Instead of treating children's focusing and behavioral problems with drugs, French doctors prefer to look for the underlying issue that is causing the child distress—not in the child's brain but in the child's social context. They then choose to treat the underlying social context problem with psychotherapy or family counseling. This is a very different way of seeing things from the American tendency to attribute all symptoms to a biological dysfunction such as a chemical imbalance in the child's brain. French child psychiatrists don't use the same system of classification of childhood emotional problems as American psychiatrists. They do not use the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM. According to Sociologist Manuel Vallee, the French Federation of Psychiatry developed an alternative classification system as a resistance to the influence of the DSM-3. This alternative was the CFTMEA (Classification Française des Troubles Mentaux de L'Enfant et de L'Adolescent), first released in 1983, and updated in 1988 and 2000. The focus of CFTMEA is on identifying and addressing the underlying psychosocial causes of children's symptoms, not on finding the best pharmacological bandaids with which to mask symptoms. To the extent that French clinicians are successful at finding and repairing what has gone awry in the child's social context, fewer children qualify for the ADHD diagnosis. Moreover, the definition of ADHD is not as broad as in the American system, which, in my view, tends to "pathologize" much of what is normal childhood behavior. The DSM specifically does not consider underlying causes. It thus leads clinicians to give the ADHD diagnosis to a much larger number of symptomatic children, while also encouraging them to treat those children with pharmaceuticals. The French holistic, psychosocial approach also allows for considering nutritional causes for ADHD-type symptoms—specifically the fact that the behavior of some children is worsened after eating foods with artificial colors, certain preservatives, and/or allergens. Clinicians who work with troubled children in this country—not to mention parents of many ADHD kids—are well aware that dietary interventions can sometimes help a child's problem. In the United States, the strict focus on pharmaceutical treatment of ADHD, however, encourages clinicians to ignore the influence of dietary factors on children's behavior. And then, of course, there are the vastly different philosophies of child-rearing in the United States and France. These divergent philosophies could account for why French children are generally better-behaved than their American counterparts. Pamela Druckerman highlights the divergent parenting styles in her recent book, Bringing up Bébé. I believe her insights are relevant to a discussion of why French children are not diagnosed with ADHD in anything like the numbers we are seeing in the United States. From the time their children are born, French parents provide them with a firm cadre—the word means "frame" or "structure." Children are not allowed, for example, to snack whenever they want. Mealtimes are at four specific times of the day. French children learn to wait patiently for meals, rather than eating snack foods whenever they feel like it. French babies, too, are expected to conform to limits set by parents and not by their crying selves. French parents let their babies "cry it out" if they are not sleeping through the night at the age of four months. French parents, Druckerman observes, love their children just as much as American parents. They give them piano lessons, take them to sports practice, and encourage them to make the most of their talents. But French parents have a different philosophy of discipline. Consistently enforced limits, in the French view, make children feel safe and secure. Clear limits, they believe, actually make a child feel happier and safer—something that is congruent with my own experience as both a therapist and a parent. Finally, French parents believe that hearing the word "no" rescues children from the "tyranny of their own desires." And spanking, when used judiciously, is not considered child abuse in France. As a therapist who works with children, it makes perfect sense to me that French children don't need medications to control their behavior because they learn self-control early in their lives. The children grow up in families in which the rules are well-understood, and a clear family hierarchy is firmly in place. In French families, as Druckerman describes them, parents are firmly in charge of their kids—instead of the American family style, in which the situation is all too often vice versa. Copyright © Marilyn Wedge, Ph.D.

ADHD - A Fake Condition!

I knew the truth would come out sooner or later about this hideous prank on American parents looking for a pill to solve all of their discipline problems! Now if the truth about Obama would just come out! INVENTOR OF ADHD'S DEATHBED CONFESSION: "ADHD IS A FICTITIOUS DISEASE" Wednesday, March 27th 2013 By Moritz Nestor, Current Concerns ADHD Hoax Fortunately, the Swiss National Advisory Commission on Biomedical Ethics (NEK, President: Otfried Höffe) critically commented on the use of the ADHD drug Ritalin in its opinion of 22 November 2011 titled Human enhancement by means of pharmacological agents: The consumption of pharmacological agents altered the child’s behavior without any contribution on his or her part. That amounted to interference in the child’s freedom and personal rights, because pharmacological agents induced behavioral changes but failed to educate the child on how to achieve these behavioral changes independently. The child was thus deprived of an essential learning experience to act autonomously and emphatically which “considerably curtails children’s freedom and impairs their personality development”, the NEK criticized. The alarmed critics of the Ritalin disaster are now getting support from an entirely different side. The German weekly Der Spiegel quoted in its cover story on 2 February 2012 the US American psychiatrist Leon Eisenberg, born in 1922 as the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, who was the “scientific father of ADHD” and who said at the age of 87, seven months before his death in his last interview: “ADHD is a prime example of a fictitious disease” Since 1968, however, some 40 years, Leon Eisenberg’s “disease” haunted the diagnostic and statistical manuals, first as “hyperkinetic reaction of childhood”, now called “ADHD”. The use of ADHD medications in Germany rose in only eighteen years from 34 kg (in 1993) to a record of no less than 1760 kg (in 2011) – which is a 51-fold increase in sales! In the United States every tenth boy among ten year-olds already swallows an ADHD medication on a daily basis. With an increasing tendency. When it comes to the proven repertoire of Edward Bernays, the father of propaganda, to sell the First World War to his people with the help of his uncle’s psychoanalysis and to distort science and the faith in science to increase profits of the industry – what about investigating on whose behalf the “scientific father of ADHD” conducted science? His career was remarkably steep, and his “fictitious disease” led to the best sales increases. And after all, he served in the “Committee for DSM V and ICD XII, American Psychiatric Association” from 2006 to 2009. After all, Leon Eisenberg received “the Ruane Prize for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Research. He has been a leader in child psychiatry for more than 40 years through his work in pharmacological trials, research, teaching, and social policy and for his theories of autism and social medicine”. ADHD Hoax And after all, Eisenberg was a member of the “Organizing Committee for Women and Medicine Conference, Bahamas, November 29 – December 3, 2006, Josiah Macy Foundation (2006)”. The Josiah Macy Foundation organized conferences with intelligence agents of the OSS, later CIA, such as Gregory Bateson and Heinz von Foerster during and long after World War II. Have such groups marketed the diagnosis of ADHD in the service of the pharmaceutical market and tailor-made for him with a lot of propaganda and public relations? It is this issue that the American psychologist Lisa Cosgrove and others investigated in their study Financial Ties between DSM-IV Panel Members and the Pharmaceutical Industry7. They found that “Of the 170 DSM panel members 95 (56%) had one or more financial associations with companies in the pharmaceutical industry. One hundred percent of the members of the panels on ‘Mood Disorders’ and ‘Schizophrenia and Other Psychotic Disorders’ had financial ties to drug companies. The connections are especially strong in those diagnostic areas where drugs are the first line of treatment for mental disorders.” In the next edition of the manual, the situation is unchanged. “Of the 137 DSM-V panel members who have posted disclosure statements, 56% have reported industry ties – no improvement over the percent of DSM-IV members.” “The very vocabulary of psychiatry is now defined at all levels by the pharmaceutical industry,” said Dr Irwin Savodnik, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles. ADHD Hoax This is well paid. Just one example: The Assistant Director of the Pediatric Psychopharmacology Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School received “$1 million in earnings from drug companies between 2000 and 2007”. In any case, no one can easily get around the testimony of the father of ADHD: “ADHD is a prime example of a fictitious disease.” The task of psychologists, educators and doctors is not to put children on the “chemical lead” because the entire society cannot handle the products of its misguided theories of man and raising children, and instead hands over our children to the free pharmaceutical market. Let us return to the basic matter of personal psychology and education: The child is to acquire personal responsibility and emphatic behavior under expert guidance – and that takes the family and the school: In these fields, the child should be able to lead off mentally. This constitutes the core of the human person. WorldPublicUnion.org

YET ANOTHER REASON FOR HOMESCHOOL

Middle School Girls Forced to Ask Classmates for ‘Lesbian Kiss’ During Anti-Bullying Presentation Imagine 13 and 14-year-old girls being instructed to ask one another for a lesbian kiss in a class exercise. The girls had no choice. The parents were NOT informed. But hey, if it falls under “anti-bullying,” than who are you to question it, right? Heather Clark over at Christiannews.net reports this alarming development: Red Hook, New York – A recent anti-bullying presentation at a middle school in New York that focused on homosexuality and gender identity has angered parents after their daughters have come home to tell them they were forced to ask another girl for a kiss. According to reports, the session occurred last week at Linden Avenue Middle School in Red Hook, New York, near Poughkeepsie. A group of students from Bard College led two workshops for the youth, separated by gender. During the workshop for girls, the 13 and 14-year-olds were told to ask one another for a lesbian kiss. They were also taught words such as “pansexual” and “genderqueer.” Parent Mandy Coon told reporters that her daughter was very uncomfortable with the exercise. “She told me, ‘Mom, we all get teased and picked on enough; now I’m going to be called a lesbian because I had to ask another girl if I could kiss her,’” she lamented. Coon stated that she was especially irate over the matter because parents were given no warning about the presentations, nor an opportunity to opt out. She is also dismayed that college students were granted the right to come into the classroom and encourage her daughter to be sexually active. “I am furious,” she declared. “I am her parent. Where does anyone get the right to tell her that it’s okay for her to have sex?” “The school is overstepping its bounds in not notifying parents first and giving us the choice,” another parent remarked. “I thought it was very inappropriate. That kind of instruction is best left up to the parents.” According to reports, during the workshop for the adolescent boys, the students were counseled to keep a condom in their pocket at all times, and were taught how to identify a woman who is a “slut.” “I was absolutely furious – really furious,” an anonymous parent told reporter Todd Starnes. “These are just kids. I’m dumbfounded that they found this class was appropriate.” However, both the school principal and the district superintendent are defending the workshops, and are advising that they will schedule more. Superintendent Paul Finch told the Poughkeepsie Journal that the presentation was “focused on improving culture, relationships, communication and self-perceptions.” “[We] may require more notification to parents” in the future, he said, contending that the sessions are required under the state Dignity for All Students Act, which prohibits harassment and bullying in the classroom. He advised that Principal Katie Zahedi and guidance counselors at the school worked with the Bard students to plan the workshops. Zahedi asserts that the sessions were rather about saying no to unwanted advances as opposed to encouraging homosexual acts. “In planning the discussion, we made it clear that absolutely no discussion of any sexual acts is appropriate to middle school, and they used the examples of a kiss,” she wrote in an online forum for parents. “It was a separate activity for boys and girls and ultimately about respect and safety.” Mark Primoff, a spokesman for Bard College said that students had volunteered to give the presentation after Zehedi invited the institution of higher learning to participate in the workshops. However, parents remain livid over the matter. A public meeting was held this week for residents to express their concerns. It is not known whether girls actually had to kiss one another, or if the exercise stopped at the request

HOMESCHOOL IS FOR EVERYONE!

IN A WORLD GONE NEARLY MAD, HERE IS A FAMILY THAT KNOWS HOW TO "GIT-ER-DONE"! SIX KIDS IN COLLEGE BY AGE 12. Seth Harding grabs a two-handed rubber sword, adjusts his helmet made with electrician’s tape, and starts to teach. "Try to block her sword with the base of your sword." “Why aren’t you wearing shoes?” I wonder. “We’re peasants.” “En garde!” Seth yells. The battle begins. He is bringing light to the Dark Ages. At 7, when many kids figure they might be firemen, Seth announced he would be a military archeologist. His mom, Mona Lisa, encouraged that curiosity. "Wow! That kid was into this!" she marvels. By 12, Seth was hanging out with students nearly twice his age, studying the Middle Ages at Faulkner University, near his home in Montgomery, Alabama. "How's he doing?" I ask assistant professor Grover Plunkett. Seth Harding dressed as a knight. Harding family Seth Harding dressed as a knight. "He's got the highest average in the class." Seth was motivated by his brother Keith's success. Keith is just down the hall, studying finite mathematics, a college senior -- at 14. "It makes you wonder,” their friend Wesley Jimmerson says, shaking his head. "Are they advanced, or are we just really behind?" Sister Hannah was the first of the Harding kids to take college entrance exams -- at age 12. "I didn't expect to pass,” she says, “so I started crying, because I was thinking, 'Now what?'" By 22 she was designing spacecraft. She holds master's degrees in math and mechanical engineering. Ten-year-old Katrinnah Harding hopes to enter college next year. Her brother Heath started at age 11. He's finishing his master's in computer science -- at 17. "If they're going to be working at my kitchen table,” Mona Lisa says with a smile, “why not earn college credit for what they're doing?" Named after her mother’s favorite song, Mona Lisa Harding home-schools her children in the basics, but found that her kids learned more quickly (and got less bored) when they were allowed to study deeply -- something they loved. "I don't have any brilliant children,” she contends. “I'm not brilliant. My husband's not brilliant. We're just average folks.” Who inspired six children to enter college before they became teenagers. Kip, their dad, didn't take his own advice. He graduated from college at 25, while flying helicopters in the military. Mona Lisa studied to be a nurse before staying home to teach her kids. They were high school sweethearts who shared a passion for learning. "The expectation is that you're going to have a fun day,” Kip says, watching his children play. "Not that you're going to come home with A's." Each Harding has a different passion. Keith loves music. Rosannah became an architect -- at 18. And Thunder James? Well, what’s in a name? The 3-year-old careens down the hall, scattering his brothers and sisters, driving a little electric car. I can understand maybe convincing one or two children to enter college early, but Mona Lisa has more kids than Mother Hubbard: 10. She shrugs. "By the time you get down to number five, number six, they just think learning seems normal. We find out what their passions are, what they really like to study, and we accelerate them gradually." But what happens to their childhood? "We didn’t limit their experience," Mona Lisa says. "They’re taking college classes, but socially, they are just teenagers." Who live at home, not in college dorms. "We don't drop them off at school, 16 credit hours first semester, 'bye, I'll see you,'" Kip says. These are not itty-bitty adults. They play with kids their own age, but they don’t wait until they're older to figure out what they love in life. Are the parents pushing their kids too hard, too fast? "All our children would have to tells us is, 'You know, this isn't fun any more," Mona Lisa says, "and we'd do something about that." This is what their daughter, Serennah, tells them: "I hope to love you back very well with what I do with my life." Like her dad, Serennah chose the military. She's about to become a Navy doctor at age 22 -- one of the youngest physicians in American history. Story from Today.Com, April 18, 2013, by Bob Dotson http://www.today.com/news/meet-family-who-sent-six-kids-college-age-12-1C9316706

Higher Standard

Jesus demands a much higher standard than most American Christians are willing to live. Shaped and molded by the biggest brain trainer and brain drainer in the history of mankind, the television, American Christians are unwilling to turn away from their idols, the big peeping, muttering ones that sit as the focus of every family room in America. Satan is winning this battle through deception, while his prey is crooning justifications and rationalizations for their sins of defilement. They continue to devour the defecation that passes for prime time programming and bite their nails until the next season packed with sins of the flesh. Repent? Repent of what? Turn away from sin? What sin? Thus goes the tug-of-war between spiritual and secular reason. Face the fact that the Christian conscience has been malformed through the constant taunting and tempting of the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh and the pride of life that never goes black. The time is fast approaching when milky reason will not suffice against the justice of a jealous God. So keep nourishing your spirit through ESPN, all the Movie Channels, ABC, CBS, NBC, and all the other initial combinations, then present the stewardship of your time before God, and see what He decides. Not only will it be a time issue but also a content issue. Held up in the light of Scripture, hope for mercy for intentional ignorance. Pray for grace to douse the flames earned by open rebellion and obvious disobedience. Ezekiel 14:1-11 was surely written for God's people of old as well as the 21st century. Turn away? Turn away from what?

LOCAL SCHOOLS!

This is from a story in the Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser. But how can you listen to one child? I can verify the truth of this child's story because I have heard it hundreds of times, and stories worse than this, from students of all the schools in this area, both public and Catholic! Good Morning, Debbie Dugas here. I have purposely held back details of the incident responsible for starting my mission to involve myself in the school system. After careful reflection, I think I need to post it for people to understand the importance of this issue. The Advertiser did include it in their story (to a degree) but I have found most people did not see the paper. Derrick Comeaux gave us insight into Carencro High School but even that did not prepare me for my daughter’s conversation with me. While Mrs. Billeaudeau is protesting the lack of “decorum” in the board meeting, my daughter is telling me about her classroom which begins almost every day with a group of boys in the back telling the teacher they want to perform oral sex on her. They also debate the merits of anal inclusion in this process. Please replace my words with the most vile words you can imagine and you will have the actual conversation. Now, this is so horrible the media does not want to say it; do you think my child should have to listen to it? Understand this is being said TO THE TEACHER. Please forgive me if I have offended someone’s sensibilities here, but I need support on this. Everyone agrees the schools need to put discipline back. I see it on all the posts. So are you going to stand with me to put a stop to it? Are you ok with your children being pawns in political games and personal conflicts? Are you ok with your children being placed in harm’s way to receive an education? I have posted the Teachers Bill of Rights on my page, Parents for Education Reform – PER. Our parish is violating this law. There are 31,000 students in Lafayette Parish Schools. How much can they cover up if even a third of us stand up to the biggest bully of all….Lafayette Parish School System and its board members. I would ask you all to reflect on this and your priorities, on this most holy of all weekends.

10 Signs Your Child Needs a Different Kind of Education

By Jerry Mintz Many parents don’t realize that the education world has changed drastically since they were in school. Schools and class sizes used to be smaller, dropout rates lower, in-school violence almost unheard of, and teachers weren’t terrified of showing affection to their students, or of discussing moral values. Of course, even then, school was far from perfect, but at least the teachers—and usually the principal—knew every student by name, something that is increasingly rare today. Because our public school system has deteriorated considerably, many parents, teachers, and individuals have taken it upon themselves to create public and private alternatives to that system; and it is important for parents to know that they now have choices. So how do you know that it’s time to look for another educational approach for your child? Here are some of the signs: 1. Does your child say he or she hates school? If so, something is probably wrong with the school. Children are natural learners, and when they’re young, you can hardly stop them from learning. If your child says they hate school, listen to them. 2. Does your child find it difficult to look an adult in the eye, or to interact with older or younger children? If so, your child may have become “socialized” to interact only with peers within their own age group—a very common practice in most schools—and may be losing the ability to communicate with a broader group of children and adults. 3. Does your child seem fixated on designer labels and trendy clothes for school? This is a symptom of an approach that emphasizes external rather than internal values, causing children to rely on shallower means of comparison and acceptance, rather than deeper values. 4. Does your child come from school tired and cranky? While a student can have a hard day in any school, consistent exhaustion and irritability are sure signs that their educational experiences are not energizing, but actually debilitating. 5. Does your child come home complaining about conflicts that they’ve had in school, or unfair situations that they have been exposed to? This may mean that the school does not have a student-centered approach to conflict resolution and communication. Many schools rely on swift, adult-issued problem solving, depriving children of their ability to emotionally process and thoughtfully discuss the situation at hand. 6. Has your child lost interest in creative expression through art, music, and dance? Within the traditional system, these creative outlets are often considered secondary to “academic” areas, and are not as widely encouraged. In some cases, courses in these areas are not even offered any more. This neglect often devalues, or extinguishes, these natural talents and abilities in children. 7. Has your child stopped reading or writing—or pursuing a special interest—just for fun? Are they investing the bare minimum in homework? This is often a sign that spontaneous activities and student independence are not being valued in their school. Children have a natural inclination to direct their own learning; however, an emphasis on meeting standardized test requirements limits the abilities of teachers to nurture and encourage this inclination. The result can be an increasing apathy toward subjects that were once exciting, and a loss of creativity. 8. Does your child procrastinate until the last minute to do homework? This is a sign that the homework is not really meeting his or her needs—perhaps it’s “busy work” or rote memorization—and may be stifling to their natural curiosity. 9. Does your child come home talking about anything exciting that happened in school that day? If not, maybe nothing in school is exciting for your child. Why shouldn’t school—and education—be a fun, vibrant, and engaging place? 10. Did the school nurse or guidance counselor suggest that your child may have a disease, like ADHD, and should be given Ritalin or another behavior regulating drug? Be wary of these diagnoses and keep in mind that much of the traditional school curriculum these days is behavior control. If test requirements limit a teacher’s ability to engage students, if students are discouraged from following their own passions and expected to sit for five or six hours a day with limited personal attention and interaction, I suggest it’s the school that has the disease, EDD—Educational Deficit Disorder—and it might be time to get your child out of that situation! If your child has exhibited several of these characteristics, it’s time for you to start looking for an alternative. In most parts of this country today, there are many options to choose from—public and private. For example, 40 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have now enacted legislation which allows groups of parents and teachers to create charter schools, which are not stuck with having to fulfill as many of the myriad of state regulations and can create their own individualized approach. There are now more than 4000 of them. There are also 4,500 magnet schools throughout the country, public schools that specialize in an area of expertise, and draw students from a wider geographic area. Additionally, there are over 4,500 Montessori schools, based on the experiential approach designed by Dr. Maria Montessori, and hundreds of Waldorf schools, which put equal emphasis on traditional academics areas and the arts. There are also hundreds of independent alternative schools, many emphasizing participant control, with parents and students taking responsibility for their own educations. The latter are often called democratic schools, free schools, or Sudbury schools. Many public school systems, too, have a variety of alternative programs within their systems. These are divided into two general approaches: 1. Public Choice; programs which are open to any student in the community. Sometimes they are called Schools Within Schools. 2. Public At-Risk; programs for children who have had a variety of problems coping with school. These programs run the spectrum from helpful to dumping grounds. Examine them closely before making a decision to enroll. Parents of well over a million children in this country have checked off “none of the above” and decided to teach their children at home. It is now legal in every state and does not require teacher certification. Homeschooling has taken a variety of approaches. Some try to create “school at home” with a fairly standard curriculum, the main difference being that parents can teach one-to-one with their children. Some families have signed up with a curriculum designed by an umbrella school; this school will help the parents create their own curriculum or, provide its own basic curriculum, grade homework, and help with any necessary report forms. A third approach is called “unschooling.” In this case the parent bases their educational approach on the interest of the child and builds on that, rather than a pre-set curriculum. In some cases, curriculum is designed “retroactively,” by keeping records of the activities throughout the year and at the end of the process dividing the experiences into the appropriate subject area. Remarkably, since most states require some form of testing for homeschoolers, as a group, they average in the 85th percentile, compared to the 50th percentile of the average public school student. There are now so many homeschoolers around the country that virtually all of them are part of some kind of homeschool group. Some of these groups have coalesced into homeschool resource centers and operate as often as four or five days a week. Generally, colleges have discovered that homeschoolers make such good students that they welcome them to apply to their schools. As more and more parents become aware of, and make, these choices, we hope that the traditional system will evolve into one that meets the needs of an increasing number of students. Meanwhile, don’t wait for that system to change; take responsibility for your child’s education. Find out what your options are and choose what is best for your child. None of these signs by themselves should be taken as a reason to panic. But if you have noticed several of them, you should certainly explore educational alternatives.

THE ALTERNATIVE!

It is not more of the same, just do it better that will change American political outlook on education. It is grassroots, homeschool movements that will appreciate diversity rather than uniformity. God did not make all children the same, therefore they should not all have to move through the same curriculum... Homeschool appreciates creativity and personalizes education to the individual. At the present time the only reason we put up with standardization is that currently, there are no "HOME" Colleges! Check out this vid by Sir Ken Robinson. You will have to type it into your browser http://www.vimeo.com/58069426

AS WARNED, ITS HERE!

January 14, 2013 Barack Obama Interested in ‘Allah-Is-God’ Curriculum 01/14/2013 by John Griffing, WND Secondary Source “CSCOPE, the controversial online curriculum that taught ‘Allah is God’ and currently is used in 80 percent of Texas school districts, has caught the attention of the Obama administration’s Department of Education. A source in the Texas education system has told WND that Common Core operatives in the U.S. Department of Education are actively pursuing CSCOPE as a way around the Texas legislative process. Texas is one of the few states still resisting implementation of Common Core, Obama’s national standards initiative, which many feel is a transparent attempt to nationalize education and progressively control classroom content with minimal parental oversight. Implementation of Common Core is known to have been made a condition of school systems’ receipt of federal dollars under Obama’s ‘Race to the Top’ program. CSCOPE recently has come under fire for evidence of what sources claim to be radical content and secrecy. Now new information of such a radical agenda has surfaced showing CSCOPE connections to Obama mentor and self-acknowledged terror group member Bill Ayers. WND has documented a strong link between Ayers and CSCOPE heavyweight and Common Core advocate Linda Darling-Hammond. An unrepentant terror group member (and known Obama supporter, financier, and ghost-writer), William ‘Bill’ Ayers was part of the notorious Weather Underground which attempted to bomb the Pentagon in the seventies. After 9/11, Ayers was interviewed by the New York Times, and was quoted as saying he had ‘no regrets.’ Ayers gave Darling-Hammond an enthusiastic endorsement for education secretary when Obama was first elected. Ayers has worked extensively with Darling-Hammond on many of the same projects, even editing her work. Both are part of what some education experts have termed the ‘small schools movement,’ which allegedly emphasizes ‘emotional’ responses and output over factual mastery. Darling-Hammond is mentioned throughout CSCOPE literature, has given innumerable lectures on behalf of CSCOPE, and was part of Obama’s educational transition team. She is a primary advocate and proponent of Common Core in Texas, and observers see the acquisition of CSCOPE by the U.S. Department of Education as a logical next step. This scenario has alarmed those concerned about classroom content accountability. Previously, WND reported how CSCOPE lessons promote Islam, teaching conversion methods and presenting verses from the Quran that denigrate other faiths. In CSCOPE curriculum, the Boston Tea Party is likened to an act of terrorism on par with 9/11. In the wake of the Newtown massacre, the Second Amendment is portrayed as a ‘collective,’ not an individual right, despite the Supreme Court’s recent rulings to the contrary. The CSCOPE website has posted a response to concerns about certain lesson plans, including an extensive discussion of the Boston Tea Party. But critics say that such lessons should never have appeared in the first place. Sources within the Texas education system recently informed WND that Wicca, thought by many to be akin to witchcraft, was being taught in CSCOPE curriculum alongside Christianity, but was removed before the news media could access it, a fact which represents one of the biggest concerns for followers of CSCOPE. CSCOPE apparently immediately deletes controversial content once leaked, making it impossible at any one time to know exactly what students are learning and in what order. Defenders of this process say that this responsiveness to public scrutiny is a form of self-auditing. Others have said that it simply leaves parents, teachers and those in charge of curriculum oversight powerless to stop agenda-driven lesson plans and the damage the ideas therein might do to students. WND has documented numerous instances of lessons being deleted after their use in classrooms. When it was discovered that Islam was being given preferential status as a part of a study on the world’s major religions, CSCOPE administrators deleted the lesson plan and associated PowerPoint in the presence of two sources, leaving no trace online. However, through available technology, documentation of this lesson plan and other such controversial content has been retained and reviewed by Texas educators and WND. See the lesson. In CSCOPE World History/Social Studies, Lesson 2, Unit 3 under the heading, ‘Classical Rome,’ students are told that Christianity is a ‘cult,’ and given a link to a BBC article saying the early Christians were ‘cannibals,’ i.e. the Eucharist, which students are then led to conclude is the reason for Roman persecution. See the lesson. This lesson has since been removed, but documentation in WND’s possession confirms that the lesson existed. Critics contend that this ability to change content on a whim to evade scrutiny or accountability is a persistent risk with a system like CSCOPE. An organic curriculum – if regulated – might be advantageous, but without transparency, these types of occurrences will likely be more frequent, critics say. Speaking with WND, Texas Sen. Dan Patrick, new chairman of the education committee, communicated his intent to hold high-profile hearings and investigate CSCOPE. Sen. Patrick noted, ‘Any system where the chairman of the state board can’t get a password to explore their site in detail for six months, requires teachers to sign an agreement that could subject them to criminal penalties, and is not easily transparent to parents, needs to be closely examined by the legislature.’ When asked if he would support placing CSCOPE under state oversight and/or local school board oversight, Sen. Patrick answered carefully, explaining, ‘We will make that decision after our hearings. However, I have concerns of any curriculum program that is in the majority of our school districts without some level of oversight by either the SBOE, TEA, or the legislature.’ Patrick, along with many other Republicans, supported the 2011 legislation that took power over Internet curriculum review away from the SBOE, though this provision was admittedly ill-understood in its implications and was originally intended to reduce the cost-burden to school districts in obtaining and distributing the curriculum. While reducing costs, this move also created the basis of the current controversy. Opponents of CSCOPE, on the other hand, desire a lawsuit. They do not want to wait for hearings. As they contend, CSCOPE is already violating Texas public statutes, which require all ‘instructional materials’ to be available to parents. CSCOPE places all primary content – apart from summaries – behind a pay wall. Texas Education Service Center Curriculum Collaborative (TESCCC) Governing Board minutes, obtained only by Texas Public Information Act request, reveal that even the governing board in charge of CSCOPE may not be fully aware of CSCOPE content issues. Minutes for the meetings covered show that governing board members were told by CSCOPE Executive Director Wade Labay that they will only be involved in content-related issues if ‘politically sensitive,’ what Labay calls ‘’911′ type messages or those deemed critical.’ In other words, in addition to the absence of state oversight, corporate oversight within CSCOPE might be lacking. The fears of some that CSCOPE is replacing textbooks, a claim denied by Texas SBOE member Thomas Ratliff, would appear justified if governing board minutes are considered. In addition to outlining when and under what circumstances CSCOPE would communicate with the TESCCC governing board, pending textbook alignments with Pearson, McGraw Hill, et al., were discussed and delayed with the support of governing board members. Some attendees lamented even having to align CSCOPE content with textbooks, since ‘the mission of CSCOPE is to change instruction in the classroom.’ TESCCC has now asked the Texas Attorney General to make its minutes exempt from public information requirements.” Source – WND.