Utterly Meaningless

Freshmen senator and this is his first big action? Somebody should look closely at who financed his election…

Yikes, can you imagine the Illinois educrats coming to the door to see your pre-school curriculum for your 3-5 yr old? (extention of story about teen blogged above)Gotta make sure that you’re not just keeping those babies home & just letting them be babies.

The 3-year old schooling idea seems to be gaining popularity. I wish that they would use the money that would go to lowering the compulsory age to strengthen families and teach parents parenting skills. The rhetoric of the misguided proponents is based on the studies of low-income families that show that early preschool may help them. The same studies show no positive effects on any other groups. How unfair to make preschool or kindegarten mandatory for all as a bandage that will surely not help low-income families over the long-term.

“I wish that they would use the money that would go to lowering the compulsory age to strengthen families and teach parents parenting skills.”

How is government going to do this? The only posible way I can think of would be to take all that money and give it back to the taxpayers they took it from in the first place.

That is not going to happen.

No, no. They’ll take the money to fund classes to teach parents to parent exactly the way they want them to parent. Of course, they’ll also have to fund a department to enforce the new parenting standards. Instead of showing up at your house to check on your curriculum, they’ll be showing up to check on your entire parenting philosophy. But, if random home inspections prevent even one case of child abuse, it must be worth it.

And they’d of course need specialized colleges to train the future “professional parentalists.” And an entire new level of bureaucracy. Maybe the Public Parenting Department (PP Dept for short).

LA legislators are also considering lowering the attendance age to 5. Anyone have hints for websites that offer discussion/research into this situation? I’d like to understand the reasoning for lowering the age before I call my representatives.

It depends on who is pushing. Legislators are typically swayed by some limited studies that showed early education had all sorts of benefits including lowering overall costs to the community. The studies, though, were only for VERY poor families.

OTOH, teachers are all in favor of lowering the CA age because it means more teachers must be hired. More teachers = more money for the union = more power in the state legislature.

I’d like to understand the reasoning for lowering the age before I call my representatives. *****
They want their hands on the cradle so they can train your kids to be government parasites.

The more people they can get to depend on big government, the more voters they have to use democracy to vote every right you have out from under you. Look at history; it is not a good thing.

Vox Day has a lot of knowlegable bloggers on this topic that frequent his site: voxday...t.com/
Check out the archives; there was recent flurry on this topic.

One thing that you could point out is that the NEA openly admits that it wants to have public school programs for all children from ONE DAY OLD. Point this out, and maybe a few of the public school parents will get concerned.

I wouldn’t hold my breath though. But it’s worth a shot.

Thanks for the feedback. I did receive an alert (www.la-home-educators.com mailing lists, announcements, if anyone is interested) explaining why homeschoolers should oppose the lowering of the attendance age.

I was specifically looking for arguments that supported lowering the age requirements so I could argue against those points in my email or phone call. First, though, I should find out who is supporting the bill, thanks Daryl. Also, I checked out voxday as you suggested Gene, and didn’t find anything in the archives. It might be my computer though, because the site pulled up in a goofy way and didn’t show many of the posts. I guess I’ll head over to the library this afternoon to check it out.

I do appreciate your comments. It has given me the boost to do the research and make the calls!

One thing that you could point out is that the NEA openly admits that it wants to have public school programs for all children from ONE DAY OLD
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I can see it now. 3 generations after they pull this off the public will think you must send your babies to a professional or they will never learn to walk or talk properly… And if they don’t learn to eat properly, they could choke and you wouldn’t want that to happen.

What I see with homeschoolers doing as well or better than school kids is this same pattern. They do well without teachers because the usefull stuff is not that difficult and much of the rest of government selected busy work is an unnecessary waste of valuable learning time better spent on individually chosen learning activities.

Babies learn naturally to talk, and walk. Other simpler tasks such as those taught in school such as reading and math, most kids could pick up with minimal instruction and being around it.

If you look at the difficulty of language acquisition and learning to walk from a babies “blank slate” perspective, proclaiming that reading and math are so difficult that professionals are needed for these tasks to be learned is laughable.

Bidgette, Here is another link with lots of good information: johnta...ex.htm