Utterly Meaningless

I didn’t know I was engaged in a “social experiment” that has been around for about a “decade”… I always thought education at home had predated institutional schooling by hundreds, if not thousands of years…

I reckon, since I am a “silly, self taught dilettante” that I cannot fathom what on earth the Hoe is talking about. Maybe my crystal ball is brighter….let me see….problems on the horizon….Oh, yes! I know a problem, the homeschoolers will continue to raise the bar demonstrating just what children who are taught well are capable of and embarrass the public school teachers. Another problem-all the good scholarships will be snatched up by the homeschoolers, much to the chagrin of the public school system. Yes, I see big problems on the horizon. Will society survive an onslaught of high achieving, emotionally balanced, self motivated young people? I don’t know. I do know that my 10 year old could put together a better looking blog. I had the hardest time reading that mess.

I think she needs to get a refund on her crystal ball. It appears to be broken.

And what abut those of us who have been homeschooling for more than ten years? We must be really whacked out then.

It can’t be read at all with my version of Firefox with the grey print on purple flowers. Well, I suppose I could copy/paste it to Notepad and read it.

Andrea’s right – it’s unreadable in Firefox; well, not unreadable, but who wants to make the effort after Daryl’s “recommendation”?

“What is it with all of the anti-homeschooling rants lately? Jealousy?”

Actually, I think it is defensiveness. They think of our choice as a condemnation of themselves (well, I went to public school and I turned out okay!) and of their choice for their children.

Yep, Karen, I think you’re right. Now to be fair I have to say we get MANY positive comments on our homeschooling. But the negative ones almost invariably start out with, “Oh, well, I could never do that with my kids because…” then here comes this string of they need their friends, I don’t have the patience (and I do???), we don’t have the money and I have to work (and we have 9 kids and live on one income), yada, yada, yada. Why don’t they just say, “If I was heiress to the world’s largest fortune and had the patience of Job I’d still send my kids to school.” It is indeed their choice so why won’t they leave us alone with ours?

A trick that I figured out using Myspace, if you highlight the text, it’s white on a blue background and much easier to read. It doesn’t make it any less painful to read however, and after a couple of lines, I remembered that Daryl had already given us enough to read. So why not let him do the work?

If you can’t read it, it’s because you’re using that inferior browser and maybe that’s an indication of the other choices you make? As for defensiveness, just look in your own words and responses. I made my bold prediction. Big deal. What do you really care anyway?

Self-confidence annoys those who don’t have it.

Apparently an appropriate amount of it annoys those who have too much of it too. 😉

Must.Not.Argue.With.Idiots.

Homeschooling in the modern sense is about 35 years old, and you want another 20 or 30 years. So you’re saying we have to wait until the first homeschoolers are retirement age for the “H-bomb” to go off? I’ve set a reminder in iCal.

Your blog also looks like shit in Camino and Safari.

Hoe, what exactly would be your response to the many who have been successfully homeschooled throughout and are now happy productive citizens? Or are one of those who single out one homeschooler out of a thousand that doesn’t “measure up” and declare your prediction correct?

Under FF it’s unreadable. Using the IE rendering engine it’s unreadable only half the time. And IE is NOT a better browser. It’s insecure and downright dangerous. I don’t use it at all anymore since I learned I can view IE-specific websites under FF with the IE Tab extension.

At least we aren’t “Hoes”! 🙂

Didn’t everyone know that homeschooling truly is just a mass cult movement to satisfy the need for more pirates in the world to combat global warming? Eventually we’ll be touched by His noodly appendage, and those other people won’t! haha! So yeah, there will be future consequences. No need for climatologists! We shall see them to extinction! RAmen.

The results are in: We graduated three from home. The eldest aged 30 is in public relations for a major (liberal) university. The middle one is happily homeschooling a brood of her own and publishes her own paper, and the youngest owns his own construction business. They are too busy to wonder how they turned out.

Thanks for the IE/FF tip, Daryl!

At least we aren’t “Hoes”! 🙂

The original name of this blog was “Homeschool & Other Education Stuff,” which I routinely shortened to H&OES. So, in a manner of speaking, we’re all HOES. 🙂

The Hoe’s site only works better in IE because IE compensates for sloppy coding. She’s using a Blogger template, which normally work fine in Firefox, so she’s obviously done something to mess it up.

Learn a little HTML, and your site can look good in Firefox, too!

**dusting my red lightbulbs**

I wonder how that “public school” thing will work out in the long run? I know some kids that have been through them and they can barely read and write. And I’ve met some public school kids who are social misfits too. Oh well. Not every faddish social innovation is a success.

“I wonder how that ‘public school’ thing will work out in the long run? . . . . Oh well. Not every faddish social innovation is a success.”

And, alas, neither is every social innovation failure a fad.

I’m going to make a bold observation here. I see many parallels between the ‘ignorance’ camp and the ‘state schooling’ camp. (That goes double for the *compulsory* state schooling camp.) Sorry for any toes I might be smushing here, but this is how it looks to this facer of reality.

This public-schooling movement that has been going on for about a century is proving itself to be another failed social experiment. We’ve already seen problems arise from it that most of us wouldn’t have considered possible, given that it’s supposed to be about ‘education’ (or is it? Some proponents of State indoctrination do admit it’s about proper socialization and citizen training) and new sociological pathologies continue to spring forth. Those problems include not just ignorance but apathy as well, and a hearty sense of entitlement, and mob- (aka democratically-) enforced ‘values,’ and enfeebled parenting.

But State schooling is so entrenched, and so lucrative to the vast educational-industrial complex, and such a handy means of social control and information gathering — not to mention the lure of ‘free’ babysitting — that it’s here to stay in one form or another for pretty much bloody ever.

Too many people are starting to notice, and mind, that it’s not actually working very well for the outrageous amount of money and time it consumes, so it *will* morph itself just enough to pacify the whiners, but it will never go away. The best we can hope for is that, someday, a small population of independent thinkers gets the chance to declare independence all over again (on another planet, perhaps; might be awhile, so don’t hold your breath), and maybe THAT time they’ll get it right, and tell the Benjamin Rushes to get lost, and the Thomas Jeffersons will take a lesson from history and realize the impossibility of the government overseeing the informing of discretion when the State’s self-interest is at stake.