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Imma just address one point, and I think I'm done here - since the folk so against homeschooling have resorted in the same "dishonest debate tactics" they claim to dislike, but only when facing them, I guess.

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I thought about this a while, and I realize that I am probably a rarity in this, but I wonder...

Did it ever occur to anyone some kids might not WANT regular contact with people outside their family ?

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You ain't discussin it, you're ranting and screaming

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throwing worst-case examples as commonplace

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and linking together assumptions to build an easy to knock over strawman

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getting explicitly snide

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you and Rue both

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personally insulting

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downright petty and irrational

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Cause I *did* offer suggestions on that

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and *was* willing to discuss it

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till you started acting like an asswipe

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cause your little sacred cow got a little kicked in the knees

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which might not have happened had you not *gone out of your way* earlier in the thread to make a post offering NOTHING but insult to people simply because they disagreed with you

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something you *claimed* to despise around here.

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Either get OVER it, or stop wrecking perfectly good discussions with your over the top temper tantrums, dammit.

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Originally posted by canttakesky:
/quote]Did you say you were in Australia? Maybe the educational system there is better than here. All I can speak on is the educational system in the States.

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Here, teachers aren't experts in science, math, history, or whatever subject they are teaching. That is not what they studied in college. To get a bachelor's in education, you take mostly classes in practice and theory of education--they spend most of their time learning procedures and processes of how to teach, not what to teach. That is the substance of their credential.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
So, let's take another running start on this issue: There are two possible problems to homeschooling

1) Students may not get an education that allows them even the option to participate in a post-school world. That problem can be solved by requiring that homeschooled students take some sort of curriculum-based test which could allow them to ultimately get that piece of paper from HS.

2) SOME parents choose to homeschool because they're abusers. They choose to isolate their children from anybody that has any authority because they simply don't want to get caught. Now, if anyone has a solution to this problem, let me know. Or just tell me that it's not a big enough problem to deal with, and not worth disturbing other parent's rights over.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
... Now, I grant you that some could say that I'm using the "war on terror" argument- that in order to catch a small percentage of abusers I'll resort to "treating everyone like a criminal".

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... Neither you, nor Sarge, nor CTS have come up with a solution to the problem of "disappeared" children. You don't even have the balls to say it's not an issue!

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Originally posted by rue:
B/c you see it involves the big boogeyman government, and that's scarier than any monster-parent could ever be.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
No Magon, you didn't kill the thread.

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Originally posted by rue:
individual children are an acceptable loss in the face of your hatred of any kind of government.

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Originally posted by Fletch2:
Brings to mind a conversation I had with a friend of mine almost 20 years ago. It was about higher education and the fact that in every country it's rationed in some way. In the UK at the time the government paid tuition but only if you passed a set of standardised tests to get into university. In the US entry requirements for university was lower but candidates tended to be self selecting because of the need to pay tuition.

Anyway, my friend said in effect that societies effectively limit access to higher education because in the end it still needs people to empty dustbins and repair sewers. If tomorrow every child's true potential could be realised who would do society's dirty jobs?

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The government IS scarier than any one parent

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I don't think you can honestly make a consistent argument that government eliminates more suffering than it causes. You haven't tried, so maybe you agree.

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You, and Signy, also haven't made any attempt to address the rather obvious idiocy of institutional education - which is what you're holding up as the only honorable way to curb child abuse.

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On the other hand, there are increasing reports of homeschool child abuse in the media. It all started in October 2003 when CBS news aired a two-part series about the “dark side” of homeschooling. The Oct. 13 episode discussed a case in AZ in which an abused 14-year-old homeschooler killed himself and his two siblings while the Oct. 14 show discussed homeschool child abuse cases and murders in TX, KS, and NC....

Then three local Akron area incidents involving child abuse of homeschooled children (including starving homeschooled children found wandering in Akron after they escaped from a closet where they weremade to eat from a cat litter box) led two writers for the Akron Beacon Journal to conduct a systematic search of newspaper articles to see if such incidents were isolated. Since child abuse cases are seldom reported in the media, they instead examined murders and found that a relatively high proportion of homeschooled children had been murdered by their parents in recent years. In November 2004, they published their findings.

...
The Florida Story

The first national story of 2005 began on February 4 when homeschool parents Jim and Linda Dollar fled Florida after their child abuse was discovered. Governor Jeb Bush told the press, “I hope they find them, and I hope that they put them away for a long, long time. It’s disgusting.” But if you would just listen to the Dollars talk, you would think that they were loving parents. For example, in a 1995 questionnaire, Linda wrote, “We have five adopted children and have seen what we can do to help those less fortunate, we can see so many children who need special care, love and an opportunity to be part of a warm, loving, caring home atmosphere.” Despite their talk, their child abuse was chillingly cold. Here is a summary, from the February 5 Tampa Tribune of the torture and starvation that five of their children allegedly endured:

"Two parents arrested Friday near Salt Lake City are accused of using cattle prods, pliers, vises and starvation to torture five of their seven children. Their adopted 16-year-old son weighed 59 pounds when hospitalized Jan. 21 in Citrus County, which started an investigation, officials said. Twin boys, 14, subsequently were found to weigh 36 and 38 pounds. Two girls, 13 and 12, also were severely undernourished.... “The twins were particularly shocking,” said sheriff´s spokeswoman Gail Tierney. “The pictures were reminiscent of something you would have seen at Auschwitz.”

Florida law gives families three homeschooling options: evaluations by a certified teacher, testing by a certified teacher, or enrollment in an umbrella school. The Dollars complied with Florida law by enrolling in an umbrella school that advertised itself as “non-intrusive.” According to the Tampa Tribune, Barbara Dunlop, administrator of the umbrella school that was supposed to be supervising the Dollars, noticed that the children were abnormally small when she tested them three years ago: The adopted children of John and Linda Dollar appeared abnormally small during academic testing conducted nearly three years ago at a Lutz private Christian school. Barbara Dunlop, 51, administrator of Tampa Educational Academy of Christian Heritage Inc., said via e-mail Friday that she had noticed “some of the children were very small. The mother explained that they had been adopted and came from a family of small stature.”

Unfortunately, Dunlop failed to act upon her observation, perhaps because she still believed the myth that only parents who love their children homeschool them. She didn´t yet understand that there is a small group of parents who homeschool children that they hate in order to better control them and better hide the abuse. If she had acted upon her observation, the abuse of these children could have been ended three years earlier.

The Arizona Story
An underweight 14-year-old Arizona girl escaped from her home after allegedly being locked in her room for 15 months while sexually abused and starved by her homeschooling father. The girl finally broke out of her room and made it to a friend’s house, where she talked with child abuse authorities, who believed her.

The girl’s father, Rene Valenzuela, had signed an affidavit with the local school superintendent’s office back in 1999 when he first began to homeschool her. However, after this step he didn’t have to do anything else to comply with Arizona’s lax homeschool law. When Governor Janet Napolitano was questioned about this story, she replied with a question, “How could this happen in our state? That a young girl is kept prisoner in a home for years and as you say, no one knows about it?” During her six years of official homeschooling, since 1999, there are virtually no records to demonstrate that this girl was ever educated. Although she had apparently been given books to read and there was an unused algebra book in her room, there was no evidence that she had received an education. If the Arizona law had included annual accountability, as in Pennsylvania, this girl’s lack of education would have been discovered long before she was locked in her room for 15 months at age 13 as a sex slave.

The Iowa Story
The Iowa Department of Human Services first began investigating accused child-endangerer and homeschool dad Jon Neely when his daughter [failed to show up for a public school test required by Iowa homeschool regulations. Later they found his 10-year-old daughter, weighing 59 pounds, locked in a dark room with no furniture or light while her father and his girl friend were out. The couple were charged with child endangerment for leaving the girl with no escape in case of fire. Quotes from a February 23 Des Moines Register story suggest that Jon Neely hated this child that he had had with his just-divorced wife: Jon Neely told police he had taken out the light bulbs in the room because his daughter was being punished. He said he had removed all of the furniture because his daughter “breaks everything,” according to the warrant. Police also reported in the document that Neely later said his daughter “peed on everything and she steals.”

The Iowa case was nipped in the bud because of the quick reaction of government officials when the girl did not show up for a test required by the Iowa homeschool law. According to an AP story, Iowa Governor Vilsack reviewed the case and “says that appropriate measures were taken.”

What We Can Do
The vast majority of us teach our children at home because we love them. Our goodness shines through and can be seen in the goodness of the children that we raise. But there is a very small group of child abusers who keep children home that they hate in order to better control them and hide the abuse. Given the new media template, whenever this abuse is discovered, it will be widely publicized and the state’s Governor will be sought out for comments and action.

If the Pennsylvania homeschool community acts responsibly, we may be able to prevent similar incidents from happening in our state. Evaluators who meet in person with children may be able to recognize possible abuse situations. Almost all of these abusive parents isolated their children and use lack of food as a way to control them. Unfortunately, some evaluators are so trusting in the goodness of all homeschoolers that they sometimes do distance evaluations where they do not even meet with the children of strangers, even though the PA home education law requires that the child be protected by an interview with the evaluator.

These distance evaluators do not exist in a vacuum. Most are homeschoolers themselves. They are supported by homeschooling friends who laud them for their belief in freedom. We need to challenge our libertarian friends to act responsibly.

And when we are working as evaluators and encounter underweight homeschooled children who have been isolated from outside contacts, we should become suspicious. If it is clear that the parents hate or are not educating their children, we should inform authorities. The homeschool law in Pennsylvania gives our community a way to protect homeschooled children and at the same time protect our own reputation.

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Originally posted by Magonsdaughter:
I talked about choices. You don't have alternatives to mainstream school? I'm pretty sure there are waldorf, montesorri, steiner and other independent schools in the US.

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but you yourself wrote at some length on how you don't need to be expert in any particular subject to teach.

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Good grief, would it be too much if kids just actually had to cope with existing in an imperfect world where every single thing wasn't specially tailored to their individual needs?????

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A few of you have talked about your crappy experiences at school, well did you ever think that you are different to your child, that their school experience may not actually be yours???

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Originally posted by SignyM:
1) Academic. Solved using Frem-style proposal.

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2) Abuse. Some parents intent on abuse will use "homeschooling" as a way to isolate their children from view.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
it seems that y'all lack the intellectual honesty to even THINK about this issue.

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Originally posted by canttakesky:
What people and kids NEED, and what they lack, are communities. They need their very own monkeysphere of folks who care for them, folks who aren't afraid to pour in some sweat and get involved.

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Honestly, if sadistic parents are abusing children whom they have closed them away in the basement closet, how does the community discover them? How many years must a child endure this kind of abuse before a mistake finally reveals them to passersby?

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Originally posted by canttakesky:
And btw, it doesn't matter how you check up on children, whether through testing or a mandatory bracelet or health exams or what. Criminals will find a way around it.

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you never answered MY question.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
I even capitalized the most relevant portions of the answer.

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Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
but it’s your unsympathetic attitude towards the rights of children that I find just as disturbing.

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Originally posted by SergeantX:
I won't do that any more than I'll preface every complaint about our idiotic foreign policy with overt statement of my patriotism. So keep your propaganda.

The bottom line is I don't think your solution is worth a shit. On the whole, I just don't think that government does much to stop violence and injustice. It just organizes them. And it's not going to stop bad parents from harming their kids. What it will do is insist that we all follow the same prescription, no matter how bad that prescription may be.

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Originally posted by canttakesky:

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Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
but it’s your unsympathetic attitude towards the rights of children that I find just as disturbing.

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Finn, Sig, you have my permission to slap me silly if I ever use this argument in a debate: "You don't agree with my solutions so you must not care as much about the problem as I do."

Seriously, anyone, slap me silly if I ever do that, ok?

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Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
Your solution to the problem of the protection of children within homeschooling is to simply wait until their abuse is accidentally discovered by passersby.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
(CBS) ...But homeschooling is largely unregulated.

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Originally posted by canttakesky:

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Originally posted by SignyM:
(CBS) ...But homeschooling is largely unregulated.

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So is homecooking.

Why do you want to regulate homeschooling and not regulate homecooking?

Let's try the same question from this angle.

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Originally posted by Fletch2:
Is that really a serious question? If so you have absolutely no sense of proportion.

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Originally posted by canttakesky:
Rich people have choices. Public schools get the sort of teachers I was talking about.

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That's right. My problem with teachers vs. parents is twofold.

1. Parents have to have special skills/resources to offer, such as the time to learn with the child, the ability to support a child-led and spontaneous education, and/or an intense passion about the child's welfare. Teachers in schools either don't have those skills, or don't have those types of resources. So they SHOULD have something else to offer, like subject expertise, but they don't. So what DO they have to offer, besides a glorified babysitting service?

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2. Teachers are the first to criticize homeschoolers are insufficiently qualified to teach. My point was defensive, pointing out that teachers living in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. If they actually had any qualifications themselves, I would take their criticisms more seriously.

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Do you have children of your own? When your child has problems at school because of the teachers, do you tell your kid to just suck it up and "cope with existing in an imperfect world where every single thing wasn't specially tailored to their individual needs?" Do you solve your kid's educational problems by saying, "Kid, you don't fit in? Get used to it. You can't expect the world to revolve around you."

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And to set things straight, homeschooling parents aren't asking teachers to tailor every single little thing to their kids' needs. They understand the school system has limitations, so they are solving the problem by withdrawing their children from a limited system to find a better fit.

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I had a great time at school. Straight A student, valecdictorian, teacher's pet and all. My daughter, however, begged me every day of her one month in a private school to PLEASE don't send her back. It was torture for her. So yes, I am aware that my child's experience may not actually be mine.

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Originally posted by canttakesky:
But don't try to pin that on *my* personal values.

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Originally posted by canttakesky:

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Originally posted by Fletch2:
Is that really a serious question? If so you have absolutely no sense of proportion.

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It is indeed a serious question. Please be so kind as to explain it to me. Thank you.

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well teachers are degree qualified here, so I can only speak for here. I guess teachers do see themselves as both qualified and experienced. I don't know what their stance is generally on homeschooling, I suppose it might not be a 'group' mentality (they are individuals after all) maybe they all have different views.

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Originally posted by Magonsdaughter:
you don't think that its possible that teachers can equip children to explore, self learn, and find their own resources?

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From your other quotes, you sound pretty down on what school can offer, so I feel a little skeptical of your claim to a fantastic time at school.

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Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
Earlier you stated that you felt that legislation was a threat with no explanation given when you believed the point of that legislation was to provide protection for homeschooled children, but later you were prepared to accept legislation when you felt that it was only to provide a legal recourse to the parents.

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In my view, all legislation is a threat.

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I don't have a problem with making homeschool "legal" (if in fact it needs to be made "legal"). It is your assertion that part of this "legality" requires some minimum standard and monitoring for homeschooling abuses that I have a problem with.

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Originally posted by canttakesky:
What the hell are you talking about? Now you are making shit up about me. I did no such thing. And if you interpreted that I did, you are wrong.

Quit lying about me. I really am done with you now. I don't tolerate libel well.

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Originally posted by canttakesky:
If parents can, teachers can. But not with the kind of teacher-student ratio that exists in American public schools. The school system is simply not set up for individual attention or a tailored education. Sometimes it tries, but it is very limited.

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