Mid 6 figures in Providence, an hour south of Boston, for a family of 5 (single income) is very challenging. I can't imagine trying to do that in in East Bay. Nope.
If you read that story carefully you'll see that it toggles between God hardening Pharaoh's heart and Pharaoh hardening Pharaoh's hear.
Ex 8:32 And Pharaoh hardened his heart at this time also, neither would he let the people go.
The point the text is making is that God helps you along the path you are choosing for better or worse. So Pharaoh is to blame for all the calamity that falls on him in the story because he was given a clear choice, and according to the text, chose poorly.
As much as some people like to disagree, beauty is largely objective. This "glitch art" is objectively *not* beautiful. However, some people find the *concept* beautiful. But once you have moved from objective beauty based in traditional, objective artistic craftsmanship to pure concept, the execution of the concept is less relevant than the concept itself.
Think about it. What was more interesting in this article? The idea of "making art from computer glitches" or the actual 7 min video and few seconds of actual glitch art?
Yes, the actual "art" is underwhelming, and you can see by the amount of abstract talking, that it's the idea they are more interested in. This is where concept art just fails. All you must *really* do with concept art is state the idea, and you really can't progress much beyond that.
The trick with concept art is that you *must* explain it to "get" it. But whip out a classical oil painting and everyone around the world gets that it's beautiful, and that the beauty is intrinsic and universal. Modes of objective beauty may alter to one degree or another between cultures, but the modes are still objective. Compare Japanese brush work to Titian or Raphael. They are different kinds of formal beauty, emphasizing a different aesthetic value, but beautiful nonetheless.
I found a waterfall track on emusic years ago, when tracks were.25 cents. It's direct recording from nature and is perfect. It's 60 minutes long and has it's own built in fade. I just put it on repeat. It's the most played track on my iTunes by a factor of 1000:). Best.25 I ever spent, by a factor of 1000 too. Though I did by all kinds of whiten noise apps, cd's, and other nature tracks before I found this one.
Waterfall: A Week In Hawaii : The Atmosphere Collection / B Morrissey/Dick Morrissey
Yes, I'm on 9. I keep Chrome and Safari (as well as the corporate IE8 I'm stuck with) and none of those browsers have this issue. Firefox does NOT release memory after the tabs are closed, or rather, enough of them over a period of time. I can close all my tabs, as I usually do after reading sessions, leaving it back down to 1 tab open, and no matter how much time goes by, the ram stays consumed. Firefox gets pokier and pokier until I have to restart it using the add-on I mentioned, so that I can pick back up where I left off with whatever tabs I had open.
I have a brand new HP Elitebook with 128 GB SSD, I5, so it's no slouch. I also have adblock installed. It's FF, not my machine. It's done this on every Mac and PC I've had going back to probably all the early 1.0 RCs I've used.
That said, there are still too many useful things about FF that make it my default over the other browsers, so I've put up with it all these years.
"Firefox doesn't have a memory" leak is the oft-repeated line. "It's your add-ons" is the next oft-repeated line. Yet with a clean install of Firefox, no add-ons, it gobbles up memory the longer you use it. Opening and closing tabs seems to be the problem, quite simply. Translated: using the browser at all causes memory leaks.
I installed the Quick Restart add-on for FF and use it 3-4 times a day, usually at around 800mb, when performance lags become noticeable. For instance, videos start getting choppy (Flash) on my MacBook Air i5. A quick restart and I'm good for a few more hours.
You must not know what HSLDA is. Their news is not propaganda. That's just uninformed, very uninformed of you to suggest that. HSLDA has fought tooth and nail for decades for parental rights, back when it was illegal in *most* US States to homeschool. They are an in-the-trenches legal team that is one of the primary reasons it's now legal to homeschool all across the country. We have used their legal services to intercede several times already, to protect us from over-zealous school administrators that try to gate requests with special provisos or demand compliance above what individual State law requires. When HSLDA steps in, historically, school administrators back down after HSLDA clarifies State law for them. All US homeschoolers are required to comply with State law.
But when it reaches the point where you can't get kids to learn anything, and the troubles at home cause them to fail in droves, you have to address the problem if you want to do your job at all.
No, you don't have to become a nanny state to address family problems. Parents have to address their children, and society has to address the family unit on a much larger level. The state cannot function as surrogate normalized family. It can't for very long without giving rise to despotism. You might recall some failures on your side of the pond.
...the vision of frontal teaching has been thoroughly analyzed, found to be lacking for most elements of education...
At what point was the ineffectiveness of the talking-head model not obviously deficient? It was *already* obvious that if you spend time in as small groups as possible, educational achievement directly increases. I think humanity has known this pretty much...forever. Apprenticeship, guilds, etc.. What's always worked better will in the future still work better. That said, statistics *can* tell us which kinds of institutional teaching methods are the *least inefficient* compared to the gold standard of 1-on-1 methods, or simply put to score a rhetorical point: homeschool methods.
The bad is the assumption that you can do a better job than someone who actually learnt all about it.
It's clear at this point you don't understand homeschooling. It is varied. In our situation, we pay a regionally accredited Catholic school for their materials and access to instructors - actual teachers. Our kids are registered in that school, which has 16000 students. They are available by phone, chat, video, email, etc. at all kinds of hours. We, as parents, make ZERO pretense to be experts at anything the kids learn. That's stupid, and your assumption is based this misunderstanding. A child needs 2 things to learn: access to quality media on a given topic and 2) access to people who are experts on given topics. Between our paid services and the internet, none of these are lacking. In fact, we have the opposite problem. We have so many choices of where to get expert answers, the overwhelming thing is narrowing down what sources use. It can be harder than it sounds. Go to a homeschool convention in the US if you care. It's a bazaar of resources bigger than you can possibly get your mind around, even the small regional ones.
The law is for the lawless
I lifted that quote from 1 Tim 1:8-9, which says in full: "We know that the law is good, provided that one uses it as law, with the understanding that law is meant not for a righteous person but for the lawless and unruly, the godless and sinful, the unholy and profane, those who kill their fathers or mothers, murderers...". Here, St. Paul is talking about Jewish law, specifically the 10 Commandments, upon which the understanding of Western law resides. Paul's greater point is that good people who do right don't need restraints on them. In that sense, law protects good people from bad people. The freedom of bad people gets restrained, not the freedom of people of goodwill.
One of the reasons is that teachers need protection from people like you
First, my friends are teachers. Teachers don't need protection from me. What are you talking about? Of course there are good and bad teachers. Now listen to you come unglued:
the fucking parents did their parts and put some basic life skills into their brats. Instead, not only education but raising a kid has been outsourced to the schools. And then the same parents who cause all those behaviour problems and phone calls and meetings you mentioned yourself above are giving the people who compensate for their failures a hard time.
Sounds like parents need protection from you. Regardless, the disruptive environment due to the family unit breakdown (kids with no life skills as you put it) is way beyond the ability of the school system to address. It *took* what it could not manage, and now can't easily give back: the role of surrogate parent. So now it just ends sadly for many uneducated dropouts and "graduates" that can't do grade school math. Call a failure a failure. But you know, those kids that want to succeed for whatever reason, will find a way, regardless if they are public schooled, charter schooled, private schooled, home schooled, or unschooled.
Back to my point. The schools *took* parental responsibilities. They take them everyday. They go above parents heads and hide behind specially crafted laws. What part of that have you missed? If you go around parental authority by means of the law, you lose the moral ground to complain to the parents about what they are or aren't doing. I can't speak for Germany, but here in the US the schools, like Horace Mann first envisioned, took on the role of surrogate parent, and they keep that role by force of laws backed by..."science". So, if you take the job of surrogate parent you get the babysitting job with it. That is why kids can't be left alone in a classroom. Require adult supervision is, of course, babysitting, whether it involves changing diapers or handing out detention slips. And, you can't have it both ways
And one final word on homeschooling: The rich used to home-school their children for pretty much all of history, from at least ancient greek onwards. But they never did it themselves. The kids got their education at home, yes. But their parents hired professional teachers.
And the point of the article is that with access to books, which only the rich had, is now cheap and ubiquitous, which is why homeschooling can exist today, and why it's growing by leaps and bounds in some countries...where it's legal. A free country produces free thinkers. A country of excessive laws produces lawless people.
Sure you can have all the pupils practice on their own while the teacher watches - but then you would be right about complaining that all they're doing is babysitting. So what is it? Homework or babysitting?
No. If the students were doing actual work (the "homework") in school, the "teacher" would be a tutor, directing and guiding instead of being a front-of-the-room talking head that reads the instructions to the kids - from the book they have right in front of them - and bores many of them into "acting up." If the kids where learning in school, there'd be no homework. My kids don't do homework because what they do is *actually* learn in an efficient, compact manner *every* single day with *no* fluff. That is what homeschool is about. It's more effective, fairly or not, at a fraction of the cost, is bully and drug free, and is wonderful for the parent-child relationship, which is a problem for many in Western cultures.
Two thoughts: "The law is for the lawless" and "bad company corrupts good morals".
When my vice-principal friend says babysitting, he means it. He literally spends his time dealing with behavior problems, and makes dozens and dozens of parent calls and meetings a week. He babysits, un-metaphorically.
"What we did for thousands of years doesn't count."
Not true. The amount of knowledge and what knowledge specifically is completely relative. They had full days of learning back then, and learning is learning. It's just different stuff. We've not evolved into smarter, more complex humans in the last 2000 years. People were pretty damn smart in Europe and Asia back then.
Regarding homework, you said:
"One, it teaches kids to work on their own"
Stop and think for a second. That is precisely what they should be learning in school, during the school day.
"...there is no group to wait for or catch up to".
This is an unresolvable problem that currently creates pitiful outcomes and reflects the broken state of education in the US. The smartest kids are held back (somewhat, either literally or bureaucratically) and the slowest kids simply get left behind. But since it's the "best we can do", we settle for it, because "best we can do" protects the interest of the institutions (teachers unions, the public school system, etc.) and not the students. Putting students first would up-end this model completely. It can be done, but it's not done. It's a case of institutional self-preservation delimited by a "this is what can do for you and nothing more" philosophy, that comes with a staggering monetary cost regardless of outcome. There are far cheaper models, but they are radically outside the institutional norm.
"Which is why they were invented long, long before mothers would go out to work"
I'm talking about state-mandated compulsory school attendance, like in New England in the mid-19th century. Horace Mann believed "that universal public education was the best way to turn the nation's unruly children into disciplined, judicious republican citizens."
And this: "Mann also suggested that by having schools it would help those students who didn't have appropriate discipline in the home. Building a person's character was just as important as reading, writing and arithmetic. By instilling values such as obedience to authority, promptness in attendance, and organizing the time according to bell ringing helped students prepare for future employment. Mann faced some resistance from parents who didn't want to give up the moral education to teachers and bureaucrats"
So yes, the NEA position is propaganda. You can't even get rid of bad teachers without a lawyer and $$$ to go with the effort. "But if we just spend more money..." is not the answer. If it was truly a pure science, after 160 years of field work, surely we'd know more and have better results by now. But the evidence of homeschoolers, who spend less than $500 per child per year and have far better results, is problematic for the public education sector. Yet the NEA maintains parents are not qualified and SAT scores are significantly better? The average public school spend per student is over 10k, nearly $900 of that going to transportation alone.
I know several teachers and am close friends with a vice-principal who confide quite candidly that the majority of their work is babysitting in one form or another. That is the racket: pay for an "advanced degree" based on "science" only to end up babysitting. Why not skip the required "science" and just go babysit? What is scientific about that reality? That is the racket, the price of admission: a teaching degree.
You don't need science to tell you how to teach a kid. You need a little wisdom. We've been doing it without science for thousands of years. Managing small herds of kids? That might require some science. The ability to teach children is biological at it's core.
The teachers union website says it believes that parents are not qualified to teach their children. Yet scores of homeschool parents teach their kids, and these kids test higher across the board in all subjects, period.
Public school kids have hours of homework per day because they can't learn in class or don't learn (much) from their teachers. Homeschool kids don't have homework. They do the work during their school day. In the end, most public schools kids teach themselves during homework time. Public schools are in many ways just babysitting farms so both parents can work.
We homeschool. My oldest is in Advanced Math, which is for juniors and seniors, but he is a sophomore. I don't know any of the math he does, nor does my wife. He is self-taught, and due to our simple curriculum choices and environment at home, that will always be the case. Our youngest is in private school for a few more years, but we'll homeschool him for high school as well.
Does this sound scientific, or does it sound like propaganda? I just copied this from the 2011 NEA Guidelines PDF available on nea.org:
"B-82. Home Schooling
The National Education Association believes that home schooling programs based on parental choice cannot provide the student with a comprehensive education experience. When home schooling occurs, students enrolled must meet all state curricular requirements, including the taking and passing of assessments to ensure adequate academic progress. Home schooling should be limited to the children of the immediate family, with all expenses being borne by the parents/guardians. Instruction should be by persons who are licensed by the appropriate state education licensure agency, and a curriculum approved by the state department of education should be used.
The Association also believes that home-schooled students should not participate in any extracurricular activities in the public schools.
The Association further believes that local public school systems should have the authority to determine grade placement and/or credits earned toward graduation for students entering or re-entering the public school setting from a home school setting. (1988, 2006)"
Yes, supposed to be. "Supposed" is the operative word. Functionally, it is not the goal. The goal in most public schools is to get kids ready for color-in-the-dot tests, which has nothing to do with getting kids to love learning. Most public education is geared to get kids to score well on a test, which in the end, only proves how well one can take a test. Test taking is a skill that has little application outside of test taking.
"The future educated person may well be someone who has the interest to learn independently..."
There it is. That was the past, and needs to become the present and future again. It was never any other way until relatively recently.
Teaching is work, but is not that hard.
Teaching does not have to take much time.
Teaching does not require expertise in various topics.
The more you "teach" the more you might wasting your time.
If your goal is to teach all the subjects, good luck with that. You will probably fail.
If your goal is to teach your kids to teach themselves, and you NEVER budge from that basic requirement, your kids will learn by themselves and you won't do much "teaching" at all. The teaching you will do will be administrating the environment and providing the resources for kids to learn for themselves. You won't have to learn calculus or Latin, but your kids will be able to, with the right self-learning mandate from you - the homeschool administrator. That's how we do it and it works in spades. The results are extraordinary.
"There's a reason we have a whole field of science dedicated to teaching - educational science"
It's mostly a racket. It's not that hard to teach kids, especially one on one or in very small groups. It's a whole different thing to figure out how to teach classroom full of kids.
Here is a fundamental misunderstanding of homeschooling:
"3. Parents have the capability to do it. (How many know parents whose maths is non-existent or whose spelling is beyond comprehension?)"
Homeschool kids teach themselves from quality text books and by input from a variety of other sources. Your job as parent is never to teach calculus, but to teach the child to teach themselves, and then provide access to information, services, and people where necessary.
Teach children to teach themselves. This is the mission statement of our homeschool "academy". It just works, like putting seeds in the ground and providing water and sun. It's less work than you imagine, from an academic point of view. Homeschooling is essentially an administrative task, done correctly.
In fact, the average non-college degree parent has children the score the same, and sometimes above, as those children of college degree parents.
mirra.com
Plug it in, install one app, and in 10 minutes, you'll start seeing your (default) My Documents folder backed up. It has remote access and stores up to 8 previous version of the file. It's not a file server. It's a backup device, plan and simple. It even allows you to share / sync files across a network if you wanted to, like an MP3 collection.
"He who controls the classrooms today controls the future."
That is why there is a huge movement, growing by 8% a year, somewhere close to 2 million, of home schoolers. Christians understand this very well. Homeschoolers are smarter than their publicly educated peers. For the most part, they focus on the three Rs - Reading, Riting, and Rithmetic the good ol' fashioned way with great rigor. I homeschool my 3 boys. My 10 year old is doing 8th grade math because he has the freedom and opportunity to do it. He's read every classic piece of literature available in Barnes and Noble. We've literally run out of material. Family members joke that he is a walking encyclopedia.
For a good example of hard-core Christian curriculum that focuses on science and math, check out robinsoncurriculum.com. The author is a tenured scientist for a large state University. He's no dope. Several of his kids graduated from college 2 years early because of their home education. That's quantitative proof something is right with his thinking and system.
We believe in some form of evolution (nobody agrees what that is these days - punctuated equlibrium, spontaneous mutation, who knows?) and are devoted Christians. Not every Christian is a literalist. Children like mine will lead the way in the future. We are doing everything we can to see that that happens. What are you doing?
Read the NEA's manifesto on their website. They have in their bylaws that they don't believe parents can teach their children. But look at the results? Someone is not doing their science very well, and it's not Christians, in regard to basic education and ability to think / read / write / do the math.
I frequently use porn = there is no God
I feel bad about using porn = there might be a God
Porn is bad = there is a God
I was addicted to porn but now I am not = I believe in God
I see no problem with porn and it's not addictive = there is no God
I'm a porn fanboy = there is no God
Belief is based on lifestyle, of course. How you live is the manifestation and proof of what you believe. Just like "you are what you eat", it is true that you "live you what you believe"
The above equations are excellent sociological facts.
These two statements in the linked article, only a few lines apart on the first page, don't jive:
"I think SSHRC should come out and state that evolution is a scientific fact and that intelligent design is not."
"...the scientific world's understanding of life 'is not static. There's an evolution in the theory of evolution.'"
According to Oxford:
fact: (noun) actuality, certainty; truth, verity, gospel. antonym lie, fiction.
"Current theories" of evolution will be discarded as time goes on. Darwinian evolution is passe, so theories like Punctuated Equilibrium and the like "arise" to deal with the growing set of "facts" that make older theories obsolete. So, any theory of evolution cannot be a fact per se because we don't have all the facts and can't say for sure at all how it works. Evolution is a theory and not a fact.
Evolution will always remain a theory because it can't be proven empirically in the most rudimentary scientific fashion.
Given enough time, though, we should be able to prove evolution is true. For now, it's a theory grounded on the limited powers of our observation. This is growing too.
It was not then and is not now an easy thing to become indepedently wealthy. Back then, it usually meant you were doing something right. So you had to have the panache first. Then, your community had to nominate you and ask you to go. That second hurdle can't be faked. It was basically a hassle to go and do that back then to say the least. It was "serving" in the purest sense of the word. A return to "service" would weed out the career seekers and would most definately have an impact for the better.
In the earliest days of our country, nobody was paid like that. People "served" their country. Usually it was people that were successful and well respected that were asked by their community to go "serve". The best people were "sent" by their communities because the entire community agreed that so and so would best represent them. It's a completely reversed model of what we see today. Strip out the salaries of elected office and you'd see a radically different society emerge overnight.
You are *quite* right when you say it is not provable that God or aliens started life. It's quite untestable. In the same way, no explanation will ever exist that proves how things got started. The simple fact there is that we can't go back and watch it and test it - a fundamental requirement of science no matter how you slice it. We can't go back into the first millionth of a nanosecond to measure what exactly happened. But why would we want to know? Does it make life more meaningful? Does it make life right now any better? Arguably, at least for the forseeable future, it has no bearing on daily life.
As for the government = god idea, I probably like it even less than you do, but I have no idea how you get from scientific theories to a deified government.
"[Darwinian] Evolution prepares for revolution and creates the ground for it..." - Joseph Stalin
If you oppossed Stalin, you died. Under the guise of "survival of the fittest" which is the traditional sore spot of atheistic evolutionists (and not religious evolutionists), Stalin established a rhetoric and belief system that allowed for the extinction of untold millions and millions during his "tenure." In that practical sense, evolution was infact religion. In all regards, evolution was the defining "god" of that entire age, which is now happily passed. Simply read any writings of Lenin, and you see what functioned as his religion: spontaneous generation. Pick a book about Lenin or Stalin or Marx, and they will quickly and happily tell you that this is the very foundation of that they believed. Sadly, today, it remains unproven and always will remain so. And so faith to the rescue!
If spontaneous generation is true, then you can only conclude that Hitler was wrong because he didn't win the war. This cannot be argued against, and to this day, this kind of reasoning has never been overcome by the most brilliant Marxists, Communists, or Secular Humanists. It's the big sore spot, and is well documented. They are silent on this matter. You cannot say I'm wrong or right, and you can't say you are wrong or right. In evolution, might = right, quite simply. Whoever is the strongest makes the rules, and there is a constant struggle among rulemakers. This cannot be argued with as it is the most essential doctrine of the Hegelian Dialectic, which is the foundation of all that Marx established. There is more than enough of Lenin's own writings about the dialectical process to give anyone the willies. The confluence of athiestic evolution with the Hegelian Dialectic quite simply added up to hundreds of millions of lost lives over the span of nearly a century.
That is why there are the Humanist Manifestos: get enough people together to say what is right, and by fiat you make it so. Science won't help all the way, so in the end, coercion will have to suffice. You simply need to read up on any history of Hegelian Dialectic to see where this came from and where it's going. And you thought radical terrorists embedded in Islam were impossible to talk to...
Slashdot Mirror
Mid 6 figures in Providence, an hour south of Boston, for a family of 5 (single income) is very challenging. I can't imagine trying to do that in in East Bay. Nope.
If you read that story carefully you'll see that it toggles between God hardening Pharaoh's heart and Pharaoh hardening Pharaoh's hear.
Ex 8:32 And Pharaoh hardened his heart at this time also, neither would he let the people go.
The point the text is making is that God helps you along the path you are choosing for better or worse. So Pharaoh is to blame for all the calamity that falls on him in the story because he was given a clear choice, and according to the text, chose poorly.
As much as some people like to disagree, beauty is largely objective. This "glitch art" is objectively *not* beautiful. However, some people find the *concept* beautiful. But once you have moved from objective beauty based in traditional, objective artistic craftsmanship to pure concept, the execution of the concept is less relevant than the concept itself.
Think about it. What was more interesting in this article? The idea of "making art from computer glitches" or the actual 7 min video and few seconds of actual glitch art?
Yes, the actual "art" is underwhelming, and you can see by the amount of abstract talking, that it's the idea they are more interested in. This is where concept art just fails. All you must *really* do with concept art is state the idea, and you really can't progress much beyond that.
The trick with concept art is that you *must* explain it to "get" it. But whip out a classical oil painting and everyone around the world gets that it's beautiful, and that the beauty is intrinsic and universal. Modes of objective beauty may alter to one degree or another between cultures, but the modes are still objective. Compare Japanese brush work to Titian or Raphael. They are different kinds of formal beauty, emphasizing a different aesthetic value, but beautiful nonetheless.
I found a waterfall track on emusic years ago, when tracks were .25 cents. It's direct recording from nature and is perfect. It's 60 minutes long and has it's own built in fade. I just put it on repeat. It's the most played track on my iTunes by a factor of 1000 :). Best .25 I ever spent, by a factor of 1000 too. Though I did by all kinds of whiten noise apps, cd's, and other nature tracks before I found this one.
Waterfall: A Week In Hawaii : The Atmosphere Collection / B Morrissey/Dick Morrissey
Doesn't that attract seagulls?
You must work for Mozilla :)
Yes, I'm on 9. I keep Chrome and Safari (as well as the corporate IE8 I'm stuck with) and none of those browsers have this issue. Firefox does NOT release memory after the tabs are closed, or rather, enough of them over a period of time. I can close all my tabs, as I usually do after reading sessions, leaving it back down to 1 tab open, and no matter how much time goes by, the ram stays consumed. Firefox gets pokier and pokier until I have to restart it using the add-on I mentioned, so that I can pick back up where I left off with whatever tabs I had open.
I have a brand new HP Elitebook with 128 GB SSD, I5, so it's no slouch. I also have adblock installed. It's FF, not my machine. It's done this on every Mac and PC I've had going back to probably all the early 1.0 RCs I've used.
That said, there are still too many useful things about FF that make it my default over the other browsers, so I've put up with it all these years.
"Firefox doesn't have a memory" leak is the oft-repeated line. "It's your add-ons" is the next oft-repeated line. Yet with a clean install of Firefox, no add-ons, it gobbles up memory the longer you use it. Opening and closing tabs seems to be the problem, quite simply. Translated: using the browser at all causes memory leaks.
I installed the Quick Restart add-on for FF and use it 3-4 times a day, usually at around 800mb, when performance lags become noticeable. For instance, videos start getting choppy (Flash) on my MacBook Air i5. A quick restart and I'm good for a few more hours.
But when it reaches the point where you can't get kids to learn anything, and the troubles at home cause them to fail in droves, you have to address the problem if you want to do your job at all.
No, you don't have to become a nanny state to address family problems. Parents have to address their children, and society has to address the family unit on a much larger level. The state cannot function as surrogate normalized family. It can't for very long without giving rise to despotism. You might recall some failures on your side of the pond.
...the vision of frontal teaching has been thoroughly analyzed, found to be lacking for most elements of education...
At what point was the ineffectiveness of the talking-head model not obviously deficient? It was *already* obvious that if you spend time in as small groups as possible, educational achievement directly increases. I think humanity has known this pretty much...forever. Apprenticeship, guilds, etc.. What's always worked better will in the future still work better. That said, statistics *can* tell us which kinds of institutional teaching methods are the *least inefficient* compared to the gold standard of 1-on-1 methods, or simply put to score a rhetorical point: homeschool methods.
The bad is the assumption that you can do a better job than someone who actually learnt all about it.
It's clear at this point you don't understand homeschooling. It is varied. In our situation, we pay a regionally accredited Catholic school for their materials and access to instructors - actual teachers. Our kids are registered in that school, which has 16000 students. They are available by phone, chat, video, email, etc. at all kinds of hours. We, as parents, make ZERO pretense to be experts at anything the kids learn. That's stupid, and your assumption is based this misunderstanding. A child needs 2 things to learn: access to quality media on a given topic and 2) access to people who are experts on given topics. Between our paid services and the internet, none of these are lacking. In fact, we have the opposite problem. We have so many choices of where to get expert answers, the overwhelming thing is narrowing down what sources use. It can be harder than it sounds. Go to a homeschool convention in the US if you care. It's a bazaar of resources bigger than you can possibly get your mind around, even the small regional ones.
The law is for the lawless
I lifted that quote from 1 Tim 1:8-9, which says in full: "We know that the law is good, provided that one uses it as law, with the understanding that law is meant not for a righteous person but for the lawless and unruly, the godless and sinful, the unholy and profane, those who kill their fathers or mothers, murderers...". Here, St. Paul is talking about Jewish law, specifically the 10 Commandments, upon which the understanding of Western law resides. Paul's greater point is that good people who do right don't need restraints on them. In that sense, law protects good people from bad people. The freedom of bad people gets restrained, not the freedom of people of goodwill.
In Germany, it is a
I happen to live in the country (Germany) where the first state-mandated compulsory school attendance happened. That was 1592.
You also live in same country that arrests homeschoolers. That is political, not scientific.
http://www.hslda.org/hs/international/Germany/201104190.asp
One of the reasons is that teachers need protection from people like you
First, my friends are teachers. Teachers don't need protection from me. What are you talking about? Of course there are good and bad teachers. Now listen to you come unglued:
the fucking parents did their parts and put some basic life skills into their brats. Instead, not only education but raising a kid has been outsourced to the schools. And then the same parents who cause all those behaviour problems and phone calls and meetings you mentioned yourself above are giving the people who compensate for their failures a hard time.
Sounds like parents need protection from you. Regardless, the disruptive environment due to the family unit breakdown (kids with no life skills as you put it) is way beyond the ability of the school system to address. It *took* what it could not manage, and now can't easily give back: the role of surrogate parent. So now it just ends sadly for many uneducated dropouts and "graduates" that can't do grade school math. Call a failure a failure. But you know, those kids that want to succeed for whatever reason, will find a way, regardless if they are public schooled, charter schooled, private schooled, home schooled, or unschooled.
Back to my point. The schools *took* parental responsibilities. They take them everyday. They go above parents heads and hide behind specially crafted laws. What part of that have you missed? If you go around parental authority by means of the law, you lose the moral ground to complain to the parents about what they are or aren't doing. I can't speak for Germany, but here in the US the schools, like Horace Mann first envisioned, took on the role of surrogate parent, and they keep that role by force of laws backed by..."science". So, if you take the job of surrogate parent you get the babysitting job with it. That is why kids can't be left alone in a classroom. Require adult supervision is, of course, babysitting, whether it involves changing diapers or handing out detention slips. And, you can't have it both ways
And one final word on homeschooling: The rich used to home-school their children for pretty much all of history, from at least ancient greek onwards. But they never did it themselves. The kids got their education at home, yes. But their parents hired professional teachers.
And the point of the article is that with access to books, which only the rich had, is now cheap and ubiquitous, which is why homeschooling can exist today, and why it's growing by leaps and bounds in some countries...where it's legal. A free country produces free thinkers. A country of excessive laws produces lawless people.
Sure you can have all the pupils practice on their own while the teacher watches - but then you would be right about complaining that all they're doing is babysitting. So what is it? Homework or babysitting?
No. If the students were doing actual work (the "homework") in school, the "teacher" would be a tutor, directing and guiding instead of being a front-of-the-room talking head that reads the instructions to the kids - from the book they have right in front of them - and bores many of them into "acting up." If the kids where learning in school, there'd be no homework. My kids don't do homework because what they do is *actually* learn in an efficient, compact manner *every* single day with *no* fluff. That is what homeschool is about. It's more effective, fairly or not, at a fraction of the cost, is bully and drug free, and is wonderful for the parent-child relationship, which is a problem for many in Western cultures.
Two thoughts: "The law is for the lawless" and "bad company corrupts good morals".
"...the term "babysitting" is metaphorical"
When my vice-principal friend says babysitting, he means it. He literally spends his time dealing with behavior problems, and makes dozens and dozens of parent calls and meetings a week. He babysits, un-metaphorically.
"What we did for thousands of years doesn't count."
Not true. The amount of knowledge and what knowledge specifically is completely relative. They had full days of learning back then, and learning is learning. It's just different stuff. We've not evolved into smarter, more complex humans in the last 2000 years. People were pretty damn smart in Europe and Asia back then.
Regarding homework, you said:
"One, it teaches kids to work on their own"
Stop and think for a second. That is precisely what they should be learning in school, during the school day.
"...there is no group to wait for or catch up to".
This is an unresolvable problem that currently creates pitiful outcomes and reflects the broken state of education in the US. The smartest kids are held back (somewhat, either literally or bureaucratically) and the slowest kids simply get left behind. But since it's the "best we can do", we settle for it, because "best we can do" protects the interest of the institutions (teachers unions, the public school system, etc.) and not the students. Putting students first would up-end this model completely. It can be done, but it's not done. It's a case of institutional self-preservation delimited by a "this is what can do for you and nothing more" philosophy, that comes with a staggering monetary cost regardless of outcome. There are far cheaper models, but they are radically outside the institutional norm.
"Which is why they were invented long, long before mothers would go out to work"
I'm talking about state-mandated compulsory school attendance, like in New England in the mid-19th century. Horace Mann believed "that universal public education was the best way to turn the nation's unruly children into disciplined, judicious republican citizens."
And this: "Mann also suggested that by having schools it would help those students who didn't have appropriate discipline in the home. Building a person's character was just as important as reading, writing and arithmetic. By instilling values such as obedience to authority, promptness in attendance, and organizing the time according to bell ringing helped students prepare for future employment. Mann faced some resistance from parents who didn't want to give up the moral education to teachers and bureaucrats"
So yes, the NEA position is propaganda. You can't even get rid of bad teachers without a lawyer and $$$ to go with the effort. "But if we just spend more money..." is not the answer. If it was truly a pure science, after 160 years of field work, surely we'd know more and have better results by now. But the evidence of homeschoolers, who spend less than $500 per child per year and have far better results, is problematic for the public education sector. Yet the NEA maintains parents are not qualified and SAT scores are significantly better? The average public school spend per student is over 10k, nearly $900 of that going to transportation alone.
http://www.hslda.org/docs/news/hslda/200105070.asp
I know several teachers and am close friends with a vice-principal who confide quite candidly that the majority of their work is babysitting in one form or another. That is the racket: pay for an "advanced degree" based on "science" only to end up babysitting. Why not skip the required "science" and just go babysit? What is scientific about that reality? That is the racket, the price of admission: a teaching degree.
You don't need science to tell you how to teach a kid. You need a little wisdom. We've been doing it without science for thousands of years. Managing small herds of kids? That might require some science. The ability to teach children is biological at it's core.
The teachers union website says it believes that parents are not qualified to teach their children. Yet scores of homeschool parents teach their kids, and these kids test higher across the board in all subjects, period.
Public school kids have hours of homework per day because they can't learn in class or don't learn (much) from their teachers. Homeschool kids don't have homework. They do the work during their school day. In the end, most public schools kids teach themselves during homework time. Public schools are in many ways just babysitting farms so both parents can work.
We homeschool. My oldest is in Advanced Math, which is for juniors and seniors, but he is a sophomore. I don't know any of the math he does, nor does my wife. He is self-taught, and due to our simple curriculum choices and environment at home, that will always be the case. Our youngest is in private school for a few more years, but we'll homeschool him for high school as well.
Does this sound scientific, or does it sound like propaganda? I just copied this from the 2011 NEA Guidelines PDF available on nea.org:
"B-82. Home Schooling
The National Education Association believes that home schooling programs based on parental choice cannot provide the student with a comprehensive education experience. When home schooling occurs, students enrolled must meet all state curricular requirements, including the taking and passing of assessments to ensure adequate academic progress. Home schooling should be limited to the children of the immediate family, with all expenses being borne by the parents/guardians. Instruction should be by persons who are licensed by the appropriate state education licensure agency, and a curriculum approved by the state department of education should be used.
The Association also believes that home-schooled students should not participate in any extracurricular activities in the public schools. The Association further believes that local public school systems should have the authority to determine grade placement and/or credits earned toward graduation for students entering or re-entering the public school setting from a home school setting. (1988, 2006)"
Yes, supposed to be. "Supposed" is the operative word. Functionally, it is not the goal. The goal in most public schools is to get kids ready for color-in-the-dot tests, which has nothing to do with getting kids to love learning. Most public education is geared to get kids to score well on a test, which in the end, only proves how well one can take a test. Test taking is a skill that has little application outside of test taking.
"The future educated person may well be someone who has the interest to learn independently..." There it is. That was the past, and needs to become the present and future again. It was never any other way until relatively recently.
Teaching is work, but is not that hard. Teaching does not have to take much time. Teaching does not require expertise in various topics. The more you "teach" the more you might wasting your time. If your goal is to teach all the subjects, good luck with that. You will probably fail. If your goal is to teach your kids to teach themselves, and you NEVER budge from that basic requirement, your kids will learn by themselves and you won't do much "teaching" at all. The teaching you will do will be administrating the environment and providing the resources for kids to learn for themselves. You won't have to learn calculus or Latin, but your kids will be able to, with the right self-learning mandate from you - the homeschool administrator. That's how we do it and it works in spades. The results are extraordinary.
The goal of many homeschoolers is to teach one thing: to teach the kids to teach themselves. Everything is secondary to this primary task.
"There's a reason we have a whole field of science dedicated to teaching - educational science" It's mostly a racket. It's not that hard to teach kids, especially one on one or in very small groups. It's a whole different thing to figure out how to teach classroom full of kids.
I second Unity3D.
Here is a fundamental misunderstanding of homeschooling: "3. Parents have the capability to do it. (How many know parents whose maths is non-existent or whose spelling is beyond comprehension?)" Homeschool kids teach themselves from quality text books and by input from a variety of other sources. Your job as parent is never to teach calculus, but to teach the child to teach themselves, and then provide access to information, services, and people where necessary. Teach children to teach themselves. This is the mission statement of our homeschool "academy". It just works, like putting seeds in the ground and providing water and sun. It's less work than you imagine, from an academic point of view. Homeschooling is essentially an administrative task, done correctly. In fact, the average non-college degree parent has children the score the same, and sometimes above, as those children of college degree parents.
mirra.com Plug it in, install one app, and in 10 minutes, you'll start seeing your (default) My Documents folder backed up. It has remote access and stores up to 8 previous version of the file. It's not a file server. It's a backup device, plan and simple. It even allows you to share / sync files across a network if you wanted to, like an MP3 collection.
"He who controls the classrooms today controls the future."
That is why there is a huge movement, growing by 8% a year, somewhere close to 2 million, of home schoolers. Christians understand this very well. Homeschoolers are smarter than their publicly educated peers. For the most part, they focus on the three Rs - Reading, Riting, and Rithmetic the good ol' fashioned way with great rigor. I homeschool my 3 boys. My 10 year old is doing 8th grade math because he has the freedom and opportunity to do it. He's read every classic piece of literature available in Barnes and Noble. We've literally run out of material. Family members joke that he is a walking encyclopedia.
For a good example of hard-core Christian curriculum that focuses on science and math, check out robinsoncurriculum.com. The author is a tenured scientist for a large state University. He's no dope. Several of his kids graduated from college 2 years early because of their home education. That's quantitative proof something is right with his thinking and system.
We believe in some form of evolution (nobody agrees what that is these days - punctuated equlibrium, spontaneous mutation, who knows?) and are devoted Christians. Not every Christian is a literalist. Children like mine will lead the way in the future. We are doing everything we can to see that that happens. What are you doing?
Read the NEA's manifesto on their website. They have in their bylaws that they don't believe parents can teach their children. But look at the results? Someone is not doing their science very well, and it's not Christians, in regard to basic education and ability to think / read / write / do the math.
I frequently use porn = there is no God
I feel bad about using porn = there might be a God
Porn is bad = there is a God
I was addicted to porn but now I am not = I believe in God
I see no problem with porn and it's not addictive = there is no God
I'm a porn fanboy = there is no God
Belief is based on lifestyle, of course. How you live is the manifestation and proof of what you believe. Just like "you are what you eat", it is true that you "live you what you believe"
The above equations are excellent sociological facts.
These two statements in the linked article, only a few lines apart on the first page, don't jive: "I think SSHRC should come out and state that evolution is a scientific fact and that intelligent design is not." "...the scientific world's understanding of life 'is not static. There's an evolution in the theory of evolution.'" According to Oxford: fact: (noun) actuality, certainty; truth, verity, gospel. antonym lie, fiction. "Current theories" of evolution will be discarded as time goes on. Darwinian evolution is passe, so theories like Punctuated Equilibrium and the like "arise" to deal with the growing set of "facts" that make older theories obsolete. So, any theory of evolution cannot be a fact per se because we don't have all the facts and can't say for sure at all how it works. Evolution is a theory and not a fact. Evolution will always remain a theory because it can't be proven empirically in the most rudimentary scientific fashion. Given enough time, though, we should be able to prove evolution is true. For now, it's a theory grounded on the limited powers of our observation. This is growing too.
It was not then and is not now an easy thing to become indepedently wealthy. Back then, it usually meant you were doing something right. So you had to have the panache first. Then, your community had to nominate you and ask you to go. That second hurdle can't be faked. It was basically a hassle to go and do that back then to say the least. It was "serving" in the purest sense of the word. A return to "service" would weed out the career seekers and would most definately have an impact for the better.
In the earliest days of our country, nobody was paid like that. People "served" their country. Usually it was people that were successful and well respected that were asked by their community to go "serve". The best people were "sent" by their communities because the entire community agreed that so and so would best represent them. It's a completely reversed model of what we see today. Strip out the salaries of elected office and you'd see a radically different society emerge overnight.
You are *quite* right when you say it is not provable that God or aliens started life. It's quite untestable. In the same way, no explanation will ever exist that proves how things got started. The simple fact there is that we can't go back and watch it and test it - a fundamental requirement of science no matter how you slice it. We can't go back into the first millionth of a nanosecond to measure what exactly happened. But why would we want to know? Does it make life more meaningful? Does it make life right now any better? Arguably, at least for the forseeable future, it has no bearing on daily life.
As for the government = god idea, I probably like it even less than you do, but I have no idea how you get from scientific theories to a deified government.
"[Darwinian] Evolution prepares for revolution and creates the ground for it..." - Joseph Stalin
If you oppossed Stalin, you died. Under the guise of "survival of the fittest" which is the traditional sore spot of atheistic evolutionists (and not religious evolutionists), Stalin established a rhetoric and belief system that allowed for the extinction of untold millions and millions during his "tenure." In that practical sense, evolution was infact religion. In all regards, evolution was the defining "god" of that entire age, which is now happily passed. Simply read any writings of Lenin, and you see what functioned as his religion: spontaneous generation. Pick a book about Lenin or Stalin or Marx, and they will quickly and happily tell you that this is the very foundation of that they believed. Sadly, today, it remains unproven and always will remain so. And so faith to the rescue!
If spontaneous generation is true, then you can only conclude that Hitler was wrong because he didn't win the war. This cannot be argued against, and to this day, this kind of reasoning has never been overcome by the most brilliant Marxists, Communists, or Secular Humanists. It's the big sore spot, and is well documented. They are silent on this matter. You cannot say I'm wrong or right, and you can't say you are wrong or right. In evolution, might = right, quite simply. Whoever is the strongest makes the rules, and there is a constant struggle among rulemakers. This cannot be argued with as it is the most essential doctrine of the Hegelian Dialectic, which is the foundation of all that Marx established. There is more than enough of Lenin's own writings about the dialectical process to give anyone the willies. The confluence of athiestic evolution with the Hegelian Dialectic quite simply added up to hundreds of millions of lost lives over the span of nearly a century. That is why there are the Humanist Manifestos: get enough people together to say what is right, and by fiat you make it so. Science won't help all the way, so in the end, coercion will have to suffice. You simply need to read up on any history of Hegelian Dialectic to see where this came from and where it's going. And you thought radical terrorists embedded in Islam were impossible to talk to...