These fundy whackos in North Dakota are scary.

[Proteus_MST]

The majority of the children in “Jesus Camp” are home-schooled by evangelical parents who teach them creationism and dismiss science. Handsome 12-year-old Levi, who wears his hair in a mullet, is being groomed as a future evangelical preacher. Already exuding star quality, he strides through a group of children, waving his arms and mouthing dogma about how his generation is so important.

So do the USA allow Kids to homeschool their children and entirely keep them out of regular schools?
If yes this sounds to me like an invitation for these parents to successfully indoctrinate their children with this crap and really turn them into some kind of christian taliban.

[Gatekeeper]

I do believe there are standards that parents or guardians must maintain if they are to home-school their children, but it's by no means universal.

Gatekeeper

[Gatekeeper]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat


Yeah, actually, they do. It would be real unpleasant to try to take over one of those silos. The occupants tend to be very highly trained, duty bound sorts, and completely willing, under standing procedures, to detonate the missle (not the warheads, obviously) in place, if necessary, to prevent takeover. Even if you got in the silo, (autmatic weapons in tight, constrained spaces can ruin your whole day), knew your way around, and managed to do anything else other than get in before you were killed, you wouldn't be able to target it on anything, nor would you live long enough to get to the warheads to be able to do anything with them, even if you could extract them. (lots of specialized tools, machinery and know-how needed, plus time, which you wouldn't have.)

I'd hope it'd be hard to commandeer a missile silo, hence the icon to indicate I wasn't being serious that Christian fundamentalists would stand anything but a snowball's chance in hell of taking over such a silo. That's not their style, anyway. They'll take over the levels of government, one rung at a time, and go from there.

About the most "dangerous" thing you get with missile silos are the occasional protesters who camp out near one or two. Most recently, I think three nuns were convicted of trespassing on federal property (i.e. missile silo) and got some time behind bars and/or fines.

Gatekeeper

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Q Cubed
Also, I look forward to the day that these Evangelicals take over the country.

Don't you mean backwards? Jan 20, 2001 was that day.

[Proteus_MST]

Originally posted by Gatekeeper
I do believe there are standards that parents or guardians must maintain if they are to home-school their children, but it's by no means universal.

Gatekeeper

I hope these standards involve a little bit more than an obligatory exam once or twice a year to check if the kid has learned a few things this year/ half year

[Jon Miller]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_school

"Some studies have suggested the academic integrity of home education programs, demonstrating that on average, home-educated students outperform their publicly-run school peers by 30 to 37 percentile points across all subjects. Moreover, the performance gaps between minorities and gender that plague publicly-run schools are virtually non-existent amongst home-educated students.[9]"

My observation was that homeschooling was really good for academics. Where it was weak in was in socialization..

JM

[Jon Miller]

That being said.. I knew of a few who were homeschooled who just sat arround and did nothing. It wasn't that the parent was religious or anything, more just garbage... (mother had much younger boyfreind for a while, daughter had much older (she was below 18) boyfreind for a while, + much much Worst which I won't get into).

Shame because they had been neighbors.

I also know of one kid who seemed to have social problems from it (I might have had some social problems from it (I was homeschooled 1st, 2nd, and 4th)).

However, it can provide a huge advantage. Many schools suck, and don't provide a good learning environment. Plus they don't push their students. The advantage can be seen in the statistics cited.

Jon Miller

[Proteus_MST]

Originally posted by Jon Miller

My observation was that homeschooling was really good for academics. Where it was weak in was in socialization..

JM

Jep,
that is the main concern I have,
that these fundamentalist parents use the homeschooling,
to keep their kids away from children outside of this fundamentalist movement, so that they can better indoctrinate them (and that the kids don´t get in contacts with views other than those they parents present to them).

Aside from this I fully agree,
that, if done right, homeschooling can lead to a better intellectual performance than normal education at school (no miracle after all, in homeschooling the kids could get their education more intensely and in smaller groups than they would get at schools and could be taught by people who normally know them better than any normal school teacher would).

[Gatekeeper]

Plus, the home-schooled students generally don't have to deal with the dregs of society, as the public schools must. After all, they're *public* schools.

Certainly, the schools have to do their part when it comes to providing an education, but so do the children's guardians. It all begins at home, and without a solid foundation like that, a child automatically starts out a step behind his or her peers.

Responsibility. It's a good thing. Not easy all the time, but essential to the functioning of any society.

Gatekeeper

[Dis]

my cousins were home schooled. They had a lot of trouble in public schools. It was about 90% black and the rest were white, hispanic, and native american. And they faced a lot of abuse from what I understand.