[quote=zk][quote=CA renter][quote=zk][quote=squat300]It might be best to start teaching schoolkids now how to create IEDs to disable govt vehicles approaching their homes per the 2nd amendment. why isn’t that in the curriculum?[/quote]
You snark. But I wouldn’t doubt that it is in some home-school curricula.[/quote]
The vast, vast, vast majority of criminals were traditionally schooled. The fact that somebody doesn’t follow fads or do everything that they’re told without question doesn’t make them criminals. You do know that, right?[/quote]
Wow. Have you ever got that all wrong.
First of all, I was not disparaging all home schoolers. There is a subset of home schoolers who home school because they believe the government is trying to brainwash us and oppress us and is working toward becoming a tyranny. And it wouldn’t be surprising if a few in that subset of home schoolers teach insurrection techniques, including ied production, to their children. Squat said, snarkily and rhetorically, that it should be in the curriculum. I pointed out that, while it obviously won’t be in a traditional-school curriculum, there is a possibility that it could be in some home-school curricula.
You show a glaring weakness in your logic skills, yet again, with your “vast majority of criminals were traditionally schooled” comment. If 98% of people are traditionally schooled, then the vast majority of criminals will almost certainly be traditionally schooled, whether home schooling produces criminals or not (which I have no reason to believe it does).
Finally, to imply that I think that ”somebody [who] doesn’t follow fads or do everything that they’re told without question” is a criminal is completely ridiculous and has no basis whatsoever. You’ve twisted the fact that I don’t share your paranoia about our government into something completely unrelated.
My philosophy, which I believe has been manifest in all my posts, has been “be realistic, don’t be paranoid.” You’ve twisted this into “don’t question authority.” Two completely different things.
Some people are born to question authority. And everybody who’s known me for very long knows that I’m one of them. Although it might be less obvious now, and I certainly get into trouble because of it a lot less than I did before I learned to question authority without pissing people off. I learned to do that because I realized that you have a better chance of truly challenging authority and changing the status quo (if necessary and desired) if you don’t come off as angry and condescending. I believe that coming off as paranoid, unrealistic, and weak in logic also decrease your chances of effectively challenging authority.[/quote]
There is no weakness in my logic at all.
When I said that the “vast, vast, vast majority” of criminals were traditionally schooled, I meant that the percentage of traditionally schooled kids who commit crimes is probably greater than the percentage of homeschooled kids who commit crimes. I could not come up with reliable data to show specific percentages, so left it at “the vast, vast, vast majority.”
Yours isn’t the first post to indict homeschooling when it comes to crime of various sorts. Someone did it on the thread regarding the Connecticut shooting, too. While Lanza appeared to have been homeschooled in recent years, he spent most of his time in traditional public schools, so why didn’t anyone mention this as a probable source of his problems? He was bullied in public school, which is a much more common variable seen “crazy” killers than a history of being homeschooled, and this bullying is one of the main reasons why he was pulled out and homeschooled.
Quite franky, there is NO evidence at all showing that homeschoolers are more likely to commit these types of crimes. My point was that the majority of criminals are traditionally schooled, yet when they are arrested or identified, nobody bothers to say: “See, that’s because they were traditionally schooled.” It’s only on the **very rare** occasions that a homeschooler gets in the news that everyone makes the automatic assumption that it was their method of schooling that simply must have led to their criminal behavior…and this often leads to big debates about how homeschooling should be made illegal or more highly regulated.
It’s important that everybody understands the FACTS vs. the myths about homeschooling:
“Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Does school attendance effect crime rates?
I got the pointer to this from a local homeschool newsgroup.
What Effect Does School Attendance Have on the Crime Rate?
Increasing the length of school attendance does not decrease the crime rate, according to the postwar trends in most industrialized countries. Arguing that requiring children to attend school longer would reduce crime is arguing from a statistical fallacy. Neither school uniforms nor longer school days or school years can be expected to reduce crime as long as schools themselves promote the development of youth culture. A much more effective set of crime control measures, as demonstrated by the experience of the United States in recent years, is vigorous police work, strict law enforcement, and allowing young people more choice in education.
Here are a few insightful quotes:
“As the labor of children has become unnecessary to society, school has been extended for them. With every decade, the length of schooling has increased, until a thoughtful person must ask whether society can conceive of no other way for youth to come into adulthood.”
A socialization used to mean something different.
Kett demonstrates, among other things, that the “peer group” of most children used to range in age from four to twenty-two– until age-segregated public schools became commonplace after the Civil War.
Montgomery reached the conclusion that any time a state adopted compulsory school attendance laws in the nineteenth century, its crime rate and youth suicide rate increased. United States census figures are cited throughout the book. Montgomery also reemphasized the point Cowper made a century earlier, that age-peer socialization produces more criminal behavior than socialization by parents.
This is a different point of view than those awful commercials promoting universal preschool.
A 1992 Associated Press article about Dr. Shyer’s research was widely reprinted in newspapers across the country. Dr. Shyers reports that direct observation by trained observers, using a “blind” procedure, found that home-schooled children had significantly fewer problem behaviors, as measured by the Child Observation Checklist’s Direct Observation Form, than traditionally schooled children when playing in mixed groups of children from both kinds of schooling backgrounds. Shyers concluded that the hypothesis that contact with adults, rather than contact with other children, is most important in developing social skills in children is supported by these data.”
Parents whose children attend public schools are just as capable of “teaching their kids how to use IEDs” as parents who homeschool. It’s the ignorant comments about homeschooling that bother me the most. Don’t meant to unload on you, personally, but there is so much propaganda and misinformation out there regarding homeschooling (usually coming from teachers’ unions and people who think everyone should act and think the same — including government officials who want everyone under the control of the govt thought police*), it gets frustrating having to correct people all the time.
*Before you go labeling this as another “conspiracy theory,” I’ll show you how true it is in another post.
