The end of civilization as we know it?

[catsittingstill]

I found an interesting (read "appalling") article on the use of home schooling to destroy science education in the name of religion (complete with hothouse "colleges" for these intellectually crippled kids which have the nerve to purport to adhere to "the highest academic standards).

The really scary thing? Most of these uber-Fundies are planning to go into politics. They train in rhetoric and law for the purpose of gaining dominion over the rest of us. How are they doing so far? One such "college," which has 240 students, has captured 7% of White House internships.

Read about it here

Comments

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Don't really see a good answer to that one.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I see some possible solutions, though these are just passing thoughts.

Restore basic academic standards for people wishing to pull kids out of school and teach them themselves.

Or require homeschooled kids to take a yearly test over the subjects that would have been covered in school in their year; the kids that fail go back to school.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Scary, aren't they? But I don't think it's going to go much of anywhere despite all claims and fears; the young people who come out of such schools are just like any other group of students and they are poorly educated to boot. It's not like education can magically make them into superhumans. Once they're adults some will fall away, others get caught in the various traps of adulthood, some will turn out to be gay, and so on--it's an old story; they children of the Puritans fall away, the children of the kibbutzniks leave the kibbutz. The White House internships are probably only available as long W. Bush is there--I don't think we're likely to see another president as sympathetic to religious radicalism for a long time to come. Where these people are going to be problems is when they are the children of entrenched privilege or when, despite all handicaps, they come to real positions of power. They are going to be be problems, but, for instance, it's hard for me to see them as worse problems than people like Justice Scalia, who got a similar, though more honest, education in the Catholic schools.

Stepping back, and taking a broader view, I am reminded yet again of the tendency of the obsessive religious to sacrifice their children for power. I wish we could put a crimp in that.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm hoping Bush will be the only president to embrace the radical religious right (RRR for short?). But I wouldn't bet the farm on it. As far as I can tell, the RRR has been working to embed itself in politics at the local level for decades now.

I do hope these kids will grow up and learn better. But having known a couple of RRR homeschooled kids--well, they seem pretty impervious to other ideas.

Hoom, hom

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

The religious right has been in local politics for a long time; Mark Twain, even, complained of it. But US local politics nowadays is much more urban, and religious radicalism doesn't get as much traction there; if it weren't for rural dominance in the Senate, we'd hear much less of them in national politics. I don't think the rigidly homeschooled kids mostly will learn better, but I do think they'll mostly be ineffectual. And I think it will be at least a generation before any US political elite allows another president like W. Bush; he's been too expensive in too many ways.

[adamek.livejournal.com]

Hope none of those interns are named Nehemiah Scudder (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22If_This_Goes_On%E2%80%94%22).

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

(grin)

[dan-ad-nauseam.livejournal.com]

I suppose we could call this the equivalent to the madrassah.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Yes. In more ways than one, I think.

[fantasyjax.livejournal.com]

All sorts of terrifying :(

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Something to keep an eye on, certainly.

[madrona.livejournal.com]

Yeah, just don't forget the progressive home-schoolers who do so because they want to give their children the chance to take joy in learning and see slim chance for it in local public schools that increasingly teach to a standardized test. They exist, too.

Speaking of which, shouldn't more regular high school students be learning rhetoric?

[gorgeousgary]

True...if I'm remembering correctly, I know at least two homeschooled filkers.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Certainly people can homeschool for good reasons and their homeschooled kids can come out okay. I think you risk "conservation of ignorance" (i.e. kids with only one teacher will tend to be weak in the subjects their teacher is weak in; kids in school have many teachers--if one is weak in math another will make up for that) but with a sufficiently talented parent/teacher, that may not be a big problem.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I am not forgetting that there are people who homeschool for the purpose of teaching their children in the way their children learn best. I seem to remember that the article states that only 75% of homeschoolers are Fundies who don't want their children to learn about evolution. If I'm remembering right (and if the article is right) about that, that means 25% of homeschoolers are homeschooling for other reasons.

It's fine to learn rhetoric, as long as you also learn logic and math and science and history. It's not so fine to learn it for the purpose of persuading people to impose the RRR's (radical religious right's) agenda on others.

[occams_pyramid]

Yes, I saw that in New Scientist.

Is there any other source on this though? I've been considerably less willing to trust stories in NS since the article a month or so back about someone's space drive, where they seemed to have decided that Newton's Third Law was more a sort of guideline which could be ignored if you just said 'relativity' a lot.

[gorgeousgary]

I can't comment on everything in the article, but Patrick Henry College and Mike Farris are both as scary as they sound. They turn up in the DC-area papers more than I care to read about them.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I don't read New Scientist regularly. For what it's worth, the article about religious homeschooling ties in with things I have heard from other sources about radical religious right (RRR) homeschooled kids working on campaigns and such. This article makes the problem seem more widespread than I had thought, though.

[andpuff.livejournal.com]

There's a bright side though; if they have 7% of White House internships they don't have 93%.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

:-) Well, yeah. But kids all over the country are presumably competing for those internships. 7% seems out of proportion for a college of 240 kids.

[madfilkentist]

Not having seen the article, I don't know whether it's an exposé of the abuse of homeschooling or an attempt to discredit homeschooling by painting all homeschoolers as "uber-Fundies." Both the abuses and the smears are more common than I'd like.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Well, the article doesn't require a subscription or anything, and it's still available through the link I put up in my post, so you can read it if you want.

I think it acknowledges that there are homeschoolers who are not Fundies. For instance it says:

Ironically, home-schooling began in the 1960s as a counter-culture movement among political liberals. The idea was taken up in the 1970s by evangelical Christians, and today anywhere from 1.9 to 2.4 million children are home-schooled, up from just 300,000 in 1990 (see Graph). According to the US government's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), 72 per cent of home-schooling parents interviewed said that they were motivated by the desire to provide religious and moral instruction.

And farther down it says:

However, not all home-school parents have a religious agenda. "There are probably some wonderful home-school parents, some of whom may be evolutionary biologists themselves. But I have a feeling after talking to a lot of home-schoolers that this is the minority," says Alters

So at least 28% of homeschoolers aren't Fundies, according to that article. It does interest me that such a high percentage of homeschoolers are avoiding school because they think it would interfere with indoctrinating their children with religion and morals. I would have thought that the years before school age, and the time after school and on the weekends would be plenty for that.

The part I find particularly disturbing:

For these parents, religious instruction and science are often intertwined. This bothers Brian Alters of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, who studies the changing face of science education in the US. He is appalled by some home-schooling textbooks, especially those on biology that claim they have scientific reasons for rejecting evolution.

This is part of the RRR's drive to destroy science, particularly geology, the paleo-sciences, and biology, because the truths they have to tell us about who we are and where we and the world came from do not align with what they read in the bible. Real science has made a creditable job of holding on in most schools, so these people are pushing to pull kids out of school. Apparently, according to the article, they're hoping they can pull a third of kids out and cause the public school system to collapse. I'm not sure there's a serious chance they'll achieve that, but it bothers me.