Happy As Kings

Blink and Rorschach

Fresh, from their long run on the front of the refrigerator, the online debut of my niece's cartoon strip, Blink and Rorschach!

Military bases open their doors to home-schoolers

An article on military homeschooling popped up, so of course I had to read it.  It's an interesting article, but one that follows the pattern of most mainstream articles about homeschooling:  cautious observation but without any endorsement.

Military Bases Open Their Doors to Homeschoolers 

Military families move on average nearly every three years. The transition can be tough for children, and home schooling can make it easier, advocates say. The children don't have to adjust to a new teacher or worry that they're behind because the new school's curriculum is different.

 

Other points in the article are how it seems that only certain people can, or should, homeschool, how military homeschooling has only recently become acceptable, and how homeschooling may make deployment stress worse.

No, homeschooling isn't for every military family. Neither is bowling, or riding motorcycles, or cheeseburgers. Preferences vary across populations, as do results of schooling styles. Whether homeschooling's "long-term social and academic effects" are positive or negative can be weighed against overall developments such as the increase in the need for remedial courses in basic studies for freshman college students. Interested readers can Google "homeschool college acceptance" for a range of results on whether college admissions staffs see homeschooled graduates as good candidates for their schools.

As for the impression that homeschooling among military families is a recently-acceptable development, some parents homeschooled on military installations (and "on the economy" in USAREUR) from the late 1980s on. There were ups and downs, but overall the situation was fairly stable and parents were supported by local homeschooling groups.

It's good that more installations support the children who are homeschooled as well as those who are schooled. I know that I appreciated the work in the mid-1990s of the Heidelberg Youth Center when the staff developed an exceptional art program featuring museum tours and lessons in sculpting and drawing.

Concerning stress during deployment, it's a good bet that the deployment caused the stress (going by all the YouTube videos of children-in-school being surprised by a returning parent) and not the homeschooling. Parents in online support groups say that they are better able to help their children weather the separation because the parents can control when to forge ahead with new material or slow down to 'go with the flow' of the child's emotions.

 

Germany and homeschooling: fact-checking the Romeike situation

The reversal in May of 2012 by the Department of Homeland Security of the granting of asylum to the Romeike family from Germany is emotionally upsetting -- no one likes to see children threatened with action from a government.  Hearing about it is distressing and makes people want to do something.

• Romeike v. Holder, Case No. 12-3641  (awaiting submission, as of yesterday, 12 Mar 2013)

Yelling about Hitler (just Google Romeike v. Holder) and President Obama, though, is not constructive action.  At this point, unless the topic is WWII, using the name Hitler to make a point is political spin using hot-button words to generate even more emotion, and perhaps also to raise more donations for a legal fund.

A goodly portion of German laws probably did carry over from the laws of the Third Reich, and many of the Third Reich's laws probably carried over from the Weimar Republic. Drivers still had to stop at stop signs, people expected that others who handled cash would not embezzle, and spouses' partners probably expected that their significant others should refrain from bigamy. To make entirely new laws would require the overhaul of an entire society. Schooling laws from one era to another also probably resembled each other, but the laws were not in themselves "Nazi-era" artifacts pointed at the hearts of homeschooling families.

• Modern History Sourcebook: The Federal Republic of Germany Basic Law, 1949

Is the Basic Law American in flavor?  No.  Is it democratic?  Yes.  The Federal Republic of Germany has a representative government in a similar vein to that of the U.S.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Claim:  The Romeike family was granted asylum by the Bush administration and the Obama administration has reversed that.

Fact: The Romeike family arrived in the U.S. from Germany in August of 2008, probably entering the country using regular passports and most likely clearing immigration as tourists would. President Obama took office in January of 2009 and a pre-hearing brief on the Romeikes is dated 16 December 2009. The decision granting asylum was issued in January 2010.

On January 26, 2010 ... Judge Lawrence O. Burman granted asylum to Uwe and Hannalore Romeike ...

... Uwe Romeike and his family arrived in Atlanta in August 2008, with little fanfare and only their suitcases.

Source:  HSLDA Court Report, March/April 2010

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Claim:  Hitler made it so German families couldn't homeschool, and the current German government won't change that.

Fact:  Organized schoolling in the lands that became Germany has a long history, and it is a source of pride.

Headline from the newspaper Ausburger Allgemeine, 23 December 2002

From Swabia and Upper Bavaria:   Without School, No Wedding

200 Years ago, Duke Max IV Joseph of Bavaria directed the compulsory schooling of children

The duke was serious about compulsory schooling, showed by how the graduation certificate was one of the keys to later life. It must be tendered if one wanted to establish a business in a trade, or if one wanted to buy a house. Also, one couldn’t marry without this certificate.

(translation)

The need for the "village helping to raise the child" runs deeply in German society. I once had a woman (a cleaning lady in the military guest house soon after we arrived) take a bottle from my year-old son's mouth to warm it under a stream of hot water in the sink. Given my knowledge now of how Germans viewed cold drinks I'm assuming she explained, as I didn't yet know any German, that the cold milk would give him a stomach ache.  Years later an older German woman on a bicycle chided me and my children's piano teacher for crossing the street on a red light that had changed while we were walking.  Apparently, we were setting a bad example for my kids who were with us.  You can also read the light-hearted account in Planet Germany about strangers' concerns for children not wearing hats:  "Of course, it is disconcerting for a first-time British mother that strangers will accost her on the street and express concern about the child's upbringing." (p. 206)

Communal concern for kids isn't seen as interference, but as a responsibility. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Claim:  Germany persecutes Christians

Fact:  Where to start?

• With compulsory schooling under Charlemagne (Karl der Grosse, in German) -- in the year 813 -- being rooted in the desire to "develop the understanding of Christian teaching in the people"?
• With the present language, "High" German, stemming from Luther's translation of the Bible?
• With the compulsory religion classes in school, depending on whether you're Catholic (Katholische), Protestant (Evangelische), nondenominational Christian (Freireligioese), or atheist?
  
  Lehrplan Katholische Religion 2010
  Lehrplan Evangelische Religion 2010
  Lehrplan Freireligioese Religion Sek. I (and Sek. II)  
  Lehrplan Ethik 2010  
  (taken from the Teaching Plan, linked above, for the state of Hesse in college prep schools)
  
  
• With taxes used to support churches? 
• With the legal religious holidays, all of which are Christian? (document of school holidays and school vacation schedules for the various states; vacations are staggered so that everyone isn't off at the same time -- schoolkids and workers -- clogging the already busy highways into gridlock)
• With the network of religiously-oriented schools (in this case, those in the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg)?

Is the German expression of being Christian identical to the American expression of it?  Of course not. In the U.S. the various versions of Christian expression differ, so why wouldn't there be dissimilarities between countries?  Whose "Christianity" is the right one?  

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Claim:  The Romeikes will be thrown in jail after leaving the U.S.

Fact: Deportation is not extradition.

Theoretically, the family could still move to any country they want.  Deportation means they must leave the U.S., not that they will be extradited to Germany. 

• Extradition in International Law (Google Books)
  
   Theoretically there should be no confusion between extradition and deportation.  They are clearly distinct in purpose.  The object of extradition is to restore a fugitive criminal to the jurisdiction of a State which has a lawful claim to try or punish him for an offence. ... Deportation, on the other hand, is the means by which a State rids itself of an undesired alien.  Its purpose is achieved as soon as the alien has departed from its territory; the ultimate destination of a deportee is of no significance in this respect.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Is homeschooling a perilous undertaking in Germany?  It can be, and probably is more so since the American campaign to demonize Germany for their constitutionally legal laws -- the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany is not identical to the constitution of the United States of America, but it is a constitution.  Americans seeking to change the German constitution are probably as welcome in Germany as any constitution-changers are in the U.S.

Any change in the compulsory schooling laws of the various German states will have to come from within the culture of Germany and not as a result of exporting American culture.  Foreign shouting about schooling laws will probably have as much effect on the average German voter as the rantings and flag-burnings by angry young Muslim men do on Joe Six-Pack, soccer moms, or helicopter parents.  

The Romeike family could have moved to another country within the European Union with fewer long-term uncertainties for their children.  If they had moved to Austria, the language would have remained reasonably the same (perhaps the difference between Brooklyn and Alabama?), and they would have been able to continue homeschooling.  The Neubronners moved to France (3rd paragraph; translate here).  Jonas Himmelstrand of Sweden fled to Finland.  

Why did someone think that the Romeikes moving to the U.S., specifically to claim asylum, was a better idea than moving within the E.U.?  Was the purpose for the Romeike family to merely be able to homeschool, or were they to serve as a symbol within the U.S., as a rallying point here?  Is this situation about generating fears for American homeschooling?  Whatever the reason for suggesting that they come to the U.S. and helping them move here, they're in the thick of it.

I wish the Romeike family good things in whatever comes. They look like nice people who want only what's best for their children and they remind me of the Germany I miss.  I hope they find someplace to live where they won't need special conditional permission to continue homeschooling their children.

Liberals, Don’t Homeschool Your Kids

The subject line is the title of a Slate article.  I'd take apart the article, but most of it is of the 'old news' variety that has been dealt with many times. 

Effective research would have revealed information about the objections, as research would also have shown that Robert Reich (former Labor secretary) and Rob Reich (Stanford professor) are two different people, another bit of information fairly well-known in the (older?) homeschooling community.

 

Robert Reich http://robertreich.org/ 
 
Rob Reich 
http://humanexperience.stanford.edu/reich

 

A resonable reply to the article is in the comments section: search -- Ctrl. F for PC-users -- for Patrick Farenga.

In Plain Sight

Finally, a tv show on which the homeschooling family is shown in a positive light.

• Girls, Interrupted, In Plain Sight

A family Mary Shannon comes across while chasing the errant dog, of whom she has custody, sparks Mary's interest as an adoptive family for her child.

Law & Order's homeschool fixation

A couple of years ago, I stopped watching Law & Order SVU, in part because of the homeschool fixation of the producers and writers of the series.  I almost felt that when "the cellos" kicked in with the suspense music, each time a parent-figure came onscreen, that homeschooling would be part of the story. It wasn't enough that parents-in-general are marginalized by the series -- watch sometime and see who children light up for, who they're shown to be best protected by, who has the kids' best interests at heart (hint:  rarely the parents), but that homeschooling parents in particular are bad guys.  When a series reaches that level of predictability, the theme is a cliché. 

Yes, the crimes of murder and molestation of children happen disproportionally in families, but just because that's where the crimes usually happen doesn't mean that most parents commit such crimes.  After a while, I had enough of Law & Order's viewpoint and stopped spending any time with Olivia and Elliot.

I have not yet stopped watching Law & Order Criminal Intent, but if this series goes the way of SVU, then Mr. D'Onofrio will have to complete the show's final season without this viewer.  Tonight's episode has the homeschooled grad as a political radical, indoctrinated by his single-mother who herself was a '70s counterculture criminal with explosive tendencies. (and I just noticed my kids and I don't have matching wrist tattoos with Korean letters -- have to get on that)  I can tell you, from personal experience, that even kids who graduate from day schools can be strongly influenced by their parents' opinions.

As I've said before, I'd like to see the Law & Order writers feature an observant homeschooled kid who helps solve the crime because she wasn't cooped up in school.  With all the good PR that homeschooling gets, there should be at least one homeschooling family in the nation with a good enough rep to be used on a prime time show as a model for common sense.

Homeschooling as a Form of Child Abuse

I'm glad I discovered that making people angry is the point of the blog with the above title as a post.  Now I needn't reply.  If you want to give the blog traffic, Google will take you there.

I'm also glad I never had to put up with that teaching style ... and I was in the Army.

Should Homeschooling Parents Have College Degrees?

Two days ago, Psychology Today's website featured a blog post from Laura Brodie, author of Love in a Time of Homeschooling.  Dr. Brodie's subject was "Should Homeschooling Parents Have College Degrees?"  Comments were open for a day, but now seem to be closed.

Points in the article were:

• Why home-educated children are not held to the same "minimum standards" as public school students.
• Parental competence
• The perception that GED certificate holders were granted their certificates, rather than earning them.
• Parents' proficiency in English.
• Americans' inherent interest in the production of an educated citizenry.
• Should parents who choose to educate their child(ren) at home be required to demonstrate their competence to a public authority?

These concerns range too widely for me to answer them in one post -- I'm too wordy -- so I thought a re-write of the original piece would make my point more easily than justifying the importance of academic freedom for everyone. 

For the most part, every day our society sends helpless firstborns home to be cared for by new parents, care that is unregulated except for existing laws against abuse and neglect.  If these parents can learn enough to make decisions to ensure that their infant will not only live, but thrive, and manage to keep up their level of 'continuing education' until their child reaches the age of traditional school attendance, why, when the kid turns five, would these parents suddenly get stupid? 

Why do we think that parents can't shift from raising their four-year old to raising their five-year old?  In our information-heavy world, why is it assumed that parents won't be able to find the information they need to school their child, just as they have been schooled?  And if parents manage to school their child(ren) to the age of traditional high school attendance, why would they not be able to continue learning, or find a tutor, or program, or video course, or textbook, to continue?

Few first-time parents have had experience raising a child, but we've all been through some form of school.  New parents may need an infant orientation course, but most of us are already clued in to what learning consists of, especially concerning a small person who has been sharing our lives for years, and especially with subsequent children.

If homeschooling families lose their freedom to allow their children to learn at a different pace and in a different manner than the public school template, then that applies across the board, and where does that leave parents and their children if school problems develop?  Any parent can have the need to homeschool -- it's not just for those outside the mainstream.

In the following adaptation, I've only replaced school-words with words about the care of a child:  feeding, housing, clothing, need for medical care, and so on.  The rest of the article is the original.  See what you think of the Psychology Today's writer's thoughts applied to all raising of children.

===========adaptation===========

Should Stay-at-home Parents Have College Degrees?

Here's a subject that can make tempers flare: staying home with children. Some parents feel that our federal and state governments should keep their fingerprints completely off of whether or not children should be raised at home only by parents. Others believe that modest oversight on a state-by-state basis is acceptable. And then there are plenty of observers outside the stay-at-home community who wonder: Why aren't stay-at-home children held to the same minimum standards as children in daycare? And shouldn't stay-at-home parents be required to get a parenting license?

I'll consider the question of standards for stay-at-home children in a future post. For now, let's focus on the second issue: the qualifications of stay-at-home parents. Child care books and magazines often insist that all parents are capable of caring for their children. Parents know their kids best, and are their natural care-givers, right?

Not necessarily. While the vast majority of parents might be well-suited to "care for their own," not all parents are cut out for raising children unsupervised. Not only does it require double doses of patience, humor, and the financial freedom for one parent to forego a fulltime job, stay-at-home Moms and Dads need basic competency in food preparation and elementary medical concerns, and that's where the government tends to step in.

Most states require that stay-at-home parents have high school diplomas or GEDs. Only one state, North Dakota, expects the parent-caregiver to have a college degree, otherwise a family's child raising program must be monitored on a weekly basis by a certified caregiver. My state, Virginia, used to include a college diploma as a requirement in its original at-home statute, but in 1996 this qualification was lowered to a high school diploma.

Whenever I mention these facts to friends outside the stay-at-home parenting world, they tend to be shocked, saying things like : "Are you kidding?...A high school diploma or GED? Some people can get a GED without being able to read."

I admit that I share their skepticism. To me, the idea that parents with GEDs could, if they desired, turn around and raise their children until they're teens is setting the bar very low. More problematic is the fact that several states have almost no home-inspection regulations, including no specified qualifications for stay-at-home -- not even a basic elementary education.

Don't get me wrong-the vast majority of stay-at-home parents are bright and diligent and well-qualified to raise their kids. My own brief sojourn into the world of stay-at-home parenting left me greatly impressed with the SAHMs I met. And there are plenty of child care facilities that are doing a poor job supervising children.  When we talk about child care regulation, the question is whether there are rules that can help minimize worst-case scenarios, and whether all children have the right to a basic level of care that should be ensured by the state.

Years ago I worked as a child care volunteer in my local community, and I saw how an inability to maintain a home environment can be passed from generation to generation. Children with parents who can not read often repeat the pattern, occasionally due to problems with dyslexia or various learning disabilities. At a minimum, should all states require that stay-at-home parents demonstrate a certain level of literacy? Taking it further, should all stay-at-home parents show that they can read and write English, or is it OK for an American child to receive no stay-at-home care in English, and be spoken to entirely in Spanish, or Japanese, or Arabic?

Because Americans value freedom and self-reliance, the idea of regulating any aspect of the parent-child relationship makes some people furious. Nevertheless, all Americans have an interest in breaking cycles of poverty and producing a civilized citizenry. A college education might not be a fair requirement for stay-at-home parents, but what does constitute a reasonable baseline?

In my next post, I'll share more of my own, constantly evolving, thoughts on the subject. But before I offer my opinions, I invite anyone who cares about this topic to voice their own:

How much education should a stay-at-home parent be required to have? A high school diploma? A two-year associate's degree? A four year college degree? A teaching certificate?

Should all stay-at-home parents be required to pass a test demonstrating their ability to read and write in English, and calculate math at a basic (say, fifth grade) level?

Is all regulation bad regulation?

===========end adaptation===========

Further reading from Home Education Magazine:

Communicating the Strengths of Homeschooling

Problems with Legislation to Prevent "Unqualified" Families From Homeschooling

Watchdogging the Media 

Homeschooling: Our Perspectives, Their Views 

Parents' Work: Invaluable but Nearly Invisible

Unschooling in the un-news

ABC News reporter Hyunju "JuJu" Chang has reported once again on unschooling .  This is her second report on unschooling since April 2010 when she filmed a report on the Yablonski-Biegler family.  Her second report features the family of Joe and Dayna Martin.

Critiquing this second report is probably a poor use of time because not only are the subject and the bias not news, they're not new.  Unschooling is so old, cyber-culturally speaking, that the newsletter-magazine devoted to it, Growing Without Schooling shuttered itself in 2001 after 24 years .  As for report-bias, the second report repeated the slant of the first report almost as if the reporter used an outline.  Because of the reach of the program on which it aired, Nightline, many people saw the program, so replies are in order.

Leaving aside unschooling itself, the overall points about the report that come immediately to mind are:    

• sensational presentation
• biased editing
• unnecessary images of school
• reporter's gasps and astonishment

Sensationalist reporting is nothing new, just think of the late 1800s description of 'yellow journalism' .  And sensationalism is almost a requirement in the milieu of 24-hour 'news' channels and 500-channels that must fill their 24 hours of programming with something.  That something must be interesting enough to compete with the programming on the 499 other channels, as well as with daily family life, books, music, movies in the theater and at-home, fitness routines, and the Internet. "Infotainment," as a word dates from 1983 , so that underscores the not-newness of sensationalism.  But even knowing what the network employees are up to, and up against, I find it hard to watch the Nightline segment and then read the online text reports without sputtering, "Wait a minute!"  When the reporter audibly gasps then exclaims at a stay-at-home child's admission that he goes to bed later than the working-mother-reporter's idea of what a child's bedtime should be, that exclamation shows a lack of separation between her reporting and her own opinions.  Or she was hamming.

Keeping the bias in mind is especially important when you're reading a report about something that you're already not inclined to like, such as children who appear 'out of control' .  If 'out of control' kids are the concern, perhaps the reporters should look into the continuing rate of school dropouts, kids who, I presume, are not in a self-directed learning environment with caring parents.  Over the decades the American dropout rate has declined, but it still rests at 8%  of the 16,294,000 high school age teens  (ca. 1,303,520 individuals).

Watching the Nightline report on the Martin family, and the Good Morning America segment featuring the Yablonski-Biegler family confirmed for me why I'm a non-viewer of television news programs:  I recoil at reporters poorly manipulating my thoughts.  I'd react better to a well-planned manipulation that makes me think (which is what most nonfiction writing intends, in one way or another) than to a report that presumes I will go along with sharply edited interviews rolling across the screen in mere seconds-long bursts.

My objections about the editing of the programs stem from seeing the same the 'playbook' particulars within the two reports:

• editing discrepancies between the video report and the written version of each program
• same contrast at the beginning between a schoolroom and kids at home
• same emphasis on 'no X, no Y, in fact no nothing at all!'
• same focus on children's bedtimes when the child is an 'owl' instead of a 'lark'
• same focus on legality
• same truncated interview answers
• same recording of a field trip
• same highlighting of children eating 'wrong' food
• same questions on "what will happen when they're older?"
• same child-quizzing "do you want to go to school?"
• same challenging of the children as to the validity of their feelings and viewpoints

That looks like less like an enquiry and more like a checklist.

One difference between the two programs was of the 'how many homeschoolers are there?' variety.  In the April program, the reporter guessed that parents unschool 150,000 children, but by the June program the reporter had 150,000 families unschooling their kids.  How did the number of children increase so much between April and June?  And why was the quantity the same number?  And, since only 19 states report numbers of homeschooled children, with no breakdown of the unschooled, who supplied the number?  Of course, viewers who see the programs months apart won't distinguish between 'children' and 'families' even if they watched both programs, and even if they remember the number but the questions remain,    

• who put together the number 150,000?
• where did the numbers come from?
• who was that analyst?

Concerning interest in unschooling, the programs could have used different jumping off points - that is, if the producers meant for the programs to inquire into something new to many people.  What these 'news' programs seem to be doing is using the growing freak show television trend, a technique competing hotly with the 'can we shout at people loudly enough to make them cry?' gambit (or maybe gasp them into admitting their social deviance).   Bonus for hyperventilation.

A starting point for reporting on unschooling might be to look at how far schooling itself has branched off from natural learning so that natural learning appears to be radical and irresponsible.  Down through the millennia, people who want to make money from learning have co-opted the process - an example from antiquity being the Sophists .  Today, basic compulsory schooling in America costs over a half-trillion dollars every year.   That's not million with six zeroes, or billion with nine zeroes, but trillion with twelve zeroes. Contrasting an unschooling household with a classroom is comparing two far ends.  The reporter might have contrasted unschooling with school-at-home, summer school, or camp. Will family life without curriculum and classrooms look radical in the shadow of an industry whose yearly cost has twelve zeroes in it?

|<-- If 'just family life' is here …

a half-trillion dollar industry in $1,000 bills face-to-face is about 34 miles thataway -->

Which end is the extreme?

There will always be differences within a group of individuals or among individual data points.    If you line up all the leaves on a tree, some will be lighter, some will be darker, and most will be about the same hue, but you will be able to line them up, lighter to darker.  Same thing with the height of individuals, number of peas per pod, worst-to-best ping pong players and smallest to largest chocolate covered raisins (eat the smaller ones first, save the big ones for last).

Maybe if the USA channel featured the Yablonski-Bieglers and the Martins on a television program the public would find them less threatening.  Too bad that "Characters welcome" turns out in the 'real' world of television to be just a clever tagline.

For information on unschooling, please see: 

• What is unschooling?  
• Unschooling - What's The Real Story  (see comments for discussion)
• Unparenting and unschooling 
• Unschooling Stephanopoulos: Good Morning America Fail
• Unschooling : How Good Morning America Got It All Wrong  

Copyright Valerie Bonham Moon 2010

footnoted article is at: Download 2010 06 Jun 03 critique of ABC News's unschooling reports

Lydia Schatz, via Salon

The Pearls are not "normalized" in the homeschooling circles I'm part of ...

Godly discipline turned deadly, 22 Feb 2010, Salon.com

Because they did not want to admit that a 'normal' home-schooling mom could abuse her child to death, they did not want to admit that a book that has been normalized in home-schooling circles was a factor in the death, ...