its not that.

with others calling them nuts for saying somethign that is not agreed, and the ones that know better not willing to stand and fall.

you get the final scene to william wallace.

one man standing up for truth, abandoned by all others, and left to face the fight and die by himself, crucified by the people he opposed, and betrayed by the people he wanted to help.

sound like a repeating famililar theme?

There will be damage done, thanks not so much by the lefty indoctrinators but by parents, educators and community leaders who through shear laziness do not speak out against them.

Well I don’t have a lot of familiarity with Catholic parochial schools these days, but when I was in my mid-to-late teens they were very fine. My sense, based on reading a bit about outcomes, is that they are yet continuing in that tradition. And I’m with you on the positive value of uniforms–they do serve, do they not, to limit the areas of natural competitiveness to those which actually result in lasting gain.

It’s not easy being Mom and Dad. But no one ever told us it would be, did they. . . .

Thanks. I’d looove to be able to homeschool, even with all of the difficulties. My wife and I work opposite shifts so that we don’t need to pay for daycare. I love my one on two time with the kids everyday. I’d love to teach them too. But I’m not sure if it will be economical for us. I’d have to quit my job and we just can’t afford that.

In the end, I’ll probably end up paying for them to go to our regional private catholic school (Uniforms. Yes!) and I’ll consider it worth every penny, even though there are no longer any nuns there. I know from experience (being a good old Irish Catholic boy), when a nun is teaching you, you learn. Or you don’t live long, to paraphrase Heinlein.

And not to interject into your discussion with expat, but I remember that the education program was the fallback program for students that couldn’t cut it in whatever their initial major was. Say 3 out of 10 Ed. majors went into it specifically to be teachers. The others started out as engineering majors or something demnding a certain amount of rigor. When they realized they weren’t cut out for it, they went off to be a teacher. I had a calc. professor remark on it once saying ,”Give it a generation. This won’t end well.”

Incidentally, your idea about local-focus history competitions and bees is excellent. It’s the kind of thing we are going to have to undertake.

You’d be surprised at the low educational level required for university admission these days. Just ask yourself why there is now such a proliferation of remedial curricula in large numbers of colleges and universities. And the answer is, it’s because admission carries very few achievement requirements, and the higher-level institutions have set up entire programs whose mission is to teach university students that which they were not taught in K-12.

This is what happens when a college/university credential is determined to be a universal necessity. The credential itself becomes devalued. Just as a high-school diploma has become essentially worthless as an achievement indicator, a higher-education credential is moving towards becoming the same. When everyone has one, it will tell you nothing about anyone.

I wish you the best of success with your kids.

Remember John Paul Jones: “I have not yet begun to fight.”

I do have a suggestion on the history problem: What if people in local historical societies, museums etc. got together and organized something like history bees? They could be pretty local and offer modest scholarships to winners. But in doing publicity for the events, organizers could say they are motivated by the proposed curriculum changes, that they just want to make sure that future generations still know who the founding fathers were, why the constitution is as it is, and what the civil war was about. This could get quite a bit of air time on local TV and radio and great pix in local papers.

Anyway, there came a point, somewhere around junior year that it was almost like the Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Soon, we were being lectured about how oppressed our fellow students were and it was worse in the lower grades and they were being trained to fix it.

They kept trying to get us to read “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” (We preferred our Monster Manuals).- “Here! Try our free literature!”- I eventually read it, by the way, (to get one of the girls to sleep with me) and, well, bleh. (On both counts, actually, but D&D players can’t be picky).

They were completely different people after; brainwashed. And then they went off to shape young minds. One went to be a math teacher (she failed 3 out of 5 math courses she took) and the other became a school psychologist.

My kids are only 10 months old but when the time comes, I’ll be damned if I turn them over to the public education system.