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From the Fox News article:
Thomasson said parents should consider pulling their children out of California’s public schools.
“Fortunately, parents can protect their children from the insanity of biological boys in girls’ restrooms and girls’ showers and biological girls in boys’ restrooms and boys’ showers by exiting the dysfunctional, immoral public schools for homeschooling and solid church schools,” he said.
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Perhaps this new law could be a trigger for the mass exodus from public schools you’ve written about previously. At least in an area of CA with a lot of conservative Christians who are offended by the law–Orange County, perhaps?
The thing that came to me reading this is that we have evolved in our knowledge as a society over the past 100 years to now know (pretty soundly) what is developmentally appropriate for children’s ages and stages and how school from 100 years ago goes against most bits of this knowledge- sleep, behavior, emotional regulation, rote memorization, play…so on. In that context, to me at least, it’s pretty shocking we aren’t looking at the bigger picture now that we have identified a framework of what children DO need.
My kid is in a coveted G&T program. Each day it feels like war: early rise, long school bus rides, bullies, homework, very long hours, behavior charts, reading & writing in K, etc. WTF? I am so close to pulling my kid out of that place and homeschooling it. It is a choice. But it takes guts and money. I am working on both. It’s getting close.
My best advice-start small. Pull your kids now and tell yourself that it’s just until Christmas. And the decide again. I pulled one kid in April, the year we started homeschooling. I figured I couldn’t mess it up with only a month and a half left of school. One is in college, one graduated and had a job waiting for him post college. No regrets except that I didn’t do it sooner.
you’re usually so on the money, but you’re really off base about Israel. You start this post blaming Israel and then talk about all the trauma inflicted on Israelis by the Palestinians. And the conclusion you leave your readers with is that Israelis are to blame for their troubles. So Arabs can (and do) live safely and fully (with equal, progressive rights not afforded them anywhere else in the Arab world) in Israel, but Jews cannot live safely in what may becone Palestine? As Golda Meir has said, there will be peace only when the Arabs love their children more than they hate the Jews. Infantilizing Palestinians and holding double standards certainly won’t get them to that point.
You are totally wrong on your interpretation of PT’s words. She’s just referring to the trauma any ordinary Israeli person – jews, mostly, but muslims and christians too – have to live with, day-in, day-out, and how accostumed to it people get. Thus she makes the parallel with people going to (public) school and having to “adapt” to trauma.
I think the parallel is wrong in many aspects, but it is not a condemnation of Palestinians nor of Israelis…
The head-scratcher for me is, “why do North Americans move to Israel and voluntarily live under those conditions?” http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/07/30/israel-ashkelon-americans/13366575/
From that point of view, the analogy to public school definitely holds up.
Katie Jay, that Golda Meir quote is extremely ignorant. Ignorance and racist stereotypes will definitely not bring peace. Please can you give Penelope some artistic licence, recognise the main thrust of her dodgily crafted argument and keep it moving?
“The other result is that school is a battle ground.”
Of course. Politics is civil war by other means.
The danger of homeschooling is that parents are taking their children out of the war zone. They get to peaceably raise their children on their own far from the grunting artillery of the culture wars.
But what will the politicians and activists do then, poor things?
I take it your own school experience was traumatic? I’m sorry, it sounds like a lot of things in your life were traumatic. You’re doing a pretty good job all things considered although your comments about drinking have concerned me.
I found that becoming a parents stirs up all sorts of childhood and emotional issues. I guess we are trying to sort through the things that our parents did wrong so we can try to do them better.
about California governor enacting that allows a child to choose which gender they identify with. Recently there a someone in Kenya who went to court to have her high school certificate gender changed. She won the case. Her name also was changed from Andrew to Audrey because that is what she wanted. I did not know whether to refer to “her” or “him” because this is Africa and things are really different.
I just started homeschooling my 6th grader this year and I was recently with a group of women who also have 6th grade boys whom I’ve known for years. They were complaining about how moody their boys were and how they were starting to have a bad attitude. I haven’t seen that AT ALL in my son, he is a joy to be around. I thought at the time that their boys are being traumatized and this is how it is showing up. Glad to see you agree.
But I’m sure those moody boys will snap out of it and become angelic teenagers (sarcasm.)