This op/ed surfaced in the news reader’s list because homeschooling is given as a choice for parents.  The point of the article is that children below the age of compulsory attendance are not included in the public schooling system, and that this exclusions is the cause of the sad life of that disadvantaged children live with their disinterested parents.

“Parents Who Don’t Parent”, 23 June 2008, The New York Times, New York, New York

To address this initial and rarely insurmountable inequity, free education ought to be mandatory at age 1, not age 5. (Parents who do not wish to participate can continue to home school or enroll their children in licensed daycares.) Early intervention is required to ensure that all children are activating and engaging their brains during these crucial years.

The effects of poverty, discrimination, ill-educated parents, crime and any other factors that bear down on the children born into these circumstances are not mentioned.  The effects of these situations are interwoven in the children’s experiences so that distinguishing the critical cause for their later sad lives isn’t easy.  I don’t think, though, that taking them from their sad families at even earlier ages is the ‘fix’ that many people look for. 

The bias for ‘school’ as the fix is betrayed in this part of the opinion by saying that parents who don’t want to use early, “free” education, ”can continue to home school …” their children.  This sentence reduces the daily life of young children from birth to age five to “home schooling.”  The children aren’t presumed to be dropping Brussels sprouts under the table, listening to lullabies, making mudpies, chasing the cat, cutting their bangs too short, sitting in a laundry basket with their blankies, draining the water out of inflatable pools, or yelling at grasshoppers.  In the world of this op/ed, they’re being “home schooled.”  Whatever that means.

I embrace the homeschooling concept but there is no way I would have wanted my children’s early lives to have consisted of “home schooling.”   Little kids need childhood.

And as for the all-important growth of those precious brains between the ages of birth and three, however did our ancestors , who were clueless about these crucial years, manage to get humanity to the point we are now?  Or maybe they did stunt us!  Imagine how much farther along we’d be if the children of ages past had been properly schooled. 

“The basic science of brain development says you need to start as early as possible for kids in the greatest danger to get the best outcomes,” states Jack Shonkoff, director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. “If you start at age 4 for kids who are at a disadvantage, you’re not starting early. You’re playing catch-up.” With our current educational system, most urban students will never catch up.

What I think is missing is an emphasis on the family.  The professionals apparently believe, by providing a ‘better’ environment outside the family, that the children will blossom despite the barren soil in which they are planted. 

I, with my glorious 98.6 degrees, think that unless the soil in which the children are planted (their families) is improved, then no amount of rain, sunshine, and bug spray is going to make that garden grow.  The place to begin to prevent having to play catch-up in the first place is with the parents (and yes, this is a chicken and egg problem). 

However, for me, ‘beginning with the parents’ is a family effort, not a communitarian effort in which the parents are sent to classes, seminars and such sponsored by government, foundations or trusts.  The family effort to improve the lives of children is the experience of living as a family.  In taking away children from the family, there is no model for the children to learn how to live as a family.   When these de-familied children are adults and become parents, they have little experience upon which to base their actions with their own children.  Children who spend most of their time outside of families do not learn how parents parent and siblings sib, and they grow up to be adults who need to be taught how to parent, possibly through asinine attempts such as The Baby Borrowers.  Children raised in classrooms learn that classrooms are the model:  if one has children, one sends them to a classroom.  I think it is another example of McLuhan’s “the medium is the message.”

The family must be repaired before the children can be well-raised.

====================

I must add a note here about Mr. Gaither’s review at Anderson on Nomadic Homeschooling.  I include it because of the link to the concept of family in the op/ed above, and the piece Mr. Gaither reviewed.  Like Mr. Gaither, I agree with the idea that “where we learn becomes part of what we learn.”  He notes the McLuhan ‘vibe.’

Anderson here offers a two-pronged argument.  First, she makes the interesting claim that “where we learn becomes part of what we learn.”  Second, given Anderson’s conviction that traditional families and homes tend to reproduce all sorts of social pathologies and oppression, the only way to overcome deeply ingrained social inequalities is to deconstruct the home.

But the idea to “deconstruct the home” does not strike me as ‘people friendly.’  Perhaps this is because Ms. Anderson’s view of the family is foreign to my experience.

Examples of those excluded by this notion of home include “those who are not white, financially stable, heterosexual, Christian, able bodied, and able minded…”

…

What Anderson wants to say I think is that families often teach children to be prejudiced against people who are different from them, and the way to beat this is to have children get out in the world a bit and get to know other kinds of people.

I get the feeling that Ms. Anderson would rather not have the parents along.

It is the next part of the paragraph where I jam on the brakes.

I couldn’t agree more.  As in so many other domains, here homeschooling can be both liberating and constricting.  For some homeschoolers it is frustration with the narrowness and provinciality of our public school system’s racial, class, and age segregation that drives them to homeschooling.  Such families can use their freedom to do some of the very things Anderson suggests–sailing around the world, taking “field trips” to foreign lands, volunteering with urban missions, and thousands of other creative ways to interact with “the other.”  Homeschooling can also be a way to seal children off from such encounters.

Do not drag homeschooling into Ms. Anderson’s dystopia.  I don’t get the impression that homeschooling entered into her work, although I can’t confirm that impression because the work is unavailable and not usefully referenced in any other place that I can find.  If she did include homeschooling, I’d like to see a more specific treatment of her conclusions.

Who’s gonna watch the monkeys, if the teacher’s out?

So asks “Mom.”

Abuse?, 24 June 2008, Mom is Teaching

I say that parents be required to have certifications before attempting to parent thier children unsupervised during the long summer vacation. They should also be required to report back to the professional teachers during the vacation months to make sure that they are parenting their children correctly. It may also be prudent to require psychological profiles created of these parents. We have to do every thing we can to protect and ensure our children’s futures during this vulnerable time. Even if that includes making summer vacation illegal.

This is along the same lines as my question as to whether children’s 5th birthday cakes make parents stupid.  Why are ‘we’ adequate for helpless infants and as summer caretakers, but not at other times?

I caught a glimpse of this somewhere else the other day (too many articles, too little time), and now I’m catching up with the news alert backlog. 

The op/ed is a scathing take on the point of view that homeschooling must be regulated.

Drooling Home-Schooling Ruling, 18 June 2008, River Cities Reader, Davenport, Iowa

“Cindy Kayshan of the Sacramento BeeEss. How is home-schooling a threat to our economy?”

“Forced government schooling justifies property taxes. Property taxes for schools are vital to our economy because they fill the pockets of the school-construction industry and the textbook-publishing industry and the school-lunch-program food-processing industry and the school-bus-fleet sales industry and the Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder pharmaceutical industry and the state teacher-training and -credentialing industry, to name just a few.

The recent court decision in Kassel, Germany is part of a growing trend of child protection actions for thoughts, not just physical harm to a child. This has happened not only in Germany, but apparently, in other ‘western’ countries.

In the United States, authorities took over 400 children of the Yearning for Zion ranch from their parents. This number included nursing babies. To point out that the babies were in no danger of being married to anyone almost weakens the outrage. It’s as if people have to justify why babies should be left with caring mothers. The actual harm to infants in being removed from their mothers, because of a possible harm, years later, is foul. And I can only sympathize with nursing mothers who no longer have a child to nurse. The mental pain must have been terrible. The physical pain, almost dangerous because it indicates engorgement which can lead to a breast infection or mastitis.

In Canada, authorities took two children in Winnipegfrom their home because their parents seem to be neo-Nazis. One of those children is two years old. (the children may be returned)

Last year in Germany, officials took Melissa Busekros from her home because authorities said she was mentally ill.

What looks like the beginning of a trend isn’t to protect the children from physical harm, such as a teacher allegedly did to a student: “One of the complaints was that [in the course of a science demonstration] Freshwater used an electrostatic device to burn crosses onto students’ arms.” The protection in the actions in Germany, Texas and Canada weren’t to prevent physical harm, but to protect them from harmful thoughts, ie, their beliefs. Even in the California case concerning credentialing of a person used by a school to teach children at home (an ISP acting as an umbrella school for a family whose children stayed home for their schooling), the judge wrote:

page 5: “A primary purpose of the educational system is to train school children in good citizenship, patriotism and loyalty to the state and the nation as a means of protecting the public welfare.” [emphasis added]

In a blog post a couple of years ago, I termed that “Camazotz” from Madeleine l’Engle’s planet of the same name where everything anyone did conformed to schedules and rules.

A Wrinkle in Time, Wikipedia

Camazotz – A planet of extreme, enforced conformity, ruled by a disembodied brain called IT. Camazotz is similar to Earth, with familiar trees such as birches, pines, and maples, an ordinary hill on which the children arrive, and a town with smokestacks, which “might have been one of any number of familiar towns”. The horror of the place arises from its ordinary appearance, endlessly duplicated. Thus, the houses are “all exactly alike, small square boxes painted gray”; this characterization has been compared with the post-war housing developments of Levittown, Pennsylvania. The people who live in the houses are similarly described, with “mother figures” who “all gave the appearance of being the same”

On the USA television network, I’ve watched the “characters welcome” theme continue, and it always makes me laugh. It’s a sardonic laugh, but still a laugh. Characters? Welcome? In real life? Go ahead, pull the other one. What about the derision and scorn that commenters poured on the women from the Yearning for Zion ranch?

• Yearning for Zion Fashion: LOL!!!!!!!!!!!
• Hundreds of women and children in 19th Century clothing flee from Mormon ‘polygamy’ ranch of dark secrets
• Polygamy Garb Born of Rules

Our latent xenophobic streak comes out for all to see when ‘the other’ does something wrong. All of a sudden, it’s a free-for-all to peck them to death like chickens.

• Results 1 – 10 of about 21,700 for polygamist women homely

In the cases of state organizations defining ‘the other’ as aberrant, I think it looks like ‘we’ (through our social representatives) have decided that ‘the other’ cannot be tolerated. Created equal? Pursue happiness? Proof of actual lawbreaking? None of that appears to matter if you’re ‘the other.’ The anti-’normal’-social aspects of the thoughts of ‘the other’ must be eliminated, not just debated. A first step is to stop the transmission of the thoughts from one generation to the next. Catch the kids.

Other discussions of child-taking for lack of conformity are at:

• Children at risk, Spunky Homeschool
• Some people must be from a different reality, Why Homeschool
• Moving away from a pluralistic society, Green fields and open horizons
• Homeschoolers threaten our cultural comfort, Principled Discovery

Alan Smithers: Home education’s time may have come, 19 June 2008, The Independent, London, England

Emotions can run high in education. Lately my in-tray has been enlivened by some passionate dissent. …

Was it reaction to the highly critical report that we published recently on the diploma? No – this in fact has attracted widespread support. … The outcry was in response to some remarks I had made about home education.

…

Treason and fascism are way over the top, but home educators are on to something when, taking their lead from Winston Churchill, they suggest we ought to be alert to schools as agents of control. Compulsory schooling was introduced in 1876 not primarily for the benefit of young people, but because with the curtailment of juvenile labour too many were making a nuisance of themselves on the streets. In an echo of the 19th century, the Brown government is legislating to extend the period of compulsion to age 18, mainly to deal with those not in education, employment or training.

…

You can have too much of a good thing. …

Home education’s time, therefore, may have come.

I haven’t seen any mention of this truancy case on Missouri email lists or in previous news alerts, so I had to dig for background on it. The comments at various sites added to the overall picture of the case, and this situation almost looks like one of those unfortunate examples of a continuing collection of bad choices, poor skills, and anger stirred in the crucible of compulsory school attendance.

Even though ‘homeschooling’ is mentioned, I saw no indication in the news reports that the prosecutors pursued the case because of ‘homeschooling’ itself. Of course, this is only a reflection of what has been reported, and non-homeschoolers can be unaware of what needs to be looked at concerning ‘homeschooling’ itself. In Missouri the crucial item would be the daily log of activities. No record = no defense.

Parent gets 2 days in jail for child’s truancy, 10 Jun 2008, KSPR, Springfield, Missouri

Tuesday Kathleen Casteel was sentenced for violating the state’s truancy law. According to Assistant Prosecutor Joe Knipp, Casteel’s son missed nearly half the school days at Reed Middle School last year.

Background:

Mother sentenced to jail for son’s truancy, 11 June 2008, News-Leader.com, Springfield, Missouri

He also ordered Casteel –who has home schooled her son since his enrollment was revoked from Springfield Public Schools –to put the child back into a public school.

That provision came after prosecutors argued Casteel was not home schooling her son in compliance with state law, something defense attorneys contested.

…

Fitzsimmons’ order that Casteel enroll her son in public school also is an aberration, according to Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education spokesman Jim Morris.

“That is a rare step,” Morris said, noting that neither his office nor many school districts regulate home schooling. “The state has always had a hands-off policy.”

Give truancy trial a meaning, 26 April 2008, News-Leader, Springfield, Missouri

No other school scofflaw in memory has been so brazen as to push the attendance police to this degree. None had demanded a trial in front of a panel of her peers. None had shouted so publicly: This just wasn’t my fault.

So what will a chronicler of history say? What does this mean? Was she martyr or malingerer?

…

The case left the public defenders in the case asking at trial: What purpose does this serve? Observers also ask whether parents like Casteel face a Catch-22: use too much force to get a kid to go to school, you get charged with abuse. Don’t get the kid to school, you can be charged under the truancy law.

Greene County Prosecutor Darrell Moore defends the decision by the school district, embraced by his office, to prosecute Casteel.

Mother from Springfield could get week in jail for son being truant, 24 April 2008, KY3.com, Springfield, Missouri

Casteel testified that her son, who is mentally retarded, didn’t like school and often fought her efforts to make him go. She said he would throw things, leave their home through his bedroom window, and even once tried to jump out of her moving car as she took him to school. Casteel said her son said other Reed students teased him and tried to start fights with him. She also said, part of the time, her son lived with her ex-husband in Buffalo.

A district attendance advisor testified she visited Casteel’s home about 25 times, and sometimes took the boy to school with her. The advisor also said Casteel’s other children also had attendance problems, and one time she caught Casteel lying about whether the children were home. A Reed attendance secretary said she repeatedly told Casteel to call school if her son wasn’t coming, but Casteel rarely called.

Proposed homeschool restrictions draw criticism from across U.S., 5 June 2008, The Examiner, (via Google cache; please scroll down for article)

Calls from across the country have been flooding into the D.C. State Superintendent’s Office from families who are profoundly unhappy about the proposed restrictions on homeschooling.

The regulations have been a hot topic locally over the past four months, with education officials drafting multiple versions, forming a working group devoted to the rules, and setting several hearings to gauge public opinion.

..

Homeschoolers felt that the changes were a knee-jerk reaction to the tragic deaths of four D.C. children whose mother, Banita Jacks, has been charged with murder in the case.

…

“These regulations create situations where educational bureaucrats are violating the fundamental constitutional rights of parents, and are unnecessarily broad and difficult to manage,” Donnelly said. “[They] have breached the trust between the District’s government and its citizens.”

Maria Ibanez, a spokeswoman for the State Superintendent’s Office, said Board of Education members will vote on the rules in the middle of the month.

Mary Nix has links and images about the proposal at her new blog The Informed Parent.

In the following article, it sounds as if the townspeople have not differentiated between truancy and a daytime curfew.  The effectiveness of homeschooling is also touched on, although whether or not children learn well at home, as people generally assume they do at school, has nothing to do with the suspected juvenile crime concerning the citizens.

Home schooled children aren’t truants, home schooler says, 28 May 2008, Picayune Item, Picayune, Mississippi

Rigney addressed the school board for the Picayune Municipal Separate School District at its noon meeting Tuesday because of concerns raised at an earlier meeting by the Pearl River County Neighborhood Watch about truancy and whether all children who are supposed to be being home schooled actually are being home schooled.

There is a difference between detaining truants, that is children who are enrolled in a school and who are playing hooky, and a daytime curfew that forbids people under a certain age to be in public during the hours between, say, eight in the morning and three in the afternoon.  One method targets specific children, the other targets all children.

However, Pearl River County Sheriff’s Dept. Chief Deputy Frank Vaccarella said later in the meeting that the sheriff’s department would like to help enforce truancy laws but now have to back off when they stop a child and the child says that it is home schooled.

Is it difficult to tell a truant from a homeschooled child?  Of course.  As yet, I haven’t read about any state that requires either group to sport an identifying symbol, temporary or permanent, so that onlookers can determine the child’s status at a glance.  Even in our identity-badge-aware society, we are not all under house arrest and allowed to be out only with permission.   

Another question I see is, what are the children doing when they are questioned?  Are they committing crimes?  Are they walking somewhere?  Are they playing in their yards?  What is it that catches the officer’s eye?  Just their presence, or their activities? 

• If the children are committing crimes, then whether they are homeschoolers on a flexible schedule, truant public school students, errant private school students, or visitors from Timbuktu, lock those kiddies up.  Crime is crime.  Don’t put up with it. 
• If the kids are meandering along, do they have Fifth Amendment rights?  I don’t mean to get between the police and wrong-doers, I’m just curious.  When they are talking to the police, do children have Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination, or do they say, “Yes, officer, I’m playing hooky.”  This is a dicey area because I think most of us want kids to answer police officers truthfully.  To complicate matters, are we talking about Officer Friendly talking to Timmy who is avoiding ‘that big kid’ at school, or is this Officer Krupke grilling the Jets?

If the school attendance reasons are, indeed, paramount, what prevents the school from maintaining a daily list of the names of absent students?  Can the police not be given a specific truancy phone number to call to determine if Hudson Higgenbotham III is on the list?  If Hudson is, then the officers take Hudson back to school and the principal calls Hudson’s parents.  If he isn’t, then Hudson is not a truant.  Hudson may be homeschooled, or he may be visiting relatives for the funeral of Uncle Hudson Higgenbotham, Sr. and was so overcome by the demise of his namesake that he had to take a walk to calm down.

I don’t mean to mock police officers while they do their jobs.  I just think that the relationship of kids in our society to schools, and to authority, is not clear.  Maybe to some people the changing status of children is still ’future shock.’  I’ll admit that the recent FLDS mess in Texas comes to mind, where young women who produced driving licenses to prove their ages but were taken into custody because they looked young.

Police judge criminal profiles based on who writers them, study finds, Ohio State University

“A profile is not intended to identify a specific person. A profile is only one of many tools in an investigator’s arsenal, and it is not my business to tell investigators what tools they should use.” But the results do suggest that anecdotal accounts of the accuracy of a profile are not a good basis for arguing that profiling is actually useful, [Andrew Hayes] said.

If “students” are truant, find out who the “students” are.  Don’t presume that, like the FLDS women assumed to be children, that all children are ”students.”

‘While looking for something else’ I found an article about what used to be pre…schools (and that earlier were known as ‘nursery schools’) and are now called “preK.”  I think the change in wording from “pre[before]-school” to ”pre[before]-K[indergarten]” is significant, but I will leave that point alone this time, as I will the point about education as an industry.

Campaign Watch: Spotlight on Two Early Education Laggards, 3 June 2008, The Early Ed Watch Blog, New America Foundation

Today’s final Democratic presidential primaries have focused public and media attention on South Dakota and Montana, two largely rural western states that get the last vote in the 2008 primary season. Here’s something else these two states have in common: They’re both early education laggards

…

Debate over the measure illustrated that “culture wars” opposition to preschool, from conservatives who view it as a gateway to government intrusion in the family, is still alive and well in some states, particularly those that lag on early education.

The name-calling caught my interest – I don’t find anything neutral about ”laggards.”  I did a search for “New America Foundation” and found many items in my email alone.

• Charter Schools: An Important Partner Supporting Quality Pre-k, 2 April 2008
• Pre-K Advocates of a Certain Age, 25 March 2008
• Let’s Count: Boosting Math in PK-3, 18 March 2008
• Continuing the Investment, 19 November 2007

That last item, “Continuing the investment,” has some strong statements, so I pause here in listing the emails for “New America Foundation” – Google says I have “21 results stored on your computer.”

Advocates of universal pre-K are nothing if not visionary. They view universal pre-kindergarten as not just an end in itself but also a first step toward much more comprehensive public social welfare programs for preschool-age children and their families: prenatal care, parental leave, universal children’s health care, and quality child care. For these advocates, the case for universal pre-K is also the case for new state-level systems, policies, and institutions that would serve children from birth through preschool.

The universal pre-K movement isn’t just about offering another social service: Pre-K advocates are actually building a whole new system of public education, and that has implications for the existing K-12 public education system.

Put a “whole new system of public education” together with compulsory schooling laws, and add in the “vision” of the advocates of “universal pre-K.”  The picture I see is of parents delivering babies and children to wherever it is that the visionaries see the cadre of professional child-raisers bringing up the babies and children.  That place sure does not look like home.

The writer explains that contrary to conservative opinions, and despite conservatives ‘fretting’ about sending children to school at increasingly younger ages:

By working together to build high-quality pre-K programs, education reformers and pre-K advocates can also open the door for improvements in the elementary and secondary education system. 

This means that the schooling experiments on little kids can lead to better schools for bigger kids, so the people in South Dakota and Montana had best get with the program.  It doesn’t matter that these states have low numbers of citizens – Montana is #44 in population and South Dakota is #46 — and that the number of children not schooled as toddlers must also be low, everyone must participate.  

The tertiary system — colleges and universities  — isn’t neglected either. 

States must also build new systems of teacher preparation and professional development to help experienced preschool teachers who lack a bachelor’s degree meet new, higher education standards.

That reminds me of something a drill sergeant told us recruits, “There’s the right way, the wrong way, and the Army way.”  Apparently, the “experienced preschool teachers” are to learn the Educational Industry way.  Their vision is of people either as students or teachers, with the teachers teaching the students to be teachers.

I understand that the article is about schooling, but given the amount of time taken from the lives of people as they grow, do these visionaries see infants, babies, toddlers, children, teens, young adults, and adults doing anything other than living at school?

The words that brought this article to my news reader’s robotic attention were, “… people who home school their children are opposed to the legislation, but Clark-Coleman said she would wave (sic) the requirements for home-schoolers.”  If that’s the case, then the article shouldn’t be of interest to us.  After all, ‘we’ are outta that picture.

Still, the article niggles at me.

A Call For All-Day Kindergarten, 21 April 2008, WWJ news radio, Detroit, Michigan

Senate Bill 162 would “help maximize learning opportunities for the next generation, Michigan’s 21st century workers,” according to Clark-Coleman, who is a former Detroit School Board member.

Yuck.  The kiddos should be out playing stick-ball or laying under trees, but instead, they’ll have their “learning opportunities” maximized for their dismal-sounding destiny as “Michigan’s 21st century workers.”  That puts me in mind of the communist art of the late Soviet Union.  Especially in reference to Kindergarten, which in the original German means “children’s garden.” 

In addition to my objections to the grey-sounding grind of a whole century of hamster-wheel hurrying that today’s children theoretically could see, is the question of the purpose of education for children.  I understand that economic stability is necessary to keep things puttering along — economics can’t be tossed in a trash bag just because it’s the dismal science – but is shaping a child as a cog in the state’s economic engine the end-all and be-all of schooling?  Shouldn’t the focus of a child’s education be the child, and not just his future worth, but also his ‘right now?’

Either I echo Alfie Kohn’s ideas, or he echoes mine (chicken and egg, from my point of view) in his book Education, Inc.:

The question is what vision of schooling — and even of children — lies behind such suggestions [that business's interests drive education].  While a proper discussion of this issue lies outside the scope of this book, it is immediately evident that seeing education as a means for bolstering our economic system (and the interests of the major players in that system) is very different from seeing education as a means for strengthening democracy, for promotic social justice, or simply for fostering the well-being and development of the students themselves.

Michigan homeschooling parents don’t have to worry about being roped into mandatory Kindergarten (yet)  (online references to infant education go back to the 1970s), but the characterization of children as an economic widget of the 21st century to be manufactured by schools requires comment.