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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (77275)	4/9/2000 12:09:00 PM
From: Father Terrence	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

This is one of the reasons why I advocate that the federal government get out of the business of educating American children. Here too the government has greatly overstepped its bounds. What the government teaches through public schools and approved textbooks is often dubious at best, subversive at worst -- subversive not to the government but to individual liberty. Public schools are also being used today to program children in irrational, unhealthy ways. It has also become politicized and some schools have been turned into little more than factories designed to manufacture legions of future robotic citizens who just blindly accept Big Brother's agendas. By the way, one of the issues I have hinted at, but not elaborated, is the way that school can be subversive of parental authority. Suppose that there is a strong conflict between what one has learned at home, and what is promulgated at school. Then the student is merely confused, or the school loses respect, because it is teaching nonsense, or the parents come to seem like uneducated rubes who need not be listened to. Although conflict is not always avoidable, it is advisable that one try to moderate the tension. Liberal democracy, in order to succeed, depends on a truce about how we raise our children. Parental authority ought not be lightly challenged. That is one of the problems with the way the evolution issue is framed: there is no sensitivity shown for the fundamentalist parents who have to explain the contradiction of teachings to their children. Anyway, "education" which is ineffectual and furthers the disrespect for either schools or parents generally does more harm than good......... FT

To: Neocon who wrote (77275)	4/10/2000 1:22:00 AM
From: one_less	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 108807

You have a good point. I have been involved with many international families who are in the USA for a year or to to get advanced education up to the Post PhD level. When a foreign mom walks into a classroom wearing the cloths of her home land and struggling with language, the attitude of the American teacher can be very demeaning (ie treating them as an uninformed, oppressed, representative of the female population of the world). In some cases, the affluence of the mom represents a multicultural and multilingual background with academic skills that far out weigh the teachers. This teacher may be ineffective at turning kids on to learning but often is effective at convincing them that their parents are backward and out of it.

To: Neocon who wrote (77275)	4/10/2000 4:37:00 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

That is one of the problems with the way the evolution issue is framed: there is no sensitivity shown for the fundamentalist parents who have to explain the contradiction of teachings to their children. I suppose one could frame that the other way and say that one of the problems in raising children according to fundamentalist dogma is that sooner or later they will have to face the fact that all available physical evidence contravenes what you're teaching them. I remember very clearly the moment in which I rejected my parents' religion (and it was wholly my decision; they were quite devout). There is no doubt that their authority suffered a serious blow, but I think the only way they could have prevented it was by either not teaching me to think independently or not putting me in Sunday school, where my capacity for independent thought ran quickly afoul of the dogma. It is a bit of a quandary for fundamentalist parents, but not for schools. Science teachers teach science, and science is the development of theories based on experimentation and observation of physical evidence. Asking them to teach a theory which has no basis in either, a theory which is based entirely upon passed-down accounts (and which must therefore be classed as mythology), simply to avoid embarrassing parents who accept the myth, is absurd. Asking them to ignore significant areas of inquiry for the same reason is equally absurd. If parents choose to disregard science, that is their affair, but they have no right to expect that the schools will distort science to avoid challenging their authority.