On Parental Rights and Homeschooling in California

Thomas Bowden at the blog Principles in Practice posted "California Children Still Considered State Property" in response to a recent legal decision on homeschooling and parental rights in California. He argues that the court decision didn't go nearly far enough to truly establish parental rights of child education. A good article, he concludes by rightly asking the bigger questions:

But what if parents stopped groveling and started asking whether the state has any right at all to be running schools, dictating educational standards for children, and “permitting” parents to homeschool their own kids? This would call into question the moral foundation of public education as such.

But I especially liked the following paragraph, which draws a great analogy:

Education, like nutrition, should be recognized as the exclusive domain of a child’s parents, within legal limits objectively defining child abuse and neglect. Parents who starve their children may properly be ordered to fulfill their parental obligations, on pain of losing legal custody. But the fact that some parents may serve better food than others does not permit government to seize control of nutrition, outlaw home-cooked meals, and order all children to report for daily force-feeding at government-licensed cafeterias.

That is a great analogy. I especially like "outlaw home-cooked meals", which is a direct reductio ad absurdem of any attempt to outlaw homeschooling.

No Homework Equals More Learning

Lisa Van Damme makes an interesting case for a "no homework" policy for K-12 students. See her post The Homework Lie, and then Part 2 as well -- wherein she gives some anecdotes on the success of the students at the VanDamme Academy. Impressive.

Schoolhouse Rock

There was a brief blurb in my local paper today about School House Rock! -- the series of 3-minute educational, musical cartoons that aired on Saturday morning TV from 1973-1985 . You can now buy the complete set of these on DVD. What amazed me was that there were 46 of these shorts! Since I grew up during the era that these played, like millions of other American kids these were a part of my childhood education. But when I tried to remember them, I could only think of a handful -- no where near 46 of them:

• I'm a Bill
• Electricity, Electricity
• The Preamble
• Elbow Room (about manifest destiny)
• The Great American Melting Pot
• Lolly, Lolly, Lolly get your Adverbs here
• Conjunction Junction

I didn't remember any of the math ones! See the Wikipedia entry for a complete list and lots of good background info and trivia. See also this website which provides some info and has .wav files for many of them.

IM TXT OK IN NZ, LOL

For me, this falls under the "Nearly a laugh, but really a cry" category for sure: New Zealand students may 'text-speak' in exams.

As the article begins: "New Zealand's high school students will be able to use "text-speak" -- the mobile phone text message language beloved of teenagers -- in national exams this year, officials said."

Thankfully, English exams will be an exception. But apparently you can use the increasingly common cell-phone and IM abbreviation language in exams for history, government, science, math, and so on.

And for those who don't know, my subect line of course means "Instant messaging text is okay in New Zealand. I'm laughing out loud."

Dropout rates... not so high?

Alan Reynolds (Cato) has an interesting brief piece Dropout Nation? where he notes some contrasting numbers between surveys on high school drop-out rates (both general, and comparing whites and minority groups). He argues that the recent Time magazine cover story on this subject is flawed.

Aside from the specifics of this situation, which is an empirical matter, I was glad to see him raise the increasingly important issue of grant and other funding for crises, and the role that the media plays in this. He ends with this nice zinger:

The only thing more tiresome than enduring the boredom of a monopolistic public high school is to grow up and be faced with the American media's naive and fumbling efforts to dream up an endless series of imaginary crises.

Maybe someday I'll start a list of "crises" that are exaggerated or fabricated by the media, with an emphasis on ones that lend themselves to channeling or increasing government spending to fix them. Would be an interesting project I think...