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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
TinaS1
Published Letters: 780 Editor's Choice: 21
is the creation of a parallel society. In my view, to deny your children an opportunity to grow up normally amounts to child abuse, but these people do not feel that way. So in the next few years we are going to have a few million homeschooled children in our society. They think women are for cooking and that homosexuality is an abomination, and everyone who doesn't think the way they do are damned in the next life, so it makes no sense to respect their right to live as the equals of Christians in this one.
What are we going to do with them? A few will get out and run, but not all of them are going to self-re-educate. Seriously, what is our responsibility to these children, prisoners in their own houses?
We need a serious legal challenge to homeschooling. NOW. This BS is not practiced in Europe. You send your kids to school, or try to explain it to a policeman.
I was born too soon for the homeschooling trend, I got sent into the PACE packets program of the 80s (anybody remember it?). This "Christian Education" thing is a non-education. I would give anything to have those years back, even if I spent them at our local very crappy public school. It would have been better than nothing.
I know some homeschooled kids, and I watch them fall back into fundamentalism because they literally cannot function outside that venue. I mean can't find a partner, can't hold down a job function. They are totally unsocialized. It's really sad, and the "soft" child abuse of homeschooling is very often a cover for "hard" child abuse, meaning physical and sexual assault, confinement, etc. etc.
When for God's sake are we going to view children as human beings who have some basic rights? Just because your body generated a child does not mean you have a total right to screw that child up any way you want. It's maddening.
I have read the "teenage liberation handbook" and just had to roll my eyes.
Typically, a couple of wunderkinds are trotted out in support of homeschooling, but these do not represent 99% of homechooled kids. And there is a small secular side movement of homeschooling, again not very big, but the fundies are more than happy to use their propaganda.
I have a lot of up close and personal experience with homeschooling. Don't tell me I'm ignorant. I'm also a teacher. I know that some kids where I live are pulled from school and registered as homeschooled because the teachers started to notice signs of sexual or physical abuse. One "homeschooled" girl got pregnant by her father while the family was living out of a pickup truck. Andrea Yates was also "homeless while homeschooling" her kids in an old bus.
Why aren't these cases discussed by the homeschooling crowd? Why is it that raucous uproar results when one even tries to discuss safeguards for the children? Because it's not about the kids--and it ought to be. It's really about the weird political and religious convictions of the parents and I'm sorry, that's not good enough.
Somebody mentioned mandatory public school education. Hey, I'm all for it, or at least for making the curriculum/staffing requirements of schools so high that 99% of the parochial schools would be put out of business.
Oh yeah--and the homeschoolers are active in the public schools as well, agitating for this and that, and sometimes they even get on the school board (but they believe they should be exempt from property and millage taxes). If they hate the schools so much why are they in there trying to impose their beliefs on the rest of the kids as well?
Well, we know the answer to that.
she didn't, she responded with an egregrious non sequitor attack on Western plastic surgery, a topic well deserving of ridicule all on its own, but not having much to do with the veil. Clearly she was avoiding giving any response to the veil question. Why? The interviewer should have asked why she did not feel she could respond to the question. Now that would have been interesting.
Satrapi's answer is the Iranian revolutionary version of a politically correct answer. I bet the mullahs loved that one and it got into all the Irani newspapers the next day. That Americans are so eager to take the criticism to heart shows how well this work. Our critics are very good at bashing us with things we ourselves feel uncomfortable/conflicted about. Then we concede that they must have a point, and the next thing you know we are saying well, the forced veiling must be fine. At least we're not "forcing" women to look like geese's butts!
And Canukistan Bob, if think there is no racism in Islam...you have GOT to be kidding. In the Arab world they still have Africans as slaves TODAY. There is no worse fate in the world for an Arab woman (or man) than to be "looking Negro". Racism is not Islamic (although the Q'uran condones slavery, it doesn't say any particular race), but racism is virulent in the Muslim parts of the world.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
