Digital Cowboy

It’s not easy to remain committed to the choice of home education. There is an organized, concerted effort to make it difficult. The primary opponents would make it completely illegal if they could and that alone says much about what drives them. But I’ve found that even those that nominally support the concept are often challengers simply by ignorance.

I’ve been asked often – and in many different contexts – why I’m so determined to shield my children from the government indoctrination camps. In fact, I often ask myself that question because I need to bolster my resolve in the face of a world that disagrees with me. Everywhere. All the time.

There are many, many reasons, but here’s the shortest, easiest answer:

I’m not raising employees. I’ve been given responsibility for two wonderful little people and I want them to be employers.

Here is the longer explanation of that statement:
I don’t want my children to ever need to work for someone else. I want them to learn business and trades (multiple) and skills (multiple) that will allow them to pursue their passions and create multiple income streams, hopefully of the passive variety. Those are the things I’m pursuing now. With God’s Blessing on “everything I set my hand to” it’s going well. But it took me way too many years to get here and, in my opinion, I’m just now at the starting point.

It’s a sappy cliche that all parents want their children to have “a better life” than they did. It’s also either not true or there are a whole lot of very, very ignorant parents. I suspect it’s the latter, it’s by design and it’s ultimately forced government schooling that is to blame.

Don’t misunderstand me – there is no shame in working for someone else. But it should be a temporary situation if it’s necessary at all. Selling nearly half of your waking hours to others for nearly half of your life is not “living.” It’s plum stupid. It’s also unnatural. We were created as sovereign beings and tasked with subduing the earth. For the last 150 years (or so) in this country, there has been an organized concerted effort to redirect us from that God-given directive into subservience and it’s done primarily, if not entirely, through compulsory government schooling.

There is no one in a government school that can teach you how to be an employer because there aren’t any there. Everyone who has ever wasted twelve or thirteen years in a government school and gone on to eventually become an employer did it in spite of that “education,” not because of it. It doesn’t take a genius to figure this out; you can’t learn from someone what they don’t know. There is no one involved in government schooling, at any level, that is an employer.

It’s a machine; a headless monster. Everyone there is a victim of the system. No, you can’t reform it from within. No, you can’t fix it. It’s broken by design and it’s running smoothly, accomplishing its intended purpose.

That purpose is to condition its victims to quietly obey arbitrary authority and irrational rules. Sit down, shut up and do what you’re told. The teachers and administrators – no matter what their intentions – are just as much victims as the students. It is evil on a very basic level and it is the root of everything wrong with America.

If you intend to change my mind about this, you’ll need to show me the individual in charge in that mess. Be careful if you go seeking that, though. That “i” word is impermissible inside the machine.

In summary, home education to me is simply a return to the way God intended things to be and the way things were in this country at its start. My job, as I see it, is to teach my children how to prosper as sovereign individuals. The hardest part of that is explaining to them that the ever-growing government is a violent beast that hates them, not their friend.

If you disagree with me about any of this, I’ll smile and listen to your opinion with sympathy. It’s OK. Do what you feel is best for your children. My children will need employees just like I do.

My five year old has recently taken to coming into my office while I’m working or reading online and reading “over my shoulder.” (She actually stands next to me between me and the monitor; she’s a little short to literally read over my shoulder.) A few days ago she did this while I was working. I happened to be at the jQuery web site reading the developer documentation for a plugin to that excellent Javascript library. She understood none of it but, much like her Dad, it’s unnatural to her that words within her range of vision should not be read.

So without missing a beat, she just started reading out loud, “Using jQuery.extend to extend jQuery itself. In the above section, we checked if any options are given before we applied jQuery.extend(settings, options). The reason for this: If you specify only one parameter, the jQuery object itself is extended with the given object.”

She never so much as struggled with any of it, reading it almost as quickly as I do. (As an excuse, I’ll say that I read it slower than I could because I’m trying to actually comprehend it and she’s not. So there! Thfffttt!) She even correctly read the oddities in the first line, a section header, as “using jay-query dot extend to extend jay-query.”

No matter how many times I see her do these things, I still find it amazing.

That night, I was reading Opinion Journal’s “Best of the Web” while the kids were getting ready for bed. She came in and again automatically began reading. This time, I decided to record it for those who don’t have the opportunity to witness firsthand what home education can do.

That was completely impromptu. She had no preparation and had never seen the text before. The SMOG calculator says that the column she was reading is at grade level 13+ and the section she reads in the recording above is nearly grade level 12. You can hear me helping her some in the audio but what you hear is all the assistance I gave her. I was not helping her in any silent way.

Granted, the SMOG rating is the grade level at which one understands everything they have read and I’m sure she didn’t understand what she read. Then again, I’m not sure anyone including Dubya understands the current Iraq policy. (HA! couldn’t resist!) Anyway, I suspect that is what the ignorant/evil critics of phonics are getting at when they say comprehension suffers – it’s because phonics allows one to read way beyond their level of understanding. Help me understand how that’s a bad thing.

She had real trouble with the words “Rwanda,” “Sunnis,” “ideological” and “Shias.” My guess would be that many high school graduates in this country would as well. Other words, such as “century” and “nonstrategy,” she had to work at but she got them on her own. (It should be noted that “nonstrategy” isn’t actually a word either.)

She made a few mistakes, too. But as someone that has seen her do this frequently, I can also say she wasn’t in her top form when I recorded her. It was past her bedtime and she was very tired.

This child is not yet six years old and would be two months into kindergarten if we had not chosen to educate her at home. Incidentally, my older daughter can read just as well but usually doesn’t. She’s an artist and not as interested in reading so she tends to get in a hurry and guess at the words instead of actually reading them.

Athor’s taken an undeserved beating and handled it like a man. He’s absolutely right and has been knocked around enough by people that have missed what he’s saying.

I would probably qualify as what he calls a “true believer” and I know he meant that as an insult. But I didn’t take it that way. I absolutely and totally believe that you can’t read unless you know phonics.

I also understand what he’s saying and it seems to me that everyone here is talking past one another. He’s also right that phonics is helpful with 90% of the English language, useless with the other ten percent and that I’m using the part that works. I learned the concept first with spiritual things – eat the meat and spit out the bones.

I before E except after C unless it says ‘ay” as in neighbor and weigh. That’s weird.

I would challenge those of you that think you disagree with Athor Pel to go back and reread his comments here. He’s made more than one salient point.

My guess would be that he’s better at what you do than you are.

Do you want a point to this post? Here ya go:

Schools are designed from the ground up to take the fun out of learning and make it seem like work. Way too many “homeschoolers” mean well but try too hard and because of that, they end up repeating the evil they’re trying to avoid. I’ll never allow anyone to make my daughters work at learning or deceive them into believing it’s not fun.

They’re already way ahead of their peers. Watch and see where they go from here! Spanish and Latin are both on this year’s to-do list. We live in Texas, so they’re both already pretty good at the former.

My recent post on home education has gotten more response in a shorter time and from a much more varied readership than anything I’ve done in months. Before you start chuckling to yourself, I’m way ahead of you. I haven’t given y’all much to work with lately. I apologize for that. That will be changing.

Anyway, there were a number of great comments on that post. I suggest you read them all.

Difster did a pretty good job responding to Jason, but I think I can sum up what he said more concisely (or at least add to it): You can’t comprehend what you cannot read. Without phonics or assistance, you cannot read any word you’ve never seen before. What Jason has heard about that concept is some of the propaganda they use to batter phonics. (deputyheadmistress made the point better than I can with a link that’s worth clicking.)

Everyone should read The Underground History of American Education. You have no excuse now. I have a signed pre-publication copy but I had to con a friend into buying it for me. You can read it for free if you’re a good enough student to scroll, investigate and clickety-click. I suggest you check out a little more about the author first because it would be very easy to be skeptical about the outrageous charges he makes if you haven’t read his bio and credentials. (And by “credentials,” I mean accomplishments. In Texas we have a saying, “It ain’t boastin’ if ya done it.” He’s done it. Belly of the beast and all that.) In fact, unless someone here will do it for me, I’ll have to dig up the link to his acceptance speech when he won the New York State Teacher of the Year Award. He told them the truth in his acceptance speech and, though the material is sad on it’s face, I’ve read it more than once and laughed out loud each time. He knew he was on the way out and had the balls to tell them the truth.

I’m getting sidetracked but you have to read that book to understand. It changed my life because for the first time I understood specifically why I hated school so much and why I wanted to spare my kids that horror. Back to the point, the “teachers” are mostly ignorant pawns and the people creating the curriculum don’t want children to know how to read. The propaganda is just that. Propaganda.

My only possible disagreement with Athor Pel’s comments is that he implies (at least the way I read it) that phonics doesn’t work for some kids and that for some kids, something else may work instead of phonics. If you don’t understand phonics, you don’t know how to read. Period. It would be like saying that you can learn multiplication and division without understanding addition or subtraction. More precisely, it would be like saying that you could understand any kind of advanced math without ever learning to count.

Maybe I read too much into what Athor typed there, but learning phonics (as Dif said) is essential to understanding the English language. The understanding of phonics is a building block that is required to ever get beyond “functionally literate.” Most of what I know that matters in the real world, I’ve learned reading things I don’t understand. I’m thirty-five and I still will sit for hours reading something that I don’t understand at all. By definition, those things are usually filled with words I’ve never seen before. (I don’t even think about this consciously anymore, but…) I look at the letters, sound out the word and, with rare exception, I recognize it as a word I heard but have never seen. (You have to listen too! Especially when you’re around smart people. That’s far less often than you think.) Having done that for thirty of my thirty-five years, my experience has been that if I put the time in, reading something that I don’t understand at all, within a year I’ll know it well enough to teach it or write the article.

See, I still love learning. I do it every day. It’s not a discipline. It’s not a habit. I didn’t train myself to do this. It’s a passion. It’s like air to me. If I didn’t stretch my mind yet today, I can’t go to bed yet. The day’s not yet done. I have to find something that baffles me and (hopefully) figure it out.

People used to think it was cute when I was a little kid and they would say, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And I would reply…

“I don’t care what I am when I grow up. I just want to KNOW EVERYTHING!” (“Isn’t that adorable? *chuckle* He wants to know EVERYTHING! You’re smart enough to do it too!”)

I’m thirty-five and nobody finds it cute when I say that now. I don’t understand. I didn’t say I do know everything, though I’m often accused of that crime. I know what I don’t know – most everything. I’m just saying that’s my goal. I understand ignorance of a topic and I’m quick to admit it.

Just when you thought I was rambling…. I had a point once and I think I remember where I left it.
|inline

My cousin has a masters degree in elementary education. I’ve known her since her birth and she’s intelligent, compassionate and loves children. So if she can piss me off, there’s a problem with the system.

Yet she has nearly every time I’ve encountered her since having children. She’s great with my kids on a social level and they love her – she knows how to play with them real, real good. She sees them once a year, if that, and is always astounded at how much they know and how “smart” they are. It’s become much more relevant since my wife shipped my oldest off to the government babysitter for a few months. My oldest daughter was in first grade. (Thank God she’s home!) Since my cousin is a first grade teacher they have much to talk about.

Sing-songy, talking to a little kid voice: “Can you count to twenty-five?”
My thought: “She’s seven! She could do that when she was three! Do you have a challenge?”
Sing-songy, talking to a little kid voice: “Wow! That’s great. You must have a really good teacher!”
My thought: “Yeah. Sittin’ right here with no college education, fool.”
Sing-songy, talking to a little kid voice: “Can you count to a hundred?”

At this point, I spoke up and said, “Emily can. She can count to two hundred by ones or tens. Take your pick.” (Emily is my youngest that *gasp* hasn’t been to SCHOOL!)

Sing-songy, talking to a little kid voice: “You can?!?! Really?!?! You can’t count to two hundred!”
Sing-songy, talking to a little kid voice: “Wow! That’s great! You’re both smarter than anybody in my class!
Sing-songy, talking to a little kid voice thins: “I’ll have to get your address so I can send your Daddy some really good stuff to do with numbers to help you learn even more!”

My thought: “Don’t bother. I did all that and more without the stupidity you were taught in college.”

She also asked Emily, “So when will YOU get to go to school? Next year?” Emily very non-chalantly said, “Prolly.” and I thought, “When Daddy’s dead. I have to protect them from people like you.”

This is also a woman that informed me a few years ago that it’s “completely wrong” to teach a child to read with phonics and now is amazed at how well my seven year old reads. Oops! Can’t argue with results. Reading with my daughter she says, “Look at the picture. Look at the picture. What are they doing there?” My daughter responds, “I don’t look at the pictures to read ’cause a lot of books don’t have them. I just look at the letters and sound out the words.”

Oops.

Based on what she said, my five year old reads better than any of her students. You have to understand both that I was separated from my kids for most of two years before I got custody and also that she (teacher, masters degree girl) works in “the highest paying school district” here. This ain’t the inner-city we’re comparing my kids to folks.

This is also someone that said she asked “her” children what was the true meaning of Christmas and had to say, “No” when a student answered, “It’s the birth of Jesus.” When pressed by her father, she said, “I can’t acknowledge that in the classroom! The true meaning of Christmas is giving!”

Read my lips:

SCHOOLS WORK PERFECTLY BECAUSE THEY ARE ABOUT SCHOOLING. NO ONE GETS AN EDUCATION THERE EXCEPT THE TEACHERS SMART ENOUGH TO LEAVE.

It’s no place for a kid. Especially one you love.

You’re doing fine, Heidi.