Missouri Homeschoolers: HSLDA Asks for Your Help on Pending Legislation

HB 1139, pending in committee, would improve the Missouri homeschooling laws. Missouri is a reasonably good state for homeschooling, but this bill would make it better still. For information, check out the HSLDA alert here.

Synod Perverts to Target Homeschoolers?

The current fake youth synod run by Bergoglio’s predatory perverts and promoters of sins against the Natural Law– or, for brevity’s sake, the bishops– has just sent up a little trial balloon that should put homeschoolers on their guard. In one of the summary reports from the discussion groups, we read this:

Home based schools – a model coming from America.

◦ USA has many home schoolers – bishops in USA are not united, as homeschooling can have an ideological basis – kids may have special needs

◦ are parents qualified to homeschool them?

Yes, you read that right. The very members of the hierarchy who are undermining the Catholic faith they are supposed to teach, preserve and hand down are asking whether YOU, the parents, are qualified to carry out the duty of education that God has charged you with carrying out.

“Ideological basis”? Please. To these people the Catholic faith is mere ideology. Everything is ideological to them.

Recall that the primary end of marriage is the procreation and education of children. Recall that this has been held in Catholic Tradition from the beginning. Recall that this is still enshrined in Canon Law (can. 793) and proclaimed in the Magisterium.

But no, stupid Catholics. Francis, Cupich, Tobin, Coccopalmerio, and all their creepy friends don’t think you can cut it.

Why?

Because you must embrace sodomy, like they do. You must submit your children to their Catholic-in-name-only schools so that the cabal can get money and your children can get indoctrinated. And if you don’t submit, they will be happy to place you at the mercy of their allies in the secular state.

Think I’m overreacting? Just wait and see. Be vigilant, as Our Lord admonishes us.

Fight these people when they come for your children.

Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!

I’m Thinking One of My Children is Ready for Homeschool

"Leviathan cannot brook a single opponent."

This line is taken from an excellent, insightful and foresighted article in Crisis Magazine.  Excerpts from the full article below:
  
Leviathan Groaning

by Anthony Esolen

On June 25, 2009, a seven year old boy was abducted at gunpoint from his terrified parents. They had just boarded a plane to fly to the country where the boy’s mother had been born, and where her kin still lived. They were leaving their own country for good, because they had grown weary of the harassment they suffered there from a syndicate of well-placed thugs. They themselves had broken no law.
 
The boy’s name is Domenic Johansson. He is now going on ten years old, and he has seen his mother and father only very briefly since. The thugs, officials of the Swedish government, have allowed the parents very little opportunity to visit. Domenic’s mother has suffered a nervous breakdown, and is now quite incapacitated. The foster-woman into whose care Domenic was given has informed the boy that she will never let him return to his mother and father, no matter what any court might say. Domenic, once a cheerful little boy, looks haggard, crushed, dull, as if the heart had been ripped out of him.

What was the crime committed by Christer Johansson and his wife? They did not run drugs. They did not steal. They did not cheat the government of its yearly right to a third of their corn, milk, potatoes, and apples – or whatever it is that the Lords and Ladies of Stockholm now exact from their tenant citizens. Or what was the moral sewer wherein they were raising their little boy? It could not have been a sewer of fornication; the Johanssons are married, and the Swedes have turned fornication into their national pastime. It could not have been the dry gulch of nihilism; Christer Johansson did not work for Swedish television. The crime was simply that the Johanssons, a devout Christian couple, had pulled Domenic out of the state school and were educating him at home. It was, we should note well, perfectly within their rights by the Swedish law then in force to do this. It was also within their rights as specified by the European Union.

[…]

What makes for such cruelty? I cannot imagine the black heart of a man (or, alas, a woman) who struts before a simple little family, and steals their child away. That person, we would say, should be hauled before a court of law and then be banished from civil society. He – she – should be granted plenty of spare time to think again about the cruelty, while staring at the blank walls of a prison cell. How much worse it is, however, when the abduction involves an entire social organism: the long arm of a dull-witted and compliant police force, the convoluted brains of a corrupt judiciary, and the seething metaphysical hatred burning in the heart of politicians, who cannot abide a single little reproach, not even in the form of a happy little boy, against their claims to know what is best for everyone. So far from repenting in sackcloth and ashes, the Swedish thugs have compounded their sin by breaking their own laws, denying the Johanssons their right to choose their own legal counsel. The Swedish education domina has even written, openly, brazenly, that all homeschooled children should be abducted.

[…]
There was a time when certain things were considered holy. The family was holy: it was a realm of order and authority and love, not to be burst into by marauding benefactors. “A man’s home is his castle,” went the saying, meaning that the home, for father and mother and children, is as an independent dukedom, with its own traditions, its laws, its bonds of loyalty, its wisdom, and its hard-won wealth. So long as no crimes against God and man were committed, that castle was to be honored; for upon such families the whole social order was founded. One would no sooner set spies in the home to rat on mother and father, as the Soviets did, than one would burn down a church. It is not simply that one would refrain from abducting a child, as the Swedish government has done. One would not wish even to associate with someone who could conceive of so vile a thing.

Conscience was holy, too; as were the churches wherein the consciences were formed. I cannot imagine George Washington intruding upon a Quaker meeting to conscript men. He would have considered it a blot on his sacred honor to do so despicable a thing. I cannot imagine even that progressive Puritan, Woodrow Wilson, prying open the gate of a Catholic school to compel the nuns to conduct courses in state-approved licentiousness.

But the Leviathan has no such scruples. Consider the case of the current administration, wishing to compel Christian employers to provide insurance policies for free contraception, sterilization, and abortifacient drugs. Even before we consider the sheer harm these things have done to the common good, what decent person would want to bring the churches to heel? 

What kind of soul must one have, to wish to cow every religious institution into submission, so that one may gain one’s will? The same kind of soul that is required, I believe, to order policemen to board a plane and remove a little boy, screaming and wailing, from his mother and father he loved, all because they dared to oppose the lovingkindness of the State.

Let us be clear here. The American Leviathan loathes everything that is not Itself. It does not want self-reliant people who can take care of themselves and their neighbors. It does not want people teaching their children in their own way. It does not want free associations, like the Boy Scouts, who actually do things like clean a park or build a bicycle path, things that benefit everyone, and for little or no cost to their towns and cities. It does not want private schools with their own curricula. It does not want private universities with their own ideas about what sports to sponsor, or what people they should hire. It will allow the shells of these things, so long as the “free” truckle to its will, and the “private” strip naked to its searching glare. Its pact with the little people is simple enough.
The Leviathan will promote a false freedom, mere license, which helps to destroy every other social institution in existence, from the family to the neighborhood to the local school to the church. Then the Leviathan, having built a sufficient number of prisons, will come a-knocking on every door to help.

This is really the central meaning of the debate concerning whether the Catholic Church should provide for Fornication Protection Kits – for that is what we are talking about, though no one wishes to say so openly. The diktats from Levi come cloaked in the language of medicine, just as the diktats from Lotta and Lars come cloaked in the language of children’s welfare. But just as no one without a diseased mind can really explain why it is a benefit to children to be yanked out of their innocent mother’s lap and sent to live with strangers, just because mother and father wanted to teach them to read and write, so no one without a diseased mind can explain why it is a benefit to women’s health, or anybody’s health, to underwrite the sexual revolution.

The abortifacients and contraceptives heal no disease. They do not restore proper function to any organ or limb. They do not soothe chronic pain. They do not shield the taker from casual infection. If a couple were infertile, that would be a medical problem. It would require a remedy. That is why we call it “medicine.” But the problem with the fornicators is not that their reproductive organs are not working. They are working just fine. When people engage in a reproductive act, using their reproductive organs in a natural way, then reproduction is the healthy and natural and perfectly predictable result.

More than that: the sexual revolution itself is the cause of tremendous human misery. The problem with Pope Paul’s Humanae Vitae was not that the Holy Father was wrong in his predictions. He said that the sexual revolution – that is, the regime of Pill-popping – would result in more, not fewer, unwanted pregnancies and children born out of wedlock. The cognoscenti laughed at him, but he was right. He said that it would result in more, not fewer, abortions. The illuminati laughed at him, but he was right. He said that it would result in more divorces, and a debased view of women as mere objects of sexual gratification. The women’s liberationists laughed at him, and then proved him right themselves by turning men into those same objects. No, the Pope erred in not being pessimistic enough. Even he did not foresee that the reign of sexual license would destroy human communities and human culture. Even he did not foresee that the people of a once great nation would, as placid as pigs in a sty, give over their most precious civil liberties just to ensure a good roll in the mud.

Leviathan cannot brook a single opponent. The Johanssons learned this lesson, to their excruciating sorrow. We Catholics are learning it now.

The War on Kids

The title of this post is the title of a film that provides a fresh look at the problems inherent in the modern, government-run system of education.  It covers all of the various issues that sometimes get attention in the media, but highlights that these problems are all related to the way the system itself is designed.  In other words, the problem isn’t so much one of deficiency, but rather of intent. 

The film itself is posted in six parts at TagTele–  very revealing.  Thanks to Karen de Coster for the referenced link.  Below is the synopsis of the the movie, taken from its website: 

Blame for problems with schooling in America is often assigned to insufficient funding or the inherent failings of today’s kids. In rare cases, parents, teachers, and administrators are also implicated. However, all efforts to improve the quality of education are doomed to fail if the system itself is not examined and understood to be the most significant impediment. After over six years in the making, THE WAR ON KIDS reveals that the problems with public education ultimately stem from the institution itself. Astonishingly all efforts at reform consistently avoid even considering this to be a possibility and the future for children and American democracy are at stake.

In 95 minutes, THE WAR ON KIDS exposes the many ways the public school system has failed children and our future by robbing students of all freedoms due largely to irrational fears. Children are subjected to endure prison-like security, arbitrary punishments, and pharmacological abuse through the forced prescription of dangerous drugs. Even with these measures, schools not only fail to educate students, but the drive to teach has become secondary to the need to control children.

THE WAR ON KIDS begins with the history of “Zero Tolerance” policy. In the 1990s, almost all schools began instituting guidelines that were originally designed to keep weapons and drugs off campus. Very quickly, school officials began to arbitrarily decide what should be considered a weapon and what should be considered a drug. Hundreds of situations followed where children were (and continue to be) suspended or expelled for possessing food knives, nail clippers, key chains, chicken strips, aspirin, and candy. Kindergarteners were even suspended for playing cops and robbers and using their fingers as guns. Under the guise of Zero Tolerance, administrators have been able to wield tremendous power without the burden of responsibility and this authority continues to be increasingly abused. Students invariably feel despondent and fearful in the Kafka-esque state that has been created.

The film reveals that students’ civil rights have been virtually obliterated. They can be searched, drug-tested, denied the right to express themselves verbally and in print, as well as be physically punished without due process. They are routinely deprived of protection from self-incrimination and in some circumstances can even be strip searched without the consultation of parents. Courts typically uphold the rights of schools to behave in whatever manner they deem appropriate where children’s rights are involved.

Ultimately schools now look astonishingly like prisons in their structure and operation and the film shows that it is hard to tell them apart. A side by side comparison in the form of a tour displays the apparent inferiority of the average public school with regards to prison in terms of its resources and upkeep. Most disturbing of all, the school environment is clearly much more oppressive and dreary.

Schools have become obsessed with security and THE WAR ON KIDS shows how none of the profoundly invasive measures are effective. Security cameras were present at Columbine High School, for example, and did nothing to mitigate the massacre. From the students interviewed in the film, it is clear that cameras are unwelcome and breed paranoia and fear and may actually contribute to creating a hostile environment. Locker searches and metal detectors have been shown to be ineffective and contribute to creating an oppressive environment.

Police footage is shown from a 2003 SWAT team raid on Stratford High School high school students in Goose Creek, SC when the principal suspected illegal drug activity. In spite of the aggressive search involving guns and dogs, no drugs were found. The raid highlights the persistent scrutiny that students are under and the complete lack of boundaries that exist when children are involved.

Beyond physical intimidation, psychiatric abuse in schools is also rampant. Experts are interviewed about the epidemic of ADD and similar diagnoses. The preponderance of evidence is stunning and implicates drug companies in blatantly nefarious activities. Ritalin and other pharmaceuticals that are being heavily prescribed to children are not only physically harmful with lifelong consequences but can and do lead to murder and suicide. What is presented as treatment is more dangerous and debilitating than the condition it is supposed to cure. In addition, the condition itself is clearly dubious, and the kids getting treated are often the ones who question teachers and authority. Invariably, these kids are drugged into submission.

THE WAR ON KIDS shows how schools are authoritarian institutions that by their nature cannot be reformed. Children are subjected to the most invasive forms of control and are deprived of the most basic and fundamental human rights that are afforded even to prisoners of war. The net effect is chilling not just for the kids who are subjected to these extreme forms of control, but also for American society’s future as a generation grows up with no first hand experience or understanding of civil rights in a democracy.

Skool Daze

Two items in the Drudge roundup today caught my homeschool Dad eye.  I share them with you.

First comes a story from a New York state high school about a mysterious disorder that has 12 female students exhibiting Tourette’s Syndrome-like symptoms.  From the full story: 

[Health officials] have ruled out all environmental factors, infections and the possibility of carbon monoxide poisoning. The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta has been consulted, along with Columbia University, as well as the Genesee County Health Department and the New York State Health Department.

Dr. Young said tics like this can be caused by genetics, head trauma, drugs (all students tested negative), antihistamines, and drugs for ADHD and OCD. They said cases like this have been seen nationwide and they come and go in individuals. They add it’s not uncommon to see them in waves as stress and anxiety exacerbate them.

Symptoms in these kids are “significant” according to officials, and they add they do not believe the students are making the illness up. 

The first comment on the story asked the question that had occurred to me:  Did these girls receive a Gardasil vaccine?  It is just so weird.  Even the article lists ADHD drugs as a possible cause of such symptoms.  But of course–and I would like to emphasized this fact– this is rank speculation at this point.  I would love to see a follow up as (hopefully) answers come.

The second story involves a government elementary school in Connecticut that lives up to the “prison-school” epithet.  This school has parents outraged over its practice of locking nonconforming students into unsupervised rooms, where some have injured themselves and/or engaged in Lord of the Flies-type behavior.  They are called by some there “Scream Rooms”.  From the full story: 

“My daughter is telling me that there’s kids being taken out in ambulances, by stretcher,” parent Sean Archer told CBS 2’s Hazel Sanchez on Wednesday.

Disturbing allegations have surfaced of teachers locking students in closet-sized concrete “scream rooms” for punishment.

“Kids come home and they cry, because they’re afraid to go to school. And it’s often,” parent Brian Robillard said.

“She can hear the kids screaming at the top of their lungs, while she’s trying to read and she asks her teacher what’s going on and they never give her an answer. They tell her to ignore it,” said Liz Archer, the sister of one Farm Hill student.

Parents said their children have witnessed teachers placing unruly students into the tiny “time-out” rooms to calm down.

“From what I heard it’s more traumatizing for the child than it was as a help,” parent Jeff Daniels said. “Kids were hitting their heads on the concrete wall. Kids were urinating in the room.”

School Superintendent Michael Freschette said allegations of children harming themselves in the timeout rooms are not true. However, the Board of Education is investigating. The chairman spoke to CBS 2’s Sanchez by phone Wednesday night.

“We certainly are concerned with these allegations and I’m looking into every single one of them to be certain that our staff is providing a safe environment for our students,” Gene Nocera said.

Two “time-out” rooms were implemented two years ago for special needs students. But with growing community concern about their use, the school district drafted a new support plan to deal with students who act up.

[…] 

The state Office of Protection and Advocacy for Persons with Disabilities and the state Child Advocate are now investigating the school’s use of “time-out” rooms. 

Why, again, do parents put up with this?  I also find it interesting that this type of discipline began as a strategy to deal with special needs students.  I can’t imagine how I would react if my child were imprisoned as a form of punishment; if my child had some disability and this happened, my outrage would be 50 times greater.  These are grade school students.  Where are the adults with any common sense?

Another Reason to Homeschool, and Another Reason Why Homeschooling Will Be Targeted for Extinction

You haven’t realized that your child belongs to the state, you see.

A Bully Question

Karen DeCoster at the LRC blog asks a legitimate question.  In light of the massive “anti-bullying” movement across the several states and from the federal government, resulting in more publicly-funded programs, more laws and more angst, she asks:


“So what is it about government schools that promotes ‘bullying?'” 

From the full article:

Federal Bully Pulpit

Posted by Karen De Coster on December 3, 2011 05:42 AM 

 

The Michigan legislature is working to pass an anti-bullying law to “protect” vulnerable children in the public school system. Doesn’t this strike people as being bizarre that almost all the individual states have passed these laws? Don’t we already have laws against aggression/violence?

A question: So what is it about government schools that promotes “bullying?” Why don’t private schools and private businesses have anti-bullying laws? Note that the US Department of Uneducation (Office of Safe and Drug-free Schools!) recently held a … Bullying Prevention Summit? An even better question: why does the federal government need to promote an entire program, funded by taxpayers, dedicated to “stopping” bullying (StopBullying.gov)?

Could the answer be that yanking children from their parents and assimilating them into dumbed-down, draconian learning pools based on age and collectivizing their learning experience in a quasi-prison environment hasn’t worked, and will never work for the vast majority of the kiddies?

I had correspondence with one gentleman, on Facebook, about his fiancé, who is being threatened by the state of New Jersey for removing her children from the state’s uneducation camp to educate them in the privacy and peace of her own home. The legal notice I link to maintains that the state has a legal right to file formal charges and arrest any “habitual truant child.” 

The threat also pointed out that any person who does not have a child attend school regularly will be “deemed a disorderly person” and therefore subject to fines as determined by the court.

That isn’t violence bullying?

Two of the Last Hopes to Preserve Civilization: Homeschooling and the Internet

The full article from which I publish excerpts below comes from LewRockwell.com.  Fred Reed writes, in his typical style muy-irreverente, about the twilight of Western civilization.  He ignores the essential guardian of civilization, the Catholic Church, but he gets many of the symptoms and mediate causes right.

__________________

A Culture in Regression

by Fred Reed

The night closes in. Read the surveys of what children know, what students in universities know. Approximately nothing. We have become wanton morons. As the intellectual shadows fall again, as literacy declines and minds grow dim in the new twilight, who will copy the parchments this time?

No longer are we a schooled people. Brash new peasants grin and peck at their iPods. Unknowing, incurious, they gaze at their screens and twiddle, twiddle. They will not preserve the works of five millennia. They cannot. They do not even know why.

Twilight really does come. Sales of books fall. Attention spans shorten. Music gives way to angry urban grunting. The young count on their fingers when they do not have a calculator, know less by the year. We have already seen the first American generations less educated than their parents. College graduates do not know when World War One happened, or what the Raj was. They have read nothing except the nothing that they read, and little of that. Democracy was an interesting thought.

Ours will be a stranger Dark Age than the old one. Our peasants brush their teeth and wash, imagine themselves of the middle class, but their heads are empty.

And they rule. We have achieved the dictatorship of the proletariat. Hod-carriers in designer jeans, they do not quite burn books but simply ignore them. Their college degrees amount to high-school diplomas, if that, but they neither know nor care.

[…]

Yet ours is a curious bleakness. Good things of everywhere and all time lie free for the having. […] This is news to no one. Yet it may prove important in ways we do not think.

[…]

It is literally true that the better is suspect. If you correct a high-school teacher’s grammar, she will accuse you of stultifying creativity, of racism, of insensitivity. If you reply that had you wanted your children brought up as baboons, you would have bought baboons in the first place, she will be offended.

Home-schooling, it seems to me, becomes a towering social responsibility. I have actually seen a teacher saying that parents should not let children learn to read before they reach school. You see, it would put them out of synch with the mammalian larvae that children are now made to be. Bright children not only face enstupiation and hideous boredom in schools taught by complacent imbeciles. No. They are also encouraged to believe that stupidity is a moral imperative.

Once they begin reading a few years ahead of their grade, which commonly is at once, school becomes an obstacle to advancement. This is especially true for the very bright. […]

[…]

In an age of blinkered specialization perhaps we should revive the idea of the Renaissance man. Today the phrase is quaint and almost condescending (though how do you condescend up?), arousing the mild admiration one has for a dancing dog. A time was when the cultivated could play an instrument, paint, knew something of mathematics and much of languages, traveled, could locate France, attended the opera and knew what they were attending. They wrote clearly and elegantly, this being a mark of civilization. I think of Benvenuto Cellini, born 1500, superb sculptor, professional musician, linguist, elegant writer, and good with a sword.

If there is any refuge, it is the Internet. Let us make the most of it.

"They Can Hardly Think Straight in Arkansas"; or the Consequences of Educating Children in Industrial Batches

Thanks to Homeschool Goodies for posting this video.  Please take the time to watch this; while there are certain elements of it with which I disagree or which I think are not necessarily established, it is a very thought-provoking presentation. What I am absolutely convinced of is the inadequacy of the current institutional model of education to form children into intellectually, emotionally, physically and spiritually healthy adults.