Changeable Me

I should be packing… I should be doing lots of things besides blogging… but there it is, and here I am….

I just finished reading over at John Ballard’s place, Hootsbuddy’s Place drawn by that irresistable pull of “it’s about me”. And found something that I do enjoy: “the idea that a loyal opposition is important to any discussion” as he so adeptly put it.The guy is a ‘thinking guy’ ( my personal way of putting it) who has a gift for expressing things well. I understand him… maybe he is an intp….

He gave me some things to think about, and then I further went to Parableman’s who has more stuff to think about. And now I have trouble. I am on overload at the moment. I fully understand what John said about this,”I’m tired, weary to the end of optimism, of having to read and hear the word “liberal” in the pejorative. ” because that is how I felt-exactly- at Parableman’s after following the link to a diatribe on homeschooling.

Now there are going to be those who think it was not a diatribe, because it was worded so politely, but still… it held out the same old presumptions and misconceptions, well doused in personal observations that amounted to … I hate to reuse the term, but I am going to: a hack job.

The commenters, notably Jeremy Pierce, made good opposing argument on one of the most obvious problems of “sample” … there is a fallacy name for using too small, and exceptional a sample to represent the whole spectrum of the group. But the discussion makes me a bit tired today.

And my lackadaisical manner of dealing with this invites criticism…. oh well, as Scarlett so charmingly said “Tomorrow, I’ll think about it tomorrow”.

and then I will explain sometimes why I am not so very far from the “Liberal” but why I am fairly entrenched as a Conservative, and then tie in the social implications with a dash of prophetic lightening…unless of course I get bored and change my mind.

In which case I hope to offer you something new and different….:)

6 thoughts on “Changeable Me”

  1. I just wrote you a long comment thanking you for reading and commenting, and the thing got lost when I keyed “post.” If it turns up later, that’s what happened. Go figure.
    Demon again.
    I put a link to the comment ID to an archive post from last year that you may find interesting, since you asked about the conscientious objector issue.

    Home schooling, by the way, is something that I don’t know a lot about, except that more and more parents seems to be doing it, many of them quite well.
    My kids all went to public school, except one who was in a private setting for a couple of years due to learning disabilities. We ran into a public school teacher who didn’t believe in such things, so we decided to have her in a special setting. That was over twenty-five years ago and none of us felt for a moment it was the wrong move.

    I could write for hours about education, but we don’t have the time. In short, the two most damaging ideas that seem to have crippled the process is that schools and teachers are in loco parentis and government is in loco familia.
    Nuff said.

  2. sorry about your troubles with my site- I really would have liked reading anything you said.

    “most damaging ideas that seem to have crippled the process is that schools and teachers are in loco parentis and government is in loco familia.”

    I do agree. I ponder the why behind that increasing move, and the steps that can resist it.

    I try to empahsize that homeschool is not for everyone, but it is an important choice to allow for those willing to educate their children.

    We all have alot invested in keeping the public schools as functional and responsive to their primary task as possible.
    Whether the public discussion stays mindful of that is a question.

  3. I can’t speak for the rest of the country, but I can tell you exactly why a lot of people in the South have kept their kids from the public schools: desegregation.
    School integration so shocked a lot of white people in the South that a rash of private schools sprang up. Initailly they had only white kids, but as the not-so-transparent reason for their being became socially (and probably legally) taboo, most such school admitted blacks as well.
    I haven’t read any studies to support this, but my instinct is that home schooling was the after-effect of desegregating white private schools.

    Racism, like smoking, is no longer in vogue. But like smoking, a lot of people still have the habit. Unfortunately, the social problems of the black sub-culture don’t help ameliorate the problem.
    That , together with a crippling case of political correctness and administrative micromanagement, have intersected to make public schools even less attractive than they should be.

    I, too, am an avid fan of public schools, but as home schooling and private schools draw off the cream of the crop, both teachers and students, public schools are left with the most intractible problems and a compromised cadre of teachers and administrators.

    I have more ideas, but this is only a comment thread and I have to get back to work.

  4. I’m not a fan of the public schools, but I see the need for them. I have some interesting stories to tell on desegregation… from the Northern perspective. Another time.

    You are partially right on the crop of private schools in response to desegregation, but not on homeschooling. I don’t know of any in the movement where that was a consideration, and I mean throughout all the literature and the conventions-everything.
    In my community, it was the bussing that led to problems; alternative, magnet schools seemed to be good. -Those came after my time.

    Things like racism die hard. Sort of a Gorgon.

    -til sometime next week, John:)

  5. I rarely engage others on the topic of homeschooling because I meet up on so few who know what they’re talking about.

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