Results?
Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results!
I know several thousand things that won’t work.
-Thomas Edison
I posted a comment under my July 16th post about our new HEM News & Commentary editor, Valerie Moon, who also manages The Military Homeschooler site, but I’ve also initiated a new category here titled Interviews, and I’ll start off the listings under that by once again referencing and linking to the great interview with Valerie in this month’s edition of Mary Nix’s marvelous Support Group News!
A brief excerpt, in answer to Mary’s question about how having a parent in the military affects children:
“For Brats (as children in military families are affectionately called sometimes), military life is normal. At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis I lived away from any civilian town with jets screaming over the housing area, and having to sit in our stopped car at a ‘plane crossing’ (instead of a train crossing) to wait for B-52s to take off. All the dads wore uniforms. In 1977 during the military exercise REFORGER, our older son watched columns of tanks rumble down the road of the German village where we lived near the East German border. All the (American) dads wore uniforms. Our younger kids showed their ID cards at anti-terrorist checkpoints to get into our housing area in Munich during Desert Storm (and took homemade cookies to the guards) while their brother served in Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Ninety-nine percent of the Dads wore uniforms, and some of the Moms did, too. Except in times of crisis, military ’stuff’ is background noise to Brats.
Now what all those anonymous civilians with no nametags on their clothes or houses get up to, that’s a big mystery. And did you know that in civilian theaters The Star Spangled Banner isn’t played before each movie, and the entire theater doesn’t stand to attention? Weird.
On the HEM-Networking discussion list, reader Cindy Deutsch posts a newspaper article and rightly asks, “Is this a new twist on daytime curfews?”
The article in question is from the Rockford Star, in Rockford, IL. The article is titled “Littering Statute Clears Hurdle,” and the curfew issue is only a side issue:
The committee also discussed a proposed daytime curfew, but delayed a vote until next week to give aldermen and city staff more time to tweak the ordinance.
Specifically, aldermen have questions about home-schooled children and the level of discretion police would use in stopping children.
City attorney John Gilberti is working with aldermen on potential amendments and said the curfew is not designed to target truants, but rather the crime that stems from having underage children out on the streets.
The ordinance, which does not establish a specific curfew time, would require children who skip school to attend counseling, as well as face fines and community service.
Parents could also be required to pay for their own counseling or perform community service and attend school with their children.
A wonderful article from a Minnesota newspaper about a second-generation homeschooling family:
Homeschooling has been increasing in popularity for the last decade. But for many families it’s been a way of life for a much longer period of time.
“It’s a lifestyle. We don’t fit our life around school, we fit learning around life,” said Sarah Parks, who was homeschooled.
Her mom, Jean Smith, began homeschooling her four children in the ’80s, when it wasn’t yet accepted by society or the state of Minnesota. But, though there were difficulties and she was once brought to court, Jean held fast to the concept of homeschooling.
“I always thought their character development was way more important than anything else,” she said.
To read the rest of the article click on the link above.
“As homeschoolers we need to find ways to reach out to teachers and parents who don’t want to see childrens’ 12 years of compulsory schooling reduced to skills training for big business. Nurturing the human capacity to learn through love and intrinsic motivation is as important to life — to me, more important — as ‘learning for earning.’ Art, religion, music, science, math, literature, and so on have made significant strides throughout human history because of our intrinsic motivations for learning, not in spite of it! Shutting off all the avenues to these subjects and reducing them to one toll road is the blight of educational hubris. By ‘educational hubris’ I mean as Ivan Illich defined it in Deschooling Society in 1972 (to paraphrase): ‘doing what God himself cannot do: namely, manipulate others for their own salvation.’”
~Patrick Farenga in an interview by Helen Hegener for Home Education Magazine, July/August, 1997
