Stop assaulting family values!

Let's just start with what human beings do.

From the moment we're conceived, we need to trust the adults around us to be there.  Mom in particular at first.  A baby grows in her body.  Later, if she's nursing, her very body is in tune with the infant, responding to changes in growth patterns, producing more food as the baby demands it.

Any mom will tell you it's a whole lot easier doing this with another adult on the premises, supporting every part of the activity.  

Children are made from one man and one woman.  It doesn't matter to me what science may be able to change about that.  It won't generate possibilities more than it will generate confusion.  We'll have a lot of  'splainin' to do to those products of conception, especially if they are smarter than us, because they were scientifically designed that way.

Children thrive when there are two adults committed to looking after them, because one adult cannot do it very well by him or herself.  By committed, I mean until death parts them, the adults from each other as well as the child.

From our teen years, we seek the one person with whom we can spend the rest of our lives.  Why is that?  Is it just a fairy-tale romantic notion that there would be someone out there to whom we could be permanently attached?  Or is it something built into us, making it possible for the offspring of that attachment to know that the adults around them will be there, no matter what, barring disaster out of their control?  What is there about that security that is so important to a child?

Children need a mom and a dad.  And it is arrogant to think that we, individually, have everything a child needs.  Dads can't nurse a baby.  Moms don't have the power to provide for a child like a dad can if she's nursing a baby.  "Oh, excuse me, honey, you're just going to have to put aside those hunger pangs and be quiet while I (shoot, butcher and cook this gazelle) / (am in this business meeting)"   No, babies don't do that.

Here's my premise:  The most basic family value is a child's ability trust and believe that the adults who brought that child into the world will, barring natural disaster, be there together under the same roof until natural disaster (death) really does part them.  The second family value is that those parents will love that child, putting themselves between the child and disaster.

Family values don't come easily.  Human beings don't naturally mate for life like some members of the animal kingdom.  We have to learn to treat each other well.  We have to learn how to be good enough to commit to a life-long relationship.  Our example is God Himself, who loves us no matter what, knows EVERYTHING we do, knows that the spirit is willing and the flesh is weak, and did indeed put Himself between us and disaster.  We do well to study the words that He wrote to us, the examples that He preserved for us, including the good, bad, and ugly about us.  His rules are pretty simple, but not one of us can keep only one of those rules.  I'll paraphrase them here for modern readers, and I encourage you to look up the original wording and all the commentary the Bible provides.

1.  There are no other gods.  There's only God.

2.  Don't try to make a god out of anything else.

3.  Don't speak evil of God.

4.  Let God show you that He can provide for you one day each week.  Honor God and take a sabbath off from work, and don't make anyone else work on that day, either.

5.  Honor mom and dad.  (Specifically named as "father and mother".)

6.  Don't murder.

7.  Don't have sex with anyone other than your spouse.

8.  Don't steal.

9.  Don't lie to get someone in trouble, and don't fail to tell the truth when someone is in trouble.

10.  Don't want what's not yours.

These rules, combined with wisdom, which is what the rest of the Bible is all about, will keep us safe from most man-made disasters.  Those are the ones that destroy people, relationships, and families.  God added that if as a society we pursue justice and righteousness, that He would withhold many natural disasters.  People would live long, productive lives and be able to celebrate the births of their great-grandkids.  I believe this!

Notice there's no commandment to send your child to school.  Not anywhere in the Bible is there such a commandment.  In fact, the Bible tells PARENTS to raise and teach their kids.  It tells kids to seek wisdom.

In some other post I'll discuss why we have schools at all.  My last post proposed that schools are places to warehouse children while parents, both of them, are out earning an income, and that the income is more important than the children.  Schools will teach what is important to society, and so schools teach both boys and girls how to earn an income.

No, there is nothing wrong with that.  Both boys and girls need to learn how to earn an income.

What's wrong is that schools don't support family values. In some cases, schools actively undermine family values.  It's what you get when parents fail to direct the child's education.

Schools operate under the premise that they know better than the parent about what's best for the child's education.  I was in that education class in college when they told us that WE were the professionals who knew best, and we could tell parents that.  Now I will GRANT you that a variety of adults can recognize gifts in children that a parent may not or may not have any experience to recognize, but that is not the same as assuming their knowledge takes precedent over the parents.  I often work with kids whose parents have unreal expectations.  But my job is to do my job, and teach the best way I know how.  I've sat down with parents and said "This isn't working, and this child is NOT ready for this class."  I've sat down with parents and said "Please don't hold this child back from that experience."  I've sat down with kids and said "The parents you have are the parents you have.  How can we make the best of this?"  As a parent I've sat with teachers and said "What do you think is going on here?"  But I will NEVER tell a parent that I know their child better than they do, because that's just not true.  

There are teachers who actively leverage students away from their parents.  They ask students to question their parents' beliefs without asking them to question their parents about those beliefs.  It sounds like it's a lesson in asking students to think for themselves, but these teachers are really asking students to let teachers think for them.

Drama is a very effective teacher, and TV is full of anti-family values.  One could hope that schools would be able to say to students:  "What you see on TV is make-believe.  It's not real.  People can't behave that way in real life and get away with it.  Stop watching that.  We don't act that way here, we don't dress that way here."  But I'm afraid that the values of TV producers have found an audience in teachers, who surprisingly, can't think for themselves.

I want schools to tell kids that teens shouldn't be dating, that dating is reserved for adults who have something to offer another person, including the means to pay rent on a place of their own and transportation to get there after a failed date.  I want K-12 schools to tell students they are much too young to be worrying about their sexuality, that they have to get many more parts of their lives in order before they can worry about having sex.  I want schools to tell kids that the first person they have sex with ought to be the last person they have sex with, barring the death of a life partner.  I want schools to tell students that sex produces children, and that a marriage built to love and protect children should precede sex.

That's the ideal, and that's what we should be teaching.  If you don't think this is a topic for public education, that it belongs in churches and homes, then you're right.  Parents SHOULD be  the primary educators of their children.  I have written elsewhere that K-12 education should be directed by parents who choose which philosophy they want their kids to have, and that it's impossible to teach from a values-neutral viewpoint.  Every church should have a K-12 educational program.  Parents should be able to choose which ones educate their kids.

Go here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRGZLSVph3A  to view the call to withdraw your children from public schools.

How to get an educational reform

We will not, CANNOT get an educational reform without a societal reform that gives the parents back to the kids.

If we can get the societal reform, we will not need the educational reform.

Busted families and education - the 'need' to warehouse kids under age 18.

Part of the reason for my meandering educational career is a paper I wrote for a graduate level philosphy-of-education class about 1991.  The paper explored who should have the final say about a child's education, the parents or the state.  It wasn't a very good paper, and I only got a B- on it.  My ideas were pretty raw, and despite trying to look at situations with a choice-and-consequences kind of view (rather than 'right or wrong'), I ended up dumping lots of personal feelings into the paper.

In 1991, my oldest child began Kindergarten.  Despite urgings from family and friends, I resisted pre-school.  I had a college degree, was finishing a Master's, had taught successfully for several years, we had a play group and cousins.  I didn't see the need to clutter up our lives with another commitment to be somewhere at a particular time when the parent-child ratio was so much better than the teacher-student ratio at any pre-school.  I liked doing things with my kids.  I could do them just fine, thanks.

But writing the paper opened my eyes to what people think about the need for public education.  By that, I mean that people believe that schools are a necessary part of a childhood experience, and also believe that schools are necessary to a functioning society.  We've also been taught that the school knows better than the parent.

Well, given our current, peculiarly American view on work, schools perform an important function for our society.  But are they the right functions?  Are they good functions?  Will they protect our society or contribute to tearing it down?

In America, there is a buck to be made!  In this land of opportunity, absolutely anyone can become a millionaire with hard work and a bit of good fortune. You don't have to win the lottery or be on a game show.  Opportunity plus instinct equals profits on everything from Beanie Babies to iPhones.  Among the parade of aliens in the Star Trek series, the Ferengi were the mercenary merchants of anything.  If there was a market anywhere in the universe, they would find it.  They had 285 Rules of Acquisition which their children learned like the Pledge of Allegiance.  Here are a selection of them, from http://www.sjtrek.com/trek/rules/. 

• Once you have their money ... never give it back.
  
• Never pay more for an acquisition than you have to.
  
• Never allow family to stand in the way of opportunity.
  
• A man is only worth the sum of his possessions.
• Small print leads to large risk.
  
• Opportunity plus instinct equals profit.
  
• Greed is eternal.
  
• Anything worth doing is worth doing for money.
  
• A deal is a deal ... until a better one comes along.
• A Ferengi without profit is no Ferengi at all.
  
• Satisfaction is not guaranteed.
  
• Never place friendship above profit.
  
• A wise man can hear profit in the wind.
  
• Peace is good for business.
  
• War is good for business
  

Doesn't this sound like US?  We ARE the Ferengi!  And we've failed unless we own the 3500 square foot house, have a student loan to match our mortgage, two cars and an RV in the 1200-square foot garage and a third car when the kids get a driver's license.

Which brings me to the topic of this post.

Somewhere in the last 100 years, children lost their status as economic asset and in this country are now 100% economic liabilities.  There's no financial reason to have a child whatsoever.  Children only cost money, they don't make money.  People with large families (more than 3 kids) are condemned for putting a strain on the earth's resources.

Since children cost money, that means that to afford them we have to make more money.  Where are we going to put the kids when we're out making money?  Daycare, from the earliest possible moment.  Pre-school, because the word sounds so much better and more productive than 'daycare'.  Then school, starting when the child is four or five, whether the child is ready for it or not, and not because the child needs to learn (you will hardly be able to stop that from happening), but in school because the parents need to work.  We tell ourselves we're putting them there to learn, but I propose that in our society, that's only a secondary reason, and only one of them.

Financial strain is a leading cause of divorce.  Divorce is a leading cause of financial strain.  Never-married and single parents are the heads of most households that are below the poverty level.  And then our school system preps kids to enter the job market and become Ferengi, and does zero, absolutely nothing to prepare kids to commit to and maintain lifelong relationships.

Is it any wonder that it's so hard to do school?  Perhaps we're raising kids for the wrong reason.  Maybe deep down inside we all understand that acquisition is pointless.  Are we hoarding because we don't have lives worth sharing?  If we have lives worth sharing, worth risking the economic liability of having kids for, why do we warehouse them so that we can work to give them more opportunities?  More electronic games?  A bigger house?  We're never there, so it's not like they can have their friends over.

Here we sit, in the most prosperous society the world has ever known.  We know how to make money.  We know how to make luxuries for everyone of which the emperors of the past could not even conceive.  We don't have a clue why we've acquired so many things.  We can't stay married until death parts us.  We can't make the world a better place for everyone.  We aren't even allowed to be the parents and primary educators of our kids.  And we can give them anything except a family.

Education and the family, Part 2, K-12 buildings

It is no secret that the MAIN indicator of student success is the parents' involvement in the child's education.  That is, if the parent is on top of things, if the parent is pushing for better performance, checking up on homework, showing up to school, etc. then it is far more likely that the child will succeed in school.

That's primarily why home schooled students do so well in higher education.

So why is our educational system so adamant about breaking up the family?  That is, we want to rip the toddlers away from their parents and put them in preschool.  In some local schools, the K-3 kids go to one building, the 4-6 to another, the 7-8th graders to a third, and the high schoolers to a fourth building. If families have even two children spaced a few years apart, it gets crazy for parents to attend very many functions at all of those different schools.

We tend to think that bigger is better, that bigger is more economical.  But having taught in a K-12 school where all of the buildings shared the same parking lot, and there were only 350 kids K-12, I can tell you that there was a much better family atmosphere in that environment than in the schools I attended growing up, or have taught in elsewhere.  Not only was the holiday program attended by the entire family, it was attended by the entire community.  Parents didn't have to divide up the responsibilities of so many nights out because there was only one event for all of the kids.  They went to events as families.  They got to know their kids' teachers, because the kids would probably have that teacher more than once.  Excellent teachers got the benefit of lots of affirmation, and the community worked to keep them there.  Poor teachers left after a year, because the word got around about them.  Educators had important stakes in how things were done, because their kids were also students in the school.

My gut feeling is that a K-12 school should have no more than 400 kids attending.  Everyone can actually know the names of everyone in the building if that is the limit, and we'll know who their siblings and parents are as well.

If the main indicator of student success is family involvement, then we should not make it difficult for the family to be involved in the child's education.  We should be thinking through school structure and activities with the family in mind.

I would like to propose that school districts offer both kinds of education, large buildings divided by age, and small neighborhood buildings, more like one-room school houses for K-8 or even K-12 kids.  Some folks actually think that changing schools as a child grows is a way to get them ready to transition to high school.  I don't know what's so special about high school that we need to 'transition' to it.  I also don't know what moving to a new building has to do with education.

My experience says that smaller is better, and families are happier that way.  

Education and the family

Topics in this series will include:

K-12 buildings

Busted families and education - the 'need' to warehouse kids under age 18.

Busted families and education - How much can you expect?

Stop assaulting family values!

Re-thinking society and K-12 education

The family and education, Part 1

Watched the 1968 version of "Yours, Mine and Ours" with Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda this evening.  Helen North is a widow with eight children.  Frank Beardsley is a widower with ten children. Of course, they meet, marry, and begin to raise 18 children together.  This is the 'Aha' moment of the script:

Frank Beardsley (to eldest daughter, who is complaining that boyfriend Larry wants her to 'prove she loves him'):  "I've got a message for Larry.  You tell him this is what it's all about.  This is the real happening!... And if you want to know what love really is, take a look around you... And take a good look at your mother."

Helen:  "Not now!"

All 18 children are present, rushing her down the steps into the car.  She is in labor with her 9th child, which with their blended family, will make 19 children.

Frank:  "Yes, now!  It's giving life that counts, and until you're ready for it, all the rest is just a big fraud.  All the crazy haircuts in the world won't keep it turning.  Life isn't a love-in, it's the dishes and the orthodontist and the shoe repairman and the ground round instead of roast beef, and I'll tell you something else.  It's not going to bed with a man that proves you're in love with him -  it's getting up in the morning and facing the drab, miserable, wonderful everyday world with him that counts...I suppose having nineteen kids is carrying it a bit too far, but if we had it to do over, who would we skip... You?"

Coming out

It's time to take a stand.  I'd hoped to contribute to discussion on education and cause folks to think and question their long and closely held views, without exposing my specific experience.  I thought this would protect the little school I administrate and current and former students.

But the persecution of the church in America has begun following this November, 2008 election, and I am no longer willing to hide behind any electronic wall and avoid confrontation.  Be assured, the most aggressive thing I'm going to do to you is pray for you, and vote.  And ask you to think about behavior, yours and mine.  Educate me, if that's what I need.  After all, that's the business I'm in.

Today my real name goes on my blog, and you can find me.  I'll entertain any civil comments.  Name calling will not survive comment screening.