Monday, December 04, 2006

NEA Leader Says Home School Parents `Well-Meaning Amateurs'

Dave Arnold, a member of the Illinois Education Association, says home schooling parents are "well-meaning amateurs" who should leave the education of their children to the professionals. In "Home Schools Run By Well-Meaning Amateurs," Arnold says: ". why would some parents assume they know enough about every academic subject to home-school their children? You would think that they might leave this - the shaping of their children's minds, careers, and futures - to trained professionals. That is, to those who have worked steadily at their profession for 10, 20, 30 years! Teachers!"

Arnold concludes his attack on home school parents by stating: "Don't most parents have a tough enough job teaching their children social, disciplinary and behavioral skills? They would be wise to help their children and themselves by leaving the responsibility of teaching math, science, art, writing, history, geography and other subjects to those who are knowledgeable, trained and motivated to do the best job possible."

"Dave Arnold's elitist view of parents as untrained buffoons who should leave the education of their children to his liberal minions, is clear evidence that home school parents are wise to protect their children from leftist and pro-homosexual propaganda in schools," said TVC's Executive Director Andrea Lafferty. "The NEA has been the enemy of parents and a supporter of abortion, obscene sex education and homosexual indoctrination of innocent public school children. Why should parents trust their children to teachers who are anti-Christian, pro-baby killing and pro-homosexuality?

The Home School Legal Defense Association released a report in 2004 that shows the academic excellence achieved by home-schooled children. A study released in 1997, for example, showed that home-schooled children outperformed their public school counterparts by 30-37 percentile points in all subjects.

"It would appear that the `well-meaning amateur' parents criticized by Dave Arnold, are doing a better job of educating their own children than the so-called `professionals' in the NEA," said Lafferty. "Perhaps if NEA teachers spent more time on academics and less time on training children to experiment with homosexual sodomy, children might actually get an education in public schools."

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Who killed the school trip?

The UK government wants children to get out and about - but it was its own suspicious regulation of adults that cast a cloud over such adventures.

Today, the UK government will issue a call to bring back the school trip. It is launching a new independent council, because it wants to reassure teachers (who are apparently afraid of being sued) and parents (afraid that children could come to harm) that school trips are safe, and that they are good for kids, too.

Yet the government has just waved through legislation that makes organising a school trip very difficult, if not impossible. The Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Bill – against which I am coordinating a campaign - will make it compulsory for any adult who comes into contact with a child as part of his or her working day to undergo criminal records vetting.

For the average school trip, this will mean bus drivers who drive the kids, workers at the hotel where the children are staying, any parent or adult volunteers, and any foreign exchange families. (Foreign exchange families cannot presently be vetted, which is why one Scottish local authority decided to cancel all overseas trips for its local schoolchildren.)

Vetting is costly and time-consuming – and it is part of the growing official regulation of relationships between adults and children. These regulations call into question the open encounters that kids experience on school trips, whether it’s the cranky geologist telling you about rocks or French or German parents showing you around their town. To go anywhere near a child now, adults require a Criminal Records Bureau certificate and various other certificates showing that they have been on the requisite child protection courses.

Relating to children is becoming a specialised profession, rather than the job of any adult with a bit of common sense and some experience from which children might benefit. Official regulations treat anything that takes kids away from the classroom as a problem. Even university interviews now have special guidelines on how tutors should relate to 17-year-old interviewees (see Just 17? Then forget university, by Josie Appleton).

In the midst of this, how dare the government call for more adventurous school trips? It’s true that officials frequently launch big campaigns against trends that bear their fingerprints – the Health and Safety Commission launches initiatives against safety-first regulations, for example, while the Commission for Racial Equality takes on multicultural politics.

Yet these are all managerial reactions to a problem. Indeed, the government campaign to save the school trip is as dull as can be. There will be a new independent council, which will give teachers special training and provide them with special ‘out and about’ packs. These officials even manage to make the school trip sound boring, by calling it ‘learning outside the classroom’.

Worst of all, the government’s main justification for rescuing school trips is that they can help tackle childhood obesity. Aside from the fact that one of the defining features of school trips is that you eat a lot of unhealthy food (I remember many a happy hour with platefuls of German ‘Spaghetti ice’), this is an extraordinarily narrow-spirited logic.

The point about school trips is that they expand your mind, not that they limit your waistline. You are travelling to new places with your friends and without your parents, and with teachers who are a little less uptight than normal. You always come back a bit more independent, and a bit more inspired by geography or German now that you can see how such subjects might actually be useful. I recall one biology fieldtrip where we counted seaweed species by day and whisky species by night: a liberal education that has left all branches of the fucus family imprinted on my brain.

So three cheers for the school trip, and boo to the Better School Trip Commission! School trips thrive on the spirit of adventure, not on ‘out-and-about’ packs about how ‘learning outside the classroom’ can help meet obesity targets.

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


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