Yesterday, the Iowa legislature betrayed its obligation to protect the well-being of that state’s homeschooled children. In one fell swoop, the legislature removed every safeguard designed to ensure that they were actually receiving an education. It’s gone now, all of it, every little protection, and there is now nothing left to ensure the needs and interests homeschooled children. Nothing. And that is, of course, how homeschooling advocates wanted it.
Time and again, light social conversations are peppered with anecdotes and stories, and for someone like me navigating that can sometimes feel like a minefield. Don’t let on that you have never heard of the pop star they’re discussing, do share a story about playing in cornfields as a barefoot kid—that one’s okay!—and hope you’re invisible when they’re discussing how much they hated high school pep rallies. If I slip up at a party or social event, it can be a problem.
I recently came upon a video from Christian youth outreach group Reach America. In it, Christian students explain that they face persecution in their public high schools for their religious beliefs, and list examples of this persecution. They finish by calling for change, calling for other Christians to rise up and throw off the persecution and restore the (mostly imaginary) Christian American of the past.
Christian Post blogger Kae Am recently wrote a post on abortion and women’s humanity—or more specifically, a post arguing that abortion is a symptom of not viewing women as people. Upon finishing Kae Am’s piece, I have the distinct feeling that she has never actually met someone who is pro-choice—or at the very least, has never actually listened to one. Let’s take a look at the piece, shall we?
Welcome to this month’s Forward Thinking roundup! The general consensus of these diverse posts appears to be that public education should be about teaching content, teaching children how to learn, providing an equalizer that enables people to fulfill their potential, fulfilling the nation’s economic needs, and creating a common society bound by shared knowledge and shared experiences.
Marc is a Catholic who totally embraces the Church’s ban on (artificial) contraception, so when he pulls out the bits about (artificial) contraception having health risks or about how there’s only contraception for women, he’s not doing that because he actually wants to fix those problems. He’s doing it because he wants to throw out (artificial) contraception altogether. And I suppose that’s why his twisting of feminist rhetoric makes me rather angry.
Marc of Bad Catholic has offered a “rebuttal” of my post of last week criticizing that simplistic dandelion rose illustration supposedly showing the bad fruits of contraception and the good fruits of chastity. I’m not going to bother with most of his rebuttal—feel free to go over and read and critique it yourself—but I do want to point out some rather bad logic.
A Guest Post by Tracey Another thing about this book I’ve been kicking around inside my head is the author’s definition of love. At the beginning of book one, Elsie keeps going back to the refrain, “If only Papa would love me!” She seems to think Horace only loves her whenever he is pleased with her. I don’t treat the idea of love like that. I maintain that I still have love for a child or adult with whom I happen to be angry.
A Guest Post by Tracey. Now I’d like to compare the Elsie story to some others that I actually read and liked. Early on in my reading I felt compelled to revisit the story of Sara Crewe, sometimes called A Little Princess. Sara is also presented as a long suffering child with no one to love her. Her father sends her to a posh boarding school for an education. He then dies, leaving her penniless and forced to become the house servant. Sara is like Elsie’s polar opposite however.
A Guest Post by Tracey. My name is Tracey and I write a blog describing my religious journey through local churches. In my blog surfing I became interested in the Elsie Dinsmore series, so I borrowed books 1 and 2 from the library. Functionally, I found them more like one long story than two, so I read them in succession. I would like to present an adult, outside (non-homeschooled non-evangelical) perspective on these first two books.
Women, Debi says, are to stand behind the armor of their men, and thus be protected. The reason Eve at the apple, Debi says, is that she stepped out from Adam’s armor and was thus vulnerable. Some of you readers raised a question: If this is so, why did Adam also eat the apple? Why didn’t his armor protect him and keep him from doing so? In this section, Debi answers that question. You probably already know her answer.
But what I’m really struck by is how bad HSLDA’s legal advice appears to be for the people actually taking it. HSLDA makes its money off of ostensibly protecting homeschoolers’ right to homeschool, but in practice it rather looks like HSLDA cares more about keeping its members frightened enough to keep renewing their membership than it does about actually giving them good advice.
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