Report: growth in homeschooling is outpacing new public school enrollments

From Breitbart.com. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

A recent report in Education News states that, since 1999, the number of children who are homeschooled has increased by 75%. Though homeschooled children represent only 4% of all school-age children nationwide, the number of children whose parents choose to educate them at home rather than a traditional academic setting is growing seven times faster than the number of children enrolling in grades K-12 every year.

As homeschooling has become increasingly popular, common myths that have long been associated with the practice of homeschooling have been debunked.

Any concerns about the quality of education children receive by their parents can be put to rest by the consistently high placement of homeschooled students on standardized assessment exams. Data demonstrates that those who are independently educated generally score between the 65th and 89th percentile on these measures, while those in traditional academic settings average at around the 50th percentile. In addition, achievement gaps between sexes, income levels, or ethnicity—all of which have plagued public schools around the country—do not exist in homeschooling environments.

According to the report:

Recent studies laud homeschoolers’ academic success, noting their significantly higher ACT-Composite scores as high schoolers and higher grade point averages as college students. Yet surprisingly, the average expenditure for the education of a homeschooled child, per year, is $500 to $600, compared to an average expenditure of $10,000 per child, per year, for public school students.

The high achievement level of homeschoolers is readily recognized by recruiters from some of the best colleges in the nation. Home-educated children matriculate in colleges and attain a four-year degree at much higher rates than their counterparts from both public and private schools. Schools such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, Stanford, and Duke Universities all actively recruit homeschoolers.

The post also cites another study that puts to rest the “socialization” nonsense objection to homeschooling.

Related posts

• Alabama homeschooling family sends 6 kids to college – by age 12!

Filed under: News, Child, Children, Education, Homeschool, Homeschooling, Parent, Parenting, School

Was Hitler a Christian? Is Nazism similar to Christianity?

One of the strangest things I have heard from atheists is the assertion that Christianity is somehow connected to the fascism, such as the fascism that existed under Adolf Hitler. Two posts by Jewish author Jonah Goldberg from National Review supply us with the facts to set the record straight.

Let’s start with the first post.

Here are some of the points:

1) Hitler wanted Christianity removed from the public square

Like the engineers of that proverbial railway bridge, the Nazis worked relentlessly to replace the nuts and bolts of traditional Christianity with a new political religion. The shrewdest way to accomplish this was to co-opt Christianity via the Gleichschaltung while at the same time shrinking traditional religion’s role in civil society.

2) Hitler banned the giving of donations to churches

Hitler banned religious charity, crippling the churches’ role as a counterweight to the state. Clergy were put on government salary, hence subjected to state authority. “The parsons will be made to dig their own graves,” Hitler cackled. “They will betray their God to us. They will betray anything for the sake of their miserable little jobs and incomes.”

3) Hitler replaced Christian celebrations with celebrations of the state

Following the Jacobin example, the Nazis replaced the traditional Christian calendar. The new year began on January 30 with the Day of the Seizure of Power. Each November the streets of central Munich were dedicated to a Nazi Passion play depicting Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch. The martyrdom of Horst Wessel and his “old fighters” replaced Jesus and the apostles. Plays and official histories were rewritten to glorify pagan Aryans bravely fighting against Christianizing foreign armies. Anticipating some feminist pseudo history, witches became martyrs to the bloodthirsty oppression of Christianity.

4) Hitler favored the complete elimination of Christianity

When some Protestant bishops visited the Fuhrer to register complaints, Hitler’s rage got the better of him. “Christianity will disappear from Germany just as it has done in Russia . . . The Germanrace has existed without Christianity for thousands of years . . . and will continue after Christianity has disappeared . . . We must get used to the teachings of blood and race.”

5) Hitler favored the removal of mandatory prayers in schools

In 1935 mandatory prayer in school was abolished…

6) Hitler favored the banning of Christmas carols and nativity plays

…and in 1938 carols and Nativity plays were banned entirely.

7) Hitler abolished religious instruction for children

By 1941 religious instruction for children fourteen years and up had been abolished altogether….

And now the second post.

8) Hitler opposed the ideas of universal truth and objective moral absolutes

…Just as the Nazi attack on Christianity was part of a larger war on the idea of universal truth, whole postmodern cosmologies have been created to prove that traditional religious morality is a scam, that there are no fixed truths or “natural” categories, and that all knowledge is socially constructed.

Practically everything this man believed was 100% anti-Christian. But he fits in fine on the secular left.

Conclusion

Adolf Hitler was a man influenced by two big ideas: evolution and socialism. His party was the national SOCIALIST party. He favored a strong role for the state in interfering with the free market. He was in favor of regulating the family so that the state could have a bigger influence on children. And he favored the idea of survival of the fittest. His ideas are 100% incompatible with Christianity and with capitalism as well. Christians value individual rights and freedoms, small government and the autonomy of the family against the state. The differences are clear and significant.

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Alabama homeschooling family sends 6 kids to college – by age 12!

From NBC News.

Excerpt:

At 7, when many kids figure they might be firemen, Seth announced he would be a military archeologist. His mom, Mona Lisa, encouraged that curiosity. “Wow! That kid was into this!” she marvels.

By 12, Seth was hanging out with students nearly twice his age, studying the Middle Ages at Faulkner University, near his home in Montgomery, Alabama. “How’s he doing?” I ask assistant professor Grover Plunkett.

“He’s got the highest average in the class.”

Seth was motivated by his brother Keith’s success. Keith is just down the hall, studying finite mathematics, a college senior — at 14.

“It makes you wonder,” their friend Wesley Jimmerson says, shaking his head. “Are they advanced, or are we just really behind?”

Sister Hannah was the first of the Harding kids to take college entrance exams — at age 12. “I didn’t expect to pass,” she says, “so I started crying, because I was thinking, ‘Now what?’”

By 22 she was designing spacecraft. She holds master’s degrees in math and mechanical engineering.

Ten-year-old Katrinnah Harding hopes to enter college next year. Her brother Heath started at age 11. He’s finishing his master’s in computer science — at 17.

“If they’re going to be working at my kitchen table,” Mona Lisa says with a smile, “why not earn college credit for what they’re doing?”

Named after her mother’s favorite song, Mona Lisa Harding home-schools her children in the basics, but found that her kids learned more quickly (and got less bored) when they were allowed to study deeply — something they loved.

“I don’t have any brilliant children,” she contends. “I’m not brilliant. My husband’s not brilliant. We’re just average folks.” Who inspired six children to enter college before they became teenagers.

[...]I can understand maybe convincing one or two children to enter college early, but Mona Lisa has more kids than Mother Hubbard: 10.

She shrugs. “By the time you get down to number five, number six, they just think learning seems normal. We find out what their passions are, what they really like to study, and we accelerate them gradually.“

But what happens to their childhood?

“We didn’t limit their experience,” Mona Lisa says. “They’re taking college classes, but socially, they are just teenagers.” Who live at home, not in college dorms.

What’s their secret? What I got out of the story is that parents don’t have to be smart in order to have smart kids. They just have to take an interest in what the children want to do and then guide them to the next level and the next level and the next level. It’s hands-on parenting!

Filed under: News, Child, Children, Education, Homeschool, Homeschooling, Parent, Parenting, School

U.S. Department of Justice arguing that homeschooling is not a right

Here’s a post on the Washington Times Communities page.

Excerpt:

In 1938, the practice of homeschooling was outlawed in Germany by Adolf Hitler and the infamous Third Reich. It was a rough period in German history, as thousands of young people were being pried from their parents’ direction and authority and drafted into the Hitler Youth program, where they were supposed to be trained as Aryan supermen (and women). In a few short years, vast numbers of these youth would be bleeding out on the battlefields of Europe, on the wrong side of the war for the soul of the world.

Sadly for freedom and for many families, Germany has never lifted this archaic and totalitarian ban on homeschooling. On the contrary, the German government seems to have stepped up its opposition to homeschooling over the past decade, forcing several families to flee, and others to enroll their children in state-approved schools against their will. The German Supreme Court has stated that the purpose of the homeschooling ban is to, “counteract the development of religious and philosophically motivated parallel societies.” It sounds like they aren’t really big on religious or philosophical diversity over there.

Some notable victims of this small-minded and grasping totalitarianism are Uwe and Hannelore Romeike and their five children. Uwe and his wife are music teachers and evangelical Christians who for years have been unsuccessfully seeking the right to homeschool their children. The Romeikes withdrew their children from German public schools in 2006, after becoming concerned that the educational material employed by the school was undermining the tenets of their Christian faith, and that the school was not providing their children with an ideal learning environment. “I don’t expect the school to teach about the Bible,” Mr. Romeike said, but “part of education should be character-building.”

After accruing the equivalent of around $10,000 in fines, and facing police visits to their home and the forcible removal of their children from the home, the Romeikes fled Germany in 2008 to seek asylum in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Their case was taken up by the Homeschool Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), which helped the Romeikes in 2010 to become the first family ever granted asylum in the US for the protection of their homeschooling rights.

The HSLDA explains, “The U.S. law of asylum allows a refugee to stay in the United States permanently if he can show that he is being persecuted for one of several specific reasons. Among these are persecution for religious reasons and persecution of a ‘particular social group.’ ”

On January 26, 2010, Memphis federal immigration judge Lawrence Burman granted the Romeikes political asylum, ruling they had a reasonable fear of persecution for their beliefs if they returned to their homeland. Judge Burman also denounced the German policy heatedly. In a statement, he called it, “utterly repellent to everything we believe as Americans.”

[...]The Romeikes were able to continue quietly homeschooling their children in a small Tennessee town. For a time.

Sadly, their period of respite was not to last. The Romeikes’ case is now before the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, with the US government seeking to revoke their asylum and force them to return to Germany. And the details of Attorney-General Holder’s arguments in the brief for Romeike v. Holder are sinister, to say the least.

According to Holder, parents have no fundamental right to home-educate their children.

Please read the whole thing. It always amazes me that people who voted for secularism and leftism claim to be Christians. If you are trying to raise your children to be authentic, effective Christians, then you do not promote any law or policy that takes away your right to pull them out of schools that are not partnering with YOUR GOALS. Christians should never vote to vote a public school system that not only is at odds with Christianity and morality, but may not even be doing a good job of teaching math, science and technology correctly. We need to have the option to opt out of attending failing schools. I think we should even have the option to opt out of FUNDING failing schools. I am opposed to mandatory taxation for homeschooling parents.

You can read more about this story here on the Christian Post, as well.

Filed under: News, Big Government, Education, Equality, Eric Holder, Family, Fascism, Free Market, Freedom, German, Germany, Government-Run School, Homeschool, Homeschooling, Individual Liberty, Liberty, Nazism, Public School, Religious Liberty, School, Secular Humanism, Secular Left, Social Justice, Statism, United States

Christian homeschooling mom recommends teaching kids to think through policies

Here is a neat post from Lydia McGrew, Ph.D, a homeschooling mom.

Excerpt:

As we Protestant conservatives view with great dismay what seems to us the hair-tearing foolishness of a new generation of young, “emergent” evangelicals spouting the platitudes of the left and getting their priorities all messed up, either abandoning or downplaying the pro-life movement, voting Democrat, and embracing left-wing economics, we need to think of something that cannot be said too often: What the left wants is not what is best for the poor, the weak, the little guy. In fact, we can sometimes even go farther: The left does not want what is best for the poor and the weak. Viz. the Obama administration’s willingness to shut down Catholic hospitals, Catholic charities, and anyone else who won’t toe the line on his HHS mandate. Viz. the Obama administration’s cutting off the Catholic bishops’ funding for anti-trafficking, because they wouldn’t refer for abortions. Viz. the left’s shut-down of adoption agencies that won’t place children with homosexual couples. The list goes on and on.

And there is more: The actual economic policies advocated by the left mean fewer jobs, higher prices, and small businesses pushed out by high regulatory costs, all of which is very bad for the people who need jobs the most. We’re seeing this right now with the economic burden of Obamacare, but that’s only one example. The actual environmental policies advocated by the left are radically anti-human and will result in grave economic harm both to our own country and, even more, to developing countries. I have just been reading a book I hope to write more about later, Merchants of Despair by Robert Zubrin. In it he chronicles case after case after case of leftist policies that have harmed the poorest of the poor in Third-World countries, from coercive population control to crackdowns forcing Third-World countries to eschew the advantages of more nutritious modified grains.

When our young people are growing up we Christians and conservatives often teach them biblical principles, and that is very good. But we also need to teach them economic principles. We need to teach them that there is no free lunch. We need to have them read books like Zubrin’s and like Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed. We need to talk through with them the ways that policies that sound oh-so-kind to “make things free” or “force employers to pay more” or “give health insurance to everyone” actually harm the people they are meant to help. We need to expose to them the viciously anti-human underside of the environmental movement, as well as its empirical fecklessness.

This one is a must-read! Please click through and read the whole thing, especially if you have Christian children.

Lydia’s group blog “What’s Wrong With the World?” is also good reading.

Filed under: Commentary, Application, Bible, Children, Christian, Christian Living, Economics, Family, Homeschool, Homeschooling, Life Application, Marriage, Parent, Parenting, Politics, Teaching, Theology, Wisdom