Advice from that "Atheist Mom"...
...to a struggling young person. What a great read.
Although this bundles the undies of the poor folks at Uncommon Descent, ultimately an atheist must define herself by what she does believe in.
Someday the fundies will understand that.
Shimmies to AtBC and Possummomma...and to the UDudes at Uncommon Descent, because they need 'em. Therapy, don't you know. Only for medicinal purposes! (Who just said, "Yeah, right"?)
Although this bundles the undies of the poor folks at Uncommon Descent, ultimately an atheist must define herself by what she does believe in.
Someday the fundies will understand that.
Shimmies to AtBC and Possummomma...and to the UDudes at Uncommon Descent, because they need 'em. Therapy, don't you know. Only for medicinal purposes! (Who just said, "Yeah, right"?)
Labels: atheism, cuddlies, warm-fuzzy disgusting love-thine-enemy liberalism
posted by Kristine | Thursday, March 08, 2007
2 Comments:
It seems the goal of Christian home schooling is to indoctrinate children and shield them from opposing views. Don't you love the home-schooled kids who, in the face of insurmountable odds, learn to think for themselves?
Yeah, I do. I try to keep my workplace out of the discussions here, so I'll just say that I and the educators that I know take a pretty dim view of homeschooling, and with good reason.
I know people who are not fundamentalists who also homeschool their children, but they talk about it as if it were a cult. "We homeschoolers" this, "we homeschoolers" that. One of our friends came to the opening of the downtown library while we were having a good time and, over the music playing from the stage that we were trying to listen to, unleashed an angry rant about how "we homeschoolers" don't like central libraries [!] because there used to be some Spanish videotape on the shelf at their branch library, and now it's gone, blah, blah, as if that has anything to do with anything. After she left, John said, "Is it me, or has she become an angry person about this homeschool stuff?"
In a way, however, I was home-schooled: after a teacher (the one I was really afraid of) screamed at me for the umpteenth time in third grade, I decided that school was bullshit and made an effort to educate myself. I read voraciously, but looking back I'm amazed that I was able to very good choices about what to read. Some way, somehow, I understood very early the idea of cognitive authority and didn't just grab the first thing off the shelf, but assessed its authority and accuracy. Now I realize how exceptional that is.
I wanted to get out of dodge, and I made plans for that very early in life. I did that all on my own. I think homeschooling can work if the parent is an educator, but the major advocates are on record as saying, "You can teach your kid evolution if you want, or you can teach your kid creationism, and it solves the whole problem!" No, it doesn't. That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard an alleged educator say! The real problem, I think, is the fact that Americans have this idea that parents (or older siblings) get to force their kids (or younger siblings) to be whatever and whoever they damn well want them to be - because American children, in the final analysis, are considered to be property. And that's definitely the mentality behind fundamentalist homeschooling.
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