Saturday Inspiration - 4 Questions

For your Saturday Inspiration, please take a few minutes to listen to this intelligent young woman answering questions from a theist friend.  It will help bolster your conviction that some young people are managing to become free thinkers in spite of the cultural indoctrination and enormous privilege that religion enjoys all over the world.

Notable and quotable:  (on the value of prayer in difficult situations) "I have to say, that I have never been in a situation that I could do...literally...nothing about. There is always something more useful that you can do than pray. Always." (7:02)

This week, and probably for the next few weeks,  my posts are going to be focusing on issues that are important to children, teens and young adults in our demon-haunted world.  Young people like FactVsReligion will be featured. I welcome suggestions for other great videos!

Hmmm... Homeschooling...

Why are there so many infants in this homeschooling logo?  Curious!

I have been curious about homeschooling lately. I have always been pretty certain that I lack the temperament for it, because even though I always loved spending time exploring with my kids when they were younger - not to mention reading and amassing a book collection worthy of small library status - I really did not think I had the organizational skills nor the sticktoitiveness necessary for success. I have to admit, though, that some days the idea of sailing around the world with my partner and our kids - providing them with the best darn home schooled education imaginable -  is very tempting indeed!

Actors portraying the Nifty family:
citizens of the world!

Anyway, this week I have had more than the usual number of those days and thoughts about sailing away have been drifting pleasantly across my mind, so this morning - just for fun - I decided to look into what kind of resources are out there to help people like me. You know: people who like to daydream about how cool it would be to sail the world with teenaged offspring, living off the grid- independently and self-sufficiently! - learning new skills (maybe the kids could learn a few things, too) and generally becoming quite literally the coolest family on the planet!  The same people who fail to consider the challenges and frustrations of trying to help said offspring finish their high school education while gallivanting around the globe (killjoy!).

Everyone knows that the homeschooling movement in the USA is dominated by religious fundamentalists - the movement was actually inspired by Rousas John Rushdoony, the Calvinist father of American Christian Reconstructionism - but I happen to know at least one secular homeschooler (Hi Jenn!)  so it has to be at least hypothetically possible that not everything connected to homeschooling would have to be drenched in the blood of Jesus.

Yikes! Website banner for Homeschooling Books.com
Education in the shadow of the cross? That is just creepy.

This morning, I decided to idly surf the web to see what resources would be out there for a parent seeking curricula, textbooks and supporting materials in order to provide a good, non-religious homeschooling experience for her children.  I found a secular homeschooling website!  The Secular Homeschool Community homepage lists forums, blogs, groups and resources tabs for homeschooling parents who wish to provide their children with an excellent, broad-ranging, thorough education that is not based upon religious dogma.  Excellent!

Perusing the google search page again, I typed in homeschool textbooks to see how easy it might be to find books and materials to support a homeschooling curriculum as suggested on the website.  At the top of the search results was Homeschooling Books. I clicked on it only to discover that it was obviously geared toward the Christian homeschooling community in spite of its deceptively bland website name and description.

The next site I opened, sporting an equally bland name (Homeschool Supercenter!) looked much more promising.  Their textbook menu included specifically Christian resources and texts, of course, since the majority of homeschooling families are homeschooling for explicitly religious reasons. But at the top of the menu - even before the undoubtedly more popular Christian resources - were several categories of secular textbooks!

Feeling delighted that the second most referred site on the google search for homeschool textbooks offered resources for secular homeschooling, I clicked on the secular science tab and voilà!  A little intermediary page of full curricula packages popped up. On it, not one real science package was featured, but prominently displayed on the top line was "Apologia", a creationist vomitus of Biblical mythology and anti-education, wrapped up in a fancy package with a SCIENCE label slapped on it.

I have news for the Homeschool Supercenter:  creationism is not science. Calling it science does not make it science. Slapping on a SCIENCE label not only will not make that creationist dreck science, but it is false advertising as well.

8th edition of a creationist textbook

Further perusal of that site unearthed what looked to be some actual science resources, but after the bait and switch in the first layers of link clicking before finding the real science buried under the stealth religion, I am not sure it would be wise to purchase them.  I think a secular homeschooler would need to research every text she is considering for her children.

It must be interesting - not to mention a constant training ground for investigative skills - for secular homeschoolers to avoid the traps that appear to have been laid for them by the Christian homeschool movement. Presenting religious mythology in sciency-looking packages and hiding religious dogma in sciency-sounding language in textbooks and materials is the sneaky tactic used by the religious right to trick people into buying that garbage. If they are really lucky, they hope that people will buy into the nonsense, too, thus fulfilling the greater goal of the religious education strategy, which is to deny children a full education - especially denying them an understanding of the scientific method, free thought and skeptical critical thinking skills - thus keeping them ignorant, fearful followers of the teachings of their church.

Parents are free, of course, to deny their children a full education. In fact, it appears that millions have decided to do just that. Encouraged by anecdotal data which point to superior performance of homeschoolers compared to public school educated children, many homeschool parents are rightly proud of what their children  - and they - are able to achieve. But those "statistics"* hide the complete story. Standardized tests can only test what children can regurgitate under less than ideal conditions, not how well-devloped their critical thinking skills have become. There is no way to know whether they have been taught to simply memorize actual scientific theories (which they are told are lies) for testing purposes, while being taught that religious mythology is the actual truth which they must believe or face eternal damnation.

Christian homeschooling websites often post
 optimistic - and totally fabricated - charts like this.

Homeschooling parents who use religious texts for science and history education deny their children access to reality. Worse, like the sciency-sounding but educationally bankrupt creationist textbooks and materials with which homeschoolers dazzle each other and obfuscate reality, the Christian home-schooled child evinces an educated-sounding pseudo-intellectualism which masks a chasm of ignorance so deep the child may literally never be able to climb out of it.

The Christian homeschooling movement continues to grow. According to hopeful Christian homeschooling websites (quickly google** "homeschooling statistics" or similar), it will continue to grow a lot.  I wonder if secular homeschooling is likewise growing?  I am going to keep my eye on this topic because it is related to some other things I am working on about education and the power of the religious right.

Meanwhile, however, I will just keep dreaming!


*My own informal search on the internet for a source of this type of "statistic" report outside the homeschool community turned up zilch. All of the charts and diagrams showing homeschooling superiority that filled pages of goggle** search results came from homeschooling websites and blogs.
** I accidentally typed "goggle" instead of "google", but really, I did sort of goggle at it, too.

Thank Gods It's FreyaDay!

Good morning, Humans.

It is the last Friday in April. There was frost outside this morning.

I do not like to be cold. I do not like frost in April.

I will lie up here on top of the fridge where it is warm. I will stay here until springtime if I must.

It is the last Friday in April and it was frosty this morning!

Thank gods it's FreyaDay!

Thorsday Tonic - The Burden of Proof

(via Friendly Atheist) QualiaSoup on The Burden of Proof.

Just after I finished up my post about the conviction, without evidence, of Catherine Snow in 1834, Hemant Mehta posted this excellent video about a related topic on his blog.  Good timing!

If you've ever found yourself in a frustrating and seemingly pointless debate with a determined theist, here is a video which will explain to you what is happening, and hopefully help you to see how you can approach the theist in a way that might get hir to understand why hir "debating" methods are not honest.

Of course, it also explains why most theists are so resistant to understanding anything of the sort, but at least you will know!

(My only complaint about this superb video - what is up with the one-eyed characters?)

A Valuable Lesson Learned

Well, folks, I just spent the better part of this day working on tonight's Barmy Bible Study - hours of work
- and somehow, some way, the post has disappeared.  I was just finishing it up - moving a photo from one spot to another and clicked "remove" to remove the duplicate photo and    !    the entire post vanished!

Let that be a lesson to me:  I must learn to compose posts offline and transfer over somehow.  This is something I really hate to have to do because the post never migrates over properly, and in the end you have to fuss with it exactly as I just did now - which means I could still lose it.  Except, possibly I would have a back-up copy, I guess.

Just posting to complain because this seriously stinks.