Parent Extremis

It’s that time of year again kids … time to put away the flip-flops and swimsuits and breakfast at 10am while watching Noggin, time to starting going to bed ON TIME and start using those new binders with the questionable factory-plastic smell. Parents: Can you hear that tune in the distance, it sounds to me like …CELEBRATE GOOD TIMES, COME ON!.

Yeah folks, it’s back to school time!

I bet you didn’t know that you can be creative and make a lot of your school supplies, or at the very least, spruce up that bland notebook with something as simple as MASKING TAPE. Readers Digest just recently published an article about the many creative uses of masking tape! We’re not talking about just labeling folders here, you can fix a broken umbrella and design a road for Matchbox cars all using this wonder tape.

You can get creative, resourceful and organized with a few tips and products like aluminum foil and an old milk-crate or cardboard box.

Did you know that you can use aluminum foil in place of a brillo pad to scrub a soiled pot? Uncrumpled you can lay a sheet of it flat on the bottom of the oven to keep drippings from baking on to the oven.

You can use old return address labels for all those pesky school supplies that are always getting lost. A missing pencil bag might just find its way back home with an address label affixed to its side.

Click here to read the entire article on Homemade School Supplies and learn some great tips for labeling, organizing and using everyday household items in new ways.

The orphanage was a great innovation in the Roman Empire, considering that the alternative for children was death by exposure (a sort of non-invasive alternative to abortion). Christians used to gather up abandoned children and raise them.

Institutions are efficient for children who don’t have parents, but hey, your children do have them. So the author of Mommy Life points out that you don’t need to homeschool little boys the way they’re taught in public school. Public schools work better when little boys behave like little girls. But little boys act like little boys because they have hormones that you don’t want to eliminate. Trust me. Testosterone is useful in the life of a man.

Instead (writing from her Montessori background), she says, “The most important things the young child needs to learn are the ability to concentrate, to exercise independence in a constructive way, to keep order in the environment, to know the difference between right and wrong, to develop self-control and to serve others.”

That’s what I’m emphasizing with my son. He doesn’t need to learn to sit still yet. He’s learning to concentrate for longer periods of time. He’s learning how to express his disagreement with his parents in a respectful way. And he’s learning self-control.

Dominion Family has an intriguing thought about a common institutional educational tactic: “That is preparing the child for more education rather than gifting them with a lifelong love of poetic knowledge.”

Principled Discovery quotes a Palm Beach writer who says homeschooling is “a safety net for the intolerant,” and replies, “The public school has its own worldview and it is not neutral.”

As a former substitute teacher who has taught every grade, and a former public school student (every grade but 7th and 8th), I can concur. The purpose of public school is to make sure as many children as possible will grow up thinking alike.

The problem with the mind-molding powers-that-are is that they don’t know, or won’t admit, that they are not neutral. Increasingly, they do admit it. They admit that they run schools and become teachers because they want to mold the minds of children.

But I don’t think there are any documented studies that show that spending billions of dollars to incarcerate millions of children in front of brown desks has made our country a better place. Education is great. Parents who don’t want to teach their own children should feel free to let someone else teach them instead. But I’m not.

Homeschooling, at least without an approved academic institution such as the Calvert School to watch your back, hasn’t been popular for long. It hasn’t even been safe for long. I know people who were threatened with fines and imprisonment for trying it. Fortunately, in many states, there is little danger in homeschooling. I think.

Dr. Raymond Moore, who died on July 13, 2007, was a pioneer in homeschooling. Contradicting the prevailing wave of early childhood education and ever-earlier childhood education, Dr. Moore argued that children should begin formal studies when they’re ready for it.

I remember that every fall in public school, the teacher would have to spend what seemed liked months reviewing what we had learned the year before. I think I learned long division about four times.

Dr. Moore taught that when children are ready to learn, they will progress faster. Maybe one child isn’t ready to read until her or she is eight. So, that homeschooled eight-year-old might read at the level of a public-schooled six-year-old (though maybe not). But that homeschooled ten-year-old would probably read at the level of a public-schooled ten-year-old (or better).

One of the goals for our revision of the intelligence test, I believe, was to get more accurate results for people on the ends of the spectrum; people with very good brains and very bad brains. So the researchers were particularly interested in results from tests given to mentally retarded people, people with closed head injuries, and highly educated people.

The discussion question about government was one of the most interesting. I can’t tell you the question, of course (or you could boost your IQ scores and I could get in trouble), but it basically asks, “Why does the government do a certain thing?

Why the government does what it does, and what right it has to do it and what does it have the right to do, is a topic of vigorous debate. Those with closed head injuries sometimes couldn’t answer the question at all.

But what answers did we get from those considered most intelligent? “Why does the government do a certain thing?” Several former college professors responded, in effect “Beats me.”

“Beats me” wasn’t on our list of approved answers. At least one retired professor followed it with “But I know I’m supposed to say..” and got a perfect score on the question. From his extensive academic background, he knew how to answer stupid questions. Another former professor apparently thought the question was so stupid he didn’t even bother elaborating on “Beats me”.

I guess when you’re retired, you have certain prerogatives. But it seems strange that one of the most intelligent answers to the question got no points at all.

Several years ago I helped to develop a new version of a leading intelligence test. Together with other underemployed college graduates, I worked second shift in a warehouse of test materials, scoring the verbal part of the test on old computer monitors on tables. The goal was to prove that the new edition could test intelligence as accurately as the the previous edition. This assumes that the previous edition tested intelligence accurately.

A short psychologist in her late thirties was in charge of our project. She had previously administered the test in prisons and other institutions, but now that she had seen what was behind it, she couldn’t do that ever again. She told us that she had tried to become an electrician, but the union told her she was too old.

People criticize schools for teaching to the test, for giving lessons that would result in higher scores on certain material, without necessarily teaching other material any better.

But it’s possible to teach to the test on intelligence tests. The only reason it isn’t done is that those who know what the questions are, people like me, sign a non-disclosure agreement. We can’t tell you what’s on the test. But if I wrote a book that talked about a particular kind of criminal, a particular non-Christian leader, a particular obscure proverb, and a particular view of government, I could advertise it as guaranteed to help you score higher on intelligence tests.

Amish people wouldn’t do very well on the verbal part of the test. They wouldn’t want their children to study some of the required topics, and they wouldn’t agree with some of the required answers.

More tomorrow.

Parents often wistfully wish they could raise their children differently, spend more time with them, teach them themselves, protect them from pervasive influences. Their wistfulness implies it’s good, but it isn’t possible for them.

Well, is it good for their children to continue the way they’re going? Or just convenient for them? If what we’re doing is not good for our children, why don’t we make the necessary sacrifices to change what we’re doing?

Sure, society is against us, everybody does it this way, and hardly anybody does it the way we wish we could do it. No, I can’t change society, at least not right now, but I can change my family life. I can’t change what’s on television, but I can change the channel. I can unplug the television.

Maybe you’d like to give birth in a non-institutional setting, but your company insurance doesn’t cover midwives. Believe me, from personal experience, the difference is worth it. Under most circumstances, it’s safer and maybe it’s even better for your baby’s development to stay out of the hospital nursery. Why choose an unnatural, second-class experience for your child just because it’s not approved by your authorities?

People say that it’s too hard. It’s too different. Well, getting rid of a malignant tumor is hard too, harder than learning to live with it. But if to live, or to live more abundantly, I might have to do hard things.

Finances come into play in all of this, of course. Parents have to raise their children like other people do because they can’t afford to do it differently. They can’t afford to leave their job and work from home, with their children. They can’t afford to move out of their neighborhood or out of the city. But consider our children, maybe we can’t afford not to.

I’m a former substitute teacher. So, though my view of public schools is limited, I have seen public schools. Teaching is supposed to be the main goal in schools and other institutionalized settings for children, but I’m not sure it really is. I suspect command and control is.

Now, in the classroom of a skilled teacher who is good at command and control, you don’t always see that. Skilled teachers (skilled in running an institution) can focus more of their attention on teaching because they’ve already established control. But control is the main requirement to run a classroom, not education.

If you really wanted to teach a child about the real world, why would you keep them in a classroom, away from the real world? Kids don’t like to be cooped up. Because if you let them out, you couldn’t control them as effectively.

Children can start to learn really, really early. Studies indicate that they can learn before birth.

Because memorizing was hard for us in school, parents often think they need to protect our children from it. The reason why it was hard was only that we didn’t start early enough. Sure, foreign languages, for example, are a burden for many high school and middle school students. That’s because children aren’t supposed to learn languages in high school and middle school. They’re supposed to learn them before they start school. If they do, they may speak without an accent. It’s not compassion to wait until they’re older to begin helping them to memorize.

Small children love to imitate and repeat words. But it’s a pity that the words they repeat are “Simple Simon” and “Old Mother Hubbard,” instead of words that could help them throughout their lives. Tiny children can learn the letters of the alphabet, or the books of the Bible, even before they know what they are saying.