Dana Goldstein
writes:
Over the past year, there has been a resurgence of interest in homeschooling—not just the religious fundamentalist variety practiced by Michele Bachman and Rick Santorum, but also in secular, liberal homeschooling like Taylor’s. Think no textbooks, history lessons about progressive social movements, and college-level math for precocious 13-year-olds. Some families implement this vision on their own, while others join cooperatives of like-minded, super-involved parents.
Homeschooling is so unevenly regulated from state to state that it is impossible to know exactly how many homeschoolers there are. Estimates range from about 1 million to 2 million children, and the number is growing. It is unclear how many homeschooling families are secular, but the political scientist Rob Reich has written that there is little doubt the homeschooling population has diversified in recent years.* Yet whether liberal or conservative, “[o]ne article of faith unites all homeschoolers: that homeschooling should be unregulated,” Reich writes. “Homeschoolers of all stripes believe that they alone should decide how their children are educated.”
Could such a go-it-alone ideology ever be truly progressive—by which I mean, does homeschooling serve the interests not just of those who are doing it, but of society as a whole? [...]
This overheated hostility toward public schools runs throughout the new literature on liberal homeschooling, and reveals what is so fundamentally illiberal about the trend: It is rooted in distrust of the public sphere, in class privilege, and in the dated presumption that children hail from two-parent families, in which at least one parent can afford (and wants) to take significant time away from paid work in order to manage a process—education—that most parents entrust to the community at-large.
Take, for instance, Sonia Songha’s New York Times account of forming a preschool cooperative with six other brownstone-Brooklyn mothers, all of whom “said our children had basically never left our sides.” [...]
Of course, no one wants to sacrifice his own child’s education in order to better serve someone else’s kid. But here’s the great thing about attending racially and socioeconomically integrated schools: It helps children become better grown-ups. Research by Columbia University sociologist Amy Stuart Wells found that adult graduates of integrated high schools shared a commitment to diversity, to understanding and bridging cultural differences, and to appreciating “the humanness of individuals across racial lines.”
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2007:
"A Divided House Denounces Plan for More Troops"
That would be The New York Times editorializing in its news story about yesterday's House vote on the Iraq escalation. It gets even more ridiculous in the lede:
A sharply divided House of Representatives passed a resolution on Friday formally repudiating President Bush’s decision to send more than 20,000 new combat troops to Iraq.
Never mind that there were 17 Republicans voting against their own President and with the Democrats. On any other vote that would have been called "bipartisan." On October 11, 2002, 296 Members voted to authorize the President to go to war with Iraq, while 133 voted against, a vote generally described at the time as an overwhelming victory for the President. Does the 50 vote difference between those two votes make this House "sharply divided?"
Democrats are going to have to understand that this is the way they are going to be covered as long as all of this non-binding back and forth plays out.
Tweet of the Day:
Conservatives want less government for the same reason robbers want fewer cops. #p2 #gop #tcot
— @liberal_voice via Seesmic
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