Child Abuse?

 

Is it possible that the most common form of child abuse in America today consists of parents sending their children to school?

Not all schools, just 98% of them.

  • The curriculum of most schools is lousy.
  • The pedagogy at most schools is junk.
  • The institutional culture of most schools is unfortunate.  Administration is top-heavy, impersonal, and bureaucratic.
  • The social culture of most schools is lousy. Pop Cult, badly dressed, foul-mouthed.
  • The political culture of most schools is hard-core left-wing.
  • Families and their children attending government schools in particular will find themselves subject to much greater government tracking and regulation than non-affiliated families with children. Your child is much more likely to be arrested if he attends a government school and you are much more likely to have a child protective services case opened against you than if your child doesn’t attend government schools.
Published in Education
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  1. Stad Coolidge
    Stad
    @Stad

    DuncanFrissell: Is it possible that the most common form of child abuse in America today consists of parents sending their children to school?

    Former talk show host Neal Boortz made the claim parents who sent their children to “government-run” schools were commiting child abuse.  He’d give your post a “like” too!

    • #1
  2. JoelB Member
    JoelB
    @JoelB

    I appreciate the President’s reference to “failing government schools” in the SOTU. Another good on him from this home schooler’s point of view.

    • #2
  3. DonG (skeptic) Coolidge
    DonG (skeptic)
    @DonG

    Not child abuse.   There should be a national program to provide materials for patriotic parents to teach their kids the truth about American Exceptionalism. 

    • #3
  4. Ralphie Inactive
    Ralphie
    @Ralphie

    Such a heavy topic. If I was raising my children today, I would home school. Unfortunately, that was not an option, and the family I knew that tried it in my area, ended up moving.  

    There is so much wrong with education, and you have just listed the surface.  It is important to be an educated person, but what we are getting is credentialed people that sometimes are more ignorant coming out than when they went in.  Your children deserve better.

    I told my son a while ago, it makes no sense to worry about having a nice house, car, clothes for your child, and neglect their spiritual well being.  When times get tough, and they always do in a person’s life, your character and the lessons you learned as a child can be comforting and helpful in dealing with what is laid before you. When there is only one answer (government approved) to a problem, it is not educational.  When you do everything right according to current cultural and educational trends, and you still find yourself unfulfilled or disappointed, the problem just must be your own fault. And they wonder why children are depressed and the sucide rate is so high.

    • #4
  5. Seawriter Contributor
    Seawriter
    @Seawriter

    We homeschooled ours. Three engineers.

    • #5
  6. JoelB Member
    JoelB
    @JoelB

    DonG (skeptic) (View Comment):

    Not child abuse. There should be a national program to provide materials for patriotic parents to teach their kids the truth about American Exceptionalism.

    Do you mean a government program? I don’t think you do, but kinda sounds like it.

    • #6
  7. I Walton Member
    I Walton
    @IWalton

    Why should anyone be surprised?   It’s one of the few monopolies in the US.  It must be undone, but not with centralized improvement, tightening up curricula, better supervision or  charter schools here and there to show how to educate kids.   Monopolies, especially government monopolies  behave how it’s behaving. and always will.  Undo it.  All of it, everywhere as quickly as possible.  Give the money to parents and let them choose where their kids go to school.   Eliminate the supervisory bureaucracy.  It adds nothing positive.   Parents know who the good teachers are and so do the good teachers.  It will all sort out quickly.  A slow fix can’t work

    • #7
  8. Kephalithos Member
    Kephalithos
    @Kephalithos

    If you send your children to public school, there’s a 95 percent chance they’ll emerge either (a) corrupted or (b) curmudgeonly and embittered (like me). Homeschooling, done properly, seems to produce well-rounded and polite people who are generally pleasant to be around, and who lack the resentments that inevitably flow from being warehoused with a bunch of teenagers barbarians for eight hours each day.

    • #8
  9. Barfly Member
    Barfly
    @Barfly

    Disband the three evil E’s: Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Racket, and Department of Education.

    • #9
  10. DonG (skeptic) Coolidge
    DonG (skeptic)
    @DonG

    JoelB (View Comment):

    DonG (skeptic) (View Comment):

    Not child abuse. There should be a national program to provide materials for patriotic parents to teach their kids the truth about American Exceptionalism.

    Do you mean a government program? I don’t think you do, but kinda sounds like it.

    No!   Something put together by a non-profit group.  Maybe it exists and I don’t know about it.  I don’t know of any think tanks that create materials aimed at K-12.

    • #10
  11. Barfly Member
    Barfly
    @Barfly

    DuncanFrissell:

    • The curriculum of most schools is lousy.
    • The pedagogy most schools is junk.

    And that was before Common Core. Now the curriculum is intentional nonsense and the pedagogy is explicitly designed to do harm.

    • #11
  12. Henry Castaigne Member
    Henry Castaigne
    @HenryCastaigne

    I recall school being nihilistic. In fact I wrote a whole essay about it. The problem as I can recall is that there was no inspiration for either beauty or virtue, just utterly meaningless affectations to be cool. 

    In junior high, you were permitted to be interested in sports and certain kinds of music, but that was pretty much it. Being interested in books, or philosophy, or history, meant that something was malformed within you.

    I remember in a computer class when we were making a website, about half the students couldn’t think of anything to write about.

    Student: What should I write about?

    Teacher: Write about what interests you or write about yourself.

    Student: (utterly blank face)

    I also recall a new teacher in his science class. He believed in figuring out what kids were interested in and then focusing the class on that. The poor guy had to learn that the kids weren’t interested in anything. It was a dull existence where the only things of interest were things immediately affecting yourself.

    Gratitude and interest were hated in and of themselves. Believing in anything good or noble was for suckers. The ideal that everyone strived for was to be a cynical jerk that resented the world.

    • #12
  13. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    DonG (skeptic) (View Comment):
    Maybe it exists and I don’t know about it.

    I would bet it does.

    • #13
  14. Dave of Barsham Member
    Dave of Barsham
    @LesserSonofBarsham

    My wife and I adopted three kids at one time last year, even in a fairly deep red State we found a local private, small, Christian school to put them into for this very reason. A few days before the school year there was an assembly at the school for kids to see their classes and meet their classmates. A speech by the head of the school included (paraphrased, it’s been a few months), “Culture today is not interested in educating your children but rather in influencing them. Here we will teach them, leaving as much influence to you as possible.” Granted there is Christian influence in abundance, but more in a classical sense than anything else. I’ll sell a kidney to keep them in there if I have to. 

    • #14
  15. C. U. Douglas Coolidge
    C. U. Douglas
    @CUDouglas

    Yeah. Easy to say when you have options. We’re tight on funds, and there’s a few options for us. Also there’s heavy competition for said options. We’re trying to avoid the public school our kids are assigned (being like 548th out of 567 schools in the state), but we may not get what we want for our kids.

    • #15
  16. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    C. U. Douglas (View Comment):

    Yeah. Easy to say when you have options. We’re tight on funds, and there’s a few options for us. Also there’s heavy competition for said options. We’re trying to avoid the public school our kids are assigned (being like 548th out of 567 schools in the state), but we may not get what we want for our kids.

    Reality bites.

    • #16
  17. C. U. Douglas Coolidge
    C. U. Douglas
    @CUDouglas

    Arahant (View Comment):

    C. U. Douglas (View Comment):

    Yeah. Easy to say when you have options. We’re tight on funds, and there’s a few options for us. Also there’s heavy competition for said options. We’re trying to avoid the public school our kids are assigned (being like 548th out of 567 schools in the state), but we may not get what we want for our kids.

    Reality bites.

    Bites hard.

    • #17
  18. Bishop Wash Member
    Bishop Wash
    @BishopWash

    JoelB (View Comment):

    I appreciate the President’s reference to “failing government schools” in the SOTU. Another good on him from this home schooler’s point of view.

     I noticed that phrase as well. I wondered if Trump was a Neal Boortz fan, as Neal always called them government schools.

    • #18
  19. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    Bishop Wash (View Comment):

    JoelB (View Comment):

    I appreciate the President’s reference to “failing government schools” in the SOTU. Another good on him from this home schooler’s point of view.

    I noticed that phrase as well. I wondered if Trump was a Neal Boortz fan, as Neal always called them government schools.

    It is what they are.

    • #19
  20. Fake John/Jane Galt Coolidge
    Fake John/Jane Galt
    @FakeJohnJaneGalt

    Just having children at all in this dark, divisive, corrupt, doomed, time is in itself a form of child abuse.  Public school is just one aspect of it.

    • #20
  21. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    Fake John/Jane Galt (View Comment):

    Just having children at all in this dark, divisive, corrupt, doomed, time is in itself a form of child abuse. Public school is just one aspect of it.

    Always just a ray of [expletive] sunshine.

    • #21
  22. Seawriter Contributor
    Seawriter
    @Seawriter
    • #22
  23. Ontheleftcoast Inactive
    Ontheleftcoast
    @Ontheleftcoast

     

    After making her finger into the shape of a gun, Margo was sent to the principal’s office where it was determined no one was in harm’s way.

    “My daughter got frustrated and pointed her finger at her teacher and said, ‘I shoot you,’” Gaines said.

    “At that point, they went to the principal’s office and it was quickly assessed that she didn’t even really know what she was saying.”

    Despite knowing no one was truly threatened, Margo’s actions were labelled as a transient threat and the police were called—for a 6-year-old girl with Down syndrome.

    They were asking her questions, and she was saying, ‘Oh, I shoot mommy,’ laughs, or, ‘I shoot my brother.’ The principal asked, ‘Did you mean to hurt your teacher?’ And she said no and it seemed like she didn’t even know what that meant,” Gaines stated.

    And now, the local police have it on record that a six year old girl with Down syndrome made a deadly threat.

    • #23
  24. Spin Inactive
    Spin
    @Spin

    I’ll take the dissenting view.  

    First:  No.  It isn’t child abuse.  Child abuse is an actual thing.  Defining it down to “doing something that I disagree with” makes light of the actual trauma that kids go through.  

    Second:  Yeah, a lot of schools have real problems.  But you are ultimately responsible for your kids.  You need to be involved in their lives.  Which doesn’t just mean taking them to baseball and soccer and attending the school play.  It means paying attention to their grades, knowing their teachers, talking to them about school and what’s going on.  It means know their friends.  It means going and sitting down with your kids teachers or calling them and discussing issue when things become a problem.  

    Third:  the world is coming after your kids.  And it always has.  At a very base level, mother nature brings live in to existence and then immediately tries to snuff it out.  On a spiritual level, the evil one sneaks and prowls looking for lives to ensnare and destroy.  He has always done so.  And from just a general societal perspective, our kids are always going to run in to people that try to influence them to live a live we maybe don’t approve of.  It is our job, and only our job, to protect our kids and prepare them to deal with all of that.  

     

    • #24
  25. Stina Member
    Stina
    @CM

    I am a huge proponent of homeschooling… but I don’t homeschool.

    I agree that public schooling is awful. But I do not homeschool.

    If my husband was abusing my kids, I’d divorce him.

    Question: should I divorce my husband because he doesn’t want me homeschooling?

    No? Then it isn’t child abuse.

    • #25
  26. I Walton Member
    I Walton
    @IWalton

    Take a look at New Zealand.  They had to leave the Commonwealth when England joined the EC.  The Socialist New Zealand government  attacked the US to buy off their left, which was totally Soviet leaning, then abolished the educational bureaucracy, all of it; turned schools over to teachers and parents and let parents choose any school in the country.  They went up over night to just below Singapore.  Parents and teachers know what works but both have to be independent of unions, which occurs if they have to compete for kids.  Markets work.  A lot of folks who should never have been teachers lost their jobs.  It isn’t science.  It’s called markets.   They work.  Non markets don’t, and it doesn’t matter who organizes the non market approach.   States have to do the same.  No Federal money, no federal supervision or control, no state control or supervision.  It’s called a market.  They work as long as nobody thinks they know better and can organize matters.  They can’t.

    • #26
  27. Spin Inactive
    Spin
    @Spin

    Stina (View Comment):

    I am a huge proponent of homeschooling… but I don’t homeschool.

    I agree that public schooling is awful. But I do not homeschool.

    If my husband was abusing my kids, I’d divorce him.

    Question: should I divorce my husband because he doesn’t want me homeschooling?

    No? Then it isn’t child abuse.

    Someone once tried to tell me it was child abuse to teach a kid to believe in God.  

    • #27
  28. Spin Inactive
    Spin
    @Spin

    Stina (View Comment):
    If my husband was abusing my kids, I’d divorce him.

    Hopefully that’s not all you’d do to him.  

    • #28
  29. Western Chauvinist Member
    Western Chauvinist
    @WesternChauvinist

    Support Hillsdale and the Barney Charter Initiative:

    https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/four-pillars-educating-america/

     

    • #29
  30. Brian Clendinen Inactive
    Brian Clendinen
    @BrianClendinen

    Its not that bad. More like 91%. One homeschooled pop idol star who just dominated the grammies. Said ‘parents are f**** lazy that is why they send send their kids to school’. You get what you pay for, when you go the free child care option.

    • #30
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