“Our devil has pale skin and blue eyes…”

“We remain a hunted people. Now you think you have a destiny to fulfill in the land that historically has been ours for forty thousand years. And we’re a new Mestizo nation.”

“We have got to eliminate the gringo, and what I mean by that is if the worst comes to the worst, we have got to kill him.”

-- Jose Angel Gutierrez, founder of La Raza

Public schools are the backbone of the American republic that have by and large worked fairly well. Homeschooling at best is a small niche in the world of education - mostly good for literate families in rural/remote areas. To think otherwise is ridiculous.

Public schools are the backbone of the American republic that have by and large worked fairly well.

Bullshit.  Public schools were thrust upon an unwilling public by ruling elite that lied about the true nature of the schools. Ms. Lyman has only scratched the surface.  Read what John Taylor Gatto has to say about the true nature of public schooling.  It was never designed to help poor kids get ahead in the world.  It was designed to subjugate the masses to the ruling elite, to give to the elite their money, their support, and to never question anything beyond what the state has prescribed.  It is indeed based on the Prussian model of schooling, and look what that model gave the world: two horrific world wars.

If by stating that public schools have “by an large worked fairly well,” you mean Columbine, rising illiteracy, the inability to think for oneself, massive amounts of tax money, the preposterous notion that public school teachers are “experts” in their chosen fields, or any other obvious end-results of modern schooling, then I suppose all that walking in Paris hasn’t done you an ounce of good.

Tell me, if public education is so bad then why is the US university system considered the best in the world ? Where would this country be if it didn’t have the likes of the University of California and it’s ability to give a superior quality education to the American middle class ? Other nations are catching up to us - not because they are homeschooling their kids, but because they understand the value of education and open up their pocketbooks. Conservatives have a choice, knownothingism or the 21st century.

Wake up LongWalk!  The public school system, in most cases,
is a cesspool of elitist one-worlders, political correctness and anti-
Christian propoganda.  The literacy rate in the country
was higher before mandatory public education. 
As for way foreigners coming here, they use their very good
secondary education to come to the US and do well in our
colleges, especially when they are compared to public
school graduates.  Frankly, our ‘rulers’ use college to
hid or delay unemployment for the young.  Because they have
destroyed most of the jobs and industries that used to
provide good jobs for those who did not attend college.
It also helps to bring in people whose expectation of a
good paying job is considerably less than most Americans.
Indian IT engineers think 35K a year is great.

Conservatives have a choice, knownothingism or the 21st century.

What is this statement based on?  And what is the previous contention that the US’s university system is the “best in the world” based on?  Just prior to World War I, Prussia had achieved 100% literacy.  What was it good for, other than to indoctrinate young Prussian men in the glories of dying for the state?  What is the point of being 100% literate, or even functionally literate, if you are dead, or soon will be?  Do you honestly think these two events are separate?

Lovers of liberty do indeed have a choice, whether they call themselves “conservatives” or not.  Bigger, more intrusive government, or opting out of the system.

And the “best” universities “in the world” are recruiting home-schooled children at a higher rate than public-schooled children.  You really, really need to read John Taylor Gatto.

Thanks for the history lesson… didn’t know that public education was the cause of Prussian militarism. I always thought it was the socialist pension system that Bismarck introduced for the working class. Three cheers for being stupid, poor, and free.

A very hot topic that needs lengthy discussion.
Pulic education should not go beyond reading,
writing and basic arithmetic. Anything beyond that
should be considered child abuse.
Get this through your heads, today’s public officials
HATE our children.
God protect them!

Now for your history lesson… google top 500 world universities and go to the sight by that name. Did you notice that 50 of the first 100 are in the US ? As for homeschoolers I’ve met some pretty smart ones and some stupid ones. The critical factor being the effort their families put into it.

Uh, excuse me longstalksinparis,
but we were discussing “compulsory public”
education.

Long walks, did *you* attend public schools?

I graduated two years ago, and I can attest to the incompetence of teachers and the propaganda that we were exposed to.

Higher education including the UC system may be better off, but the lower levels are most definitely inferior.

The respect that was inculcated for the Prussian State
was less due to any indoctrination in the school than
by the fact that such State was seen to be doing a good
job.

A State where the grandchildren of those who had gone
hungry and were no shoes in thier childhood had achieved
middle class status and could hope for better prospects
for their children was a State that could claim the
allegiance of the governed.

It was not so much what was taught in schools as the fct
that there were schools for the children of illiterate
parents that earned the gratitude of the German people.

As for World War I, the British and the Americans have
their share of blame for it. As for World War II, it
would not have come to pass if they had not insisted in
getting rid of the Kaiser and trying the wonderful
experiment of liberal democracy. 

Blame Wilson, not Bismarck for that mess.

I had 12 years of compulsory Catholic schooling, but noticed little difference education wise between friends that went to public school and those that didn’t. Now that was 35 yr ago. As for the kids I know today, they tend to be a little more intellectually lazy. I blame this more on materialism and the fast-fast culture than on them or the schools. In fact the public and private schools where I live are quite good.

“Blame Wilson, not Bismarck for that mess.”

England turned a regional war into a European war… Wilson turned a European war into a world war… without Germany’s defeat Hitler would have never rose to power… blowback is a bitch indeed

You all need to read John Taylor Gatto, NY State Public School Teacher of the Year, and NYC Public School Teacher of the Year.  The information at this man’s fingertips is virtually indisputable.  He quotes Helen Todd:

In 1909 a factory inspector did an informal survey of 500 working children in 20 factories. She found that 412 of them would rather work in the terrible conditions of the factories than return to school.

He quotes David Tyack:

In one experiment in Milwaukee, for example, 8,000 youth… were asked if they would return full-time to school if they were paid about the same wages as they earned at work; only 16 said they would.

Public school separates children into specific age groups, grading and categorizing them at early ages—unnatural.

Public school separates children from the outside world, especially the natural world, for long periods of time—unnatural.

Public school separates children from the surrounding community—unnatural.

Public school separates children from their parents—unnatural.

Public school conditions children to respond to bells, certification for all work, permission to use the toilet, grading systems, and whatever orders they are given—unnatural.

Public school fails to recognize the critical role played by religion throughout human history.

Public school ensures that children will fail to learn numerous trades that might be useful later in life.

Children are guaranteed to be exposed, if not the victims themselves, to bullying, intimidation, unquestioning conformity, violence, sexual situations, boredom, rigidity of schedules, cliques, isolation, persecution, and any other number of maladjustments brought into the closed world of public schools by groups of their immediate peers.

The whole institution needs to be scrapped.

As far as Germans being grateful for forced public schooling in Prussia, Gatto also points out that immigrants in NYC rioted when their children were first forced to go to public school, because they remembered what public schooling in the “old country” meant.

Finally, Gatto points out that when Last of the Mohicans was first published in 1826, it was a best-seller.  Remember that this was a time when most people lived in small towns and on small farms, doing all their own work.  There were no suburbs, little industry compared to today, no Cliff Notes, no dumbed-down TV of movie versions, few universities and few public schools.  The few schools that did exist were one-room schoolhouses run mostly by the parents.  Gatto is tireless in pointing out that the public school system is designed to dumb down the children who attend.  They are succeeding.

The World’s Best Universities

1. Harvard University
2. Stanford University
3. Yale University
4. California Institute of Technology
5. University of California at Berkeley
6. University of Cambridge
7. Massachusetts Institute Technology
8. Oxford University
9. University of California at San Francisco
10. Columbia University
11. University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
12. University of California at Los Angeles
13. University of Pennsylvania
14. Duke University
15. Princeton Universitty
16. Tokyo University
17. Imperial College London
18. University of Toronto
19. Cornell University
20. University of Chicago
21. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich
22. University of Washington at Seattle
23. University of California at San Diego
24. Johns Hopkins University
25. University College London
26. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne
27. University Texas at Austin
28. University of Wisconsin at Madison
29. Kyoto University
30. University of Minnesota Twin Cities
31. University of British Columbia
32. University of Geneva
33. Washington University in St. Louis
34. London School of Economics
35. Northwestern University
36. National University of Singapore
37. University of Pittsburgh
38. Australian National University
39. New York University
40. Pennsylvania State University
41. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
42. McGill University
43. Ecole Polytechnique
44. University of Basel
45. University of Maryland
46. University of Zurich
47. University of Edinburgh
48. University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
49. University of Bristol
50. University of Sydney
51. University of Colorado at Boulder
52. Utrecht University
53. University of Melbourne
54. University of Southern California
55. University of Alberta
56. Brown University
57. Osaka University
58. University of Manchester
59. University of California at Santa Barbara
60. Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
61. Wageningen University
62. Michigan State University
63. University of Munich
64. University of New South Wales
65. Boston University
66. Vanderbilt University
67. University of Rochester
68. Tohoku University
69. University of Hong Kong
70. University of Sheffield
71. Nanyang Technological University
72. University of Vienna
73. Monash University
74. University of Nottingham
75. Carnegie Mellon University
76. Lund University
77. Texas A&M;University
78. University of Western Australia
79. Ecole Normale Super Paris
80. University of Virginia
81. Technical University of Munich
82. Hebrew University of Jerusalem
83. Leiden University
84. University of Waterloo
85. King’s College London
86. Purdue University
87. University of Birmingham
88. Uppsala University
89. University of Amsterdam
90. University of Heidelberg
91. University of Queensland
92. University of Leuven
93. Emory University
94. Nagoya University
95. Case Western Reserve University
96. Chinese University of Hong Kong
97. University of Newcastle
98. Innsbruck University
99. University of Massachusetts at Amherst
100. Sussex University

Hate to break it to you cupcake, but every industrialized country in the world uses public education.  Pretty good indication its the only viable way.  Your homeschooling fantasies do not scale (Protip:  only a minority in the US have the luxury of being able to homeschool).  There are many things wrong with the US school system, but being against public education in priciple is anti-flouridation level crankery.  Why did Takimag run this?

One thing the public schools do very well indeed is cut the better students down to size:
http://www.physorg.com/news63895622.html

Did I actually read correctly that longwalksinparis
wrote with a straight face that “...Hitler would never
have rose...”!?!  Any kid who tried to get
that one past Mrs. Howard in sixth grade at Glenfeliz
Blvd. Elementary in Los Angeles, ca. Ike’s first term,
would have experienced a traumatic shaking up in front
of his/her peers.  State-operated schools may have gone
downhill since then, but no more that society as a
whole.  So please let’s not allow ideology to derail
rational consideration of what is possible v. how
things actually work in a world gone to the damnation
bowwows, public and private.

Sure, children did not like going to school. But, later
on they saw that the good jobs went to those who knew
how to read and write, and a bit more besides. So once they
got into their heads that schooling was a means of
social ascent they made sure their children went.

And there was plenty of social mobility in Germany, too.
As much, or more as there was in France or England. the
more you applied yourself at school, the better your
prospects later on.

This is an article written with more passion than
discernement. I can understand the passion but it is
a fact that passion tends to go for simplistic explanation
and manichean constructs.

If the lady wants to affirm her right to school her
children herself, she should fight for it, but be
very careful of generalizing and demonizing her
opponents. There are objections to home schooling,
mainly that not all parents are equally conscientious
about what they teach their children, and that there
must be some control

(If I were to emulate the author’s passion I would point
out that many cases of sexual abuse come to light when
the victims talk to a school counselor. And imply by it
that parents who want to home school actually want to
sexually abuse their children without being accountable
to anyone. Ridiculos, of course, but that is the kind
of discourse that passion can bring).

Public schools are one of the two main transmission belts for indoctrinating each new generation in the values of secularism, liberalism, democracy, nationalism, feminism, immorality in general.  The other is the mass media, both news and entertainment, especially TV.  Home schooling is probably best for people who do not want their children indoctrinated in these values, although carefully selected private schools could also work.  Getting rid of TV or drastically restricting it is also a necessary component.

<<Sure, children did not like going to school. But, later on they saw that the good jobs went to those who knew how to read and write, and a bit more besides.>>

I see.  Teaching a child to read and write takes about twelve months at a couple of hours per day, tops.  Teaching a child formal grammar to complete mastery takes three or four years, tops.  Assuming a child with adequate intelligence, of course.

The real problem is, as your master of language Mark Twain put it, the knowing of so many things that ain’t so.  In other words, your “and a bit more besides” is where most of the trouble starts.

The debate begins with defining one’s objective.  The objective of public schooling is the elimination of religion and the homogenization of the citizens.  This programme is sold to unsuspecting parents by dishonestly pretending that the objective is to provide children with the capacity to live better lives. 

The objective of real education is to develop the character of the child in accord with the laws of nature and of divine revelation.  Home-schoolers generally home-school precisely because they become aware that there are no schools available which understand and pursue this true education of the child.

@Homeschooler

I was trying to give some historical background and inject
some sanity in the discussion.

You had posters saying that children do not like going
to school.  Which is about as useful as saying that
children do not like going to Church, because they have
to put on uncomfortable clothes and remain sitting quietly
while bored out of their minds.

You had posters complaining about the coercion that
schools imply, with children being taught to rise and
sit down on a given order, made to ask permission to
go to the bathroom, etc.  Now, do you want those kinds
of allies? Because this is the same situation that
children find themselves in religious schools (and nuns
quick on the trigger with the rulers to any who
misbehaved). Do you want allies who condemnt religious
schools together with public ones?

You wnat to debate, fine, but start by defining the
problem.

And also I would like an assurance that the contamination
that you fear is not mixing with people of different race

Here’s a great “Eyesore of the Month” from JH Kunstler:

http://www.kunstler.com/eyesore_200401.html

‘This typologically ambiguous building in Pflugerville, Texas (just north of Austin) is the K-through-6 medium security education facility.  It’s encouraging to know that the inmates were slated for “early release” this year. Ask yourself: what kind of citizens would an
institution like this produce? And where do they go from here?’

@Jaz

what is it your complaint?

That it is a public school, or that it is a school at
all?

Would you find it less objectionable if it was a Cahtolic
school run by nuns?

(Let it be known that they do an admirable job, even
if the children whose knuckles get rapped do not appreciate it).

Harvard, Stanford, and Yale are “better” than
Oxford? Has anyone bothered to ask “who” created
this list and what their agenda was prior to and
thereafter? I had the pleasure of attending
Catholic parochial schools; a Jesuit college prep
high school-- is there any other kind?—; a
local community college; a state university; and
good ole Oxford. I think this list was created by
an Ivy League asshole. End of comment.

Personal anecdote illustrative of the inflation of ALL kinds of education, both public and private, over the past century:
my upper-working class (equal to what today would be called upper-middle-class) great-grandfather went to school in Victorian England until only age 15 - that was more schooling than most commoners got back then - and from his letters and business pamphlets I can see he wrote better than 99 percent of today’s British or American holders of Doctorate degrees, of whom I am one.

In one of his business pamphlets in 1915, he wrote, “I apologise for any errors of grammar you might find in this booklet.  Boys (such as he) born and bred in the commercial trucking (ie, small farming) industry get little chance at Greek or Latin, but when it comes to improving your garden’s yield, I have a lifetime of experience.”

Wow, just think of it:  in 1915, he apologised for not knowing as much Greek or Latin as many of his customers did.
How far we have fallen since then.

His son left school at 18; his son in turn, my father had a BA; and I’m a Doctor of Law; yet my great-grandfather who left school at age 15 was equally as well educated as I, if not more so.  And he had better manners than I.

This is why my practice is never to address anyone other than a physician as “Doctor” - because if the ludicrous, mush-mouthed Condoleeza Rice PhD is a “Doctor”, then I don’t want to be her equal.  George Washington never went to university.  (I think neither did Wellington nor Nelson.) Let’s bring back the ways of old when the appellation, “Gentleman” was the highest one to which anyone could aspire.

It is amazing how when any major nerve of the anti-Western Christian Civilization left is touched, even cast in anything but a perpetually glowing light, that defenders of the decaying, perverted status quo belch forth from their ivory towers to lecture those of us who, like McCartney’s Fool on the Hill, refuse to pray before yet another false idol. In this case, as has been noted, the American public schools, which are the product primarily of anti-Catholic and largely unTrinitarian Yankee Protestants desiring a compulsory system to force the children of Catholic immigrants to assimilate and become typical Liberal Yankee WASPs in culture and then later of quintessential Yankee WASP become atheist John Dewey devising standards whereby that mandatory system would inculcate children into all forms of socialist and anti-Christ rot, are a primary, indispensable, vehicle for the maintaining the current morass.

One devotee here of the public schools has declared that opposing them is tantamount to opposing fluoride placed secretly in water. Before he/she/it makes another such stupid comment here, a through reading of this list, compiled by a professor of chemistry, to oppose fluoridated water might help: http://www.fluorideaction.org/50-reasons.htm

Another devotee asserts that because the US has, in some system, the best universities in the world, that is proof of the greatness of the public schools. The fact that the vast, vast, vast majority of graduates of public school would never come remotely close to a waiting list for any of those ‘elite’ American universities (without affirmative action; with affirmative action, even IQs of 90 can be deemed worthy of admission to, scholarship money for, and endless school supplied tutors from the Dukes and Vandys and Ivys of the world) is not mentioned. Beyond that mammoth sitting in the living room he has filled with his dung while the home owner sees nothing, there is the glaring problem of rating schools. In our era, PC standards are key to such ratings. The best teaching college in the world would be one that was incessantly anti-PC and focused on all the dead white men, which would get it eliminated from consideration.

To look at the problem from another angle, every one of those elite American universities on that list will have majors and courses in things that make Underwater Basket Weaving – the classic 1970s joke about how low American universities had sunk in academic standards as they rushed toward PC embrace of all things inferior as long as they aided in the culture war against Christendom - seem like sturdy stuff. Now, they have Composition courses for sodomites and mandated student fee payments into all kinds of groups advocating moral and cultural perversion as the Big Brother norm.

In terms of real education (say that which be understood as such by Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, etc.), there is not a single American university on that list worth its exorbitant tuition. Each is like the American public school system: filthy rich and spiritually, and increasingly intellectually, coprophagous.

But that is not my main point. My reason for writing is to state categorically that homeschooling will fail for one reason that should be as obvious as the wasted money perversions of the public school: it is by and large an activity of, by, and for women. Take a look at your local homeschool associations and the various classes and activities they sponsor. What you will see over and over is a Chick Club. Men are absent, and women want it that way. Feminized formal education has driven men away in droves, and so will feminized homeschooling. That the women now utterly feminizing homeschooling often proclaim a love of Jesus, they are (even ignoring the fact that most are wild-eyed heretics), as Paul Gottfried would find expected, nothing more than mild Liberal versions of the Hillary Clintons of America, and they are turning homeschooling into another bleeding-heart, and therefore culturally leftwing, pantywaist enterprise.

Remember, it was women becoming the dominant force in antebellum northern churches, and then replacing the school master with the schoolmarm, that both marked the liberal perversion of the entire culture and propelled that liberalism ever farther and faster. Declaring a love of Jesus then did not prevent those self-righteous bimbos from doing incalculable harm, and neither will the professed love of Jesus today prevent women from ruining homeschooling within a generation.

If you want homeschooling to work, you must get men involved, which will require men to stop wimping-out and instruct women to stand down, to be helpmates rather than usurping leaders (because women invariably lead toward various forms of socialistic thinking and interacting). It will require men to realize that for homeschooling to work most effectively, it must employ many aspects of the old paid tutorial system, hiring men, and a few women who are up to snuff, who have real degrees (not Education or Sociology or Women’s Studies or Missions at some PC-leaning Bible college) to teach small classes here and there.

@James Cantrell

If you are so against women teaching, then you must
also be opposed to Catholic schools. Or are nuns not
women?

Mr. Cantrell has an excellent point about the feminization of education - a point more and more acknowledged in society as a whole these days, although no one seems to be able to stop the advance of a process which is increasingly driving boys and young men out of any education system.  And while I certainly prefer the Catholic to the public school system, the complete dominance of women has been bad for the Catholic school system as well.  At least during the time when I received my secondary education there were many Catholic all boys schools with all male teaching staffs.  Such schools are very rare today within the Catholic school system and unheard of within the public school system.  The point is not whether or not women should be permitted to teach.  It is the dysfunctionality of a system almost completely dominated by female instructors where the males account for a lower and lower percentage of students above the age where schooling is compulsory and a higher and higher percentage of those medicated into submission below that age.

“the complete dominance of women has been bad for the Catholic school system as well”

That sounds about right.  I never went to Catholic schools - my parents kept me out of the Catholic schools because they didn’t want the crueler kinds of nuns to turn me off from Catholicism.  I’ve met many former Catholics whose hostility to the Church goes back to their parochial school experiences.

My Dad went to a parochial school in the 1930s, and he told me how when he showed up in his Boy Scout uniform, his nun-teacher called him a “Bolshevik”, and
continued to call him “John BALLLLLshevik!” Whatever the hell she meant by that.  I guess it was analogous to my being called a “neocon fellow traveler” by some commenters here.

Yep, those nuns were (and are tough). Now, back to a
little history lesson (which I got because I like to
read about the Irish).

Nuns were quite busy teaching Irish girls. Then the
parishes noticed that Irish girls and women as a rule
had more education than Irish boys and men. Also Irish
men tended to be unruly, and not good job prospects
(It was the time of NINA “No Irish need apply”, and
the behavior of the Irish themselve was part of the
reason).

So the put the boys in with the girls, and nuns were
instructed to tame the boys to the point that they coul
do what they were told by a person of authority, and thus
be able to hold down a job.

Perhaps if there had been more male teachers around there
would have been no need for it, but they did not seem
to want the job.

@John

curious what you say of your father’s experience. As to
the nun’s hostility towards the Boy Scouts I can only
imagine two things.

She must have been instructd that the founder of the
Boy Scouts was a freemason, and was striking a blow for
orthodoxy. There are people today who object to the
Boy Scouts for that reason, that if they go camping and
all that, they’ll end up in dark conspiracies to destroy
Holy Mother Church.

Or she might have been Irish. The Irish Republicans did
not like Boy Scouts very much, seeing in them the
embodiment of British Imperialism. That redoutable woman
Constance Gore-Booth, Countess Markiewitz founded the
Nationalistic equivalent of the Boy Scouts, the Fianna,
where the children were taught camping, woodland skills,
handling of firearms, and the glory of dying for Irelan.
She also taught them that when they saw a Boy Scout they
should beat him up and steal his uniform.

So, your father should count himself lucky that she
only called him a bolshevik (which, as Conor Cruise
O’Brien says, is only an euphemism for “bad Catholic").

I think Adriana illustrates quite well the purpose and problem with education systems in most of the world in general, whether public or Catholic.

“So the(y) put the boys in with the girls, and nuns were
instructed to tame the boys to the point that they coul(d)
do what they were told by a person of authority, and thus
be able to hold down a job.”

Indeed.  Make the boys docile like girls so they will do as they are told.  All this so they can get jobs within the system (whether the system is more capitalistic or more social democratic or for that matter more fascist) and spend the rest of their lives doing what they are told by their bosses.  Education for the masses of men has nothing to do with learning to think for yourself (that’s discouraged) or with an appreciation of the higher things of life.  It’s simply to make men a well oiled part of the machine of modernity. 

And unruliness is not so much a characteristic of Irish men as of men in general.  In the old days, this was beaten out of boys by the nun’s ruler.  This was virtually never used on girls, no matter how bratty.  But technology has advanced - the school marms now have ritalin, the feminist cure for little boys.

@Kirt

indeed, they had to make the boys more docile, mainly
because boys that did not became docile instead of
growing to be competent adults able to think for themselves
became unemployable members of the underclass with
all sorts of social pathologies. That was the sad
reality. Think black ghetto males with pale faces and an
Irish brogue (or Italian accent or whatever accent),
living it up in the hood.

There is no need to get sentimental about what the nuns
did to the boys, but at least they got started up the
social ladder, with the prospect of achieving
respectability.

Why do you think that black families that despair of
their sons get them into Catholic schools? So that
nuns can rap their knuckles and teach them to follow
directions.

@Kirt

There is a difference between a ruler applied to the
knuckles and Ritalin.  The problem is to make
naturally unruly boys develop self-control to the point
that they can sit still and pay attention. Self-control
is a virtue worthy of being acquired for its own
sake.  Ritalin masks the problem, and does not allow
the person to learn to control him/herself, but
instead teaches him/her that the soluiton to his/her
problems comes out of a bottle.

@ Adriana, “The Irish Republicans did
not like Boy Scouts very much, seeing in them the
embodiment of British Imperialism”

I never knew that, but it makes sense considering how Irish-American nationalists see virtually everything they consider disagreeable to be the embodiment of British Imperialism.  (Mr Foy, I’m looking at you.) It just gets so bloody boring after a while.

@John Ball

I can understand your distase of Irish nationalism, but
I find the history of the Republic of Ireland fascinating

Perhaps it is the fact of finding a place where, while
everyone else is debating Socialism vs. Capitalism, they
are debating whether violence is justified or not in
recovering Northern Ireland. And where you can find
history discussed without reference to Marx. Being
exposed to that can clear a lot of cobwebs from your
mind.

Then, there is something endearing of a place where an
observer can write “If the Irish Unitarians got angry,
they’d be a hundred times more dangerous than the
Communists, because they are a hundred times more
numerous”, which for an Alternative History buff raises
scenarios of a Unitarian World Revolution…

Adriana, my first inclination was to suspect that you were presenting another of your famous lesser of two evils choices - would you rather see your sons as docile feminized albeit productive drones of the brave new world or as gangstas.  Of course, we have both of these evils, thanks in large part to the feminized and feminist education system which so many in this blog have hastened to praise.

But on reconsideration it occurs to me that you don’t consider the first alternative to be evil at all.  You enjoy rapping the knuckles of those unruly little boys - vicariously if not actually.  I’ve noticed in other discussions how you are quick to brand as a closet Muslim or worse anyone who thinks female behavior needs some improvement.  But you have no problem with physically chastising little boys to make them more like little girls - you think that’s a great idea.  Neither pain conditioning nor drugging can be accurately described as SELF-control, but its easy to see why you prefer the former - it’s more fun for the female knuckle-rapper.

Mr. Cantrell has some excellent suggestions above for men to take control of the home schooling process.  I can only add that these should be carried out quietly and without ostentation as the feminist establishment will be quick to come down on any process designed to produce traditional gentlemen who are neither eunuchs nor gangstas.  It cannot be done within the existing school systems because men have been expelled or terrorized out of these systems by the threat of sexual abuse accusations at the lower levels or sexual harassment accusations at the higher levels.  The few who remain have thoroughly internalized the prevailing feminist values.

@Kirt

Check the historical background. Nuns were asked to take
over the education of boys because boys **were not being
educated at all**, with the result to be expected. It
was not a question of boys being taken out of a *growing
to be a gentleman* class to be put in charge of nasty
nuns. It was a question of boys growing up to be savages
being given some needed instruction on self-control.

As for knuckle rapping, I undestand that the *growing
up to be a gentleman* school involved paddling. So you
could say that the good sisters were kinder in that
they did not make the miscreants bend over so that
they could paddle their bottoms.

As for men not teaching, it has to do with the lower
pay of teachers, and the fact that women tended to
be paid less, and have less choice of professions. A
man had a lot more careers to choose from that paid
more, so they did not go into teaching. There was no
reason why those uneducated boys should not have been
taught by priests or other men, except that they were
not doing it.

So, when women step up the plate to do the job men should
have been doing you call that invasion.

You really must hate women, do you?

Adriana, I know the historical background from personal experience.  I went through Catholic schools from first grade elementary to getting my BA. This was before the complete takeover of the system by nuns and equally important before the adoption of feminist ideology by nuns first and then by terrorized pastors and bishops afraid to stand up to them.

Contrary to your assertion, most of the education of boys at junior high and high school level was done in sexually segrated classes and schools by priests, brothers, and laymen in those days.  But my kids also went through the system so I have had a chance to see how it has changed, along with the rest of society.

Teachers are paid far more today than they used to be paid, but fewer men are in the profession.  I personally know of some who dropped out of the profession after seeing colleagues’ lives ruined by just one unproven accusation of sexual molestation.

No I do not hate women, Adriana, and you should really get out of the habit of accusing anyone who disagrees with your rather liberal and modernist views of hating.  Feminism is as bad for women as for men, destroying their happiness by offering the empty idols of fame and fortune in a career while making sure that there are as few decent manly men as possible to marry.  Mostly feminism is bad for the human race as the collapse of birth rates and marriage rates world-wide testifies.

I think that Mr. Cantrell makes some excellent points but I was not
aware that homeschooling was the domain of women.  I was under the conception
that it varies from household to household.  I think that if the women
doing homeschooling are at least not pushing a feminist anti-religious
agenda then it is far preferable to public school, where that wil be
exaxtly the agenda.  That and the force feeding of American Imperialism
and myth building. 

@Kirt,

I find it very strange that the feminist movement has supposedly brought
about equality for women on one hand and on the other created a culture of
fear of sexual harrassment when men treat women as equals.  There have
indeed been a number of good people ruined by specious charges. Here I feel
as with the death penalty, what is the greater evil?  That one guilty person
escape punishment or one innocent man die? I would sugges the later as
society has judged, so now will it be judged.

Now somewaht off topic,

As a single father trying to bring up my son Catholic I wonder what the
state fears from me that I have to fight so hard to see him.  Is there
something I missed out on?  As much as feminism has fought for equality
how come I am treated as a criminal in the eyes of the courts simply
because I am a man?

Mr. Nucci, the feminists, like most groups who use the language of equality, have actually fought for dominance.  In the eyes of feminists and hence of feminized courts, being a man is equivalent to being a criminal.

@ Adriana, “I can understand your distase of Irish nationalism, but
I find the history of the Republic of Ireland fascinating”

So do I, and a big part of me would like to sympathise with it.  My paternal grandmother was Irish, and she married an English Catholic and so I’ve always felt ambivalent about, and among, Irish-Americans, many of whose greatest love seems to be hatred of the English.

A few years ago while I was a guest at a very old Roman Catholic rectory in Philadelphia - founded by Irish immigrants, among whom were some of my ancestors (I mean literally, some of my Irish ancestors were parishoners there) -
during one lunch someone mentioned the horrible conditions of today’s Burma (aka Myanmar), after the same person had been spewing all kinds of anti-British nonsense, and I said sarcastically, “well, at least Burma is NO LONGER RULED BY THE BRITISH!  So that’s progress, yeah?” And the other Irish-American replied, “YES, you’re right!”

Ugh…

@John

Yep. About your dinner partner, Brendan Behan had it
right “Other people have nationalities, Jews and Irish
share a psychosis.”

That’s why I admire Eamon de Valera. He took a
nationalism which had the potential of being as
vicious as nazism (and they shared the same roots),
and by the means of a quasi fascistic party, managed
to forge a civilized nation. Imagine Alcide de Gasperi
in the Thirties wrestling Benito Mussolini for control
of the Fascists, getting it, and using the Fascists as
a basis for a democratic state, and you get the idea.

(I actually wrote an Alternative History scenario in
which Eamon de Valera grows up in Spain insted of Ireland
and therefore a) in Ireland Michael Collins becomes a
dictator and allies himself with Hitler b) there is
no Spanish Civil War, only a very long and peaceful
de Valera regime and c) irritated by being called the
Italian Collins, Mussolini does not join the Axis (Berlin,
Dublin, Tokyo), and is one of the Allies, with the
result that twenty years later Fascism is a very
respectable political option, the term of derision
being “Fenian” with someone commenting that a Fenian
is a Fascist with a couple screws missing).

@Kirt

I talked about hartred by the language and the way you
framed the problem.

You say that women may not catch all the nuances of
growing up male, that is fair. That you need more balance
in the teaching position, fair.

But to attribute it to a wicked conspiracy to “destroy
men” is the language of hartred.

Mr. Cantrell is worse. The problem is not education, it
is not the agenda of the public schools, the problem is
that women are not keeping their place and want to run
things.

The problem is that while a woman is qualified to give
birth, breastfeed the baby and wipe its bottom, the
moment it comes to teaching it anything she is a nitwit
and morally unfit to do so, unless there is a man telling
her what to do and not to do, and if she refuses to
obey, then she is wicked and to be punished.

That I say is the language of hartred.

There certainly is a wicked conspiracy to destroy men in the sense of neutering them or in some cases actually killing them off.  Feminist literature is full of this sort of thing.  And needless to say, this fits right in with the agenda of the alpha male elitists like Bill Clinton and more top Republicans than I can easily count.  Neutering or marginalizing 90% of the males of the species means more whores and trophy wives for them.

You claim women took over the education of men because men would not do it, but as soon as anyone proposes that men take charge, you claim hate speech. Mr. Cantrell specifically states that women teachers should be part of the education system provided they are “up to snuff”.  But men should be in charge.

Adriana, you’re our resident liberal, neo-con, and modernist, so I guess you can also be our resident feminist.  You have the ideology down pat as well as the feminist tendency to swoon over alpha male killers - in your case FDR, Churchill and even the Hitler-loving, penny ante terrorist DeValera.

@Kirt

I do not care how you try to classify me as so many
different things but what will you think of a
situation like this

Group A has been doing something for a long time, and
been largely successful at it.

Group B decides that Group A is doing an incomplete job
and that needs itself to balance it.

Therefore it wants to take the task over, and have all
members of Group A move to a subordinate position and
take orders from Group B.

Not to collaborate, not to participate, not to form
partnershipe. To demote them, as thanks for doing a
task that needed doing.

That’s what you call justice?

The feminist education system has not been successful at educating men, unless you count neutering them as success, which you probably do.  It has neutered the majority, marginalized others, driven many out of the education system altogether and into the prisons and either purged male teachers or terrorized them into supporting feminist ideology.  Not my idea of success.

There are a few exceptions to this bleak picture.  I would cite Thomas Aquinas College in California from which one of my daughters graduated.  It teaches the classic great books program, intentionally maintains a slight majority of male students, has a virtually all male teaching staff (I actually know of no women), insists on gentlemanly behavior from male students and lady-like behavior and modest dress on the part of female students.  A high percentage of its students were home schooled up to college level.

A failure?

They started in the last century dealing with an
illiterate population. They graduated men who
could a) read and write b) could behave a way that
would not get them fired in the factory the first
week.

And factory jobs were the sum of their prospects yet.
It was be a meek worker who does the same boring thing
as told by the foreman day in and day out, or get no
job at all. They had to be taught not to drink their
wages but bring them home. Of course, you could call it
emasculating. Others call it making sure the children
eat.

You want to educated males to behave like males, send
them to the Army. War is a typical male activity, and
a male pacifist is a contradiction in terms. War is
needed to think out the weaker, feminized males, and
leave behind only the ones who deserve to mate.

“You want to educated males to behave like males, send
them to the Army. War is a typical male activity, and
a male pacifist is a contradiction in terms. War is
needed to think out the weaker, feminized males, and
leave behind only the ones who deserve to mate.” - Adriana

You’ve got that liberal feminist rant down pat, Adriana.  So a male pacifist is a contradiction in terms?  So much for our Lord Jesus Christ, who surrendered peacefully to his executioners, counselled Peter to put away the sword, and healed the wound of the enemy Peter had injured.  And of course in the days when war was fought by warriors, it was not the weaker males who were thinned out, but the stronger bolder ones who fought in the front lines and took the chances.  So much for your pop Darwinism.  Modern war, such as waged by your heroes FDR and Truman, destroys mostly men and children, but large numbers of women as well.  But to you of course, the important thing is that men are killed and that’s why you are such a cheer leader for war.

What the state desires more than anything over it’s people is control and power.
To gain this much desired control the state uses a number of public institutions.
Education, the court system, and wars are the three most popular.  The
mainstream media should also be included in this.

OUr court systems, especially family court, set up an adversarial situation
between parents that benefits no one and leaves children more susceptible
to become prey of the state and it’s education system.  The destruction
of families is also a benefit to the principal capitalist owners of government.
Parents become enamored of buying things for their children in place of
quality time and love, especially parents in an adversarial relationship.
I have seen some cases where an orgy of consumerism replaces parenting altogether.

Having worked with boys in a detention setting I have often observed just how
obsessed with consumerism they have become.  Their whole lives revolve
around designer clothes, cars, and popular culture.  Every one of these boys
is a product of a broken home, public institutions, and mass media.

It is fascinating to observe the interrelationship between between the military,
the mass media, and public education.  War and killing is promoted in all three of
these outlets.  In Orwell’s 1984 it was constant state of war that was used to
promote love of big Brother.  Blind patriotism at all costs is the message.
It is used to sell products, movies, and the new big player is war video games.

How better to dehumanize your enemy than to make him into pixels on a tv screen?

The television has become a joke promoting anti-catholic rhetoric on almost
every channel in every program.  The ones I find most insulting and dangerous
are those that pretend to be scientific in nature but are running a serious anti-Christian
agena.  Archaeologists digging up Jesus’s grave?  The intent of course to
deny Jesus’ divinity.  The church needs to step forward and demand a boycott of
all media until they clean up their act and stop using the airways to promote
their anti-Christian agenda.