“OK, my daughter loves Harriet Tubman. Tell me what you got!” she says. I explain our product, how we use historical women to teach girls about their worth and potential. The mother says: “But is it woke? I mean, I don’t want to teach my daughter about woke.”
And these people feel qualified to teach history.
The follow-up paragraph is even more amazing, because (like all conservatives) she can’t even say what “woke” is.
And that’s the really insidious part. The teacher is too ignorant of what she is ignorant of. If Harriet Tubman “might be too woke” then how would this women teach the nuance of protests? Of sit ins? Letters from a Birmingham jail? Much less modern protests. Her daughter is going to grow confidently saying things like
“I know all about black history, just not the woke stuff.”
And not even understand the tragic irony.
Or she’ll learn on her own later. It’s sad, but many do it. The line of thinking of “we used to treat black people in utterly horrific ways” -> “we freed them but took a long time to give them the same rights” -> “they’re still mad and saying that racism still is a systemic problem” -> “why” is a path that many white Americans with intellectual curiosity have tread. Some don’t like the answers because they come with expectations, responsibility, guilt, and shame. Others decide that it doesn’t matter and accept what is learned.
It’s a shame she has to start there, but we have to believe that these indoctrinated children aren’t doomed
That’s because “woke” doesn’t have a concrete definition.
It’s just “what Trump tells me to hate”, there i defined it.
Fox news tells them as well. Either way, people too stupid to have a thought originate from themselves.
I equate it to “progressive”
Which conservatives don’t like because that means they are against progress.
Yes it does. It means you don’t trust politicians or the system, you reexamine your beliefs and look at it critically.
If you don’t think there’s a fascist threat in our country right now, there’s people who are literally burning “woke” books and firing elected “woke” prosecutors. They’re using the word “woke” fairly correctly without understanding what it means, ironically enough, because “non-woke” is whatever lies the party spreads and “woke” is anything that contradicts that
if defining words is that easy for you, can you tell me: “what is a woman?”
some words are more subjective then others and for many feelings and emotions are more important then objective facts to define anything.
Right, so give a vague definition then. Give a conditional definiton. Say “woke is when black people are treated like humans and stuff, you know, like when they say marital rape is bad”. They won’t though, because while that is exactly what it means, they also know they can’t say it out loud.
“Woke” is the thing that opposes their horrible and reprehensible ideas, and they know it. Hell, when DeSantis’ lawyer had to define it in court he went with “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.” It’s weird though, why haven’t conservatives just grasped on to this definition? Because “woke” is a dogwhistle for “someone who isn’t a trash human like me”.
If you want to define “woman”, I can do way better than a vague definition though. Of course, the question itself is in bad faith, but I don’t give a shit. In terms of gender: “A woman is anyone who wants to call themselves a woman and wants to be called a woman by others.”
Just as an aside, I’m of the opinion gender is a stupid concept anyway and we should get rid of it entirely.
There are words that are notoriously difficult to define in such a way that every edge case is covered. For those words we use criteria. Listing off essential attributes and marking the entire list as provisionally sufficient. The Greeks figured this out 25 centuries ago, just a fyi. I know it is hard for conservatives to keep up with modern ideas but 2 and a half millennium should be enough time.
A women is one of the sexes, usually identified by their genitals. It is biological.
Not to conflate with feminine, which is one of the genders at the end of the gender spectrum. Which is sociological.
It isn’t so hard once you listen to the science and understand the difference between Biology and Sociology.
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I never said i can. I wanted to show how difficult it is to define something like that.
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You left out the best part.
“What do you mean, ‘woke’?” I ask. She opens her mouth. Half-words and phrases stumble and tumble around. A few talking points from news sources fall out. Finally, she sighs. “I don’t know. Just tell me again what you write.”
It’s not homeschooling, it’s unschooling.
My parents were both teachers at private or Christian schools while I grew up, and every year, there’d always be a new couple of kids who’s parents couldn’t quite hack it anymore, so they’d send them to school. But couldn’t bear to send their kids to those secular, godless, evolution teaching, sex driven, minority filled public schools, so they’d send them to my school instead.
Those kids were always some of the dumbest, most ignorant people on the planet. Some figure it out, but most don’t. They just double down. They were usually barely literate, couldn’t do math, and had no social skills. It’s how you end up with a 19 year old freshman who can’t read Dr. Seuss.
I know teachers aren’t paid much, but if you have the audacity to say that you can do a better job than 4 or 5 professionals at teaching your kid every subject, you should have to take a test to be certified, and your kid needs testing too. Some states require it, most don’t, and it shows.
I know teachers aren’t paid much, but if you have the audacity to say that you can do a better job than 4 or 5 professionals at teaching your kid every subject, you should have to take a test to be certified, and your kid needs testing too. Some states require it, most don’t, and it shows.
Jesus, this makes so much sense that it’s scary to think it’s not universal. Sure, you can teach your kids. Just get certified to do so first. It doesn’t even have to be the same certification as professional teachers, but just a bare minimum, pass the GED level of education. To not have this kind of requirement really seems like society failing those kids.
I don’t feel like a GED is even close to a good standard. Setting the GED as the bar is like setting the bar low enough to be in the hell they’re teaching kids about. But I guess it’s at least something.
Like we are comparing a GED here to people who have masters degrees and sometimes relevant training or degrees in what they teach. It’s like saying “hey if you want to perform an at home DIY surgery on your family, that’s fine, but please play this game of Operation first.”
I totally hear you. I meant GED as in the parent would be able to pass the GED exams now, not that they passed it 20 years ago. I think it would at least be something that could act as a minimum requirement that they can at least understand the material.
You clearly haven’t seen how bad some of our schools in America are. The war on education has been quite successful.
What were you doing in that school?!!!
Playing ‘Bob the builder’ with troglodyte kids in the hopes of mitigating some of the damage their wilfully ignorant parents inflicted upon the world.
Can we fix it!?..eh, maybe.
I used to sell books, oh, 30 years ago or so now.
The home schoolers were the scariest bunch of people you’ll encounter.
Had one guy ask where the weather control books were, and I was like “You mean seeding clouds to make it rain? I think we have…”
“No! I mean the government weather control programs!”
Had another lady convinced her electricity was going to give her cancer because it came from a nuclear power plant and was radioactive.
We are homeschooling one of our kids because his particular needs were not being met by the local school. Meeting other homeschool families is always nerve-wracking for me. I never know if they’re going to be a normal family adapting to an unusual situation, or tinfoil-hat nuts using homeschool as an excuse to hide their children from the outside world.
“No! I mean the government weather control programs!”
“Check the science fiction section.”
Careful. You might help create another religion.
The weather control books are in Red Alert 2.
“I do have one question, though ― do you teach feminism? I mean, I believe in equality, but I am not a feminist, and I don’t want to teach it to my daughter.”
I take the approach I used in Missouri.
“What do you mean?” I ask her.
“Well, do you teach that women are better than men?”
“No, I teach all genders are equal and should be treated as such.”
She buys three kits.
Jesus wept.
This is the problem with the kind of disinformation the right wing media pushes. If you describe something in as objective truthful a way as possible, suddenly none of this shit is controversial.
I’ve seen people totally on board with a description of public health turn around and just rail against how Obama care is Communist.
So much of this just depends entirely on ignorance. Kinda why these people are homeschooling in the first place.
Our babysitter was bemoaning her lack of insurance and my ex told her about the Affordable Care Act. She was thrilled!
“At least it ain’t that fuckin’ Obamacare!”
Ex said the babysitter was stunned when it was explained.
Ignorance is fine if your approach is to ask questions instead of assuming
I don’t see any problem whatsoever with this story?
What do you mean?
How much clearer could my words be?
I think the comment that “Jesus wept” was meant as tears of joy that the first speaker accepted the kits, not meant as tears of sorrow.
I homeschooled my kid k-12. When I started, I had no idea how many religious hs-ers there were. I used a secular curriculum, and never even thought about teaching anything regarding religion one way or another. Once I started looking around at all the creationist curricula out there–yikes.
Anyhoo, long story short, my son went on to a college degree (he actually started college classes online at 15–one of the perks of hs-ing for us), and he’s an atheist. Secular homeschoolers do exist!
ETA some links–these are a few secular homeschool curricula. There’s a lot more out there, but this is the majority of what I used through the years:
https://www.calverthomeschool.com/
https://www.keystoneschoolonline.com/
https://www.thinkwell.com/ (Primarily math–the professor that does most of the math instruction is wonderful.)
Secular homeschool graduate here. Parents homeschooled my brother and I because the public school system was drastically underfunded and we were in quite an education desert. I always hate articles like this, as folks tend to paint broad strokes about homeschoolers… But there’s a reason we never had other homeschooled friends growing up; there were a lot of crazy ones, especially in Michigan, as there is virtually no regulation.
Not having kids, but maybe some links to help others out?
Okay, I added a few links to my comment!
Thanks!
We are heading down the HS route for our two girls as the oldest has issues that meant that she couldn’t attend school half of last term. My wife has taken her to a couple of meetups and already she come across the Christian and the anti-vax members - even here in far flung New Zealand
American homeschooling seems to be particularly vulnerable to fascist/religious indoctrination. In most countries where homeschooling is common there’s usually a social contract that’s enforced to at least regulate the kind of education kids get outside of traditional schooling.
Social contract? Sounds a lot like socialism to me! /s
My brother and sister-in-law a few years ago tried homeschooling their kids to avoid having to drop $20K a year (each) in tuition to their preferred private school ($20K a year for K-6!) The “homeschooling” situation was actually four days a week in a school with teachers and everything, and one day a week supervising the kids at home doing lesson plans prepared by the school. This alleged homeschooling situation was in place so the school could legally hire uncredited teachers, allowing them to be cheaper - by paying teachers near minimum wage instead of a still-shitty starting salary in the $40Ks. Fucked up in so many ways, but at least this school wasn’t religion-based.
In America, right wing supporters are the dullest tools in the shed. They’re sure they’re right, but they don’t understand how anything works or what words mean.
“I Love the Poorly Educated” -Donald J. Trump
I’ve come to the conclusion that religious faith is a kind of mental illness that was made socially acceptable to keep primitive people from constantly killing each other, sticking instead to only occasionally killing each other within a vague set of guidelines.
Those of us free of it don’t need an insane corkscrew of Escheresque logic and imaginary higher authorities using threats commanding us to not be monsters.
I recently came to a different conclusion. It’s not religious faith. It’s just faith. And it’s not a mental illness. It’s human nature - for a significant segment of the human population.
Those people who are religious fanatics, political fanatics (e.g. Trumpists, Chavez sympathizers), pseudoscience fanatics (e.g. flat earthers, anti-vaxx, homeopathy), celebrity fanatics (Andrew Tate followers), etc, they have to share the same common traits. They’re impressionable people, they need to be patt of a group, and they can’t fathom the idea of switching groups.
It’s just that religion-based control came first.
Or maybe those who were very religious in the past got to survive and thus the genetic traits responsible for fanaticism spread like fire?
Regardless, it’s appalling.
Chavez sympathizers
I’m sorry, whom???
Like Hugo Chavez? Are there any people who care enough about him who arent Venezuelan?
Like Tito, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky, Che Guevara are all infinitely more valid than fucking Chavez.
Hell Hoxha and Posadas have bigger followings than Chavez
I mean you might be kinda right?
So there are people who think with or without internal monologue, common knowledge
Some people think that the internal monologue may have first developed as an internal dialogue, between the actor, the person and their body, and the “speaker” who they would have not been able to recognize as their own voice, and instead interpreted as a separate being relaying them direction, commands, and interpretation.
The dissociation between the individual and their internal monologue, and the resulting association of that monologue with a directing and counseling presence, could have been taken as the voice of a higher power guiding them, and by extension, others they got to follow them as the “speaker” of this divinity in their head.
If this sounds a bit crazy to you consider how many evangelicals rant and rave about their personal speaking term relationship with God.
So basically, deific religion might derive from people who have an internal monologue but who don’t identify with the speaker of that internal monologue.
Not really a mental disorder so much as a mode of thought that is prone to lead people into believing firmly that they are personally in contact with a separate being who personally directs their behavior and actions and values.
Deus Causa Sui
My step sister is going to homeschool her kids, which will be great for her youngest since she named him Jedidiah. Shockingly someone who named their kid that stopped coming to family gettogerthers after my sister’s kid came out trans.
She was sad she didn’t get invited to my wifes baby shower, even if my niece wasn’t planning on going I still wouldn’t invite her because you can’t just choose to cut out part of the family because you’re a bigot and expect everyone else to still want you around.
My father was uninvited from the yearly family reunion due to him not joining the anti-transgender circle jerk that formed there.
Ironically though I still get emails asking me to come, for the record I am my father’s transgender daughter.
I feel like they either missed a key detail or they’re just not very bright. I’m pretty sure it’s a little column a little column B.
If it wasn’t a 2-hour drive, I would crash it for the free food and just not say anything to anybody.
But I think I could get a bucket from the colonel to myself for just a little bit under what I pay in gas money. Plus that side of my family is so old that all they’re going to bring is fast food anyway. Everyone who was good at cooking is either dead or is too arthritic to do so. A shame, I am a southerner who appreciates the truth of The Stereotype of the home cooked meal.
The only two reasons why I’m not going to go ahead with that plan of just getting a bucket for myself, is that I would probably get a better meal and support a smaller business by getting my eight piece from Church’s Chicken. Well that and it’s going to be a tight month, my car and my switch need to be repaired at the same time. And I only pray Nintendo leaves my fucking Pokemon data intact because it’s not like I could back that up somehow. I mean theoretically it might have been possible if the damn thing would have turned on.
Please pray for the safe return of my shiny Dialga, I gave a good Zacian for it.
Maybe i’m already half asleep, but i love this comment that starts out on topic then drifts into a unrelated rant written in the most entertaining way.
Oh my dear little baby fetus Jesus in the morning, just covered in bacon and smoked Gouda cheese and stapled to a tiny little 3” cross, that made me laugh my ass off and blush at the same time.
For extra fun. Read it in the Skyrim Female Argonian voice
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that they invite you because they think they can “straighten you out”, the garbage they believe is that all kids are straight and cis and it’s down to brainwashing by the deep state Jewish space lasers that anyone would think otherwise.
For your own sake, best to stay away.
Honestly, I think you’re overthinking it. I legitimately believe that they actually forgot I was transgender due to how not often they see me.
Well, that’s a … win?
Transphobic relatives are a lot like war and timeshares. - “The only winning move is not to play.”
It does come in handy when you have that one annoying Uncle who acts like he’s your best buddy, when in reality he’s an annoying asshole who doesn’t even give a shit about your company, he just wants to feel young by being “A bro” around the young’uns…
Second my Uncle Wes found out I was trans, he finally shut the fuck up and just quietly keeps his distance. It has… actually made him easier to tolerate. Now his son, my cousin, on the other hand… Not so much.
I have nothing against Christians, one of my best friends is a devout Catholic, sharp as a whip too, got his doctorate in Mathematics and is a huge nerd when it comes to numbers, but… I have about as much patience for Young Earth Creationists and Biblical Literalists as they do for me.
I nearly slapped that child one Thanksgiving when I casually mentioned the existence of dinosaurs while everyone was talking about Jurassic World (Had recently come out), but see, I made the mistake of talking about dinosaurs like they were real animals that once existed instead of Hollywood monsters made up by Liberal Media… So he starts chanting “THE BIG BANG IS A FAERIE TALE! NOT A THEORY!” (despite the fact that a Priest was the one who came up with the Big Bang…), over and over until I “apologize to Jesus” for my “blasphemy”
I don’t, I just let him keep doing that while I just dig into some Mashed Potatoes, eventually his mom, my Aunt has to coax him into just shutting the fuck up. The dinner table was quiet after that and I spent the rest of the day locked in my room.
I honestly hate that kid (He’s just becoming a teenager now, my mom had kids way before my aunt did), but it’s clear his Dad messed him up… At this point his Mom understands the problem, has more or less given up on religion altogether (Which tbh, kinda sucks, I hate it when extremists ruin belief systems for everybody else… I’m not a Christian, but fuck, the idea of a Loving God is a wonderful coping mechanism with how terrible the reality of the world is) and is quietly doing the “Grin and bear it for the kid till he’s 18” thing.
Still good for my Aunt I guess, she used to be a fanatic like the rest of them, my hobby used to be casually trolling her by mentioning which characters in “Current Popular Thing” were gay, just to watch her freak out… But… after seeing the damage her husband’s “Let’s just go ALL IN on the worst interpretation of Jesus possible!” has done to her kid, she’s chilled out quite a bit. Typically I see her without her husband and kid these days, she plans weekends where she comes down to get away from him, which she usually spends getting drunk on red wine, watching movies, and being good company.
I do hope the kid’s rude awakening when he goes into the real world isn’t too terrible, I’d like to see him snap out of it and realize what a monster his father is, but I’d hate to see him jump to the opposite extreme and become a “Reddit Atheist” ya know?
(Note: This aunt and uncle are on my mom’s side, the reunion people are on my dad’s side, which is why my Uncle remembers, but my dad’s side apparently doesn’t)
There are times I’m glad to come from a small family, the drama is similar but there’s just less of it.
And yeah, people do come around. I didn’t talk to my mum at all for 12 years, and it was a very slow restart, whereas now she refers to my enby partner as an essential part of the family, and loves when we come to visit.
There’s other relatives I cut out and don’t intend on reconnecting with, but at least it wasn’t all of them.
My father was uninvited from the yearly family reunion due to him not joining the anti-transgender circle jerk that formed there.
Ironically though I still get emails asking me to come, for the record I am my father’s transgender daughter.
I might be misreading your situation, but just from this limited context, your father seems to have his priorities straight. Feel free to tell him that a random internet stranger thinks good of him.
No you understand the situation perfectly.
Jedidiah? Like 2 D’s JeDidiah??
It’s a name.
We had to pull my daughter out of her middle school and put her in an online school for reasons I don’t wish to go into, but thankfully the online school is run by the county school corporation and she has a curriculum built by accredited teachers who are also there to talk to the kids by phone, videoconference or in person during school hours. And they are so receptive too. Suddenly I feel like educators care about my child.
But homeschooling? I would never even think of it. I don’t know the first thing about pedagogy and neither does my wife. We did a less formal version of online schooling that was hastily put together during COVID while she was still in elementary school and it relied on me doing a lot of the teaching and I sucked at it. There’s a big difference between being able to do fourth grade math and being able to teach a fourth grader how to do fourth grade math. A lot of those kids are getting so underserved by having parents, even well-meaning parents, who are not educators try to give their education.
And that doesn’t even go into the “my son is learning to be a Christian as a homeschooler” bullshit.
There are definitely kids who would be better served by an alternative to regular public or private school, even school they can do from home. But educators need to be behind it, not parents. Not unless those parents have degrees in education.
exactly, parents trying to homeschool a dozen different subjects is always the worst option
That’s what co-ops are for. We had one day a week where various parents would teach on their specialty, like theatre, biology, writing, music, etc.
I was homeschooled (and very grateful for it), and mom was NOT my teacher. She would organize a lot of things like extracurriculars (mostly for socialization), but the studying I did by myself. She’d tell me where to read and do exercises in the books, and that’s it. And the testing in the end of the quarter would be done by a teacher in the school I was assigned to.
I worked at a homeschool public charter school for a few years. A good chunk of the parents were only in it because they wanted to use Christian curriculum and other conservative garbage to teach their children.
The school even had me go to a professional development event that ended up being a Christian leadership conference held at a church. One of my coworkers walked out once she realized it was religious and she was forced to use her PTO for the remaining days of the conference. I should have done the same.
Because a parent working, without any accreditation or training since they were a fucking literal child, totally sounds like a preferable route. Give me a fucking break, it’s an assault on standardized education.
To make it worse, the kid will have a large drop in socialization opportunities and isolated relatively speaking. You just do not get that kind of social utopia ever again in your entire fucking life… the life experiences the child misses out on is significant. You can’t schedule enough playdates to make up for that.
I’m a product of homeschooling, and cannot begin to tell you how detrimental it was to my adult life and being able to function in society.
100% of my socialization growing up came from church. While I have siblings who grew up to be very successful, they all stayed in the church.
It’s a cult. It’s child abuse. You are robbing your child of critical life experience and social development. It also makes it so that anyone escaping from growing up in that will have an extremely difficult time rebuilding their life outside of religion.
“Not all women are good,” he explains.
“Not all men are good,” I respond.
That’s an amazingly pithy pair of lines
Every time I see articles in this topic, it just solidifies my opinion that homeschooling should not be allowed. We live in a community, and part of that means learning a common set of skills, social interaction with others in your community, and secular, science-based lessons.
As a homeschool survivor I wholeheartedly agree. I’m middle aged now and I still struggle with basic social skills.
I was homeschooled through middle school because the public school administration wanted to put me on Ritalin despite the school psychiatrist’s objections.
Public schools aren’t perfect either.
Thank goodness homeschooling is illegal in this country. The best effect is that crazy nutjob parents are not able to install their delusions on their kids as much as they can in the US.
Homeschooling is also illegal in Brazil, and you can bet the mf of Bolsonaro and his government tried to make it legal. The Supreme Court strike them down, with the argument that socializing was a fundamental part of education and a kid’s right and the law passed by the government couldn’t guarantee that the kids would have it.
What does the small indigenous rural population do?
Small indigenous rural schools, I guess?
guess
Uber mostly
While it would help with the crazies, it would very much hurt people who genuinely need it. I was one of those: I was, to put it mildly, a “wild child” with horrible social skills, no matter the efforts, so public school was out of the question. It would have been nothing but bullying for me and gray hairs for teachers. And while I didn’t go to school, mom did her best to socialize me.
I ended up going to a very good middle school, an AMAZING high school and now in a good uni. And yes, now putting my best effort into socializing, so might very well end up having friends now!
