Republican Indoctrination: "What Jerry Falwell Jr. Taught Me at Liberty University"

[cpwill]

Re: Republican Indoctrination: "What Jerry Falwell Jr. Taught Me at Liberty University"

Questioning the veracity of a source is an Ad Hominem attack? Didn't know that.

If your response to data is to attack the source providing it simply by saying "well you are pro homeschool, so there".... yeah. I often call it ad sourcinem, to draw the distinction.

But if you like, feel free to try to discredit the numbers. I've seen similar results from a variety of sources (it's one of the reasons we home school), and it's not exactly astonishing that those associated with the home school movement would be more likely to trumpet their superior performance, while government schools would be less inclined to trumpet their relative lack thereof.

 

[jpn]

Re: Republican Indoctrination: "What Jerry Falwell Jr. Taught Me at Liberty University"

Ad Hominem, eh? How astonishing.

My 12 year old is learning to recognize logical fallacies as part of his home school curriculum this year. That was one of the first we covered .

Guessing you - like me - never covered that stuff in government school, outside of perhaps debate class?

Is your 12-year-old (punctuation lesson) going to learn about how the New Deal and Keynesian theory saved capitalism, or will he get your peculiar spin on it? How about the labor movement? And women's sufferage? And black sufferage and Jim Crow? And how blacks were not allowed to participate in the GI Bill or FDA loans until decades after those government programs had helped generate wealth for an entire generations of white people?

I was talking to a home-schooled kid who had been taught that Elenore Roosevelt was "evil." Maybe she'll some day start to learn how twisted her education was, but maybe not.

 

[jpn]

Re: Republican Indoctrination: "What Jerry Falwell Jr. Taught Me at Liberty University&

If your response to data is to attack the source providing it.... yeah. I often call it ad sourcinem, to draw the distinction.

But if you like, feel free to try to discredit the numbers. I've seen similar results from a variety of sources (it's one of the reasons we home school), and it's not exactly astonishing that those associated with the home school movement would be more likely to trumpet their superior performance, while government schools would be less inclined to trumpet their relative lack thereof.

I didn't want to spend a lot of time on it, but yes, the four or five sources that appeared to be reasonably non-biased showed superior performance in more categories than public education. It appears that math performance lags among the home schooled, especially at higher ages, which makes sense to me.

I just worry at the randomness of it, and the brainwashing that goes on. Public schools are monitored closely by parents, PTA associations, and school boards. It usually tries to provide essential knowledge even that is unwelcome in a community, like evolution and science-based sex education, with varied success depending on the backwardness of the region.

 

[jpn]

Re: Republican Indoctrination: "What Jerry Falwell Jr. Taught Me at Liberty Univers

However, fortunately, we can look at the national level (to provide consistency), where we have also continued to increase per student expenditures for years, with no noticeable return in terms of improved performance, especially for our poor. Instead what we've gotten is flat test scores, a broken system that helps trap the poor in poverty, and a growing number of more highly paid administrative bodies.

We never led the world in education. That's a myth. But we lag consistently from other nations. US test scores have improved slowly over the decades. In 1964, we were 0.35 standard deviations below the mean. In the most recent tests, we were only 0.06 and 0.18 standard deviations below the mean. Still sub-par, but gaining.

We are especially bad at educating the poor, that's true. And they tend to be schooled in poorly-funded, de facto segregated schools. This series of podcasts about a school in Brooklyn is remarkably insightful as to how that works: Introducing: Nice White Parents - The New York Times