Genetic Engineering
Jun 22nd, 2005 at 11:54 pm by Susie
They have to be trained to be extremist Republicans because thinking is so hard to suppress:
Muench, like eighty-five per cent of the students at Patrick Henry, was homeschooled, in her case in rural Idaho. Homeschoolers are not the most obvious raw material for a college whose main mission, since its founding, five years ago, has been to train a new generation of Christian politicians. Politics, after all, is the most social of professions, and many students arrive at Patrick Henry having never shared a classroom with anyone other than their siblings. In conservative circles, however, homeschoolers are considered something of an élite, rough around the edges but pure—in their focus, capacity for work, and ideological clarity—a view that helps explain why the Republican establishment has placed its support behind Patrick Henry, and why so many conservative politicians are hiring its graduates.
Very very disturbing. The American Taliban’s madrassa.
Wow. Such calculated evil. They’ll be coming for us sooner than I thought, right out of the Handmaiden’s Tale.
A small grain of salt as to the premise.
While it may well be the case that in rural Idaho, homeschooled children have had that degree of isolation, it is not always the case.
One of the guys I worked with until recently had two kids who were being homeschooled by his wife, in suburban Los Angeles (Cerritos). Being skeptical, I would often ask about them about homeschooling - how it worked, how much state involvement and oversight, etc, as well as the question of isolation.
Om a regular basis, my friendd’s kids would meet with other homeschooled kids to go on field trips or to have “gym class”. And as the kids were getting older, they were allowed into a local private school for a class or two that their mother wasn’t confident in teaching, and to join in some extra-curriculars.
They never did convince me; I think homeschooling is a bad bad idea. But it doesn’t necessarily equate to the isolation implied in the article.
Home schooling takes many forms depending on where you are. The scary thing about this is that they’re creating the next wave of the close-minded conservative “christian” right. It really reminds me of a cult in the making - first they brainwash the first members with constant fear, then they get them to breed. Scary, scary, scary.
I guess things change.
I was homeschooled back when it was mostly an extreme hippy thing, and illegal. My parents weren’t hippies, though - slightly left of mainstream Democrats with a strong libertarian (lower-case ‘l’, and it wasn’t code for “extreme right-wing freak” back then) streak. But we lived on the road, and regular school wasn’t a practical option.
I understand isolation is no longer a feature of homeschooling. Not sure I beleive it. I (and my two younger brothers) were exposed to other kids fairly often, but never really connected. Worked out pretty well in most of the world, except for the fact that we were rarely in one place very long, but American kids almost always excluded us.
All three of us are pretty intense - and very skilled - about things that were (and still are) important to our parents: art, literature, ancient history and mythology, science. And we are all very political. I’m the only one who has managed to hold down a career-type job. I don’t feel connected to the local culture, and I don’t think my brothers do either, but that’s probably more a result of extensive travel than homeschooling.
On the whole, in spite of some challenges (they forgot to teach me math, but I majored in it in college so that’s OK) I thank them for it.
They did program an elite band, rough around the edges but pure in focus, effort, and ideological clarity. Sort of a bunch of droids, programmed to go out and inflict beauty, creativity, un-droidlike behavior, and the joy of ancient and modern art and stories on the world whether it wants it or not. With a different agenda, we’d be kind of scary. But our difficulty connecting to the rest of the world probably prevents us from making much of a political dent.
Based on my experience, I expect the right-wing homeschoolers to have an intense, but limited effect. The content of their education is incompatible with what made my homeschooling so positive. Creationism is the breaker. Many of those who are homeschooled to be dangerous will realize they’ve been lied to and revolt, those who have been domesticated will be rendered ineffective by the mental rigidity or lack of aptitude (desire and/or ability) for independent thought that prevents them from rejecting the lie.
There will be unintended consequences. Oh, yes. It will be interesting. Keep your eyes and mind open.
I used to know a lot of people who had in effect been home-schooled in outback Australia. The common thread, as I recall, was a mixture of self-reliance and arrogance. No doubt the result of having a monopoly of adult attention as a kid (my unfounded speculation). A lot of them, come to think of it, were so far right it hurt..