Yosef Rosenblatt wrote:
> Before the home schoolers chime in with diatribes on the
> failure of public schools I would make one point.
> The fact that they couldn't find Afghanistan
> on a map shows lack of education. The fact that they did not
> know it was home to the Taliban or Al Qaeda shows lack of interest.

Yosef, one has to ask about the failure to generate interest in the thing
learned, by the government schools. I entered "geography bee" into google
(although one could pick just about any "bee"), and the sixth hit and fourth
site was <http://nche.hslda.org/docs/BrightSpots/200205220.asp>, which had
the following:
"Only 2 out of 100 students in America are home schooled, about 2%" Smith
said. "Yet in the geography bee 22% of the national finalists and 40% of the
final 10 students were home schoolers. If this doesn't show the benefits of
home education, what does?"

Well, OK, Wirt also wrote in OT: A little astronomy for a Wednesday
afternoon:
> Given the modern rise of conservative home-schooling and
<snip>
> At that point, we're likely lost.
and that more than stuck in my craw. Yosef merely unstuck it.

It certainly escapes me how a method which involves achieving such mastery
of any discipline, and one that is not peculiar to some single ism, heralds
the collapse of Western thought and culture. I would lay odds on it being
the home-schooled who would know their taxonomies, or the steps of Kreb's
cycle, or even the names of the species as given in a certain well-known and
often parodied depiction of the ascent of man. Imagination may be "more
important that knowledge", but knowledge is certainly foundational to any of
the heavy thinking which rests upon it.

I have literally no idea what others think of homeschoolers, for reasons
that are too involved to describe here. It was only a few years ago that
someone brought to my attention the anti-culture separatism of some
homeschoolers, a view that had never once occurred to me. We do not
homeschool to escape corruption from worldly influences, a game which one is
most likely to lose in the last quarter.

In fact, when Wirt has written less than favorable comments about fiction,
I've thought of posting an attempt at humor, likening indulgence in fiction
to the eight deadly sin, a la a fundamentalist aversion to anything that
could conceivably be confused with alcohol by someone passing by on a horse
at a full gallop (for those who do not know, there are fundamentalists who
eschew root beer because of its name, quite apart from the temperance
movements concern for things fermented).

It is no coincidence that they are called "universities", from universus,
Latin for whole, from which we also get universe. It is a whole universe of
ideas, in which each discipline, even the kind of literature which fiction
is, has its place.

Greg Stigers
http://www.cgiusa.com
I'm no Luddite.
I even got a flu shot today.

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