Fundamentalist homeschool kids blog against their past

[tabbycat31]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/witw/articles/2013/04/11/homeschooled-kids-now-grown-blog-against-the-past.html


Interesting article.

[libodem]

1. Very interesting

Rebellion is a good thing.

[SamKnause]

2. Religion

Thanks for posting.

My heart aches for children, especially the girls, being indoctrinated with this harmful nonsense.

[shenmue]

3. It must be awful

I think a lot of them will have a hard time in the outside world. Glad to see some people are speaking up now.

[lindysalsagal]

4. Very interesting article: From the link; Christian Reconstructionism

Pretty scary stuff: And really easy to believe: Home schooling is seen as the way to bring about the re-construction of the old testament world.

Yikes!

http://homeschoolersanonymous.wordpress.com/2013/04/09/crosspost-the-underlying-agenda-i-didnt-know-about/

[arely staircase]

5. why is this in GD and not religion?

I have posted articles about liberal and enlightened people of faith from non-religious, progressive blogs and had them locked as inappropriate for GD. Actually I think this, and my threads, should be allowed here. But if mine aren't, why would this be/

[cyberswede]

16. Nobody has alerted on it.

[jeff47]

20. Because it's about education.

Religion is the motivation for the education system involved, but the story's about education.

[lindysalsagal]

7. Another article confirms that some home schoolers are just abusers

There's one really long article, posted in separate blocks, about this child's abuse at the hands of her mother.

I have always suspected that home schooling is often a way to avoid detection of abuse, because there is no public school to notice.

I believe that the government should be able to access home-schooled children on a regular basis in order to protect them from their own families.

[LuvNewcastle]

10. I agree.

A lot of these home-schooling fundamentalists are child abusers. Isolating a child and leaving him without the tools to make it in the wider world is abuse.

[cali]

8. wow. I've been reading their stories

over at homeschoolers anonymous. Really powerful stuff and some great insights and arguments to use against the fundies.

[riderinthestorm]

9. Kicking to mark for later reading... nt

[meow2u3]

11. No wonder so many young adults are "nones"

They've been indoctrinated and abused from their childhoods by overzealous, overbearing, and overreligious fundamenatlist parents who ended up driving them away from religion.

I've noticed that most of the "nones" are grown children of fundie parents.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

12. Homeschooling is great, it's home-notschooling that's the problem.

If it's done well, homeschooling will probably produce better average results than most schools - one half of a reasonably bright parent is probably better than one thirtieth of even really quite a good teacher, in most ways.

The problem is the "if it's done well" proviso. There are fewer checks in place to make sure that homeschoolers are actually doing a decent job of teaching than there are for schools.

[Lady Freedom Returns]

13. "Not all these parents are Christian fundamentalists"

Yes, Christian fundamentalists do predominate. But not all are. There are many reasons why some pick homeschooling.

I for one was homeschooled. The Joplin R-8 endorsed it highly due to money issues and a bulling problem that was not stopping on the playgrounds. They offered half days, you want to handle the Social studies and language arts, they handled the Math and science. Of whatever combo you wanted. This helped with overcrowded classrooms.

It was the bulling that got my mom into having me a full time homeschooler. The constant trips to the ER, getting calls from the principle telling her there was an "accident" (they became "Accidents" when I got to scared to call the bullies out). And I was not the only one, many in the area was doing this. We set up study dates. One woman in the neighborhood was a retired history teacher. She help to teach a group of us. One guys dad had a workshop so we got shop class.

And the groups I was in were very diverse. We learned much from each other. One kid that came over for help with English ( that was my mom's strong suit), his mom was a practicing Wiccan. Another that came over for help was Jewish, the list goes on. And as my mom helped with English, we went to their homes for help on some subjects. We were encouraged to ask questions about what we might see that we had questions about in each others home. We even joined in each others calibrations.

Yes there are some that had it bad. Proof is there, can't say it's not. But their are some out there that had good experiences.

[riderinthestorm]

14. This is a terrific article... and scary!

" According to the Department of Education, 1.5 million kids were being homeschooled as of 2007, up from 850,000 in 1999. Eighty-three percent of homeschooling parents said they did so to provide religious or moral instruction. Not all these parents are Christian fundamentalists, but Christian fundamentalists predominate."

snip

"For years Stollar struggled to suppress his doubts, but when he went away to graduate school in New Mexico, he realized he had no idea what he really believed. “Everything kind of washed out of me,” he says. But even as he left his youthful faith behind, he stayed in touch with people he’d met through debate and soon came to realize that many were suffering in similar ways. Like him, they’d experienced depression, anxiety attacks, and suicidal thoughts. “There’s a lot of depression and body-acceptance issues,” he says. “I’ve seen a lot of self-injury, even to this day. When I was 16, cutting was a huge thing, especially among female teenagers in our community. There’s also a lot of coming to terms with one’s own sexuality, being able to embrace it as OK.”

Independent-minded girls had an especially rough time, particularly those raised in Quiverfull families. As the eldest of eight, King was told that her divinely ordained role was to be a helpmeet to her mother until her own marriage, when her job would be to sexually satisfy her husband, bear as many children as God would give her, and homeschool them in turn. She dreamed of going to Patrick Henry College, but her parents saw no reason for women to pursue degrees. King never learned algebra; instead, she was taught “consumer math,” which was mainly about creating a family budget. She learned about fractions and multiplication by cooking, since she often had to double recipes."

http://www.thedailybeast.com/witw/articles/2013/04/11/homeschooled-kids-now-grown-blog-against-the-past.html




83% of 1.5 million kids getting religious homeschooling means close to 1.25 million kids are being brainwashed on a daily basis by their parents in this disturbing reality.

Eek!

[Lydia Leftcoast]

17. Reminds me of an article about a homeschooled family that I saw in the Minneapolis paper once

The oldest daughter was 18, but even the fundamentalist schools like Bob Jones and Patrick Henry were too "worldly" to suit the parents. The girl was taking correspondence courses instead.

That's abuse and the psychological equivalent of creating a bonsai.

[riderinthestorm]

18. Depression, suicide, self-mutilation... those poor kids.

[Posteritatis]

15. Glad to see them speaking out.

I have a few friends who escaped fundamentalist lifestyles and upbringings when they were able to, and most of them were pretty traumatized by the experience. People talking about some of the craziness that world involves from an insider's perspective will help others.

[Douglas Carpenter]

19. thanks for posting this - I was just talking yesterday with someone who has a friend who is

home schooling their kids and does notice the kids developing into socially inept teenagers who do not know how to relate to the real world.