We don't need no education

[angrychair]

Last edited Mon Nov 2, 2015, 12:54 PM - Edit history (1)

Reason #99 I am proud to be a atheist:

"Texas does not require home-school families to register with state or local educational officials, and they also aren’t required to teach state-approved curriculums or give standardized tests."

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/11/conservative-texas-court-to-decide-if-homeschoolers-can-wait-for-the-rapture-instead-of-teaching-their-kids/comments/#discus

[Javaman]

1. brought you by the Texas chapter of 'Morons for the Future" nt

[malaise]

3. Bwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah

Nailed it

[peace13]

2. Awesome beans!

Sounds like a program! That rapture thing never works. My sister in law moved her six young children into a travel trailer, in Ohio, in the winter and gave her money to the church. There, she waited for the rapture. That was in 1986.

[Android3.14]

4. Never thought there were reasons to be proud to be an atheist

As a hopeful agnostic, it seems to me that feeling proud to be an atheist is about as useful as being proud of being a follower of a religion.

I applaud homeschoolers and the state governments that keep their grubby paws out of the lives of homeschooling families. As a former public school teacher, I have taught several homeschool children as they outgrew the curriculum and expertise of their parents. This often happens when a home school kid approaches their teen years. Out of the fifty or so that went through my classroom, all of them, except one, were more socially adept than public school students, came to the school with a better grasp of content knowledge, were more academically successful and had better support at home for the learning they sought at the public school.

Only one student came to my class having suffered from the homeschooling experience, and that was a kid who had special needs and whose single mother also had special needs.

Standardized tests and state-approved curriculums are unnecessary for a good education. They can certainly be helpful, but homeschool families have done just fine without them.

You misspelled "atheist", by the way.

[angrychair]

5. Thanks

Phone autocorrect is odd, got to figure out how to make it work better, it will happily let me misspell a word if I am not paying close enough attention.

As far as being proud about being an atheist, I am very comfortable with that term. Your assertion:
"As a hopeful agnostic, it seems to me that feeling proud to be an atheist is about as useful as being proud of being a follower of a religion."
Is under the hopeful assumption that a supreme being could actually exist and is out there somewhere or encountered after death.
As an atheist, I know there is no god(s). It is not a belief seeped in the concept of faith. It is not a theory. Since there is categorically no proof of the existence of any god(s) then the onus is on the believer to prove that one does exist. With respect to Christians, a book with random collections of 2,000 year old bronze-age characters, allegories and fables that borrow concepts and characters from several other older mythologies, is no proof god(s) exist and that is the only material they have as a physical validation of their faith.
I use that as an example as that is the mythos I am most familiar with though I am knowledgeable on all Abrahamic faiths core stories.

Lastly, you extoll the virtues of home schooling, yet admit yourself that often parents are not are capable of teaching the material the children need and seek you out, as a school teacher, to fill in those gaps.
As I have known several home schooled kids in my life, while some did seem to have a decent education, not anymore than public school kids, all were socially awkward and had poorer than average interpersonal skills. Not saying that is a universal truth but has been true in my experience.

Thank you for the response to my OP. I always enjoy a polite and intellectually honest debate.

[Android3.14]

6. Unfortunately the "intellectually honest" portion is anything but

The title "We don't need no education" shows an assumption without proof that you think persons who homeschool are contemptuous of academics. Further, by making the statement that a government refraining from intruding on homeschoolers makes you feel proud to be an atheist shows an ignorance of the reasons why people might choose to homeschool. For example, some homeschool their children in order to give them a boost over their peers when they enter public school, to avoid the cookie cutter social and academic environment, or because a child might have a severe physical or mental disability.

Based on the manner of your response, you have had little contact with people who received homeschooling or you are unaware of that contact as an adult since most people don't self-identify as having learned through home schooling. It is also obvious that you are unaware of peer reviewed research showing that homeschool children tend to be significantly more successful than public school students in many areas, both academic and social by a factor of 30 or more percentiles.

This would be a good start, though I suggest you check out the original sources rather than the summaries on wikipedia.

You also incorrectly assume that I was attacking your atheist belief, which shows a certain unfortunate sensitivity to the topic and probably creates difficulty in engaging in discussions only lightly related to atheism, such as the subset of homeschoolers who choose to teach their kids at home for religious reasons.

The assumption, that someone who is religious is somehow less intelligent than yourself, or that your atheism makes you superior to a religious person, shows a blindness to the wide range of human experience that can lead people to accept different belief systems, including atheism.

Finally, a person who makes prejudicial attacks on a segment of the population should probably check his or her spelling and research as there are people who find bigotry an affront to honest intellectual debate and will use those errors to portray you in an unflattering light.

After you have properly prepared yourself for an "intellectually honest debate", I would welcome a chance to participate.

[angrychair]

9. Good for you

You have belief in your confections. If you expect to get me worked up by darting me for percieved offenses than you are sorely mistaken. This is an Internet conversation with a total stranger, I have zero emotional investment in its outcome.
With respect to the subject line title, it was a direct reference to the story I linked in the OP, about a family that decided they didn't need to teach their children as it was more important to prepare them for the rapture. Not my words, that is from the story. I also referenced the story when I said that there is zero educational standards for a home school child in Texas. The story also stated that their eldest daughter, once she turned 17, ran away from home and registered herself in a public school but had to be started in the the 9th grade. That information is all in the story.
Second, I never discounted the possibility that home schooling was valid in certain cases. It may genuinely be the best solution for some children but only when we hold adults and children to positive outcomes with measurable results.
Lastly, atheism is not a "belief" system. It is the absence of one. I don't need validation. It should be noted that a religion becomes a mythology once a better religion comes around. While we create fantasy movies, books, philosophy and poetry around Greek Mythology, it was a real religion with real followers.

At least on religions, we can agree to disagree. I appreciate the feedback.

[KamaAina]

7. Hey! Teacher! Leave those kids alone!

[hifiguy]

8. You cannot fix stupid.

Especially religulous stupid.

i was born a skeptic and was a doubter at 8 (the story about the 700-year-old man building a giant ship seemed like preposterous bullshit to me even then), an agnostic, leaning strongly in the direction of atheism, by the time I was 15, and have been a secular humanist/scientific atheist for the last 35 years.

The clincher? I turn the stage over to Dr. Sagan:

"These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do given fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution. It has the sound of epic myth, but it is simply a description of the evolution of the cosmos as revealed by science in our time. And we, we who embody the local eyes and ears and thoughts and feelings of the cosmos, we have begun at least to wonder about our origins -- star stuff contemplating the stars, organized collections of ten billion billion billion atoms, contemplating the evolution of nature, tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness here on the planet earth, and perhaps throughout the cosmos."