if you mean like she is unemployed on cash assistance, she isn’t working then, she could homeschool and she wouldn’t even need childcare. It just takes a few good materials.. once they learn how to read it’s really easy after that. She basically needs to know the title of a book that uses intensive phonics. After that she needs a book list so she can search for books. Honestly once kids can click a mouse they can use the online card catalog at the library. My son quickly learned how to search author, series, subject if I would just type in our card number and pin. He could go from our current check out list to search more of the same. If you go when they are not busy, people at the library are usually very helpful too.

From my own experience, the big issue with being single/poor and homeschooling isn’t the education part of it. The big issues for me is paying rent and electric and dealing with life in general like everyone deals with. Homeschooling is the easy part. I didn’t know that when I started. Years have gone by though and I can see it now. My son is super smart, he reads with comprehension and is always inventing things. I guess that is why I’m so confident that it’s the answer. I know the library is tax payer financed and we do rely heavily on that. I could see parents setting up libraries and churches having libraries. Mothers have a wonderful bookswap thing online, I bet that could happen IRL too.

The only problem I see so far is that it leads to very spoiled pets! (cats)

I believe your example needs some work. Nothing is going to help the “welfare queen” with 7 or 8 kids, the reason being that she is teaching her kids dependence upon the government and sees nothing wrong with that. You can push her 7 or 8 kids through a graduate program and they’re still going to be dependent on someone because that’s how they’ve spent their entire lives.

As for the rest of the debate, I haven’t formed an opinion, yet, because I don’t have a “dog in this show.” From my own experience growing up in wild, wonderful, abjectly poor WV, people find a way to learn what they want to learn.

I can say, with the talk of the last 1.5 decades education has been made the “brass ring” all the way through college. I’ve yet to understand how every child in the U.S. attending college is somehow going to make things better when we still need people who are better with their hands, such as the carpenter, mechanic, bakers, and so on. Does that mean people will soon have to have a college degree to do that work, too?

Are you making fun of me because I only have one child?

If the children are attending a bad public school, I say encourage parents to pull the children out. That would solve the education problem immediately for their kids and also cut any funding that is tied to attendance. That is my issue with the diaries about this, they make the parents out to be helpless to what the left does, when they aren’t. The parents can solve even if they don’t get a voucher.

How is parents doing something about their kids education deserving of a mental hosptial. If y’all think I’m nuts so be it, but I know it works because I’ve seen it.

There is a good math series out there, the author is Saxon and he wrote it so well that a child can teach themself from it. No teacher is necessary. Mom can be too tired to add 8+15 most of the time and the child can finish calculus ab with that series. Children get very confident when they learn to solve math problems independently day in day out. I do menial work too and it has nothing to do with what he learns or does not learn.

I’m not a welfare apologist. Jeff gave me the example of a mother on welfare. If I met this mother and wanted to help her homeschool, I posted what I think she would need. He thinks I’m naieve that a poor single parent can teach her children to read and I posted my own experience, my struggles have not been homeschooling. I’m not sure what in there makes me a welfare apologist except for using the library? I’m not even sure what a welfare apologist exactly is though.

The gov won’t allow it’s money to go to religious based education for K-12 for long. Alaska and California are both examples of that. CA has these public school charters were they give the parents a cut of the money, and it can’t go to buy religious based books. Even if you look at some of the private “secular” homeschool materials, it’s very liberal.

I don’t see how it’s free market if the gov is funding it. I think it would turn into public schools *eventually* and we would lose the freedom we have no with private schools. In FL the only requirement for private schools is attendance reporting. Do you think the gov is going to give a penny to a place that only reports attendance? If vouchers go to everyone I believe private schools will be forced to accept vouchers or close. We will lose some religious freedom. Parents will either have to deal with their children being exposed to things against their religion or break the law and not register.

I think the gov has valid functions. I think the mandatory attendance laws are bad laws and they are part of socialism.

….with no incentive to perform, teachers have very little reason to put their maximum effort into doing so.

in mostly majority Black schools. Her last job was in a 100% black school which had once been the white school. Most whites have left the town and the few remaining whites all send their children to private school. Her job was more like a correctional officer than a teacher. The children were largely utterly unsocialized, lacking even the most basic hygenic and social habits and speaking incomprehensible Black dialect. Most native rural Southerners are tri-lingual. They speak church, school and courthouse standard English, rural Southern dialect, and some measure of Black dialect. My sister, native to the rural South, could usually understand the children and communicate with them, but those from urban areas or the North might as well have been in a foreign country.

Though teachers in the rural South have somewhat more ability to discipline students than is the case most other places, they really aren’t able to effectively discipline. Consequently, there is almost no order in the classroom and even those with a desire to learn have little opportunity. Frankly it isn’t that teachers don’t have the incentive to teach, it is that there is no reward for trying to teach and many negative consequences if a teachers disciplines or places demands on a student.

She is a much happier person now that she’s retired.

I didn’t see this ibefore my last post to Martin, can I retract the stepping out of the thread post?

Good point about the umbilical cord, did you see how many times early childhood this or that is in the serve act? I don’t know what is more scary that or the fact he wants the kids doing the “volunteering” to work with these babies.

I loved BT Washington’s book, that has to be one of my favorite books ever. So much of what he said still applies today, like with the people not using what they have around them, like when he talked about the cotton growing right to the hosue when it good have been different veggies to improve their diet.
Now most don’t garden except for maybe herbs flowers but there are other types of resources around us we could be more industrious with and improve ourselves with.