Reason #4,273 Why We Homeschool

This is one of the many reasons why my wife and I decided not to send our children to a government school:


The only surprising thing is that the father in the video was so shocked this was going on. As a father of three, I'm glad I didn't have to learn my lesson the hard way.

Just Say No to Drugging Kids

According to a recent article in The New York Times, 11% of school age children, and nearly one in five boys of high school age, have been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder:

These rates reflect a marked rise over the last decade and could fuel growing concern among many doctors that the A.D.H.D. diagnosis and its medication are overused in American children.

The figures showed that an estimated 6.4 million children ages 4 through 17 had received an A.D.H.D. diagnosis at some point in their lives, a 16 percent increase since 2007 and a 41 percent rise in the past decade. About two-thirds of those with a current diagnosis receive prescriptions for stimulants like Ritalin or Adderall, which can drastically improve the lives of those with A.D.H.D. but can also lead to addiction, anxiety and occasionally psychosis.

"Those are astronomical numbers. I'm floored," said Dr. William Graf, a pediatric neurologist in New Haven and a professor at the Yale School of Medicine. He added, "Mild symptoms are being diagnosed so readily, which goes well beyond the disorder and beyond the zone of ambiguity to pure enhancement of children who are otherwise healthy."

Don't worry. The American Psychiatric Association is planning on changing the definition of A.D.H.D. so that even more kids will be diagnosed in order to receive proper "treatment." Call it an economic stimulus for the pharmaceutical industry.

As a father of three, I am thankful that we are able to homeschool our kids. I'm sure many of you parents will know exactly what I'm talking about when I say that there is a strong likelihood that each one of my children would fall under some government school definition of A.D.D. or A.D.H.D. But have you ever met one kid who didn't have trouble sitting still or focusing, especially when they had little or no interest in the subject being taught?

Gary North has a simpler, drug-free solution:

If your kid is squirming in public school, a solution is to pull him out of public school. Kids who are not in public schools usually stop squirming.

There are two main solutions: homeschooling or doing chores around the house. Teenage kids facing this choice usually stop squirming.

Homeschooling works. But when it's either prescribing drugs or chores, I recommend chores. It's cheaper. Also, parents avoid extra chores.

So simple, and yet so difficult for today's two-income families to manage.

The Government Schools' Trans-Agenda

Reason number 5,327 to get your kids out of government schools (from Fox News):

Parents across Massachusetts are upset over new rules that would not only allow transgender students to use their restrooms of their choice – but would also punish students who refuse to affirm or support their transgender classmates.

Last week the Massachusetts Department of Education issued directives for handling transgender students – including allowing them to use the bathrooms of their choice or to play on sports teams that correspond to the gender with which they identify.

The 11-page directive also urged schools to eliminate gender-based clothing and gender-based activities – like having boys and girls line up separately to leave the classroom.

Schools will now be required to accept a student’s gender identity on face value.

Really, is any further comment necessary?

Machen on the Necessity of Christian Schools

In a 1933 lecture entitled "The Necessity of the Christian School," Dr. J. Gresham Machen summed up the evils of a secular, tax-funded, government-controlled education:

Thoughtful people, even many who are not Christians, have become impressed with the shortcomings of our secularized schools. We have provided technical education, which may make the youth of our country better able to make use of the advances of natural science; but natural science, with its command over the physical world, is not all that there is in human life. There are also the moral interests of mankind; and without cultivation of these moral interests a technically trained man is only given more power to do harm. By this purely secular, non-moral and non-religious, training we produce not a real human being but a horrible Frankenstein, and we are beginning to shrink back from the product of our own hands.

Throwing in a little Bible teaching here and there won't cut it. Christian schools are necessary because our faith envelopes everything we do, say, and think:

It is this profound Christian permeation of every human activity, no matter how secular the world may regard it as being, which is brought about by the Christian school and the Christian school alone. I do not want to be guilty of exaggerations at this point. A Christian boy or girl can learn mathematics, for example, from a teacher who is not a Christian; and truth is truth however learned. But while truth is truth however learned, the bearings of truth, the meaning of truth, the purpose of truth, even in the sphere of mathematics, seem entirely different to the Christian from that which they seem to the non-Christian; and that is why a truly Christian education is possible only when Christian conviction underlies not a part, but all, of the curriculum of the school. True learning and true piety go hand in hand, and Christianity embraces the whole of life -- those are great central convictions that underlie the Christian school.

I believe that the Christian school deserves to have a good report from those who are without; I believe that even those of our fellow citizens who are not Christians may, if they really love human freedom and the noble traditions of our people, be induced to defend the Christian school against the assaults of its adversaries and to cherish it as a true bulwark of the State. But for Christian people its appeal is far deeper. I can see little consistency in a type of Christian activity which preaches the gospel on the street corners and at the ends of the earth, but neglects the children of the covenant by abandoning them to a cold and unbelieving secularism. If, indeed, the Christian school were in any sort of competition with the Christian family, if it were trying to do what the home ought to do, then I could never favor it. But one of its marked characteristics, in sharp distinction from the secular education of today, is that it exalts the family as a blessed divine institution and treats the scholars in its classes as children of the covenant to be brought up above all things in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.