Necessary socialization? Really? REALLY?

One of the oft-repeated myths among the non-homeschooling world is the one that says children who are taught at home evolve into anti-social misfits with impaired ability to think, act, and fit in with a group.

I'm sure there are some like that. I just haven't met them.

The argument I most often hear for enrolling children in traditional institutional education is that they "need" the socialization and the time with their peers in order to become well-rounded individuals.

The logic of spending boatloads of time with lots of other kids your own age and then somehow using that as a springboard to individualism has always escaped me.

I've even read the argument that kids need to be in an institutional school setting so that they can learn how to behave, how to get along, how to cope.

If you know the story of beautiful Phoebe Prince you're likely to disagree. I know that for the umpteenth time I sure do.

Prince, 15, is the Massachusetts teenager who was found hanging in her closet Jan. 14, a victim of suicide that many say was brought about by incessant bullying and torment at her local middle school.

Her family had immigrated from a small village in Ireland last fall so that their daughter could experience all that America had to offer.

How ironic.

According to Boston newspapers, Prince was not only physically attractive she was smart and friendly -- everything her school's so-called Mean Girls found threatening.

The group of girls who, by the way, are still in school as of this writing, set out to make Prince's life a living hell, hurling slurs at her, throwing objects, following her home from school, sending her cruel text messages, etc.

She briefly dated a senior football star, so maybe that was the problem, school officials speculate.

It gets worse. According to newspaper reports, school officials acknowledged that they knew there was a problem. They don't offer up exactly what they actively did to put a stop to it. What's more, they went on and held a school dance two days after Prince died. Didn't want to hamper all that potential socialization, I guess.

Bullying has always been a part of public school life. I saw it and I was even briefly the victim of it once. The difference is that when I was in school back in the 1970s and early '80s, principals and teachers still had enough authority and autonomy to make bullies' lives incredibly miserable long term. No one worried about political correctness -- the noisome term hadn't even been invented.

If it's not the socially challenged kid who's being picked on, it's the handicapped kid, the poor kid, the shabbily dressed kid, the cerebral kid, the short kid, or the fat kid. Sometimes it's the beautiful kid, maybe it's your kid, and I have to ask again why anyone thinks ANY kid ought to have to put up with this crap in order to become more well-rounded and, dare I even say it, educated?

Children learn best in small groups and quiet environments. They learn best when the rabble rousers among them are summarily plucked out and sent away. They learn best when their teachers don't have to struggle to distraction to discipline the students whose families should've disciplined them long before.

Anytime you corral hundreds of kids into a building and expect that all their differences and weaknesses and strengths are just going to meld together in one big kumbaya experience, you're asking for trouble.

I can't imagine the horror Phoebe Prince's family is living through right now. I also can't imagine why it's now April and her tormentors still have not been punished.

On Jan. 24, Boston Globe columnist Kevin Cullen wrote the poignant final chapter to Phoebe's story:

"Last week, Phoebe was supposed to visit Ireland, where she grew up, and she was excited because she was going to see her father for the first time in months.

She did end up going back to Ireland after all, and when her father saw her she was in a casket.

Phoebe’s family decided to bury her in County Clare. They wanted an ocean between her and the people who hounded her to the grave."

What part of Trinity do they not understand?

Trinity University here in Texas is now under fire by a handful of Muslim students who want the words "in the year of our Lord" removed from college diplomas issued now and in the future.

Trinity, founded by Presbyterians in the 1800s, is not considered a "Christian" school anymore. College officials claim its ties to the church are strictly "historical."

Nonetheless, while the student association backs the idea of removing the offensive phrase school officials are balking, worried they might lose funding from alumni who are already voicing their disagreement with the plan.

My question is this: Once you decide to shop for colleges, don't you usually take time to check out your choices to make sure their goals and programs are in alignment with your needs? Didn't it occur to the offended Muslim students that a school founded by PRESBYTERIANS might, just might, also include mention somewhere and in some fashion of something related to Jesus?

No? Really?

A quick internet search yields the following fact, thanks to Wikipedia.

The school "maintains a covenant relationship with the Presbyterian Church (USA)."

Trinity's own website offers this additional enlightening information. Christians make up 70.2% of the student body. Muslims? A whopping 0.6%

Again, it's not just Muslim students who are lobbying for the change but it strikes me as strange that anyone would.

Maybe it shouldn't.

Maybe someday it won't -- you know, after all our campuses, courthouses and other public forums have been purged of every reference to Christianity and history is once and for all completely revised.

We can knock out a castle in 30 minutes, can't we?

My 7-year-old daughter ranks arts and crafts right up there with oxygen and chocolate. She's gotta have the smell of glue or tempera paint or freshly-cut construction paper in her nostrils at all times, and I won't even try to describe the near-daily scene in my kitchen after she's blown through.

The floor? Bits and pieces of yarn, paper, cardstock, fabric, glitter, sequins, stick-on jewels, stickers, felt, thread, cardboard.

The table where our family of 7 must eat all its meals? Coloring books, boxes, puzzle books, pictures cut from magazines or catalogs, craft how-to books, pipe cleaners, glue, pencils, ruler, paper awl, two sizes of hole punch, stapler, tape (endless rolls of tape), and markers.

Almost every day all of the above get used to design and create a plethora of amazing and unusual objects. My house is full of them, and we joke that we're going to have to rent a storage unit to hold the overflow.

Some of the most recent creations include a shark tank made from a man's shoe box featuring paper sharks and other sea creatures against a backdrop of glitter glue seaweed and starfish, a large green octopus made from a painted paper plate with curly paper tentacles and stick-on googly eyes, a pencil holder made from an old soup can, a whole series of paper dolls -- some human, some cats -- complete with clothes, bedding and other accessories, and a stack of drawings featuring everything from ancient Greek citizens of Athens to cats in high heels and earrings. I can't forget to mention the home-made newspaper with original stories about a tiger rescue and a store that sells maypoles. Or the art exhibit featuring several fresh renditions of classic works by guys like da Vinci (Mona Lisa) and Vermeer (Girl With a Pearl Earring). We actually had to buy tickets to this one using pretend money my daughter had also drawn and cut out!

This evening after we'd finished our schoolwork for the day and I'd sat down to begin my research and planning for an astronomy class I teach, my daughter came to me and said, "I want to do a craft but I need your help."

She was holding up a book I'd found on clearance at Barnes and Noble, "The Princess Book of Crafts."

"I've done all the projects that are rated 'easy,'" she said wistfully. "Now all I have left are the ones that need an adult to help."

I hesitated. There wasn't another adult in the room, so it was up to me to take the hint and stop what I was doing.

"What's the project you want to do?" I asked, keeping my internal fingers crossed that it would be something we could finish quickly so I could go back to work.

"This one," she said, her big blue eyes lighting up with the sheer anticipation of all the crafty fun to come. "I want to make this castle."

She turned the book towards me and I tried not to gasp for air as I saw what lay in store. The required list of supplies to make the "castle" looked easy enough. We had everything it called for. The steps to complete this dazzling homage to royalty of yore were another matter.

Perhaps sensing my lack of enthusiasm, my daughter said, "This just looks complicated, but we can get it done in about 30 minutes if we work together."

Uh, sure. Thirty minutes plus about three more days.

Never one to let the reluctance of another steal her joy, my girl set to work gathering up everything we'd need while I began shutting down my computer. She had to get a box just the right size from her grandmother. I had to find two paper towel cardboard tubes, some Mod Podge, yarn, cardstock, toothpicks, and scissors.

I won't bore you here with the five gajillion steps we then followed but suffice to say the castle as of this writing is about 2/3 complete, which means we have a way to go.

I told my daughter that when the castle is finally finished and she begins to use it as the backdrop for a whole new set of royal family paper dolls she's making, she'd better be sure it doesn't fall into enemy hands, i.e. those of her two younger brothers.

A castle built of cardboard and paper is not likely to survive for very long.

Thank goodness I can't say the same for the memory of building it.

It's almost Easter, send in the clowns

Do you remember when Hollywood hypocrite Mel Gibson released his noteworthy film, "Passion of the Christ" just a few months before Easter in 2004?

(I say Gibson's a hypocrite because anyone professing so vocally to being a Christian who then cheats on his wife of 20-something years and shacks up with a model half his age and fathers a child out of wedlock by her is, well, a tad hypocritical don'tcha think?) But I digress.

Anyway, if memory serves me the fallout from Gibson's film was tremendous with both Jewish and Christian groups decrying everything from sketchy historical accuracy to the portrayal of those who ordered and carried out Christ's crucifixion as being anti-Semitic.

Four years later the whole "Jesus Tomb" story hit the press. Interestingly enough another Hollywood gasbag, film director James Cameron, led the charge to prove that an ossuary (bone box) found by Israeli construction workers in 1980 during the excavation of a site on which to build an apartment building was, in fact, the final repository for the earthly remains of Christ.

Naturally, a symposium at which Cameron and Canadian filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici presented the box and asserted its authenticity took place -- you guessed it -- a couple months before Easter.

After all, if the bones of Jesus were buried that sort of negates the biblical account of his physical body ascending into heaven.

And anyone who knows how athiests think knows that many of them dream of the day when the whole account of Jesus' life and works is debunked once and for all. And what critic of Christianity doesn't know that the resurrection of Christ is the hub around which so much of Christian theology turns?

Disprove the resurrection and you've bagged yourself a big 'un.

Sadly for Cameron and Jacobovici, a cadre of well-respected archaeologists and scholars subsequently denounced their valiant effort to prove all Christians are superstitious idiots.

Noted Jesus scholar Geza Vermes issued a statement that said the arguments for the Talpiot tomb (Talpiot being the city in which it was found) were not "just unconvincing but insignificant" and that most of the 50 or so participants at the symposium concurred.

Sigh.

You'd think that after the firestorm of Gibson's movie and the dedicated efforts of Cameron et al that the whole Easter story could rest in peace. The athiests get to poke fun at us at Christmas, isn't that enough?

Apparently not.

In Davenport, IA last week, the city manager Craig Malin sent a memo to all municipal employees informing them that Good Friday would now be known as "Spring Holiday" and that the city's calendar would immediately reflect this change.

I'll pause for a moment so that those of you who are believers can digest this. . .

Ready to continue?

Yes, you read correctly. Good Friday, the day on which Christians around the world commemorate the crucifixion of Jesus, would now be called "Spring Holiday."

How joyful! How marvelous! How completely asinine and offensive.

As you might imagine, the Davenport City Council caught an earful and has reversed Mr. Malin's order. It's worth noting that Malin acted out of turn since any changes to the city's calendar must be voted upon by the city council.

But the deeper question is this: What prompted Craig Malin to go over the heads of his superiors to change the calendar's wording?

Enter the Davenport Civil Rights Commission.

"We merely made a recommendation that the name be changed to something other than Good Friday," said Tim Hart, the commission's chairman. "Our Constitution calls for separation of church and state. Davenport touts itself as a diverse city and given all the different types of religious and ethnic backgrounds we represent, we suggested the change."

I'll pause again for those of you who have bothered to read the U.S. Constitution so that you can digest THIS. . .

Alrighty. Let's all say it together, shall we? THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA DOES NOT CONTAIN THE PHRASE 'SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE' NOR DOES IT REQUIRE PUBLIC ENTITIES TO REFRAIN FROM DISPLAYING RELIGIOUS SYMBOLS OR REFERRING TO RELIGIOUS MATTERS.

Come on, people. Say it loud! Say it early and often! Write it on your doorposts and on your gates! (Deut. 6:9 for those who don't know)

And when all else fails, remember this:

"He himself bore our sins in his body upon the cross,
so that, free from sin, we might live for righteousness.
By his wounds you have been healed" (l Peter 2:24).

And that's really all you need to know.

And one more thing, courtesy of J-school

When I went to college back in the mid 1980s I majored in Journalism. A stint as the editor of my high school newspaper had inspired me to take it to the next level. Besides, my math skills were terrible and I had no interest in business, psychology or architecture. I wasn't talented enough to major in art, music or drama.

My potentially obsessive interest these past few years with what goes on in public education is fueled by more than just the fact I and my family have chosen a different educational path and I like to keep up with how the other half lives. A lot of my interest has to do with the fact that we pay ridiculous amounts of tax money into the public school system.

It's also fueled by something a wise journalism professor -- a gritty award-winning newspaper reporter in a past life -- once told us in class. He was lecturing us on the Freedom of Information Act (FOI) and our rights as journalists to demand access to pretty much anything we needed in order to do our jobs.

"Anytime the public's money is being used, the public has a right to know."

Period.

It wasn't until many years later, after becoming a mother and researching not only the philosophies of education but the actual application of them that I returned to the aforementioned declaration.

If schools don't perform, if teachers cheat on test scores, if administrators deal drugs or lie about their credentials, if kids are mistreated, if parents are promised one thing but receive another, if kids spend 12 years of their learning lives only to emerge from the experience with the academic skills of a fourth or fifth grader, if good teachers leave because of crappy pay, apathetic parents, out-of-control students, then the public not only needs to know, it needs to care and it needs to act.

Anytime we are required to part with our hard-earned tax dollars, we have the right to know what we're getting for that money. Don't settle for the status quo if the status quo is mediocre, and don't be afraid to ask the hard questions.