I want a New Church

(sung to the melody of "I want a new drug" by Huey Lewis)

I want a new church,
One that won't make me sick,
One that won't make me work the nursery,
Or make me feel like throwing a brick.

I want a new church,
One that won't hurt my kids
One that won't say the truth's a lie,
Or select leaders by bids.

One that won't make me guilty
Forgetting who I am
One that makes me feel like I am who I'm in you
Cause life is only in you

I want a new church
One where I can talk
One that don't charge too much
or stop when He says Walk.

I want a new church
One that sings loud
One that will let us wear our cloaks
And not teach heaven's a cloud

One that won't make me guilty
Forgetting who I am
One that makes me feel like I am who I'm in you
Cause life is only in You
Only in you, Jesus, yeah

I want a new church
One that does what it should
One that won't make me pray to Satan
"You're not welcome in this 'hood"

I want a new church
One that can handle my doubt
Handle me talking too much
and not cast me out

One that won't make me guilty
Forgetting who I am
One that makes me feel like I am who I'm in you
Cause life is only in you
Only in you, Jesus, yeah

(just a little response to our latest attempt at attending church...)

Development of the Status Quo

I've been thinking more about the History of American Education. While I wouldn't doubt that public education was begun with mixed motives (creating unity/conformity from diversity, making good workers, benefitting the poor, etc.), I think that the history of public education is highly flavored with reactions to a changing culture. Our family life has broke down considerably in the last 150 years. The collective ability to focus has been severely eroded by entertainment and leisure. The concept of discipline has been vilified. The traditional leadership of a. men and b. adults is openly scorned. While these changes have brought some good things, the cumulative effect has been to dump a lot of kids in the school system who are insecurely rooted in their families, accustomed to information presented in flashy 15 second soundbites, and burdened with "let the children lead" pressure. The public schools have scrambled to deal with these realities, but there is no way for them to fix these problems. It is neither within the appropriate place of government to address them, nor within its effective power, because they are matters of the heart.

We, the people of America and the parents of the next generation, have the responsibility to create stable homes, to provide meaningful work, and to bring our kids into the freedom of healthy submission. So, if I were running for president, that's what I'd angle for. ;-)

Agenda of State Schooling

I am having a mini crisis over schooling my kids. My oldest two daughters participate in a state run school at home program. They are loaned laptop computers which run a fairly inane curriculum with click the bubble questions after each reading. A teacher comes to our home every few weeks to chat with us—she monitors their progress remotely the rest of the time, much more loosely than I do myself.

The problem is that I have begun reading The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto. It is a scathing indictment of the American compulsory school phenomenon, holding that public schools took a population that was nearly completely literate and dumbed them down to the point where average spelling is at the level of text messaging abbreviations. Gatto’s opinion appears to be that this was no accident: a large number of dumb, minimum wage workers are required to make the U.S. economy go, so the schools produce them in quantity. The thought makes my stomach turn. It makes me want to avoid every trace of participation in “school” as the government conceives it.

I have believed all along that I could easily fulfill the government’s goals along with my own. But if the goal of state schooling is to sap passion for learning from my kid’s brains and take away their time for real life, then that is a conflict of interest I can’t ignore.

My 12 year old gets up before everyone else in the family because she likes the quiet morning hours for doing her schoolwork. I require her to do her math work before she logs on to the online textbooks, and she is often done with all of it by 8:30 in the morning when the rest of the house gets up and begins breakfast and chores. She spends the rest of her day doing as she pleases: doing crafts, reading, making butter and cheese, cooking things, reading to her brother, sewing, etc.

My 10 year old is a sleepy head and is often last up. She milks the cow, and mosies through breakfast and is often just starting school at noon. Her math takes her forever, and she zooms through her computer school. She reads plenty. She is reading the Lord of the Rings Trilogy for about the fourth time in two years, and grabs other quicker reads as I bring them from the library. She spends her spare time making clay pots, frolicking with her pet goat, playing songs with her sister on her guitar, and most recently, working with a hide she is tanning.

All that to say, I don’t think the inane curriculum time has caused their brains to leak out of their ears yet. I am afraid if I read the rest of this book, however, I may be utterly unwilling to participate with the system at all. In any case, I think it is time to revisit my goals for these children again.

Lessons in Housekeeping

Six weeks ago when the weather was still balmy, I was snuggling my 4yo off to sleep. Her six year old brother was wandering around the room getting ready to be snuggled too. He picked something up off the floor and asked me what it was, handing it to me. I didn't really know, but when someone hands you something vaguely furry next to your face in the dark, you throw it--far and fast. And turn the light on. What was it? A bat. We have cats, and they drag things in. And this kitty gift was a tiny fruit bat that had breathed its last.

Well, we homeschool, and we were currently doing a unit on flying things. After looking at the little bat briefly (since it was bedtime), I promised the kids we would study bats "tomorrow" and sealed the bat in a ziploc baggie and put it in the fridge to preserve it until then.

You know where this is going, don't you? Well, tomorrow never came. And this morning, while cleaning out my fridge, I got a lovely lesson in "Do it Now." If you ever wondered what a bat that died six weeks ago looks like, let me tell you, you don't want to know. Ziploc baggies and refrigeration only go so far in preserving small mammals. Another lesson: never wait so long to clean your fridge that a bat could rot in there. Someone should put that on one of those helpful plaques.