Showing posts with label Home Education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Home Education. Show all posts

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Erosion of Freedom

Child Welfare Legislation Outlaws Spanking


Senior Counsel Dee Black answers questions and assists members with legal issues in Delaware. He and his wife homeschooled their children. Read more >>
When Governor Jack Markell signed into law Senate Bill 234 on September 12, 2012, Delaware became the first state in the nation to effectively outlaw corporal discipline of children by their parents.
Sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Patricia M. Blevins (District 7), the legislation creates a definition of the term “physical injury” in the child abuse and neglect laws to include “pain.” Currently the law permits a parent to use force to punish a child for misconduct, but it prohibits any act that is likely to cause or does cause physical injury. By defining “physical injury” to include the infliction of pain on a child, spanking has become a crime in Delaware punishable by imprisonment.
 
Under the new law, a parent causing “physical injury” (e.g., pain) to a child under age 18 would be guilty of a class A misdemeanor and subject to one year in prison. A parent causing pain to a child who was 3 years of age or younger would be guilty of a class G felony and subject to two years in prison.

Home School Legal Defense Association opposed this bill as a violation of the right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children, including the long-recognized right to administer reasonable corporal discipline. HSLDA worked with the Delaware Home Education Association and the Delaware Family Policy Council in an effort to bring about a defeat of this legislation.

 Other Resources
View the text of this bill.

Sunday, June 26, 2011

50 Things Everyone Should Know

Just for fun...someone sent this to me:
50 Things Everyone Should Know

The word "queue" is the only word in the English language that is still pronounced the same way when the last four letters are removed.

Beetles taste like apples, wasps like pine nuts, and worms like fried bacon.

Of all the words in the English language, the word 'set' has the most definitions!

"Almost" is the longest word in the English language with all the letters in alphabetical order.

"Rhythm" is the longest English word without a vowel.

In 1386, a pig in France was executed by public hanging for the murder of a child

A cockroach can live several weeks with its head cut off!

Human thigh bones are stronger than concrete.

You can't kill yourself by holding your breath

There is a city called Rome on every continent.

It's against the law to have a pet dog in Iceland!

Your heart beats over 100,000 times a day!

Horatio Nelson, one of England's most illustrious admirals was throughout his life, never able to find a cure for his sea-sickness.

The skeleton of Jeremy Bentham is present at all important meetings of the University of London

Your ribs move about 5 million times a year, everytime you breathe!

The elephant is the only mammal that can't jump!

One quarter of the bones in your body, are in your feet!

Like fingerprints, everyone's tongue print is different!

The first known transfusion of blood was performed as early as 1667, when Jean-Baptiste, transfused two pints of blood from a sheep to a young man

Fingernails grow nearly 4 times faster than toenails!

Most dust particles in your house are made from dead skin!

The present population of 5 billion plus people of the world is predicted to become 15 billion by 2080.

Women blink nearly twice as much as men.

Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian.

Honey is the only food that does not spoil. Honey found in the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs has been tasted by archaeologists and found edible.

Months that begin on a Sunday will always have a "Friday the 13th."

Coca-Cola would be green if colouring weren’t added to it.

On average a hedgehog's heart beats 300 times a minute.

More people are killed each year from bees than from snakes.

The average lead pencil will draw a line 35 miles long or write approximately 50,000 English words.

More people are allergic to cow's milk than any other food.

Camels have three eyelids to protect themselves from blowing sand.

The placement of a donkey's eyes in its' heads enables it to see all four feet at all times!

The six official languages of the United Nations are: English, French, Arabic, Chinese, Russian and Spanish.

Earth is the only planet not named after a god.

It's against the law to burp, or sneeze in a church in Nebraska, USA.

You're born with 300 bones, but by the time you become an adult, you only have 206.

Some worms will eat themselves if they can't find any food!

Dolphins sleep with one eye open!

It is impossible to sneeze with your eyes open

The worlds oldest piece of chewing gum is 9000 years old!

The longest recorded flight of a chicken is 13 seconds

Queen Elizabeth I regarded herself as a paragon of cleanliness. She declared that she bathed once every three months, whether she needed it or not

Slugs have 4 noses.

Owls are the only birds who can see the colour blue.

A man named Charles Osborne had the hiccups for 69 years!

A giraffe can clean its ears with its 21-inch tongue!

The average person laughs 10 times a day!

An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain

Saturday, May 21, 2011

Battle Bits and Bytes and Bots

Recently I posted about the awesome Robot Class our church hosted. Well, the following week the young robot engineers flexed their skills in a battle to the death (or at least until your robot was pushed out the ring or turned over on it's side). Take a look...

Thursday, April 28, 2011

Robot Class!




What a blast for the kids. 

 David runs Bits, Bots, and Bytes and he's a great guy. I took a couple hours off to go do some much needed educational research for HLA, as well as get some pictures and video. This is the first of several classes, each on Fridays. The class is closed now, but I'm sure with the success of this one, we might like to get him back. It is difficult to place a value on educational learning experiences like this one! This introductory class led to a battle of the bots two weeks later.

Monday, August 16, 2010

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Babysitters Gain Parental Rights?


"Perhaps we get too comfortable in the thought that our freedom to homeschool our own children, and discipline them our way, will always be a given. Imagine if your state was thinking differently and wanted to take that freedom away, little by little." -david

Babysitters Gain Parental Rights?

The right of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children is hanging by a thread.
  • A West Virginia mother was shocked when a local circuit judge and a family court judge ordered her to share custody of her four-year-old daughter with two of the girl’s babysitters. Referring to the sitters as "psychological co-parents," the justices first awarded full custody to them, only permitting the mother to visit her daughter four times a week at McDonalds. Eventually she was granted primary custody, but forced to continue to share her daughter with the sitters.

    When her case finally reached the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals in October 2007, the beleaguered mother was relieved to finally be granted full custody of her daughter.

    In their October 25 opinion Supreme Court justices wrote that they were "deeply troubled by the utter disregard" for the mother's rights. One justice referred to the mother’s right as the “paramount right in the world." Chief Justice Robin Davis summed up the case in one simple question."Why does a natural parent have to prove fitness when she has never been found unfit?" he asked.3

 Click here for full article

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Age Segregation in School and Church

Two things which have been of great interest to me for as long as I can remember are "School" and "Church." In my early twenties I began to realize that there is an institutional version of each of these, promoted in the common society and upheld by most of the powerful organizations of our time. To try and escape the clutches of these institutions, into an organic version of life, is amazingly difficult for most. It's take great strength, courage, and the hand of God! There are so many areas which hold one tightly to the institution but not many more pronounced than age segregation.

I began noticing early on that it just didn't seem natural for my church to divide up family members into corresponding age groups. There were youth groups, children's ministries, young marrieds, married with young children, older adults, and seniors. We all went to separate Bible classes on Sunday, separate youth retreats in the Spring, and separate rooms in Summer Camp. As a youth I was virtually cut off from the world outside of my own age group, and, except for the devotionals of my own youth minister and his adult volunteers, had very little interaction of any spiritual depth with anyone older than myself. It wasn't until I read a book in college about parent-directed Youth Ministry, where the youth minister quit his job and left the parents in charge, that I really begin to look for an alternative to this institutional model.

I also noticed it was true in schools, which may have in fact informed the way in which 20th Century churches began to behave. Karl M. Bunday writes here http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html : 

  • Some people think it is "natural," or even beneficial, for children to be confined with other children of approximately the same age for most of each school day, but this is a recent, mistaken idea promoted by education bureaucrats.
  • The fact is, however, that most American schools were ungraded until the second half of the nineteenth century, the graded school having been introduced in the United States in 1848, when the Quincy Grammar School in Boston, Massachusetts, opened its doors. A number of educators, impressed with the graded schools they had seen in Germany, had been proposing adoption of the technique in this country. The Quincy School was the first built for that purpose; it contained twelve rooms of equal size, four to a floor, in which a teacher and somefifty-five children would meet for a year at a time. The men who created the school predicted that it would set the pattern of American schooling for another fifty years. Their estimate was clearly conservative. Charles Silberman, Crisis in the Classroom: The Remaking of American Education (New York: Random House, 1970) p. 166 (emphasis added). Read the entire article here: http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html
It just makes sense for students to be "pulled along" and "pulled up" by students older than themselves. Parents and Teachers can only be part of the equation. We should never underestimate the power of positive peer pressure. I've noticed that with each new child April and I have, and we're now on #6, the younger achieves more sooner because he is always running to catch up with older siblings. This is true in daily life, in daily school, and it is true in our spiritual lives as well. 

If we only spend time with those who are at the same spiritual age as ourselves we should not expect to gain new ground, at least not as quickly as when we sit at the table with those who have gone further with God than ourselves. The difference in Church and school, however, is that age does not mean the number of birthdays one has. Age is something entirely different in God's economy. Age is spiritual maturity. It is not natural, or even beneficial, for the children of God to be confined with other Christians just as mature as ourselves. We must seek out, on a regular basis, those who can pull us up and pull us along to a greater depth and a higher understanding of our Life in Christ. I'm sure most would agree. The real trick is finding a church where you have plenty of opportunities to mix it up with more mature Christians. 

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