2010 Overview from LifeWay VBS on Vimeo.

It’s obvious what’s going on. The old guard Republican establishment is terrified of the Tea Partiers and anybody that smacks of libertarianism. That’s why Dick Cheney and Mitch Mconnell came out in support of Rand Paul’s primary opponent, Trey Grayson. Mconnell even went so far as to privately mislead James Dobson about Rand Paul’s views on abortion. Dobson later came out and switched his vote from Grayson to Paul after he learned that he had been mislead. Obviously the GOP elitists hate Rand Paul with a passion. And then, out of nowhere comes this big hubbub about his criticisms of the Civil Rights Act, originating from the neo-con blogosphere.

The dirty little secret of historical fact that they leave out of every story is that the Civil Rights Act was soundly criticized by many people at the time it was being debated, especially libertarians. Their criticism had nothing to do with race. Instead, they were thoroughly disgusted with the amount of power that the legislation gave to the federal government. Even though most of the CRA was justified(specifically titles I and III were long overdue), there were real causes for concern in other parts of the bill when it came to civil liberties of blacks and whites.

Most criticism of the CRA was focused on Title II, which attempted to outlaw discrimination in businesses. I say “attempted” because, as we recently explored, laws can never properly fulfill their stated goals. No law can outlaw racial discrimination. It can ban certain behaviour under threat of punishment, but it can’t ban discrimination itself. That’s impossible. So, what title II did was force people to behave in ways that they weren’t comfortable with. This may have helped blacks get a better table in a restaurant, but I can guarantee you that the cook spit in their food. Why? Because the CRA didn’t change what he actually thought about race. It just told whites and blacks that they had to play ball or else they would be punished. That’s not a solution to racism. It’s a recipe for exacerbating racial hatred.

Title IV was also a focus of criticism by many. The fear was that it would lead to quotas and forced busing. Although the CRA’s proponents routinely denied this, it nevertheless happened:

One of the most “damaging” arguments by the bill’s opponents was that once passed, the bill would require forced busing to achieve certain racial quotas in schools. Proponents of the bill, such as Emanuel Celler and Jacob Javits, said that the bill would not authorize such measures. Leading sponsor Hubert Humphrey wrote two amendments specifically designed to outlaw busing. Humphrey said “if the bill were to compel it, it would be a violation [of the Constitution], because it would be handling the matter on the basis of race and we would be transporting children because of race.” While Javits said any government official who sought to use the bill for busing purposes “would be making a fool of himself,” two years later the Department of Health, Education and Welfare said that Southern school districts would be required to meet mathematical ratios of students by busing.

–Civil Rights Act of 1964, Wikipedia

This forced desegregation by forcibly transporting black children across town to white schools was a clear violation of black people’s civil liberties. It opened up black school children to being beaten by white kids and being shunned by white teachers who were being forced out of their comfort zone too fast. That’s the danger of omnipotent legislation. The natural flow of society is jolted. Racism is a mental scar that needs a lot of time to correct itself in the hearts of men. Rushing the process by threat of force might speed it up, but at the cost of large short-term harm to the very people it’s aimed at helping.

One of the persistent critics of forced school desegregation was black author Zora Neal Hurston – author of Their Eyes Were Watching God. Although she totally opposed segregation on moral grounds, she feared that such things as the court’s decision in Brown vs. Board of Education set a dangerous precedent of encroaching on civil liberties. Although she died in 1960, it’s clear that the portions of the CRA that expanded the size and power of the federal state would have troubled her greatly. Her famous letter to the Orlando Sentinel is a fantastic read. Please go read it before it goes down the collective memory hole.

On a personal note, I find racism abhorrent, as I’ve posted before. But, what I find equally abhorrent are demigod politicians and black robed dieties forcing society to conform to their image by threat of physical and financial harm. Racism itself is idiotic. It makes no financial sense to restrict trade because of the color of a man’s skin. As people come to realize this, racism naturally falls by the wayside as an artifact of history. A black man’s money is the same as a white’s. A black man’s labour is the same as a white’s. This fact alone would have driven racism out of our culture as people began to see, more and more that racism itself is foolishness. Opposition to title II and title IV of the CRA isn’t an endorsement of racism. It’s a principled opposition to a piece of far-reaching legislation motivated by an equally strong commitment to the preservation of personal liberty.

Sometimes a love of liberty and a love for people come down on different sides of an issue and it’s hard to make a decision between the two. If I saw a restaurant owner turn away a black man for being black I would probably go over and punch him in the nose. But, that doesn’t mean that I think title II of the CRA was appropriate. Personal liberty is too fragile and too easily discarded. It must be protected. Maybe I’m naive, but I think racism in the U.S. was destined to be eradicated by society itself, without the help of legislation; except such legislation that was necessary to correct racist laws that our government had already passed.

Clearly, if you go to a charter school, you will be unable to properly cut out things with scissors and will develop a habit of slapping primary colored large words hap-hazardly onto scary concrete walls. Please. How silly.

Of course, as a homeschooling family I don’t really have a dog in the hunt, but it’s still interesting to watch the mud fly from the sideline and develop some commentary. The thing that really got me were these phony reasons they are giving. They are so funny. Here’s how the site lists them out [my commentary in green brackets]:

• Charter Schools Drain Funding from Local Schools. [$10,000 per student is what Alabama government schools spend. Briarwood private school tuition is $6,375.00 per student. Go figure.]
• Charter Schools Compromise Teacher Quality. [This is probably the same teacher quality that the AEA fought so hard against a few years ago when No Child Left Behind required "highly qualified" status for all public school teachers.]
• Charter Schools are Plagued by Abuse, Corruption, & Failure. [LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!!]
• Charter Schools Perform Worse than Other Schools. [ "Because charter schools vary as widely as traditional public schools, their academic achievement also varies widely. It is difficult -- not to mention scientifically invalid -- to make blanket comparisons of charter schools to traditional public schools." --NEA Website. Someone needs to get the AEA and NEA on the same page quick.]
• Charter Schools Weaken Accountability, Standards, and Local Control. [Somehow, this will be the first time in human history that competition has weakened accountability. It's a miracle!]
• Charter Schools are Being Forced on Us by Federal Bureaucrats. [Somehow, I imagine that if we already had charter schools and the Feds wanted to make them illegal that this bullet point wouldn't be on that list. :)]

–Nocharterschoolsalabama.org, AEA

Please. Give me a freakin’ break. Nobody believes for a minute that the AEA cares about any of this baloney. The AEA has one purpose. To use education as a cover for getting more money into it’s stakeholder’s pockets. That’s it. End of story. If a certain law, policy, agenda, event will bring more money to the AEA and it’s members/leadership then they will back it. If it doesn’t, then they will come out against it. The actual content of the item in question is irrelevant. The AEA is a public employees union, and the fact that charter schools don’t require their teachers to be unionized might have something to do with their opposition. Ya think? Just maybe?

Also, I want to mention that the technical part of this bread recipe can be made in one of two ways. The modern version that’s fast, or the totally from scratch pioneer version that will blow your tongue off. It’s up to you which route you go. I’ll explain the modern variant in this post and the totally(and I mean totally) from scratch version in the next post.  This is the version I’ve settled on for awesome sandwich bread, but this recipe is very, very changeable.  It’s a great starting recipe to use and adapt to make all different types of yummy rolls, bagels and french breads.

The Modern Version:

Dry Ingredients:

• 2.5 Cups of Wheat Flour
• 1 Cup of Bread Flour
• 1 TBSP of Salt
• 2 tsp cocoa powder

Wet Ingredients:

• 8 oz. warm water
• 5 oz. warm whole milk
• 1 oz. of vegetable oil
• 2 tsp Instant Dry Yeast
• 1 TBSP Sugar

Instructions:

1. Mix all the dry ingredients together in a large mixing bowl.  Don’t add the yeast or sugar to the dry ingredients.
2. Mix the water, oil and milk together in a large cup and warm it up a bit.  Not hot, just warm.  A little more than luke warm.  You don’t want to kill the yeast.
3. Now add the dry yeast and sugar to the warm liquid and stir it around with a fork vigorously until all of the sugar is dissolved.
4. Now walk away and let the yeast liquid sit and fester for about 15 minutes.  The yeast is going to get really active and start to party.  Don’t crash it.
5. Come back and dump the liquid/yeast mix into the dry ingredients.
6. Get your hands wet with some water and begin to mix.  You will get messy, but it’s worth it.
7. When everything is mixed thoroughly, flour the countertop and dump the dough out onto the flour.
8. Knead the dough for  6 minutes until smooth, adding plenty of flour as needed.  Don’t skimp.
9. Now stretch and shape the dough into a ball with the seam at the bottom.
10. Clean and dry out your mixing bowl and then spray it inside with cooking spray or wipe it with oil.
11. Drop your dough ball into the bowl seam side down and shoot it with a light shot of cooking spray also.
12. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and a hand towel and let sit for an hour until it at least doubles in size.
13. After it doubles, uncover and punch down the dough to get all the air out.  Don’t punch it hard, just make sure it’s deflated good.
14. Now turn it out on the floured countertop again and knead it very lightly for about a minute.  You just want to work it a little to get it back to a good shape.
15. Now, crisco the inside of a loaf pan.  Use plenty of lard/crisco.  You don’t want the loaf sticking to the pan.  That’s a disaster.
16. Cover and let sit again for about 30 minutes.  It will rise quite a bit, but don’t let it get too big where it’s ballooning out over the sides of the pan.
17. Lower your oven rack to a little below center and put the pan on the rack.
18. Set the oven to 400° F and set the timer to 30 minutes.
19. When the timer goes off the bread is done.  Let it cool on a wire rack for about an hour.

That sounds like a ton of steps, but it’s really not that hard.  Try and make it a few times. You’ll get better each time and it tastes delicious. You’ll never eat sandwiches with store bought bread again. Once you’ve nailed down this recipe, you’re ready to kick it up and go old-school.  That involves hand grinding your wheat flour, using home cultured yeast and making a pre-ferment.  I’ll show you how to do that next time.

Ron Paul – Mises Circle 2010:

I have come to the conclusion that this setup of paying for chores is sort of odd. Think about it for a minute. Who pays you when you do chores? Nobody. You do chores because they are the daily ploddings of life that all people must do. You don’t get rewarded, or reimbursed for it. You do, however, get reimbursed for the time and labour you spend at your job. The reason is that, in your job function, you are representing a capital labour investment for someone else who pays you for his use of your time and effort. To put it more simply, you don’t do somebody elses chores, you do your chores. But, at a job, you do someone else’s work(the capitalist’s or entrepenuer’s) for them. And they pay you for it.

Now, if the ultimate goal of raising our children is to prepare them properly for life as an adult, then we need to mirror as closely as possible the real world that they will be living in. Remember, that’s why we homeschool to begin with – because real life doesn’t resemble the fake world of government school classrooms. At your job, you don’t get segregated into age-peer groups, so you shouldn’t be grouped that way when your raised either. Now, import the concept of wages into this same scenario. It wouldn’t fit to pay your child for doing chores, but not for their job(school). When we do it that way, we are unwittingly teaching them a fallacious, labour theory of value. We are teaching them that you get paid based on how hard you work. That’s not true.

We get paid, not based on how hard we work, but on how productive we are. Let me demonstrate. Imagine you have five employees that all do the same job(just make up something, like data entry). Two of them are extremely fast typists, and it only takes them an hour to input 50 documents. The other three are slower and it takes them an hour and a half to input the same 50 documents. In this scenario, the second, slower, group works much harder than the faster group to achieve the same results. But, you would think it silly to say that the second group deserves higher wages than the first. In fact, the first group should be paid more, because they are more productive. This enhanced productivity brings a higher return to the capitalist(you), so you can pay them more.

If we pay our kids for their school work, it reinforces the correct idea that wages are a marginal product based on how productive they are. It’s not enough to just put a bunch of junk down on the paper. They have to get the answers right and do it in an ever-increasing efficient manner. If they don’t, they don’t get paid. What matters is output, not labour or even effort. Some kids are naturally gifted in a certain subject like math. That is a benefit to them. The fact that getting the right answers comes easily to them is irrelevant. As long as our kids get the answers right, and show a pattern of solving the same problems quicker over time, they get paid 10 cents per lesson, because that is evidence that they are learning what is being taught. And that’s their job right now.

First, why pay kids for doing school work? It seems like such an odd thing to do. After all, we didn’t get paid for going to school. We just had to grin and bear it. But, as we should all keep in mind, just because the majority of people do something a certain way doesn’t make it the best way to do said thing. We should always be on the lookout for ways to improve the things we take for granted. And, that’s one of the brilliant things about homeschooling. We get to experiment with all kinds of techniques to reach the kids with a greater level of educational realism. That’s what led us into thinking about all of this. A desire to make our children’s education have the most real, practical effect. We wanted the act of educating, itself to be instructive and realistic.

So, with that in mind we thought about how the modern educational process is treated so differently than every other real-world experience we have. Just think about it for a moment. What is primary education really saying to our kids? It’s saying, because you are young, you must go and work for 8 hours a day, plus nights and weekends(for homework) without pay for twelve years of your life. If you don’t do this, the state will do bad things to you and/or your parents. Now, can you think of any other institution that resembles this? I can. It’s called slavery.

Now, I know that your knee-jerk response to this claim is that I’m crazy, because “this is different.” Or, “they’re getting an education.” Or, “it’s for the child’s own benefit.” Or, “education has X number of external benefits, so it’s worth it.” I could probably think of a dozen other statements like this that people would probably think of when I claim that mandatory elementary education is just like slavery. But, I hope that you will stop and think about it for a moment and realize that all of those statements are true for slavery as well. You could say, “they’re learning a skill.” Or, “they’re getting three meals a day and shelter.” My basic premise is that no matter how you try and make mandatory education different than slavery, you can’t. It all ultimately boils down to forced labor.

This is the premise we came to the table with. We thought in this way: if we force our children to do work, the moral thing to do is pay them a wage for that work. Work without pay is slavery. Remember, though, not all pay comes in the form of money. When I talk of paying them a wage(10 cents per lesson in our case), that wage could come in another form also. It could come in the form of food, play time/free time, getting to stay up a bit later before bed, etc. In fact, that’s going to be the subject of the next post.

Now we have a new longitudinal study titled “Fifteen Years Later: Home-Educated Canadian Adults” from the Canadian Centre for Home Education. This study surveyed home-schooled students whose parents participated in a comprehensive study on home education in 1994. The study compared home-schoolers who are now adults with their peers. The results are astounding.

When measured against the average Canadians ages 15 to 34 years old, home-educated Canadian adults ages 15 to 34 were more socially engaged (69 percent participated in organized activities at least once per week, compared with 48 percent of the comparable population). Average income for home-schoolers also was higher, but perhaps more significantly, while 11 percent of Canadians ages 15 to 34 rely on welfare, there were no cases of government support as the primary source of income for home-schoolers. Home-schoolers also were happier; 67.3 percent described themselves as very happy, compared with 43.8 percent of the comparable population. Almost all of the home-schoolers — 96 percent — thought home-schooling had prepared them well for life.

–Michael Smith, Washington Times (Op-Ed)

Guess how many teachers ran to my aid? None. My friend David helped me up, and the kid was too big for me to retaliate against so I just did what most bullied kids do. Nothing. Think it’s hard to believe my story? Think it’s crazy to think I wouldn’t have told my parents? Well, here’s exhibit A:

Jake Arend doesn’t need survey results to convince him ball tapping is a serious problem.

Classmates began hitting him in the groin when he was in sixth grade and it continued for years.

“I was just the scrawny kid everybody picked on to make themselves look better,” Arend said. “If you get hit in that area, you just want to fall and cry, but I tried not to.”

By the time Jake got to Danville High School, he says he was being ball tapped every week – sometimes even three or four times a day.

“Sometimes it would be just the flick of a wrist, and there was one time I actually got hit in the area with a socket wrench,” he recalled. “When I got hit with that, I actually just hit the ground and just laid there in the fetal position for five to ten minutes for the pain to go away, then I got up and went to class.”

Jake never told his parents and he never told his teachers, fearing the bullies at school would hit him ever harder if they got in trouble.

“I just thought ‘It’s pain. I’ll deal with it,’” said Arend.

–Bob Segall, NBC Indiana

Please, parents. Realize that when you send your kid to state prison, school, that you give up any control over them and what happens to them. If joining the PTA or some such thing makes you feel better then you are kidding yourself. The state owns your kid for 8 hours a day, and they don’t give a rat’s a– what happens to them. And, please don’t give me the “boys will be boys” argument. You’re not allowed to use that argument unless you’ve been beat up by a bully at least a few times a year for your entire elementary school experience. If you haven’t then go blow that crap somewhere else. I don’t want to hear it.