Yes, that's definitely true that Catholics are free to believe in evolution or not, that's a scientific theory that seems sort of silly for a religion to take a stance on. What the Church teaches is that God created the universe and at a specific moment created soulful human beings. I don't really know what Intelligent Design encompasses, I've never thought of it as an alternative to evolution. I just thought it was a subset of evolution that involves a divine creator.

Well, I'm not the one who introduced the "expose to reality" language into the conversation, so I just addressed it as I interpreted it, but I don't really know what it's supposed to mean. In any case, I don't think it's important that part of religious belief is that the belief itself is reality, because nobody ever said school was supposed to teach you everything or "expose" you to all of reality. The state isn't the arbiter of reality, but it is the arbiter of the public school curriculum. The absence of a fact from the curriculum doesn't make it not true, the absence of a "reality" doesn't make it less real.

Students should be taught about facts (history, science, etc), reasoning/analysis (math, literature, etc), essential skills (grammar and writing), and so on (and obviously the preceding "categories" are not discreet or mutually exclusive, eg "reasoning/analysis" are themselves "essential skills" and facts are nothing if you can't contextualize them and interpret them) -- but not beliefs, which are qualitatively different. I think a failure to appreciate this difference is at the heart of religious objections to the teaching of evolution. I don't "believe" in evolution the way a religious person believes in their god, I know the facts and I accept evolution as the unifying explanation of those facts. Religious belief may be "factual" to believers, but it's not susceptible to independent verification and so shouldn't be taught as something that is objectively "true." That religious people can choose to disbelieve in evolution doesn't make evolution any less real; where facts or truth is concerned, the opposite of disbelief is not belief. IDers/creationists fail to grasp this distinction -- because they don't "believe" in evolution, the other side must by definition "believe" in it. If "believe" is a proper word to use here at all, it at least does not carry precisely the same connotations as it does in the religious context.

(side note: I get that you are not an "intelligent design" guy yourself, so I don't want to seem as though I'm putting words in your mouth or building up a strawman here, I'm just going on a little bit of a tangent)


Granted that I'm no expert on education, but my impression here is that you're making perfect the enemy of good (or, well, maybe not good, but). If the current system doesn't socialize children well, are they going to socialize better if they don't go to school at all? This seems, generally speaking, very unlikely to me. If the current system isn't very good, I think it's still much better than homeschooling, based on the homeschooled kids I've known (which is admittedly only anecdotal evidence).


Here I don't really know what you're talking about, "us against them"? Who are "they"? I think your points about the influence of other kids who don't know any better than you did are worth considering, but ultimately I think the success or failure of the system has to be evaluated based on its end product: we end up with a society of adults who know how to interact with each other, communicate with each other, work together, and so on. Maybe they didn't follow the ideal path to get there, but that discussion probably relies on counterfactuals, which are thorny and not very trustworthy. School as a "social structure" is different from later in life, but I don't see how that is inherently bad. Children are also different from adults, so why shouldn't their social structures be? I guess I don't really know what you're trying to say here. In what ways should school more closely reflect later life? Just through greater exposure to a wider range of ages and maturity levels? And what exactly will they gain from this? (incidentally, I think you're dead wrong to suggest that a variety of ages is more important than a variety of races, religions, etc; isolating kids from people who are different from them is exactly how you develop "us-against-them mentalities," although I suspect you meant something very different when you used that phrase)

I grew up catholic, went to catholic schools and never once have I been exposed through the church to creationism or intelligent design. I give the catholic church some credit for that. I think these doctrines/dogmas are firmly protestant in origin and, remarkably, a lot of really smart people believe them without ever even questioning the basis of that belief. I think it is strange that such folk can go to a doctor or get on a jet plane and totally trust their lives to the underlying science (and in the former case, it's not exactly an exact science) but thumb there noses at everything modern geoscience and paleontology/biology comes up with respect to evolution, the age of the Earth, the validity of a Great Flood event etc...

As for Santorum, he may be Catholic but he is also republican and you cannot do well in that party without playing up to the conservative element. I tip my hat to Huntsman, he's the only candidate that admitted acceptance of evolution but look where it got him.

It isn't. ID is pretty much absolute creationism trying to masquerade as a scientific theory. Proponents of that say that evolution, especially macroevolution, by natural selection is impossible.

What you are thinking of is evolutionary creationism or theological evolutionism. The degrees vary (everything happened naturally, but God started the Big Bang/first organic soup/etc and was the one that set down the ground rules; evolution progresses normally, but there is some nudging here and there; evolution is natural, but the soul is divine; etc), but the overarching theme is that evolution through natural selection is a valid theory and is the source of biodiversity. In fact, one of the biggest opponents of ID, especially the theory of irreducible complexity, is an evolutionary creationist.

I disagree with you on this, and it's part of why we homeschooled and now send our kids to Catholic school. To me, a holistic education makes more sense than trying to separate "facts" from everything else. That's not really how life works, it seems to me. I want them to learn facts, but I want them learn manners, self-respect, work ethic, to love, to appreciate beauty, to tell the truth, to treat others well, etc. And to learn about their religion and faith as well. The implication of what you suggest is, "school is where you learn about what's true" the other stuff, well, that may or may not be true. Not suggesting that all schools need to be religious or anything, and I get the difficulty in drawing the "values" line in public education. I don't know the answer, but to suggest there's not a whole lot of secular values education in school I think is off-base. That's also, I think, at the heart of religious worries about education--that there is a competing value system being offered. Again, I don't know the answer, but it seems like many people can't really empathize with the issue. For most of our public education system, the mainstream cultural/secular values aligned pretty closely with religious values, so it didn't pose much of a problem. As there is more divergence, I think it is a real and understandable issue.



I don't have a great answer. Sure, I can imagine lots of alternative schooling mechanisms or approaches, but what is the practicality of implementing them? Ultimately, I think a lot of how kids turns out sits at the feet of the parents, whether homeschooled or not. Both systems turn out plenty of fine, well-adjusted people and plenty of crackpots. In our case, at least, I've little doubt that if we had the energy and discipline our kids would be better educated by homeschooling. I don't know for sure how much difference there would be in socialization. Systematically, I think the current education paradigm is tilted more toward efficiency than quality. And socially, I think we are more accepting of outsourcing parenting responsibility than is probably best for our kids.

If or as more people homeschool, I think you'll see more "normally socialized" former homeschool students. An absence of a "normal" social network was one of the challenges we faced homeschooling. There are large homeschooling contingents at both ends of the political/granola/conspiracy theory spectrum. If we coordinated with 5 or 10 of the school families with whom we are friendly to pool resources and all home school, it would have been a different story. I guess I'm in favor of better balance in the efficiency/quality spectrum, but that would require significantly more work from parents than most are willing to commit.



Sorry, that wasn't clear. Us=students/kids and them=parents/teachers/school. I'm sure there has always been some sort of tension between kids and parents as they emerge into adulthood, but I don't believe it's ever been reinforced institutionally the way that it is in the education system.



Do you really think we have a society of adults who know to interact and communicate with each other, etc? Looking at the state of political discourse in this country and the rancorous, caustic cultural/social/religious conversations, I'm not so sure. I'm not a sky-is-falling-things-aren't-like-the-good-old-days type, but I don't really see any evidence that our current system of raising people turns out adults that are so much more well-formed than it has in the past. Some things are better, some are worse, ultimately people are people and you try to do the best you can with the time you live in. So I'm not really willing to just say "eh, things seems fine, why worry about trying to make them better", even if the "better" requires a pretty significant change. Things tend toward decay, I think both in civilization and in physics, and I believe you've got to be pretty intentional to avoid it.

Yes, the systems for kids are very different than those for adults, school or otherwise. I don't react the same way when my wife or my neighbor do something wrong as I do when my kids do. And I don't know that school should more closely reflect later life, I just think we should find better ways to educate that are more reliant on home and parental involvement and less reliant on institutional involvement.

I do think that extended adolescence and the "quarterlife crisis" are real evidence of the failure of our system. I look at most entry level jobs in a professional environment, and there's no reason a 16-year old couldn't handle most of them with proper preparation (and not even that much). Look at the four (or now 5-6) that people spend in college and (I include myself in this) how much time is spent drinking, socializing and having a great time vs. going to class or really becoming a productive member of society. I'm not saying I blew it off--my grades were good, I worked--but its still very much institutionalized as (and here's my grad school word) a liminal time. It extends on both ends. Look at all the people in their mid-and-late twenties who don't know what they want to be when they grow up, who "aren't ready" to settle down/get married/have a kid. And I don't mean this as an insult or that there is some idiot generation Y out there who just can't handle responsibility. I don't think it's controversial to say that, as a culture, we become "adults" now later than we used to. Looking at the rest of human history, I don't think it's a biological issue. I think it's fair to ask, as a society and a culture, is that a good thing? And maybe it is--you know, life is pretty good here in 2012 in the US of A. I don't have much to complain about. I still think it's worth considering, sorry for the tangent.

And finally, I'm not suggesting that age diversity is better than racial/religious diversity, etc., just that it's generally undervalued in conversations about diversity.

And I would second that. Through 8 years of nuns and 4 years of the Jesuits religion was a belief and science was fact, there was no conflict between the two. Start with Genesis and Adam and Eve. Yes, if you take it literally then there is the conflict with evolution but with my education it was just a story told to simple people who wouldn't be able to understand what really happened. And at that time it would appear that no one really understood how it did happen. Much like today but we do appear to know more about how it happened than back then.

I tend to disagree, at least insofar as I lean toward feeling that discovering the true nature of reality is the ultimate human endeavor, and being upset that Americans are increasingly not only bad at it, but actively hostile to real knowledge and understanding. I think your suggestion that phuqueue's argument implied that, "school is where you learn about what's true, the other stuff, well, that may or may not be true," is probably pretty accurate (not to claim that I can read phuqueue's mind) at least in terms of public schools. To me, being able to opt-out of biology in a public school because it conflicts with your mom's religious beliefs is completely unacceptable. You're basically gutting the curriculum and making all subjects electives subject to the religious whims of the parents. Mormons can skip American history if it doesn't "teach the controversy" about whether ancient Jews came to America? Muslims can skip American history if it teaches that Neil Armstrong didn't hear the Athan (or fails to teach that he did) when he stepped on the moon? Where does it end? And how does the state decide which religions are true, and thus eligible for opt-outs, and which are false; and, further, how can that possibly not violate the establishment clause?

I think manners, self-respect, honesty, treating others well, etc are things you learn through interaction with other people, ie part of socialization. This could take us back to whether or not school socializes children well or whether there is a better way to socialize them, but it does socialize them. This list of other things kids should learn, though, is a different beast from the dry list of actual subjects that I was talking about, which are more directly relevant to the discussion here -- because kids aren't going to opt out of learning manners, they're going to opt out of learning science. I think schools do teach these things as well, but not in the same way that they teach you math or something. You learn manners every time you're reprimanded for stepping out of line; you learn work ethic every time you suffer the consequences of failing to turn in your homework. But these are things you learn through every facet of daily life, not just through school. I don't think you are meaning to imply that school should be the only place to teach these things, so we're probably on the same page there. However I do feel like you're implying that school doesn't teach these things, or maybe you thought I was arguing that school shouldn't teach these things. You'd be wrong on either count, although maybe you could be forgiven for being wrong in the latter case, since I didn't really mention any of these traits (but I do consider them all to be bound up in socialization and so actually a core component of my argument for schools).

I will say, though, that in particular I don't think "to love" or "to appreciate beauty" are things you can "learn" in any particular place, they're things you develop as a result of your cumulative life experience. I mean, that's true to some extent of every other trait you listed, and it's even true of just straight facts and such, but I think it's especially true here. I can't imagine learning "to love" in a school; the closest I can imagine coming to learning to appreciate beauty is in an art class or something, but a) art classes already exist as part of the curriculum and b) I don't think you really learn to appreciate beauty by just looking at art and being told that it's beautiful. So I don't think schools especially teach these things, but nor do I think they hinder students in learning them.

As an aside: you're probably more or less right that my argument is essentially that school is where you learn "what's true," but I think you're phrasing it far more aggressively than I would. After all, I've never disputed (in fact I've acknowledged) that eg religion is "true" for believers. For you to characterize my argument that way comes across as though you think I'm dismissive of that sort of truth, but the reality is that those truths are different for every person and so should not be taught in a "one size fits all" way like incontrovertible facts can be taught. If it's important to you that your kids learn about faith in school, send them to a private religious school. "Faith" doesn't belong in public schools meant to serve everyone.

I didn't go to public school myself so I don't know what "secular values" are taught there, unless the absence of a faith-based curriculum by default teaches "secular values." I think if you remove all the god and supernatural stuff from religion, most Americans (in fact most Westerners as a whole) probably share most of the same broad values morally and ethically. If "secular values" just refers to that moral/ethical code without reference to god, you're probably right, but I don't see a problem. If it goes further, maybe not just neglecting to reference god, but to actively teach that church and state should remain separate, you're probably still right, and I still don't see a problem. This is a secular country, after all. If it goes much further than that, I think you start to get away from "secular values" and start to talk about "atheistic values," and I don't think you're right although I would see a problem (the state shouldn't endorse any religion, but it also shouldn't suppress any religion or religion in general). It's unclear to me exactly what "secular values" is meant to refer to, though.


I think how kids turn out sits at the feet of literally everybody involved in raising them -- the schools, the parents, extended family, friends, and so on. I don't have kids so I don't know whether it actually takes a village, but when the whole village is involved all of their fingerprints are somewhere on that kid's social and psychological development. I don't think it's impossible to put out a normal, well-adjusted, socially capable homeschooled child, I just think homeschooling does this far less frequently than normal schools.

It's interesting to me that you think your kids would have been "better educated" by homeschooling while at the same time acknowledging that you don't know how it would have affected their socialization. I lumped many of the things you mentioned earlier into "socialization" because that seems the most appropriate way to characterize them, as they all involve learning to interact with others. I'm curious what "socialization" actually entails in your mind. You can obviously describe someone as "educated" who is learned, knows a lot, etc, but in the particular context of this discussion I think I would personally hesitate to separate out socialization from education. "They would be better educated, but I don't know how it would affect their socialization" sounds a lot to me like exactly the sort of "education" that you above claimed was incomplete -- education based primarily on facts and information. Okay, maybe you also would have taught your kids to say please and thank you, but is that really enough?


I think this is very difficult to say one way or the other. It would require very serious research into parent/child interaction prior to the advent of universal education, but controlling for other social/cultural factors could be difficult or impossible (eg maybe kids acted less rebelliously before schools, but is that because schools intrinsically inculcate intergenerational tension or is it because working 16 hours in a factory or all day on a farm or something tends to shift priorities?). Your position is duly noted but I don't think discussion can really lead anywhere, so I'm not going to try.


The loudest voices command the most attention but I don't think that necessarily means that they represent society as a whole. The "state of political discourse" is one thing, but look at the effects that it has -- Congress has a historically low approval rating, Tea Party support has eroded to its bare base, polls show the country is ambivalent about Obama and simply doesn't like Romney, etc. There are prominent politicians who could definitely stand to grow up, but there are also 300 million non-politicians who apparently hold all of these people in very low esteem.

The same is true of the cultural/social/religious conversations you're referring to. Those get all the airplay because people like to see a fight, but it doesn't mean they're representative. I mean we're sitting here right now having a perfectly civil discussion about a hot button cultural/political issue. Cable news wouldn't put us on the air unless we were at each other's throats.

I also think the fact of disagreement, even strong disagreement that manifests in childish ways, on specific issues doesn't change the fact that in our day to day life most of us interact with people from all walks of life civilly and cordially. The vast majority of us know how to treat others respectfully, how to properly react to how others treat us (even when it's disrespectful), just generally how to interact with others in a social setting, etc. We are not as bad as our political or cultural rhetoric would suggest.


Well you have to go back like a hundred years or more to find a large crop of adults who didn't go to school and I for one am not comfortable discussing how "well-formed" Victorian-era adults were (and even if they were demonstrably better people than we are now, hitting the reset button on the 20th century would be no answer to this issue anyway -- not that I think you're suggesting it would be).

I'm all for making things better and I don't think it's fair for you to imply that I'm not. But you yourself punted on proposing an alternative system. My only real points have been that schools are better for kids than homeschooling and that there is value in learning about things you disagree with, such that you shouldn't be entitled to opt out of learning it just on that account. By all means develop an alternative school system that socializes and educates kids better than what we've currently got, I'll support it all the way. But until you can outline such a system, I'll stand by what we currently have as the best existing option.


I think these are all fair points, but I don't know how closely they're tied to schooling. After all our school system has not fundamentally changed in generations, yet the "extended adolescence" you refer to is a relatively recent phenomenon that has developed in just the past couple decades. I've heard a million explanations offered up for this, but you're the first person I've ever heard suggest that it's because schools don't do a good job socializing children. That doesn't mean you're wrong, maybe you're onto something, but I think it's a really complex issue that, more than any of the complaints you've leveled against the school system so far, has to do with cultural and economic factors. For instance it takes longer now than it used to (especially in the current economy, but this was gradually developing for years even before the financial crisis) to establish yourself economically/financially, something most people want to lock down before starting a family; moreover women are increasingly choosing to pursue careers before having children. So now the average age at which you have your first child is getting later and later. Without the responsibility of family, you're largely free to keep doing whatever you want to do with yourself, and people take advantage. You can't really paint an entire generation with broad strokes, so I mean it's as dangerous for me to say "well they just aren't economically established yet" as it is for you to say they "aren't ready" (at least, in a way that suggests emotional immaturity -- we could both be right if we say they "aren't ready" because they aren't "economically established," and I would characterize that as being far more responsible than popping out a baby you can't really afford to support yet), but in any case I think it's a little bit of a leap to take all of this, imply that it's a bad thing, and pin it on the school system.

I just think the worst case scenarios you propose are really unlikely to happen on a mass scale. I don't think there needs to be a threshold or it needs to be a real religion...if you don't want your kids to be taught biology, you should have a right to opt out. I am surprise there is so much enthusiasm for absolute and compulsory government mandates for what individuals need to be taught. I believe very few would exercise extreme opt-out rights and the societal threat is low, but I do believe you should have that right.

We're edging right up against issues in the old we've been over once (or more) in the Religion thread....



Whew, I think you've got me word-count beat, phuqueue. Actually, the discussion has gotten so wide-ranging that, while still interesting, we've probably nearly exhausted this forum. I do agree that there is great value in learning things you disagree with, and I think exposure to new things is what makes life so enjoyable. Schools

Was using "secular values" by the way as a broad way of describing values unattached to religion, though there is certainly large amounts of overlap. Citizenship or modesty or tolerance or thriftiness could all be "secular values" in this sense, and while I agree that the vast majority of people agree these are good things to some extent, the degree and definitions I think show pretty wide variance.

And no, I don't pin the "extended adolescence" phenomenon solely on the school system, and haven't completely thought through the relationship, but I do think it is an interesting and highly plausible theory in there somewhere.

As for new models of education...well, working on it. Connections Academy was a client for quite a while, notice they've entered the KS market recently with TV commercials. Not sure how much legs this has, but it's an interesting idea I started discussing with my sister last year. And I think changing technology, including the Google Fiber project, has transformative potential. In fact, just saw this today, not quite sure where it fits in the discussion but seemed timely.

Apologies if you read my post as personal criticism, not intended that way...we've covered a lot of ground!

What a logistical nightmare. You already have the right to opt out - home school or private school. Allowing a lesson by lesson opt out would create a disaster in the classroom.

I suppose I don't really understand what the problem is that people have with "secular values" unless they perceive those values to directly conflict with their religious values. Taking it back a step, we got to the "secular values" discussion because I apparently came across suggesting that schools should (or do) teach no values, which clearly isn't true -- people's values will always come through in whatever they do, and that includes teachers. That being said, I don't really see how this is necessarily problematic. America is a secular nation, the values taught in public schools should reflect that. Unless schools teaching "secular values" somehow undercuts or conflicts with parents/churches/etc teaching religious values, the problem is not really apparent to me. You characterized this as a "competing value system," but can't it be complementary instead? It just often feels to me like the Christian majority (or at least the loudest voices of the Christian majority) has taken this "you're either with us or against us" stance in the so-called CULTURE WARS, but I think the reality for most non-Christians is that we aren't against you, we just don't care about you and we wish you wouldn't care about us either (maybe more succinctly: everyone should just live and let live). The absence of overtly Christian values doesn't make it a "competing" system unless the two systems are intrinsically incapable of coexisting (obviously some Christians do find eg evolution mutually exclusive with their religious views, which is maybe the blunt answer to this entire paragraph, but that is intensely dissatisfying to me because I don't feel like learning about another viewpoint means that you will or must discard your own -- I mean I went through 12 years of Catholic school and came out an atheist so clearly it's possible to learn things without believing in them yourself, although I guess I'm not the sort of success story that will inspire hope in the hearts of religious parents. Now I'm just babbling anyway).


No worries, I didn't take it that way, although I can see now how my post came across as if I did. When I said you weren't being "fair" I meant it more like I thought the suggestion was inaccurate, not that I thought you were personally taking a shot at me.

Yeah, ID is clearly anti-evolution, though apparently not specifically Young Earth. The two Young Earther Catholics I know refer to both though. ID's major advocate is Discovery Institute in Seattle founded by a Roman Catholic...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Chapman

Anyway, my point was there are _some_ (not many) Catholic Young Earthers and anti-evolutioners out there. My other point is that it's not KC/Midwest, there are Young Earthers/ID'rs all over the country and actually seems more organized on the Coasts.

The Romney/Ryan ticket is so far avoiding expressing religious conservatism but at least Romney supports evolution and has opposed teaching ID/creationism, Ryan not clear yet.

Oh yeah, I don't mean "secular values" as pejorative. My point there is that there is a whole category of things taught in school that is not simply "fact-based school stuff" and so I don't think the two can be so neatly separated.



I get what you're saying, I just don't think it would be a logistical nightmare. I think it would hardly ever happen. In fact, I'm pretty sure you can already do this--don't some people pull their kids out of sex ed--it's just that almost nobody does because it's pretty stupid and most things taught in school are pretty uncontroversial.

I have to say that I am pretty impressed with the effects of both Question 1 and 2 in and around the East Village. Charlotte Street has been getting extensive sewer upgrades since the October/November 2012 time frame and recently many streets around me are in process of being repaved including Charlotte (8th Street, 9th Street, Holmes Street and 1 or 2 more).

Anyone, else having a similar experience?

I was thinking the same thing the other day. I have seen a number of bad roads finally getting improved. Although it sounds like we live in the same area.