I think we are generally in agreement here. I do disagree on the parental front being a parent myself, and seeing many good parents fail to protect their children from the general effects from public schools (and even bad private schools). I have never seen any positives come from public schools and I have family friends that are public teachers that pulled their children and put them in private schools, for the same reasons and purposes as I described above.

I think I was a little unfair in the grating tone of my post though; and especially in that bit about the private teacher teaching like a public teacher. My definition of a “Public Teacher” does not include the public teacher that sees the problems in teaching methods, general student engagement, and a care for the students problems and concerns about their work. These are things good teachers are interested in.

As far as homework goes, I think it’s generally useless to pile work with tight deadlines on anyone who doesn’t understand the work yet. I know that professionally, when I’m leading teams of programmers, that if I treated my programmers the way that a lot of teachers have treated their students, that there would be a much higher level of mental breakdown and failed projects than there currently is. Instead I treat all my junior programmers as apprentices. I review their work carefully, find where they have a lack of knowledge, constantly develop friendly relations with each, even though I have up to 40 programmers in my care at one time over multiple projects, and try not to treat their ability to complete a task due to lack of knowledge by piling loads of more deadlined tasks on them and more studies to correct their holes. Instead I lessen their load and get more programmers involved in the same tasks. Together with the other programmers we try to help guide that programmer in the sense of common community.

If any of that makes sense to anyone else I’ll consider that good enough. I find my approach to teaching much the same as good teachers that I know personally. I find corporate project managers tend to be just as bad as most public school teachers. I think it has to do partially with the corporate conglomeration, but I’m not absolutely sure on that. It’s just an interesting parallel.

Nobody buys it when Christians say they want a dramatic paradigm shift in schools so that they can teach their own versions of morals and ethics, and somehow it’s not going to violate the Separation of Church and State. Nobody seriously believes Christians when they say they just want schools to be “neutral” in regards to religion and morals, just like nobody believes Muslims when they say that they want European court systems to be “neutral” as to whether they practice local vs. Sharia law. It’s like when Creationists suggest they just want to let students “make up their own mind” whether humans evolved, or whether they were created by God in their present form. First of all – BS. We know exactly what they want students to believe (the plea for neutrality is merely the tip of their “wedge strategy”). Secondly, there is no debate. The two sides are not even close to being equally legitimate. A school that teaches that “the moon may or may not consist of cheese – we need to teach both sides” is not being “neutral,” it’s lending undue credit to stupidity, and burdening the truth with doubt.

The responsibility of teaching ethics, morals, and religion is with parents. Primary education is for imparting knowledge and thinking skills. It’s for teaching things society agrees on, things we can see empirically, that we have a consensus about. There is no wide societal consensus that your personal religious and moral values are the correct ones to be taught to all children. I doubt very highly that we are going to overhaul the whole concept of the public school system to include teachings of your particular ethics.

Incidentally, you’ll see the term “Naturalism” pejoratively thrown around a lot by UFO believers, astrologers, ghost hunters, crystal healers, theists, etc. – basically anybody who is really tired of people who keep reminding them about those pesky facts, “hard science,” the observable world, empiricism, etc. It’s an old tactic of those who preach departure from reality – if your opposition has facts and evidence on their side, give your opponent a name which implies that facts are just one [contested] viewpoint. In reality, there is no true contest, but you can make it look that way. When the founder of homoeopathy (a radical egression from reality and sanity) did it, he derisively renamed traditional evidence-based medicine “allopathy.” An aide to George bush dubbed liberals the “reality-based community.” It’s all pretty amusing linguistic monkey business.

Re: #3: “Destruction/Protection of the Family” is a cute and oft-used euphemism for intolerance. For instance, let’s say that some people are born with a gender expression or sexual orientation that does not match yours. They aren’t hurting anybody – at most, they merely demand equal status as human beings – but they do make you a teensy bit uncomfortable. Unfortunately, it’s not considered acceptable to use epithets or stone them anymore, so you propose the idiotic and insulting notion that they are “destroying families.”

It’s code for wackaloon bigotry. Oddly enough, anybody who truly values the beauty of love and family should realize that those concepts transcend stingy, narrow definitions. People who want to come together, love each other, and raise a family aren’t “destroying the family;” petty, prejudiced sycophants – who think that their kind of love is the only right kind of love – are the ones destroying it.

For a final irony, you use a Calvin & Hobbes strip to annotate your opinions. Throughout his career, Mr. Watterson created work which espoused tolerance and inclusion. He consistently showed a high regard for intellectualism. I’m pretty shocked myself, but if Mr. Watterson came across his strip in your article, championing the teaching of your particular religious morals and acceptable gender roles to children, I cannot imagine that he would be anything other than completely saddened and appalled.