Home-school culture shifting away from religious ties

 

David J Strumfels I see the academic advantages of home-schooling (if done well), but I worry these kids won't get the social education -- just as important -- that they need. Home-schooling parents must make sure their kids don't become socially isolated.    

 

Home-schooling has risen among secular students in recent years. A 2013 National Center for Education Statistics study showed home-schoolers no longer list religion as their top reason for schooling from home.

Gerry Broome, Associated Press

Summary

Home-schooling has risen among secular students in recent years. A 2013 National Center for Education Statistics study showed home-schoolers no longer list religion as their top reason for schooling from home.

National Edition

This story is part of the Deseret News National Edition, which focuses on the issues that resonate with American families.

Eric Peschel and his family have different reasons for home-schooling.
One of his sons was taken out of public school for religious reasons and bullying. Another is taught at home because the public education system wasn't working for Peschel. His daughter was home-schooled too, but "bonding issues" caused the Peschels to put their daughter back into public school.
“Just seeing the difference between what is being taught in public school versus our school, it’s not even close,” Peschel said. “They’re not even close in the vocabulary they’re teaching, the math they’re teaching. It’s off the charts different.”
Though home-schooling has been a historically popular choice for religious conservatives, it's becoming more common among secular students. A National Center for Education Statistics study showed home-schoolers no longer list religion as their top reason for opting out of public or private schools. More than 91 percent see the environment as a reason to home-school, while 64 percent (about 692,299 students) see religion as an important reason to home-school. In 1999, about 327,000 students were home-schooled for religious reasons.
And home-schooling has been on the rise, too. More than a decade ago in 1999, about 850,000 students were home-schooled, which was nearly half of the 1,770,000 home-schooled students reported for the 2011-2012 school year, according to the NCES.
Between bullying worries and lack of belief in the public education system, many parents choose home-schooling to avoid these problems, experts say.
“I’ve seen some remarkable quality educations given to home-school kids in remarkable ways,” said John Edelson, founder and president of Time4Learning, a home-school curriculum organization. “While I see that in public schools, too, parents are a lot more resourceful to give kids quality educations.”
But as home-schooling becomes more popular, it also faces added scrutiny. In Nebraska, the Department of Education is looking to add new stipulations to track attendance for home-schoolers, which requires parents to fill out more paperwork. Other parents worry about the influence Common Core Standards is already having on their ability to shape curriculum to the needs of their children. For many, taking back control of their child's education is a fight that only continues.
A new market
Edelson of Time4Learning said there are three types of home-schoolers: religious people, free thinkers and “accidental home-schoolers,” who are “pragmatically doing what’s best for their kids.”
Because of this, academies that cater to home-schoolers or companies like Time4Learning have to adapt.
Edelson offers students a non-religious curriculum that is part online and part offline. It begins with an opening discussion, then 30 minutes of computer work and 30 minutes of desk work throughout the day.
It's a way of tapping into a new market of virtual home-schoolers, who are on the rise too, Edelson said. Instead of using the traditional method of hiring a home-school teacher, some parents want to enroll their children in an online education system, which they can also do from home, Edelson said.
Jessica Parnell, principal of Bridgeway Home School Academy, which offers curriculum for home-schooling parents, is also marketing itself in new ways by including mainstream and secular curriculums as a way to bring in families who want to avoid religious teachings.
Global Village School, a home-schooling organization that offers online and text-based curriculum, decided to shift its marketing focus in recent months toward secular students due to demand, said Gretchen Buck, the school's manager. She said part of this increased interest in home-schooling is from parents who think their children aren't getting enough attention in public schools.
“We’re not looking to fit all the square pegs in little round holes,” she said of her company's curriculum.
Peschel said public schools also don't have the materials and resources for optimal learning, like textbooks or writing utensils. Sometimes students can't take home a textbook to further develop their understanding, leaving them with less homework and less time to study.
“You want them to learn the material, but the only time they can learn it is when they’re in the class,” Peschel said.
Parnell agreed.
“They’re just not being helped,” Parnell said. “They’re getting passed along."
Another reason for the rise in new home-schoolers is because parents don’t see the traditional classroom setting as helpful for their children, Buck said.
“It doesn’t fit them, and they don’t do well at a traditional desk,” she said.
Parents, then, are taking it upon themselves to start teaching, Parnell said, as they believe they can teach their children better than public school teachers.
"Parents are saying, ‘I want control back,’ ” Parnell said.
In many cases, home-schooling parents will choose to home-school as a “last resort,” Edelson said, when the traditional educational system isn’t working.
“They get all fired up when they get into it and see the possibilities," Edelson said.

Email: hscribner@deseretnews.com Twitter: @hscribner

Deer Trail, Colorado To Vote On Creating Drone-Hunting Licenses

    

By Will Hagle, Tue, December 03, 2013

 

My Comment:  The drones should be squarely marked Amazon, and it should be a felony to shoot them down -- or at least Amazon and the recipient should be able to prosecute and sue (you want guns, you take the responsibilities which always go with rights). Only people who still believe in UFO's will think it's the gov't spying on them. People like that should also have all their guns seized from them in the name of public safety because they are not responsible or rational.

 

In what was either a smart marketing ploy to get people excited about the Cyber Monday deals offered by the online company or a demonstration of potentially revolutionary technology, Amazon’s Prime Air video had a lot of people talking over the weekend. 

The residents of Deer Trail, Colorado are not quite excited about the prospect of packages whizzing over their heads on a daily basis. One resident of the town, Philip Steel, explained that a drone in his vicinity would be nothing more than a target for him.

“I would shoot it down, ordinance or no, I would shoot it down. I will shoot it down and go to jail with a smile on my face,” Steel told the National Journal. 

The ordinance to which Steel is referring is his own new law that would allow Deer Trail residents to purchase “$25 drone-hunting licenses,” the Daily Caller reports. 

The text of the proposed ordinance is filled with libertarian paranoia about drone technology, but is written in a distinguished-enough legal text that it appears the residents of Deer Trail are taking it seriously. 

“There shall henceforth exist a legal obligation of all citizens to defend their homes and community from incursions by unmanned aerial vehicles; and Whereas, many Western communities in rural America provide monetary incentives (bounties) for the killing of predators that are injurious to Man and his interests, the Town of Deer Trail likewise establishes hunting licenses and bounties for the killing of unmanned aerial vehicles, in keeping with the Western traditions of sovereignty and freedom,” the ordinance reads.

While the ordinance is extremely reactionary, at least some individuals are questioning the potentially drastic impact a service like Amazon Prime Air could have on society. As of the last census, Deer Trail, Colorado has a population of 561 individuals.

Life originated as a result of natural processes that exploited early Earth's raw materials.

From The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science :

Life originated as a result of natural processes that exploited early Earth's raw materials. Scientific models of life's origins almost always look to minerals for such essential tasks as the synthesis of life's molecular building blocks or the supply of metabolic energy. But this assumes that the mineral species found on Earth today are much the same as they were during Earth's first 550 million years—the Hadean Eon—when life emerged. A new analysis of Hadean mineralogy challenges that assumption. It is published in American Journal of Science.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-11-ancient-minerals-gave-life.html#jCp

Sam Harris on Free Will

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCofmZlC72g

Wind turbines trash the landscape for the benefit of billionaires

Energy policy is chaotic and incoherent. The myth that wind power is 'free' has driven Britain's politicians mad

   

         
Simon Jenkins

The Guardian, Thursday 5 December 2013

'George Osborne finances a tiny group of extremely wealthy men to let someone else put up wind turbines on their land, or at least he did until Thursday.' Illustration: Satoshi Kambayashi

Is it fair for the chancellor to cut pensions for the poor while offering a million pounds a year to the Duke of Roxburghe for letting the wind blow? Is it fair to offer half a million to the Earl of Moray, a third of a million to the Earl of Glasgow, and a quarter of a million to the Duke of Beaufort, Sir Alastair Gordon Cumming and Sir Reginald Sheffield, the prime minister's father-in-law? Is it fair to promise a reported £1bn to Charles Connell over the next 25 years?
I am not particularly egalitarian. I support austerity in the public finances and accept that this may require a bit of smooth with the rough. But George Osborne is going beyond smooth.
British energy policy is chaotic. It is intellectually incoherent, lurching from fashion to fad with each lurch breeding a pile of taxpayer cash and a carnival of lobbyists out to protect it. Never in the history of public subsidy can so much have been paid by so many to so few.
The chancellor's well-trailed announcement that money for onshore turbines will be cut in favour of offshore is welcome in part, but it makes no sense. While less intrusive on the eye, offshore turbines are even more expensive and inefficient than onshore ones. The bizarre plan to erect 240 down the middle of the Bristol Channel has already been abandoned as uneconomic, despite Osborne's subsidy. The huge East Anglian field may cost billions. It all makes nuclear seem a bargain.
I have sympathy with the wind lobby in one respect. Its members are trying to turn an honest penny and must plan ahead. Just a couple of years ago they were told by wind's most fanatical subsidiser, Chris Huhne, to plan for 10,000 onshore turbines. Contracts were promised. Public money was unlimited. Offshore wind alone would "generate 20,000 British jobs". It was rubbish. The giant Sheringham field is so Norwegian that the country's crown prince was invited to declare it open.
There are almost no British jobs. The German firm Siemens makes most British turbines and sensibly does not rely on British government policy for its investment. It builds on the continent. Its competitor Vestas has pulled the plug on a plant in Kent, and South Korea's Doosan has done likewise in Glasgow. The energy required to mine the turbines' rare minerals and build, import and erect them makes a mockery of their "greenness".
The industry lobby, RenewableUK, on Thursday deplored what it suspected was a "political decision" to cut subsidy, and it was right. The switch reeked of Downing Street's obsession with Ukip, which has shrewdly opposed wind turbines. But an industry that is effectively a state subcontractor must accept such whims. The golden goose would never last.
I have spent two years traipsing Britain in search of the finest views. It is hard to convey the devastating impact of the turbines to those who have not seen them, especially a political elite that never leaves the south-east except for abroad. Fields of these structures are now rising almost everywhere. They are sited irrespective of the wind, since subsidy is paid irrespective of supply, even if there is none. It makes EU agricultural policy a paragon of sanity.
Turbines are to surround Cornwall and stretch along the north Devon coast. They will form a wall off the Dorset shore. They will line Offa's Dyke from Gwent to Shropshire, with a single giant on Clyro Hill looking down the Wye Valley like Rio's Christ the Redeemer. The once desolate Cambrian Mountains are on the way to being an estate of 840 turbines filling views in every direction.
The shires of Northampton, Nottingham and Cambridge are already gathering turbines. Heckington Fen in Lincolnshire may have ones higher than Lincoln cathedral. They are to appear in the Forest of Bowland in Lancashire, in the Brontë country of Yorkshire and on Spurn point off the Humber.
The wildest coastline left in England, in Northumberland, is being flanked by 70 turbines. In Scotland the Roxburghe array of 400 turbines has turned the once lovely Lammermuir Hills into a power station. Inverness and Caithness are to lose their open vistas, as are the Shetlands and the islands off Argyll. Scottish aristocrats have not seen such a turn in fortune since the Highland clearances.
Britain's landscape has never before been subject to such visual transformation. Human hands have always refashioned the country, urban and rural alike, but they have not industrialised its appearance on remotely this scale. Roads, railway lines, quarries, even towns and cities, are inconspicuous compared to wind turbines. Few of Britain's greatest views will be free of the sight of them.
Mostly the gain is footling. Turbines seldom produce their declared capacity. The one that towers over the M4 at Reading generates just 16% of its capacity. What they really generate is money, up to £30,000 a year each in subsidy. The billions poured into wind would have been far better spent – as energy professor Dieter Helm, the consultants KPMG and others have long argued – in pursuing lower emissions through energy efficiency and cleaner carbon.
Yet the myth that wind is "free" has driven politicians mad. They have chased the length and breadth of the land showering quantities of public money on a tiny handful of the rich. Britain's modern landscape is their memorial.

Very Nice Post on Cosmic Rays

This week’s Ask Ethan has a very nice post on cosmic rays, their origins, and how they interact with the Earth.  Recommended reading.

http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2013/12/06/ask-ethan-14-the-highest-energy-particles-in-the-universe/

Jensen K, Karch A. Holographic Dual of an Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Pair has a Wormhole. Phys. Rev. Lett. 2013;111(21)

Quoted from Brian Koberlein, Rochestor, NY.

Entanglement is a well-known property of quantum mechanics.  It is perhaps most famously demonstrated through the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) experiment.  Suppose we have a mischievous mutual friend.  She decides to prank us by sending sending each of us one member of a pair of gloves.  She packs each glove in a box and mails one to each of us.  We find out about the prank, so we both know that we’re getting one glove of a pair.  But until either of us open our respective box, neither of us know which glove we have.  Once the box arrives at your door, you open it up, and find you have the left glove.  At that moment you know I must have the right glove.

This is the basic idea of the EPR experiment.  For gloves it isn’t a big deal, because from the get-go the left glove was heading your way.  You just didn’t know you were getting the left glove.  That’s because gloves are not quantum things.  In the quantum regime, things get much more strange.  In quantum theory, things can be in an indefinite state until you observe them.  It would be as if our boxes contained a pair of something (gloves, shoes, salt and pepper shakers, etc.) but it is impossible to know what specific something until one of us opens their box.

In quantum theory we would say the boxes contain a superposition of possible things, and the outcome only becomes definite when the outcome is observed.  Now even though you can’t know what specific object you have, you know that I must have its pair.  So if you open the box to find a red right shoe, you know immediately that I must have a red left shoe.  We both know this without opening the box, so we can say that the outcomes of opening our boxes are entangled.  Knowing the contents of one box tells us the contents of the other.  We’ve actually done this experiment with photons, atoms and the like, and it really works.

Of course this is really hard to wrap your head around.  If I’m thousands of miles away from you, and I open my box to find a salt shaker, I know you must have a pepper shaker.  But your box couldn’t have known that until I opened the box.  How is that possible?  How can the opening of my box instantly affect your box thousands of miles away?  Do the boxes communicate faster than light? (No.)  Is there some secret (hidden variable) so that the boxes know what they will become when observed? (No.)  That is part of what makes entanglement so strange, and the EPR experiment so popular.  The one thing we can say is that entanglement is a very real physical effect in quantum mechanics.  There isn’t anything magical going on, just something we humans find strange.

Wormholes come from general relativity.  Unlike entanglement, there is no experimental evidence for wormholes.  Instead, they are a hypothetical connection between two locations in space.  Normally when people think of wormholes, they think of something out of science fiction (http://goo.gl/nz5SV2) where people use wormholes to travel to distant stars, but the hypothetical wormholes in general relativity aren’t traversible, nor do they have to be large.

This particular paper is looking at how there might be a connection between wormholes and quantum particles.  This idea isn’t new, in fact the idea that fundamental particles could be wormholes dates back to the 1950s, when John Wheeler proposed a model known as geometrodynamics, where everything was empty space and charged particles were the mouths of wormholes.  Wheeler was an excellent physicist known for coming up with a lot of wild ideas, some of which worked, and some of which didn’t.  In the case of geometrodynamics, it never really worked, and after a while interest faded.

But with the rise of string theory, different versions of the idea have gained some popularity.  Hence this new paper.  What the authors did was to look at a specific case of the EPR experiment, dealing with two quark particles.  What they were able to show is that the entangled quarks can be described in two ways.  The first is the standard way in which entanglement is described in quantum theory, but the second (dual) way is as two particles connected by a wormhole.  Both of these descriptions are equivalent.

Does this mean that entangled particles are wormholes?  No.  What it means is that there is an interesting connection between the mathematics of entanglement and the mathematics of quantum wormholes.  Just to be clear, this has nothing to do with any new experimental evidence.   But it is interesting, because it shows a connection between quantum entanglement and general relativity, and that may lead the way toward a better understanding of quantum gravity.