[Magdalen] Homeschool Regulation and Religious Liberty

[Roger Stokes]

On 19/09/2016 13:06, Judy Fleener wrote:
> Even more frightening are movements that will destroy public education,
> including voucher systems and charter schools

As the author says, home-schooling can be done very well but can also be 
done very badly.  Education needs to prepare children for today's 
world.  Unless you luve in an effectively closed community like the 
Amish and similar groups that will mean a multi-cultural and 
multi-ethnic society where we all need to get along together even when 
our faith and world-view may differ.  That means dealing with things as 
they are, not as we might wish them to be or what religious teachers 
said centuries in the past, views which do not stand up to scientific or 
historic scrutiny.

Yesterday I presided and preached for the first time since my accident 
in July.  Asd I still cannot drive the churches where I was provided 
transport and on the way back it was from a retired doctor who is a 
part-time tutor in anatomy in the School of Medicine in Cambridge 
University.  He told me that some Muslim students, quite possibly among 
the significant proportion who have come here specifically to study, who 
hold fast to the teaching of the Koran that we come from a blob of blood 
in our mother's womb.  Obviously the Prophet and his contemporaries did 
not have access to the scientific instruments that have been developed 
in the centuries since his death and the discoveries they have enabled.  
Bevertheless these hardline students stick rigidly to their religious 
view and will not accept the result of scientific investigation into the 
early development of the embryo.

That lack of understanding of embryology and human development can have 
devastating consequences.  Round where I live there is a significant 
Bangladeshi community and, as often happens with those from that 
country, they will look to people from their home village for a marriage 
partner for their children.  If, as if often the case, the village is 
quite small that leads inevitably to the marriage of close relatives in 
successive generations and congenital conditions developing as the 
result of inbreeding.

I am not saying that the propensity of some parents to want to 
homeschool to protect their children from this wicked world results in 
such difficulties but it is liable to lead to the reinforcement of a 
very limited worldview which is stultifying and so damaging to the 
offspring.  Externam influence and moderation is vital if the children 
are to grow to be effective in the complexities of the modern world.

Roger

> On Sun, Sep 18, 2016 at 1:47 PM, Lynn Ronkainen <houstonklr at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Thought provoking article ... Very disturbing disregard for the education
>> concept that this country thought it had attained in the post ww2 years.
>> Lynn
>>
>> http://www.patheos.com/Topics/Homeschooling/Homeschool-
>> Regulation-and-Religious-Liberty-Carmen-Green?utm_
>> source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=
>> Public%20Square%20091816%20(1)&utm_content=&spMailingID=52303594&spUserID=
>> Nzg4MDUyODY4NDUS1&spJobID=1002619993&spReportId=MTAwMjYxOTk5MwS2
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> www.ichthysdesigns.com
>>
>> When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would
>> not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, 'I used everything you
>> gave me'. attributed to Erma Bombeck
>>
>>
>