Why We Home School

People often ask us why we home school our kids.  "Aren't you afraid they won't get socialized properly?" they ask.  Curiously, Aimee and I have never felt so incapable of properly socializing our children that we needed government to do it for us.  In fact, I find it odd that so many parents do not consider themselves capable of properly socializing their children without government assistance. 

Besides the academic superiority of the curriculum we use (Bob Jones University), we also avoid exposing our kids to the immoral philosophies and plain stupidity that permeate government schools nowadays.  So, I thought I'd highlight some of that immorality and stupidity whenever examples pop up in the news.

You may have heard of the recent case in which a school took away a child's lunch and replaced it with a school lunch.

A Hoke County preschooler was fed chicken nuggets for lunch because a state worker felt that her homemade lunch did not have enough nutritional value, according to a report by the Carolina Journal. 

The West Hoke Elementary School student was in her More at Four classroom when a state agent who was inspecting lunch boxes decided that her packed lunch — which consisted of a turkey and cheese sandwich, a banana, apple juice and potato chips — “did not meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines,” the Journal reports.

The student’s mother told the Journal she received a note from the school about the incident and was charged $1.25 for the cafeteria tray, from which her daughter only ate three chicken nuggets.
The note explained how students who did not bring “healthy lunches” would be offered the missing portions and that parents could be charged for the cost of the cafeteria food, the Journal reports.

Let's look at a few of the problems with this incident.

1. Government has no right to tell parents what they can and cannot give their kids to eat, no matter how good their intentions.
2. Since when are USDA guidelines a good example of healthy eating?
3. How exactly are chicken nuggets healthier than a turkey sandwich?
4. Note how, after violating the mom's parental rights, the school forced her to pay for the privilege. 

That's the kind of stupidity, blended with a touch of bureaucratic nanny state despotism, that only government can conjure.

But it gets worse.  Check out the crap government schools feed kids.

Pink slime -- that ammonia-treated meat in a bright Pepto-bismol shade -- may have been rejected by fast food joints like McDonald's, Taco Bell and Burger King, but is being brought in by the tons for the nation's school lunch program. 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is purchasing 7 million pounds of the "slime" for school lunches, The Daily reports. Officially termed "Lean Beef Trimmings," the product is a ground-up combination of beef scraps, cow connective tissues and other beef trimmings that are treated with ammonium hydroxide to kill pathogens like salmonella and E. coli. It's then blended into traditional meat products like ground beef and hamburger patties. 

"We originally called it soylent pink," microbiologist Carl Custer, who worked at the Food Safety Inspection Service for 35 years, told The Daily. "We looked at the product and we objected to it because it used connective tissues instead of muscle. It was simply not nutritionally equivalent [to ground beef]. My main objection was that it was not meat."

 So, the USDA, the supposed ultimate arbiters of what foods are and are not healthy, the same people whose standards the kid's home-made lunch didn't meet, are buying tons of this garbage to feed kids in government schools.

Like I said; stupidity.