"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock----------------

Children have grown to adulthood for 200,000 years without benefit of psychologists, social workers, or certified school teachers. Further, children train parents as much as parents train children and for many characteristics, the child makes most of his own environment after he is eight years old. Unfortunately, we deal here with an expensive, emergent hierarchy, one led by narcissists and thugs whose job, because of our children's talents, was done just as well by single, underpaid females

Nonetheless, a three-judge panel in California affirmed parental responsibility to either have a teaching certificate or to send their offspring to a full-time day program in a certified education program: 166,000 children are affected. (This order will be appealed with help from the Home Schooling Legal Defense Fund.)

Some of the gossip and facts include 1) home-schooled children frequently test 2-3 years ahead of peers in public school and, depending on test scores, 2) have no difficulty getting into challenging colleges, and 3) have no difficulties later moving into groups of their peers. (There is also data from such as Dr. Walter Williams that the average teacher has the English scores of the average engineer, the math scores of the average English major, and the overall aptitudes of a phys ed major.)

Public education...thanks to the ability of children to "swarm"...creates not only a swarm but one composed of dissenters who sometimes wait twelve years before discovering they are allowed to disagree openly with most of their classmates or teachers. Winner-take-all networks can be an adaptive response to environmental threats; they can also be the final strategy before collapse.

Again, as Menken noted: "The liberation of the human mind has been best furthered by…fellows who throw dead cats in sanctuaries." It is the often-ridiculed loner, the volunteer, the explorer who 1) makes the group more resilient to challenges by sudden changes and 2) finds unsuspected opportunities that will eventually benefit everyone who stayed home in front of their televisions.

JimB

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"Homeschoolers' setback sends shock waves through state
"Bob Egelko, Jill Tucker, Chronicle Staff Writers

"A California appeals court ruling clamping down on homeschooling by parents without teaching credentials sent shock waves across the state this week, leaving an estimated 166,000 children as possible truants and their parents at risk of prosecution.... The ruling was applauded by a director for the state's largest teachers union..'With this case law, anyone in California who is homeschooling without a teaching credential is subject to prosecution for truancy violation, which could require community service, heavy fines and possibly removal of their children under allegations of educational neglect'..."

More At
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl.../MNJDVF0F1.DTL
To view the ruling by the Second District Court of Appeal, go to links.sfgate.com/ZCQR.

References:

CS Lewis epigraph lifted from Dr. Walter Williams (http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/wew/)

Williams, Walter(2001) What's wrong with education? is still relevant. http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/ar...TICLE_ID=25053. See also Neal Boortz's remarks about government schools in Somebody's Gotta Say It.

The continuing poor performance by American children after 4th grade becomes more obvious with stringent achievement testing. And education's response to those failures will likely be - as if they were all rats attacking a lever that no longer delivers water in their conditioning chamber - to demand doing more of whatever doesn't work.

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Emergent networks, phases, and flexibility in them:

Ball P (2004) The Physical Modelling of Human Social Systems. Complexus. 1: 190-206.
Barabási, A-L (2002) Linked: The New Science of Networks. NY: Perseus.
Bianconi, G (2002) Quantum statistics in complex networks. ArXiv cond-mat/0206433 v2 13 Sep 2002.
Brody, J. (2003) Seeds of Leviathan: Networks & Genomes. (Delivered by Todd Stark) Annual Meeting, Association for Politics and the Life Sciences, Philadelphia, PA, August 30.
Brody J (2006) Life's Organized in a Tinker Toy Way. Poster presentation at the XVIII Congress, International Society for Human Ethology, Detroit, MI, July 31-August 3. 32 pp, approx 60 refs.
Brody J (2008) Rebellion: Physics to Personal Will. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse.
Csermely, Peter (2006) Weak Links: Stabilizers of Complex Systems from Proteins to Social Networks. NY: Springer. (esp. p 75)