[HSList] Definitions of success (was Why I homeschool)

[TIMB...@aol.com]

In a message dated 6/23/98 6:44:13 PM Eastern Daylight Time, rriskus@ez-
net.com writes:

<< It's so refreshing to hear this. I have been trashed because I am denying
my kids the luxuries of life to home school them. I have been called
selfish. Though I disagree with those people, its nice to hear someone
enforce my belief that there are more important things than money...like
values. >>

If you bypass current "liberal" propaganda and examine the facts, the middle-
class American child who "has everything" is not privileged. Since at least
the mid 1960s, the majority hard working campus youth is not the "kid who has
everything." It is the less advantaged youth. When I attended university
years ago, the typical hard working student was the less advantaged youth.
The kid "who has everything" was more likely the kid who had a "C" or worse
average. Many of them failed. Many of them ended up having extended child
hoods. It is also a myth that high school dropouts are disadvantaged youth.
They have their share but advantaged youth make up a good share of the
dropouts. Look around yourself. How many youth from "good homes" are you
aware of who disrupt the home and are underachievers or have run away from
home or dropped out?
There is a tradition in my family, which I have continued, where we do
not live in the "right neighborhood" and we do not indulge our children. We
manipulate the environment so that our children are not snotty or high class
acting. Their friends are regular folks and they are taught largely by
example to be kind, simple and sharing. So far, every generation of our
family have been hard working, Christian, and successful.
The truth is success in America is mostly an up and down thing. One
generation is successful business people the next "advantaged" generation
barely makes it through high school. We do not have upward mobility in
America, not the majority anyway. What we have is up and down mobility.
There are a whole lot of advantaged youth in America right now who lack the
self-control to learn math well enough or to learn enough reading skills to
get one of the good jobs of today.
No, fill your house with Nintendo and 36 inch TV, VCRs and DVDs, deal out
sums of money weekly, buy $80 tennis shoes and $70 trashy looking clothes and
you create the future "disadvantaged" youth of America and disadvantaged never
came with such a high price tag!
Do not listen to the so-called American Educators and other pundits. Go
through the lives of historic figures listed in Britannica Encyclopedia. You
will mind most of them came from humble even poor beginnings. Look around you
at the local immigrant population. Talk about disadvantaged. Asian youth
whose parents often (this is especially true for Hmong people and Vietnamese)
cannot read in any language and even today speak poor English. Yet, their
children are usually "A" students and attend the best colleges. They are
usually well behaved. Look at the Korea immigrants who run stores in minority
ghettoes whose population discriminates and often hates them. They usually
live in these same neighborhoods as they start out quiet poor. Yet, their
children are usually well behaved, polite and are excellent students.

[Jean Riskus]

Tim,

This is exactly how I feel, but I could never have put it so well. I'm
printing this one out for my school files (and for those who think I am
damaging my kids, if I may quote you). Thanks.

Jean

----------
> From: TIMB...@aol.com
> To: homes...@efn.org
> Subject: Re: [HSList] Definitions of success (was Why I homeschool)
> Date: Thursday, June 25, 1998 5:36 AM

[TIMB...@aol.com]

In a message dated 7/1/98 8:09:48 PM Eastern Daylight Time, rri...@ez-net.com
writes:

<< if I may quote you). Thanks. >>

No problem. Feel feel to use anything you find helpful. That is what I am
about. Trying to provide a voice for the average common sense folks who
embrace a higher power and who follow a standard of decency. We live in
trying times, I believe, of luxury and cultural perversion. It is written
that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a
rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. We are the rich man.
Never have so many had so much, for so long, with such ease. Add to this
an ever expanding idea of individual rights and you have a culture in peril.
We fight with each other over the silliest of issues. We confuse intolerance
with religiosity and Godliness. We search the Bible or some left-wing
political tract for support for our personal prejudices and then seek to pound
them on the heads of others as given truths. The left insists that all
business men are thieves, that abortion is a natural right, fetuses are not
human, all Christians are narrow minded knaves. The right will not accept
homosexuals into the circle of life and act in an unbrotherly manner in front
of abortion clinics. The left has captured the academy and is shrinking our
children's' minds. The media has a political agenda which is anti-free market
but at the same time media follows its own iron law of capitalism in that it
is sure to report every negative and shocking occurrence it can find to the
point where public perception is skewed into thinking that America has the
lawlessness of a banana republic.
Yes, these are indeed perilous times. But then....which time was not?
True laughter and joy must be forged from the realization that life is tuff
for all of us, this is the truth of human existence. We laugh best when we
laugh at our selves, if only we could teach this to the so-called liberal and
to the far right. They do not seem to able to laugh at themselves. We need
to fear the doings of such people.... Or so it seems to me..
Tim B.