Sometimes CMI Doesn't Squeeze All Nonsense Out of a Feedback

When that happens, or even before looking, I try my hand at the feedback too. As you will know from some posts on ...

Creation vs Evolution
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.com

... like this one:

Number of Alleles Question (on Junior High Genetics Level)
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2014/04/number-of-alleles-question-on-junior.html

Now, this time it's the turn of Matt Walsh to see me steal some of his feedback:

Behold: the two absolutely worst arguments against homeschooling
on The Matt Walsh Blog, April 25, 2014
http://themattwalshblog.com/2014/04/25/behold-the-two-absolutely-worst-arguments-against-homeschooling/

Now, since it is so far back in time, he might not mind. But though he gave argument n. 1 a sound thrashing, he also left some of its nonsense alone. Here is the feedbacker's argument 1:

1. The flaws in our public school system have to do with PARENTS. Parents send their kids to school and think their job is done, instead of being involved in their child’s education. How can the system ever improve if the involved parents pull out and do their own thing? We have a responsibility not just to our own family but to our community. Homeschool parents hurt their communities when they isolate themselves and remove their children from our academic institutions. If we don’t help the system, the system will not work.

Matt Walsh did say what needed saying on a practical level, we owe more to our children than to a community or a system.

It is surprising that a spirit as Communist as that of "Dan" could sign his letter "in Christ". But he did.

Now, here is a matter that Matt forgot to answer. After answering the Communist nonsense, of course.

The fault of those parents is actually elicited by the system.

If a mother gets lone custody of a child, and pa gets to see child twice a month, such things do happen, then it is perhaps no surprise if dad on those twice a month is not positively educating his child, but just trying to be nice.

A dad in such a position did not chose it. He is reacting to a constraint he was not chosing.

Parents leaving their children to public school, insofar as they are, are also reacting to a constraint. Note, not an equal constraint all over the world, in US homeschooling is legal, but even where homeschooling is legal, there is a constraint. A child is supposed to get such and such parts of the curriculum, most parents are not quite up to it, and as a consequence they are victims of a constraint that stops them from homeschooling. Thereby, they are very heroic if they do get actively involved in their child's education, as heroic as the dad trying that when having two visits per month, but if they are not that heroic, this can be accounted for, in either case, by the fact they are victims of a constraint.

If homeschooling had been under the conditions lain out in today's world, like most of US or like France (in Sweden its near illegal and in Germany it has been fully illegal since 1938), Leopold Mozart would not have had a chance to homeschool Wolferl.

Since Salzburg was in what was then "Germany" (i e Holy Roman Empire), a buffer state between Austria properly speaking and Bavaria, if the laws had been similar all over HRE, to what they are today in US, German spelling would have been required.

Mozarts would have won no spelling bees in German. Riepel is often written Riepl. The German letters are pretty dialectal.

Maths was not taught except insofar as essential for the forms of Riepl. Four measure phrases can stand alone, five measure phrases need to be doubled or coupled with some even measured phrase (like a four measure or perhaps a two measure phrase) ... and so on. But if Mozart ever learnt to solve an equation for x or two equations for x and y, this side of Heaven, I think that would count as a surprise. The fact is that dad decided the curriculum. He was a musician and so he could teach music. He knew some Italian (essential to musicians back then), but Wolfgang started studying Italian in earnest when coming to Italy on a voyage. He knew some Latin, as a Catholic who was also serving his Bishop as a Court Musician at the Episcopal court. And before Colloredo, this was a good arrangement for both dad and son.

But if laws had required him to teach his son German and Algebra, or else to send him to a school where he was taught that, he would have been in the position of parents unable under modern laws to homeschool.

Except of course that Holy Roman Empire was not centralised over such idiotic modern laws.

But those that live under them, yes, they are very disempowered and therefore very passive parents most of them. Leopold Mozart would not have been passive, but definitely so disempowered that his active involvement would have been a major risk for him ending in prison or mental hospital.

For undue interference with the education of his own son.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
Vigil of the Nativity
of the Blessed Virgin Mary
7-IX-2015