Tag: politics

Liar, liar, pants on fire!

Posted on by Suki

On my morning walk, it occurred to me to think about why we tell kids not to lie. I can’t imagine why this subject occurred to me!

Obviously, none of us wants our kid to be a liar. Imagine: If being a liar weren’t that big a deal, we’d be a lier. But we’ve even got a special spelling for it.

So what’s the big deal? Why not tell a fib every once in a while? Before I was a parent, I didn’t really give this much thought. But having watched two kids and countless students in action, I’ve come up with a few answers.

1. If you tell a lie you have to perpetuate a lie

So telling a lie is pretty easy, right? Your mom asks, “Did you break this plate?” and you say, “no.” End of lie. End of situation. However, lies require more effort than that. Although some lies happen and then sink back into oblivion, most lies take on a life of their own. Once you tell it, you have to prop it up. Lies don’t have their own legs. They don’t fend for themselves.

“It’s true that I had lunch on that plate, however….um…then my sister decided to play frisbee with the plate and it broke.”

2. Lies almost always start pulling in other people.

So you think your lie is just a little pale thing that’s going to fall on the ground and be quiet, but then it starts to peep. Lies need attention; they want to be fed. In order to keep your lie fed, you need to draw in your sister, your friend, (your lawyer), your other parent, or perhaps your dog.

“And then Fido came in and you know how he likes to play frisbee…”

3. Lies beget other lies.

Your little pale thing not only doesn’t fall on the ground and lie quietly. It starts to make other lies. You need to make up an alibi, so it turns out you were in the bathroom. You’ve had terrible diarrhea.

“Oh, no! Maybe I should call the doctor…”

And you start piling lies on top of that lie in order to subdue it.

4. Lies start to define you.

In order to perpetuate your original lie, you have feed your ill-begotten lies and soon you find yourself being Someone Who Lies. You may even convince yourself that you’re not lying. (Even adults do this. Even adults who may be seen as successful and may even reach the pinnacles of their professions.)

5. You can’t find happiness in lies.

You find yourself confessing. Maybe you or someone you’re involved with has been charged with a crime, and there’s this inexplicable relief in confessing the lie. Lies weigh a lot more than the truth. The truth is light and almost transparent. When you tell it, sometimes bad things happen. But you didn’t create the bad things. Lies, however, are this deep, dark, complex thing that you made, and they create their own darkness. They weigh you down. Someone offers you the lightness of truth, and…

6. Lies almost always get found out, one way or another.

You think you’ve “gotten away with something,” but the truth is that lies don’t let you get away. They tether you to the situation you originally tried to avoid so that you can’t move forward. Having chosen not to embrace the light and buoyancy of the truth, you are pulled down, down, down by the weight you’ve chosen to bear. You thought you were choosing freedom, but

Lies make you less free. They tie you down to an untruth that you have to continue to justify.

It’s true: we all lie sometimes. Sometimes a little lie makes a situation move on when really, it just has to move on. Sometimes a little lie is exactly what’s needed to finesse a situation.

But in general, truth really is the best policy. Facing our mistakes and our shortcomings makes us better people. It helps the people around us trust us and then they are more willing to expose their own mistakes and shortcomings. In other words,

when we lie less, other people around us lie less.

Being a parent is hard, but sometimes it’s the gift we need. I have the utmost respect for people who choose not to have children, but I wonder how they learn these lessons. I don’t know about you, but parenting has made me a much better person. I understand lying like I never did before.

I understand why lying doesn’t work

and I understand how to suss out a liar.

Given how many adults are parents, it makes me wonder why they can’t suss out a liar, too. I fear for their children.

When the beautiful becomes ugly

Posted on by Suki

This should be a beautiful photo: the bounty of my parents’ farm near Corralitos. Holy basil, limes, lemons, and peppers—the bounty of late summer.

That’s the problem. This is December. The only natural bounty in this photo is the lemons and limes (which are more productive in winter). Otherwise, the holy basil should have gone to seed; the peppers should just be a memory, forlorn, brown stalks shivering in the wind.

This picture makes me sad, anxious, perplexed.

Sad because the fires raging in Southern California are directly related to the reason I am picking fresh peppers in December.

Anxious because I fear that the doomsday predictions of climate scientists are, perhaps. too optimistic.

And perplexed because I just don’t get human nature.

What does it take to get us to change our ways? How can we know if the little things we’re doing individually are having any effect at all? How can we not be angry at our friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens who are not only ignoring the signs, but blithely taking part in the actions that are causing these problems?

We are a parasite killing its host.

My personal belief is that we won’t take care of this problem until we agree to spend political capital on it, and unfortunately, the people in charge are in denial. They just passed a tax bill that will stifle investment in renewable energy. They have told our automakers that they should cede our leading role in alternative fuel vehicles to China. They say that human-caused global warming is a fiction made up by scientists.

Well, this isn’t fiction. A beautiful bouquet of holy basil on my counter in December. No rain in the forecast for 10 days out. Southern California burns today; so far Northern California is safe. But for how long? And what happens when the water greening the Central Valley runs out? What will be on wintertime supermarket shelves in Washington D.C., Texas, and Iowa?

I don’t see beauty. I see a parasite killing its host.

4 reasons why schools shouldn’t play “immigration police”

Posted on by Suki

Amongst the various proposals put forth to deal with illegal immigration there is a perennial one: catch ’em at school. People generally want their children to get educated, and also, free public schools are free childcare, right?

School children in New Mexico in 1941. (Wikimedia Commons)

So the thought goes like this: Figure out which “illegal kids” are at schools, and then go after their parents.

Britain is already doing it. And with conservatives in control of the U.S. federal government, we might be following close on their heels.

Here’s why forcing schools to track undocumented kids is a bad idea:

An educated population is always better

This is a rule that never changes, no matter which kids you’re talking about: If you want your country to function better, you want educated people.

Educated people are healthier, they have fewer children, they provide more skilled labor, they pay more taxes.

If you force undocumented adults to keep their kids at home, the only net change is that our country has fewer educated people, which means they’ll have more kids, be unskilled workers, and pay less in taxes.

This is not what we want.

Healthier kids make a healthier society

Children eating school lunch in Virginia. (U.S. Dept. of Agriculture)

Our public schools don’t just educate. They offer free health testing such as vision and hearing. They screen kids for severe dental problems. Teachers are trained to watch for signs of physical abuse.

The reason we put this money into our public schools is that it is paid back many times over. Healthier kids are cheaper to have in our society than sick kids. Sick kids turn into sick adults, who need more care, and more expensive care.

This is not what we want.

The job of educators is to educate

When we attempt to turn teachers into anything but educators, we end up with conflicts that muddy their job descriptions and decrease their effectiveness. This is something that you’ll hear conservatives say often: Teachers should just be teaching the “three R’s.”

In that case, it looks like we agree on this: If we turn teachers into immigration police, they will have less time to teach, and less focus when they are teaching.

This is not what we want.

“Street Urchin” by John George Brown, 1885 (Wikimedia Commons)

Going after children is not only unethical, it’s un-Christian

The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin. [Deuteronomy 24:16]

We have a long tradition in Western culture of not blaming children for what their parents do. If we decide to change this tradition, should we imprison children whose parents are convicted of felonies? Should we refuse to feed children whose parents are unwilling to work? Do we leave children with abusive parents simply because the child was born to those parents?

Children of those who have immigrated to the U.S. without legal papers have done nothing wrong. They shouldn’t have to fear going to school. We may as a society decide that undocumented adult workers should fear our government. But allowing immigration officials to catch families through their children imposes immoral burdens upon the children.

This is not what we want.

In other words, quite simply, Britain is doing the wrong thing. Our government has historically done the right thing. Let’s keep it that way.

An Indecent Man

Posted on by Suki

Forget politics.

I want to focus on one thing and one thing only here: What it means to be a decent human being.

Why are we indecent?

Pretty much every human religion ever invented has a mechanism for explaining and dealing with (however imperfectly) the fact that we humans do not always treat each other decently. Most of us, when it comes down to it, basically want to be decent, but we fail on a daily basis to live up to our ideals.

This is fine; this is what it means to be human. I have spent my parenting years helping my kids wrestle with this. It’s a common issue in the classes I teach. It’s good and right that kids wrestle with this issue, and it’s good and right for them to be put into situations where they clash with others who are unlike them so that they get used to wrestling with this issue.

Bullies are often the first ones to point fingers and call themselves victims.
Bullies are often the first ones to point fingers and call themselves victims.

This indecent man

Then there’s our president-elect. I’m not going to discuss his policies.

What I want to discuss is how he is an indecent man, and anyone who supports him becomes, through their support, indecent. Luckily, there’s a way to come back to decency—I’ll get to that.

In what ways is he indecent?

He’s a liar.

All politicians stretch and bend the truth to try to make their case. All politicians change their positions (which I think is a good thing!). All politicians say what their audience wants to hear as much as they can.

However, our president-elect is, quite simply, a liar. He clearly believes that whatever he says becomes true, which is the mark of someone who is a liar to the core. The most effective liars believe themselves deeply and consistently. The most effective liars simply dismiss anything that isn’t consistent with their lie as a lie.

If you support him, you support a liar.

He’s a bigot.

Even when he’s trying to be nice to people, he shows his bigotry. Remember, believing that something is better about a group of people based on an attribute they have no control over is bigotry, too. So when he makes generalizations about women, people of color, immigrants, the disabled—add other categories here—and says something “nice,” remember that’s still bigotry. Though let’s face it, most of the content of what he says is negative.

If you are still on the fence about whether or not he’s a bigot, look at his supporters in the “alt-right”—let’s call them by their real title—white supremacists. They believe he’s a bigot, and they like that about him.

If you support him, you support a bigot.

He uses his wealth for power, not to help others.

This is an important aspect of a decent person that, again, all religions agree on: decent people always help others when they can. Ironically, research shows that the less you have to give, the more likely you are to give your time and money to help others.

In other words, it’s hard being rich. It’s really hard to help others that you don’t see, don’t have contact with, and think of as “the other.” But it’s easy enough, if you’re rich, at least to give some money. Any money.

Yes, our president-elect has a foundation, but there seems to be little evidence that he has used it to help anyone. It’s also worth a fraction of the billions he says he has. And it has spent plenty of money helping…him and his family.

If you support him, you support using wealth only to empower the wealthy.

He treats others with open disdain.

It’s true that politicians are often accused of being disdainful, such as Mitt Romney after his 47% comment or Hillary Clinton after her “basket of deplorables” comment.

But our president-elect doesn’t have to say things that can be perceived as disdainful—he is simply openly disdainful. The way he behaves towards others—even, sometimes, rich white men like him—is indecent. He shows no respect for the dignity of other human beings.

If you support him, you support treating others with disdain.

How can we fix this?

The following is what I teach my children and my students.

  1. Reject indecency
    Do not vote for or support people who do not treat others decently
  2. Call out indecency
    Don’t (out of a fear of impropriety) hide the fact that you reject indecent people
  3. Ask others to reject indecency
    Make the “call to action” so that others see someone standing up for common decency
  4. Do all of this decently
    Don’t, in the name of decency, behave indecently

I have decided to be open about the fact that I reject indecency in our personal and political spheres, and thus I reject our president-elect.

I ask you also, no matter who you voted for, to reject indecency in our personal and political spheres, and thus reject our president-elect.

If you voted for him, rejecting indecency is your ticket back to decency.

If you do not reject him openly and publicly, then you, in your silence, join in the support of indecency.

This blog is not about politics, but it is about parenting. And all parents know that sometimes it’s uncomfortable to do what’s right.

The way we do it

Posted on by Suki

Until recently, pretty much every mention I found of homeschooling in the mainstream press looked nothing like what we do at our house. Or nothing like people I know do at their houses. And definitely not like what the homeschoolers I know do when they’re out of the house, which is in general a significant piece of their time. According to the popular press, we were separatist religious fanatics or hippies raising our children like wolves.

Recently, however, I’ve seen a few pinpoints of light out there in the dismal mainstream world. Two of them come from Quinn Cummings, who is apparently famous as a child actor (since I ignore popular culture her name was meaningless to me!). Her message, however, was the one I’d been hoping to see in the popular press: Homeschoolers are choosing a valid form of education that is different from school, but most of us are neither separatist religious fanatics nor hippies raising our children like wolves.

Cummings has put out a book, which I haven’t read, and in the process of publicizing it she has made us rather invisible homeschoolers more visible. In the Wall Street Journal, she not only presents her own reason for homeschooling but also gives people a sense of what is a much more important thing in homeschooling: the hybrid ways of learning that most of our kids are involved in. On the Diane Rehm Show, she necessarily had to stay more personal, but she pushed back nice and hard against the really yawn-inducing questions (as far as homeschoolers are concerned) of socialization and how well former homeschoolers integrate with other kids.

Today EdWeek, an education industry publication, published “Hybrid Homeschools Gaining Traction,” a story about homeschooling that is much more familiar to me and the other homeschoolers I know. Though Cummings mentioned “outschooling” as an option in homeschooling, she still answered questions like “how can you teach your daughter math when you are math-phobic?” with traditional homeschooling solutions—in that case, her husband does the teaching.

Of course, sharing the responsibilities of homeschooling happens all the time in homeschools, and it’s a great part of why one of our local homeschooling programs is called Alternative Family Education. Homeschoolers are all about making learning a family affair.

But the reality for most of the families I know is that what we call “home”schooling would be better called—as people I know do—”custom schooling” or “a la carte schooling” or “cooperative learning.” The EdWeek article hits this nail right on the head, and also the article’s very existence is noteworthy: The only “related story” they could find on EdWeek was published in 2008! If that’s not proof that the education establishment has been ignoring a tidal wave, I don’t know what is.

This is not the sort of tidal wave that is going to gather everything into it and destroy everything else in its path. This is the sort of slow-moving wave that is already changing education, though most of the people in the educational establishment are “blissfully” ignorant.

I use the quotes because they only think they’re blissful. They have been ignoring us and it’s been serving them just fine, or so they think. We are educated parents, people who often went to public schools ourselves. We are people who support the concept of education for everyone. But we are people who know that it’s being done all wrong. And we have found that we can’t vote at the ballot box—Republicans and Democrats are largely unified in their ignorance over what public education should be.

So we’ve taken the vote to the streets. We are leaving schools—both public and private—and looking for something else. We’re looking for an educational world in which, when a teacher doesn’t mesh with a particular learner, you simply find a different teacher. We are looking for an educational world in which a kid who studies algebra at the age of 9 is just as comfortable as a kid who’s not ready for algebra till 16. We’re looking for an educational world in which knitting, map-making, and storytelling are as respectable to study as math and science.

And—EdWeek readers will be surprised to hear this—we have found that world. It’s homeschooling, and whatever we don’t find out there for our kids we are busy creating. It’s a tidal wave because there is no way that our experiences are not going to create fundamental change in education. The blissful establishment has been put on notice by one of their own publications that people are starting to notice what we’re doing.

Outschooling, custom schooling, a la carte schooling, unschooling, cooperative learning, family education, life learning… Whatever you call it, that’s what we’re doing.

Our kids are learning, they’re doing great on standardized tests (though we don’t really care about that), and best of all, they’re doing great at life, which is what we care about most of all.

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