Re: your mail

[Daniel Kronemann <kron4155@uidaho.edu>]

Visionaries are those with open minds that although they may disagree with
something, do not reject it totally because of an obvious opportunity to
learn.

Mr. Wilson (or is it Rev. Wilson.  I'm unsure if your title.  You sound
like you may be a Reverand and do not intend any disrespect), were you a
part of a debate a few years ago entitled "God is necessary for the
existance of morality" or something akin?  I enjoyed that debate between
you and a professor from WSU whose name escapes me now.  Anyways, I
appreciated it.

Anyways.

I am all for freedom of thought and doing things as you see fit and not
being forced to do something.  This is why I feel a need to keep any one
belief system from dominating in education.  And that is what you are
doing when you send your children to a solely Christian school.  You limit
their worldview.  You make them fearful and distrustful of other schools
of thought, which is the natural human reaction to the unknown.  I'm not
trying to devalue Christianity, but what makes it better than other
religions and what they have to offer in education?  We would all agree
that when making a decision about something, we should be informed.  And
we would all agree that being informed would include getting information
from as many possible sources as we could, which includes from different
points of view.  So why can't we approach matters of the nature and origen
of humanity in the same way?  By making informed decisions?  And then
approaching education that way.  By giving as much information to our
children as we can, trying not to push our beliefs onto them, and let them
decide what makes the most sense.  Children are capable of much more than
what our fears of what they may be exposed lead us to believe.

And I think people tend to view problems with public education with an us
vs. them mentality, instead of something to be fixed and cured, much like
John Danahy stated in his emails.  Public education is the neglected child
of society.  There are certain things that you can't just leave to the
whims of capitalism, a concern shared by Dan Schmidt.  Someone shouldn't
be denied education because they can't afford it.  Subjecting things like
education, including health care and human rights, to capitalism just
allows for the financially powerful (white protestant men) to dominate the
rest of the world.

And I don't think think parents necessarily know what is best for their
children's education.  The only good thing you can do and expose them to
multiple life experiences.  Decision making has to be done by themselves.
Again I would like to stress that public education needs to be tended to
by the public for it to work.  It is so often neglected.

I also have a problem with the "Neglect of Discipline" as a fault of
public education, as Mr. Wilson asserts it.  The so called "green
hair/nose ring issue."  Discipline is a matter of behavior.  There is no
connection between behavior and clothes, hair color, or body piercings.
I have five earrings, have had every color you can imagine in my hair,
wear a pentagram, and sometimes paint my nails for fun.  I am also a
student at the University of Idaho, majoring in Microbiology, Biochemistry
and Spanish, and minoring in Chemistry where I have maintained a 3.9 GPA,
had multiple undergraduate research experiences, lived in a foreign
country and am bilingual while usually working a job or two.  Recently, 4
all American boys-next-door, who wore suits and did everything they were
told to do to conform to their rigid gender roles, stole private property
from the ASUI offices, while drunk (some of whom were under age) and tried
to destroy it, which they couldn't do.  They were convicted in a Latah
Country Court.  So I ask who had more discipline?  And what is more
important?  Being good "students" by being "prompt, clean, obedient,
hard-working, and so on" as we would expect of any mindless robot?  Or
being good citizens of humanity by being fair, open-minded, defient in the
face of oppression, and compassionate and sensitive to the needs EVERY
"child of God?"  "Those who see the value in such things have decided that
they can only be inculcated through private association with people who
think the same way."  So I don't value discipline because I like to
associate with people who may have different ideas?

Another think I have a problem with is the "religious nature of
education."  This may be just a technicality, but I can see that education
can be very spiritual, but should not contain one dominant religious
element.  There is a difference between spirituality and religion.  And I
see no necessary conflict between the teachings of the bible and how
creation happened and the hypotheses asserted by the theories of
evolution.  And the infalibility that many conservative christians give
the bible is very problematic, since it has been shown that much of what
you read in your English translation is highly inaccurate translations.
My own views of religion are quite controversial, so I'll just end this
section with a quote from Karl Marx.  "Religion is the opium of the
people."

I appreciated Bob Hoffmann's comparison of private and public education
based on his dealings with both.  He had been given multiple opportunities
to obtain many different points of view, and then was able to make his own
informed decision on how he saw the problems with education, just as I
described above.

Another thing that bothers me about people's preception of education is
that some think we education so people know the answers.  This is not how
I hope my children with be educated.  I want their education to teach them
to ask more questions with each "answered" they come across.  And also the
attempt to standardize education is counter productive.  Because of the
diversity of people in the world, there needs to be a diversity of
educational methods.  One method should not dominate, must like one belief
system.  John Danahy also touch on some of these ideas, to whom I give
credit for their appearence in this email.

And unlike Mr. Wilson I will not apologize for the length of my response,
but only for the fact that it did not come sooner.

Sincerely,

Daniel Kronemann