Re: your mail

["Archie" <archie@moscow.com>]

Very well said, Daniel.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Daniel Kronemann" <kron4155@uidaho.edu>
To: "Douglas" <dougwils@moscow.com>
Cc: <vision2020@moscow.com>
Sent: Monday, June 03, 2002 2:22 AM
Subject: Re: your mail


> 
> 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
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>