Spare the Spanker, Spoil the Wanker

While we admit we have learned very few things during our
half-century on this planet one of them is that as weird as we feel
sometimes, we are a veritable paragon of moderation and mental health
compared to many of our fellow humans. The world is full of some really
fucked up people, and in the far majority of cases they were fucked up
early by living in some really fucked up families.

We are convinced that for many Americans the family
is a cauldron of torture and abuse, physical and mental. And yet growing
up in a dysfunctional, even an abusive family is not a guarantee of
a messed up life. For millions of kids public schools are a refuge and
a window on another life, an escape or end to the torture, and a door
to the future. Yet now, even that door is being shut for many of them.

Increasingly, families with things to hide are joining
families hiding from things like sexuality and evolution in the burgeoning
Home
Schooling movement. It is hard to believe this is still going on
in America.  Home Schooling is the biggest step backward in American
education since free public education was introduced in the early 1800’s.
Check out the open hawking instruments of human abuse – kiddie whips
to torture the victims of this sick inbred gulag:

ARLINGTON — On a spring day, Susan Lawrence was flipping through a
magazine, Home School Digest, when she came across an advertisement
that took
her breath away. In it, ”The Rod," a $5 flexible whipping stick,
was described as the ”ideal tool for child training."

The ad shocked Lawrence, a Lutheran who home-schools her
children and opposes corporal punishment. She began a national campaign
to stop what she sees as the misuse of the Bible as a justification for
striking children. She also asked the federal government to deem The
Rod hazardous to children, and ban the sale of all products designed
for spanking

"This is the dark side of home schooling," according to
Lawrence.

Though corporal punishment is on the decline in the United States and
the American Academy of Pediatrics strongly opposes the practice,
spanking children remains common. National polls in 2002 indicated
that two-thirds
of American parents approved of spanking, and more than 20 states
sanction corporal punishment in schools. Most parents said they use
bare hands
if they spank a child, though roughly one-third of parents in a 1995
Gallup poll said they had used ”a belt, hairbrush, stick, or some
other hard object" to strike their child’s bottom.

Is it just us, or does anyone else get the sense that
a higher than usual percentage of our future politicians AND serial
killers will turn out to have been home schooled?

from the Boston Globe