Stop me if you've heard this one before....

I found this hilarious bit over at Our Unschooling Adventure, and since it's the kind of thing that travels rapidly all over the Internet, I hope it's okay to copy it here. Okay, so here it is:

Q:

How does a homeschooler change a lightbulb?

A:

First, Mom checks three books on electricity out of the library, then the kids make models of light bulbs, read a biography of Thomas Edison, and do a skit based on his life.

Next, everyone studies the history of lighting methods, wrapping up with dipping their own candles.

Next, everyone takes a trip to the store where they compare types of lightbulbs, as well as prices, and figure out how much change they'll get if they buy two bulbs for $1.99 and pay with a five-dollar bill.

On the way home, a discussion develops over the history of money and also Abraham Lincoln, as his picture is on the five-dollar bill.

Finally, after building a homemade ladder out of branches dragged from the woods, the lightbulb is installed.

Who's protecting our kids?

At Joseph Mercola's health blog today, he posted about conflicts of interest in the FDA's drug oversight committees. If you've ever wondered why the ADHD drug Adderall was banned in Canada and not in the US, or why Paxil was banned from use in children in the UK but not in the US, here's your answer:

The study [published in the Journal of the American Medical Association] reviewed detailed financial disclosures by FDA advisory committee members and consultants who voted on new drugs... from 2001-04.

Almost 30 percent of voters acknowledged a financial conflict during the previous year with either a company that made the drug or one of its competitors. Among the conflicts: Consulting, stock holdings or investments and research grants ranging from $10,000-100,000.

Overall, at least one drug committee member or consultant had a conflict in 73 percent of the 221 hearings that took place during the course of the study. Here's the real problem: Only 1 percent of the drug advisory committee members were recused from attending some meetings.

On a related note, vaccine policy-makers often have conflicts of interest. Consider this excerpt from August, 2000 Congressional testimony (pdf) regarding the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunizations Practices:

The CDC routinely grants waivers from conflict of interest rules to every member of its [vaccine] advisory committee.

CDC Advisory Committee members who are not allowed to vote on certain recommendations due to financial conflicts of interest are allowed to participate in committee deliberations and advocate specific positions.

The Chairman of the CDC’s advisory committee until recently owned 600 shares of stock in Merck [worth roughly $50,000], a pharmaceutical company with an active vaccine division.

Members of the CDC’s advisory committee often fill out incomplete financial disclosure statements, and are not required to provide the missing information by CDC ethics officials.

Four out of eight CDC advisory committee members who voted to approve guidelines for the rotavirus vaccine in June 1998 had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine.

3 out of 5 FDA advisory committee members who voted to approve the rotavirus vaccine in December 1997 had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine.

The rotavirus vaccine they mention was pulled off the market a year later after it was found to be unsafe, causing intestinal intussusception (often requiring surgery) in 1 in 5,000 babies.

A certain subculture of people, including most academics and most doctors and a lot of leftist folks who tout their own empathy and compassion, have got a stranglehold on medicine. They claim that financial ties do not affect anyone in medicine or public health, although we all acknowledge that such ties affect politicians and other professionals. They claim that alternative health treatments are not scientifically justified, when in fact, as I am always discovering, there are all kinds of trials and studies published in perfectly mainstream peer-reviewed journals which support those treatments. They imply that it's dangerous to attempt to address your health problems on your own, even though some analyses find that improper mainstream medical care is the leading cause of the death in the United States. They'll advise the arthritic to take Vioxx, which has killed between 30,000 and 55,000 Americans in 4 years, according to the FDA itself. Never mind those natural arthritis treatments, like omega-3 fatty acids (great for your heart and brain also), turmeric extract (which helps to prevent certain cancers), and probiotics (which, as a bonus, improve nutrition and elimination of toxins and help to regulate the immune system, reducing allergies and asthma).

My advice (not that anyone asked for it) is to find a Whole Foods or a health store nearby, find out if there's someone knowledgeable there who is up on all the alternative literature. We have a local health guy, known to me only as "Dennis" from the nutraceuticals aisle, who has helped my family several times. And don't take your doctor at their word, but look into every fricking thing on your own before you agree to a course of treatment.

Creepy

Today I got some junk mail addressed to "The M-Care Parents at...." M-Care is our insurance company, run by the University of Michigan medical complex.

The letter read, in part:

Dear Parents:

M-CARE, in partnership with the Ann Arbor Public Schools, is pleased to announce the following free educational presentation for parents and teachers about Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD):

Understanding ADHD: At Home and in the Classroom

The goal of this presentation is to provide an opportunity for both parents and teachers to learn the facts about ADHD from experts in the field, and to learn effective ways to manage children with ADHD.

Translation:

The UM medical system, in partnership with the Ann Arbor schools, Novartis, Eli Lilly, and Shire Plc, bring you this free advertising seminar! Learn how to manage, control, and manipulate your child through modern pharmaceuticals! (You can trust us, we're experts!)

Heck, why not just have door prizes? Can't you just imagine it?

All participants receive a free sample of your choice: Effexor, Focalin, or Lunesta! Get your child started on stimulants before another week goes by! Free introductory Ritalin to qualifying children!

Sickening.

Both M-Care and the Ann Arbor schools push vaccinations and health screenings with the sort of zeal and deceit that one normally associates with the mentally unwell. To see them teaming up is actually quite frightening.

Lock-downs

[This did not post properly the first time, don't know why....]

In Southern California, students have been walking out of school by the tens of thousands on key days, to join protests against proposed immigration laws. These laws would (among other things) deport parents while leaving their children behind in the U.S., apparently in state custody. These students have met with scorn and sarcasm from the major media, who claim they just want a free day off from school. One student organizer I heard interviewed on the radio asked, "Why would we walk three miles to city hall in the rain if we just wanted to goof off?"

Schools have reacted to these walk-outs by instituting "lock-downs." I still can't get over it that they use the same term which is used in prisons, and without any chagrin or embarrassment. Anyway, one recent lock-down is being criticized:

[O]ne Inglewood elementary school imposed a lockdown so severe that some students were barred from using the restroom. Instead, they used buckets placed in classroom corners or behind teachers' desks.

Appalled by the school's action, Worthington Elementary School parents have complained to the school board and plan to attend another board meeting next week.

Principal Angie Marquez imposed the lockdown March 27 when nearly 40,000 middle and high school students across Southern California staged walkouts.

Apparently these lock-downs are also used during locker searches, in which police enter the school using dogs to hunt down drugs. They are ordered at the drop of a hat because of student fights or reports of a student making threats. To give you an idea of the sorts of threats which throw administrators into a panic, consider this case:

In Ponchatoula, Louisiana, a 12-year-old who had been diagnosed with a hyperactive disorder warned the kids in the lunch line not to eat all the potatoes, or "I'm going to get you." The student, turned in by the lunch monitor, was expelled for two days. He was then referred to police by the principal, and the police charged the boy with making "terroristic threats." He was incarcerated for two weeks while awaiting trial.

There are other absurd examples at the above link. I presume that lock-downs would be similarly misused during frequent over-reactions by principals.

Naturally, they are touted as being for the students' protection:

BLOOMINGTON, Minn. Across the country, many schools hold lockdown drills because of terrorism fears and school shootings like the Columbine High bloodbath in Colorado in 1999 that left 15 people dead.

But Minnesota could apparently become the first state to require such exercises. A proposal before the Minnesota Legislature would mandate at least five lockdown drills a year while reducing the required number of fire drills.

Legislatures in Michigan, Kentucky, Ohio and South Dakota are among those weighing laws that would require schools to update safety plans periodically and practice them regularly.

The increased use of this prison tactic isn't really about safety, though, because schools are actually becoming safer. According to a Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice report (somewhat out of date, from 2000):

• During the 1998-1999 school year, the year that included the Columbine shooting, the National School Safety Center reported that there were 26 school associated violent deaths-- a 40% decline from the previous year. Since there are 52 million students in America's schools, the odds of dying a violent death in a school in America last year was one in two million.

• A joint study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and National Center for Education Statistics found that between 1993 and 1997, the number of school crimes declined 29%, the number of serious violent crimes declined 34%, the number of violent crimes (including fighting) declined 27%, and the number of thefts declined 29%.

• A study by researchers from the Department of Special Education at the University of Maryland found that students at schools which employed "secure building" strategies to combat crime (including metal detectors and locker searches) were more likely to be afraid and be victimized than those attending schools which used less restrictive school safety measures.

It's not even about school board members trying to address community fears, albeit unfounded fears. The above report also found that 86% of teachers, 89% of students and 89% of law enforcement officers felt that their local schools were safe.

The lock-down policies are coming from places like Homeland Security and state legislatures, not from parents and teachers. This idea is being pushed by those in power, and I don't mean on the school boards. Practicing lock-downs is seen as a homeland security exercise, something which might protect us somehow from terrorism (completely ridiculous, of course). I guess politicians like to look like they're doing something, and this is easier than (say) assisting in the clean-up of nukes in the former USSR, or checking the cargo coming into our ports, or providing economic relief to certain countries with angry unemployed men who provide the reservoir of terrorists. Or, just to toss out an idea here, not bombing the bejeezus out of the Middle East.

But the larger benefit to those in power may be that the next generation of adults will be far less resistant to the use of temporary martial law, curfews, enforced quarantines, or whatever else the government has in mind. They'll feel just like they're back in first grade, peeing in a bucket.

In an increasingly deceptive world....

One of the reasons that education requires more time, more drills, more testing and just seems to be more difficult than in the past is that schools have to teach students more material than before. At least, that's what they would have us believe. The phrase "increasingly complex world" is trotted out to justify new math and science requirements, or to make the claim that we now require longer school years or universal preschool. There's just more we have to learn, because our world has become so technological and complex.

When I look around I don't see that everyday life is any more complex than it used to be. You don't need trig to operate a cell phone. It's easier to microwave Lean Cuisine than to cook meals from scratch. It's easier to shop for clothes online than to buy patterns and hem and sew. Cars are not much more complicated (and the new technologies like OnStar might actually give you directions, so in that sense things are easier). Americans would benefit from much more understanding of personal finance and economics, but the schools don't teach that.

What I see changing in our everyday lives is that we are being manipulated and lied to with increasing intensity. Advertising is increasing, and it's increasingly hard to spot, as well. Many news stories were literally written by corporate PR departments and get passed off as journalism because it's cheaper than actual journalism. People get paid to spread "word of mouth" advertising in public places.

Another change is that information is more readily available, but one needs to be able to filter out the dubious info and to consolidate information from all over the Internet. People need to be familiar with conflicts of interest, with the fact that yes, even people who speak calmly and seem to be experts and wear suits and show up on TV will still look you right in the eye and lie to you. They do it all the time.

Instead of exposing kids to a range of sources of information, and helping them to think critically about what they are reading, schools actually do the opposite. There is one textbook per class, and there is one teacher who typically never contradicts the textbook.

Instead of teaching kids how advertising works and helping them to understand its pernicious effects, schools increase the advertising which students are exposed to, through ads on buses and in hallways or through Channel One "news" television. In many cases, as with vending machines selling pop and chips, the school's contract with the vendor involves a quota of minimum sales which must be met or the school gets no money at all. Thus the administrators and teachers become the allies of the corporations.

Government / civics class, when I took it anyway, was a dry memorization of governmental structures and Congressional procedure. We memorized some definition of "lobbyist" but gained no actual idea of corporate influence in politics. Nor did we study any political scandals or discuss campaign contributions, political ads, or vote suppression (which didn't die with the 60's). We learned nothing about the manipulation of politicians or politicians' conflicts of interest. We got the straight "You vote for them, they represent you" story.

It's quite fun to analyze ads. My mom used ad analysis as a writing exercise when she was teaching some years back, and it was very popular with the students (mostly college freshmen). My response to catalogs in the mail that look alluring (e.g. Pottery Barn) is to sit down and really look at the photos and imagine how they've manipulated everything. Pottery Barn is a fun one, because they photoshop the wall paint to perfectly match the color in, say, some sheets or a duvet cover. They photoshop the windows, giving the hazy, sunny outdoors either a bluish or yellowish hue depending on what's in the room. In most photos you can't see the outdoors, it's just a foggy sunny haze, which gives the rooms a dreamlike quality that real-life rooms are never going to attain. You also start to notice how, for instance, the candles and the apples in a bowl are the exact shade of green featured in those drapes on the wall. So, to attain Pottery Barn decor in your own home you'd have to spend hours scouring stores for candles and run to the grocery store every week in search of the ideal Granny Smiths. The Pottery Barn folks have it easier, they just photoshop said candles and apples and voila, perfect match. Pretty soon you start thinking, "Give me a freakin' break!" and throw the thing in the trash. This is the kind of skill that really is useful in real life. The typical kid sees 50,000 TV commercials per year, I read somewhere.

Needless to say, teaching kids how to think critically and protect themselves from advertising does not serve those in power... and that's why the schools don't teach this.

My daughter on evolution

I want to preface this little anecdote by saying that evolution comes up fairly frequently here, due to Anya's obsession with animals. It makes me wonder how parents do this when they are Christian fundamentalists and don't teach evolution. We've been talking about freshwater vs. saltwater fish this week, including why saltwater fish would want to leave the ocean and go upriver to lay eggs, and how some of those fish, hundreds of millions of years ago, wound up staying in freshwater.

Tonight we've been watching one of the Blue Planet BBC ocean videos, which featured schools of sardines being eaten by sharks, dolphins, birds and a very big whale. We were talking about how predators tend to eat the slower or stupider fish, which helps the species because the babies are from the smarter, faster fish-- and thus the babies are usually smarter and faster.

Anya said that Goldie [our goldfish] would definitely survive in the wild long enough to mate, because she was definitely smart and fast. She added: "And Goldie's babies would be even smarter and faster and more mateful!"

More mateful... gotta love that one. I chuckled when she said this and she said indignantly, "Well the fish that aren't mateful don't have babies!" Probably true, and I'm proud of her level of understanding, I just have to laugh that when you practice child-led learning you wind up talking about such concepts as fish libido.

16 ways to tie your shoes

Ian's Shoelace Site is a cool place to visit. You can learn the super-fast Ian knot, a more secure knot that looks cool when tied, and 14 other knots. Also, numerous ways to lace your shoes.
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Medicalizing schools

My mom sent me the article Medicine Goes to School: Teachers as Sickness Brokers for ADHD, which concluded:

The organised penetration of the pharmaceutical industry associated with ADHD into the education domain is a new phenomenon. While there has been extensive discussion about the ethics of fast-food marketing within schools, there has been little about the consequences of the pharmaceutical industry's infiltration of schools.

These consequences include the fact that about half of all ADHD diagnoses originate with the child's teacher, that teachers often administer medications, and that teachers "educate" parents and students about ADHD. On a supposedly "educational" web page aimed at teachers, Novartis (maker of Ritalin) advises teachers to handle parents' questions as follows:

Make it clear that it is important for them—and for their child—to understand and follow the doctor's medical advice about medication and other therapies for ADHD. ADHD is a serious condition that may require the child to be on medication and undergo counseling for a long duration.

Why is it the teacher's job to tell parents ADHD is a "serious condition"? What the hell is the teacher doing answering parents' medical questions in the first place? It is one thing to discuss classroom behavior or learning, but Novartis is clearly attempting to use teachers to increase "patient compliance."

Even if you agree with the historical collaboration between schools and doctors (it's a rich history), surely it is cause for concern if school staff are now being manipulated by big pharma propaganda campaigns. Doctors are influenced by such campaigns. Teachers will be no different. I wouldn't be at all surprised if in 10 more years, teachers were advising parents to seek medication for social phobia, separation anxiety, or oppositional defiant disorder on the basis of their "expert" observation.

[UPDATE: My mom posted on big pharma's "disease-mongering." Take a gander.]

Where I've been

"Just look at us. Everything is backwards; everything is upside down. Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the major media destroy information and religions destroy spirituality."

--Michael Ellner

That's pretty much how I'm feeling right now.

My husband and I have been reading about vaccines, fluoride, antibiotics, food additives, and mercury dental fillings over the past few days (thus my absence from blogging). Once again I've been thinking of how schools train everyone to look to the authorities for the truth, and then those authorities turn around and lie to us. What a perfect system for those in power.

Only in a country with state schooling could you get people to believe:

• antibiotics cure ear infections caused by viruses
• injecting infants with mercury (>90 times safety limits) does them no harm
• infants do not feel pain (medical dogma into the 1970's)
• even though 100% of fats produced by your own liver are saturated, saturated fats are in fact bad for you
• even though your liver makes 80% of all the cholesterol in your body, making more or less depending on how much you eat, cholesterol is some sort of poison
• children have no natural desire to learn
• humans don't know how to form social groups or communities without schooling
• Christopher Columbus was a great guy
• fluoride is good for you (would you like a side of arsenic?)
• putting mercury in your teeth has no health effects
  

Amazing what they can get us to believe.

Real knowledge

Anya is very interested in the natural sciences, whether it's insects or fish, planets or kitchen chemistry. I find that I'm learning quite a lot, myself. What's more intriguing is that the new knowledge is completely different than the old schooly, memorized knowledge.

I knew what larvae were, and about larvae forming coccoons and turning into winged insects. But I've still been staring at these white cottony patches at the corners of our back porch and thinking "Damn those spiders." A few days ago it finally dawned on me that they were coccoons, thus the problem was some sort of insect. It finally dawned on me, because I finally paid attention, I finally got a real grasp of insects vs. spiders vs. other bugs. Probably that's because Anya and I haven't used any textbooks, we've only looked things up online as the questions occurred to us, in our own order, on our own schedule, using our own mental map for understanding this new information.

I have been able to recite "Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter...." for years. But I never realized that the planets consist of four small rocks near the sun, four enormous gas giants farther out, and one or two anomalous planetoid objects which may or may not, in fact, actually turn out to be planets. Or that the little rocks aren't likely to have many moons (a combined total of 3, in fact) because they don't have much gravity and they're so close to the sun that most small objects will "miss" the orbit window and fly right into the star. Gas giants, on the other hand, are farther away from the sun's pull and have more gravity due to their mass, so they, of course, have dozens of moons. This just makes sense to me now, it's not a matter of cramming the information into my brain to be regurgitated on a test.

Or, to take another example: Insects are a lot smarter than other bugs. You might read in a science book that insects are highly evolved, but when you've been examining ladybugs for weeks and you come across a pill-bug, that pill-bug strikes you as so dumb you can hardly believe it's living. The difference in intelligence between insects and creepy-crawlies strikes me as huge, probably analogous to the difference between mammals and fish. Furthermore, some ladybugs are a lot smarter than other ladybugs. And yes, I'm "anthropomorphizing" to some extent, but some ladybugs have a whole range of behaviors and others species sit like lumps on their chunk of orange and do little else. Unfortunately, the invasive species (7-spotted and Southern) are much smarter than native species, which does not bode well for the native ladybugs.

I've learned these things like I've learned cooking, or how to change a light fixture, or how to get stains out of clothes. If you have to strain your brain and use mnemonic devices and onerous repetition to remember something, maybe you're being asked to learn in an unnatural way. Is it more important to know whether Jupiter or Saturn is closer to the sun? How does that inform daily life? On the other hand, if you have a sense of four little rocks and four giant, moon-encircled balls of gas, well, at least that's an image. At least, when you're gazing at a night sky, it gives you some sense of the solar system.

The more time goes on, the less I feel like I truly learned in school.