Homestead mailing list

["Marie McHarry" <mmcharry AT gmail.com>]

On 12/1/06, Clansgian AT wmconnect.com <Clansgian AT wmconnect.com> wrote:
> When I was much younger, most people assumed that health was a default state.
>  It was what you could reasonably expect if nothing was constitutionally
> wrong with you.  Taking medicine was rare.

> Now of days I know very few people, and almost no one my age, who isn't
> taking half a dozen very invasive drugs for this or that or nothing but 
> imagined
> ills.

I'm not sure how old James and Denise are, but back when I was young
most people weren't taking many medicines either. One reason was that
even if you had some chronic illness -- hypertension, rheumatoid
arthritis, asthma, to name the ones that come to mind -- not many
effective medicines existed. Probably millions of people were walking
around with undiagnosed and untreated hypertension. They generally
felt fine until they had a stoke.

People can still manage without medicine for a good part or most of
their lives. I didn't take anything on a regular basis until I was in
my late 40s when I started having problems with blood pressure.
Although several members of the family and extended family have the
problem my father didn't. When he died at age 94 the coroner couldn't
believe he wasn't taking any drugs until he talked to his doctor.

> Schooling sets up an expectation in the child's psyche.  Reading?  Oh, that's
> what you will learn at school.  Many a child secretly wonders then, 'What if
> I can't do it, what if the first grade comes and goes and I haven't learned
> it.'

Really? I'm on a copyeditor's list, and the topic of when we learned
to read came up. Almost everyone was reading by the time they were 4.
I was slow -- didn't learn to read until I went to school -- but I
must have picked it up fairly quickly and was reading my same-aged
cousin the books he got as presents that year at the family Christmas
(which my mother gleefully recalls as causing my aunt to shoot steam
out of her ears, figuratively speaking, of course). I suspect that
since Daddy read to me nights, I wasn't about to give away the fact
that I could do it myself.

> Unschooling puts the child in an atmosphere of "Reading?  Oh, you'll pick
> that up when you need it or want it.  Don't sweat it."  And they do.   As 
> long as
> the process is not blocked or thwarted, it always happens.

Unless they're dyslexic, which is an actual neurological dysfunction.
Which is not to say that public schools necessarily deal with dyslexic
kids well. Some do, some don't.

> You hear the old saw that some children are different and need "structure"
> and other such garbage.  Children aren't all that different, but the
> brainwashing, condidtioning, and prejudice at play with children and their 
> parents IS
> vastly different.  What passes for  very different needs for children most 
> often
> comes down to how much they have already been schooled (brainwashed).

A man who had been first a priest and then an educator (now there's a
background for everyone to fault) held the opinion that we were
wasting our time with NCLB. His opinion was that we as a society
needed to make sure that pregnant women and infants had good
nutrition. Of course, pregnant women ought to take the responsibility
upon themselves, and most of them do, but the kids that the minority
produce end up being problems for everyone.

Marie