Will the Watchtower ever turn against K-12 public education? (page 2)

Vidiot

@ WingCommander...

Keeps 'em solidly entrenched in the WT, though.

sir82

Many individual JWs are really into home-schooling.

Which, by the way, turns out the most shockingly inept (intellectually, emotionally, socially) people you could possibly imagine. But I digress; that is another topic for another day.

Anyway, while many self-righteous JWs are all gung-ho on home-schooling, the WTS has never (to my knowledge) endorsed it or even recommended it.

But if indeed an impetus to encourage "critical thinking" begins to catch on, even in elementary education, you can be sure that soon enough, there will be WT study articles on "The Blessings of Home-Schooling" or "The Dangers of Public Education" or some such.

freemindfade

Adding my comments from the second post:

This may be something real on their horizon, but who knows, I prophecy they will be doing this some day. As an extension of their new electronic presence, and online education program to keep kids out of satans schools.

What if they were planning something like this and it got out in prank/hoax form? They would $hit bricks.

We should make a top secret viral prank campaign to distribute the rumor this is coming down the pike until all the dubs who can't resist forwarding idiotic inaccurate emails get caught up in their own mess.

"A friend from walkill emailed me this announcement from morning worship..."

jw.edu could be just a prank, or maybe its real, but getting people talking about it would be hilarious.

JW_Rogue

I have some personal experience with this as i was home schooled for most of my life. There seemed to be two viewpoints that most JWs had about public education. One was that public education was just too dangerous and would teach kids the wrong ideas and involve them with bad influences. When I was growing up my parents also believed that the schools were failing to teach kids how to read and write properly. For those reasons I was enrolled in an alternative school. The curriculum was chosen by a teacher but the work was still done at home. Every few weeks we would go and turn in samples of what we had done and talk to the teacher about our progress, goals etc.

Some people though viewed this as a way of sheltering kids from the real world and believed that kids should go to public school as a way to prepare them for real life. By going the home school route you avoid many of the things that can test a young persons faith. Things like birthdays, holidays, flag salute can all be avoided with home schooling. So I guess some felt it was better to test the young people by making them stand up to these things at early age. I know for me personally since I was never around worldly kids I didn't see what the big deal was about holidays and never really felt different from others because I had a core group of JW friends. I loved not going to school because I had so much free time that other kids didn't get to enjoy. Now though I can see that I was stuck in a JW bubble even at that age. I never was exposed to anyone who didn't believe exactly as I did. I never really learned to make friends, the friends I had were more by default than anything else.

born and bred redhead

I just don't understand how these people survive! If the only income you have is coming from your self-employed janitorial/construction/landscaping business, how can you afford to support a pioneer/Stepford/homeschooling wife and kids?! I guess it keeps them in the poor bracket with no time to question the bigger pictures in life, but still!

If they wanted to, they could get a lot to homeschool. It'd be the same way they talk about how young kids are getting baptized these days. "We don't baptize babies because they have no mental faculties. But there are some as young as 6 showing their devotion to Jehovah!"

GrreatTeacher

My mother is always saying that she would never send kids to public schools nowadays. But, she sent all of us kids to public school. We're all over 30.

AndersonsInfo

http://www.newsystemschool.org/aboutnss.html

http://www.newsystemschool.org/

History of New System School, Inc.

New System School, Inc., was created for the purpose of helping parents who were looking for an alternative to the public school system for their children's education. The school was started in North Carolina in 1980. In 1985 the school was incorporated in Missouri, and associated corporations have since been formed in many states. We have students and faculty in 35 states, several foreign countries...and we're still growing!

New System School, Inc., is an organization of parents who wish to be very closely involved in their children's educational process. They have made legal arrangements to be recognized as a private religious school. This is not a home school satellite situation, but a private religious school with a faculty and non-institutional campus arrangement.

We are a non-profit, private religious school created for the children of Jehovah's Witnesses. We are not sponsored by any local congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses or the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania

Barrold Bonds

A kid in my old cong went to that newsystem school. it's garbage. his dad told me it was great because his kid didn't have to take algebra because it's a waste of time lol. yes, a basic form of math is a waste of time. they did little dances and social things. they even got class rings and had a graduation ceremony.

long story short, he graduated at 16, pioneered for a couple years, got married at like 18 or 19. good thing he works for his dad.

Ignoranceisbliss

Caleb and Sophia both go to school. If the Borg wanted to push home school that would of been the perfect opportunity. It's always been said that school is the dub kids personal territory to preach in. Regardless many Dubs in the Midwest do homeschooling. I figure at least 50% in our circuit are Home schooled.

Village Idiot

It's funny you should mention critical thinking skills and Texas in the same post. Here's a quote from the Republican Party of Texas in its 2012 platform (PDF: Do a word search under "critical").

"Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."

It goes to show that JWs are not the biggest crazies on the block.

There is also a homeschooling movement that has grown amongst conservatives with fundamentalist religion influenced text books.

Will the Watchtower ever turn against K-12 public education?

History of New System School, Inc.

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