Have you talked with the teacher or the principal about your concerns? A movie like the one shown should be discussed with both as it was inappropriate for kids of that age (was it rated PG-13? Then it shouldn’t have been shown to 11 and 12 year olds.)

In any case, please consider giving it one more year. In middle school/junior high, she’ll be on the same footing as everyone else. New school, new teachers, new classmates. She’ll have more opportunity to meet new people, and find kids of like mind.

I put my 11 year old child in public school this year – 6th grade but still in elementary school in our district. She has heard bad words that she didn’t even know existed until this year (my kids thought the s-word was “stupid”); kids curse often and daily in the classroom and lunchroom. (For example, she tossed her lunch bag toward the garbage can but missed. Before she could pick it up, someone snarled at her, “Pick up you f***ing trash.” Nice, huh?) Kids are unfriendly, telling her “go away” when she tries to join a group on the playground. Girls talk about their “lesbian” relationships. One girl says she wants to be a pole-dancer like her mom and shows her moves using the basketball hoop pole. The teacher plays a top-40 radio station during study hall (listen to some of those lyrics – not words suitable for children!!!!). The teacher showed a movie in which the male private part breaks off a naked statue and ends up in a character’s mouth. It’s played for laughs, but was shocking for my child. The girl sitting next to her wants to be a witch. Another child yesterday told her how she wants to kill herself (she sleeps with her dad’s gun). So, yeah, it’s pretty much been as bad as I thought, despite all the Christian parents who told me their kids did just fine in public school. Mind you, this is a school in the suburbs that is considered a good school with a very good principal.

Perhaps I would continue to encourage her to be a “light on a hill” at the school if she had at least one good friend there. But she is lonely and overwhelmed, discouraged and attacked. Her spirit is being crushed by what goes on around her.

I went to Christian schools from K-12. The first part through 4th grade was ACE. Let me say that it was the worst experience. That system does not work. Unless you are self motivated, it will do nothing but frustrate you. I can remember my mom trying to get me to do the math “paces”. They had an entire page of long division problems…there must have been about 25 to 30 on the page. I was not motivated in the least, and the sight of it intimidated me. So, I procrastinated. At one point, I resorted to hiding them under my bed if I had homework and saying I “lost” them.

My sister, on the other hand, flourished, because she was a self-starter. I flourished in the English and Vocabulary section, so I was advanced in those areas, but math was definitely behind. My parents eventually decided that it was not the best system for me and moved us to a more traditional Christian school that used Abeka textbooks. That was much better for me. At that point, I learned to be motivated, and I was able to keep pace with all of my classmates after adjusting to an actual teacher and schedule. In the ACE school we were left to our own with a monitor, and the score keys. It’s hard to get kids to teach themselves with very little adult interaction. Plus, so many of the ACE students cheated by looking at the score keys anyway…

So, I spend 5th to 12th grade at the much larger Christian school. It also had it’s issues, but I think generally, the education was good. Well, the texbooks were ok. We did have a problem with the teacher talent pool. Most of our teachers were either PCC or HAC graduates, and had little experience in the subjects they were teaching. I remember our Spanish teacher (who was also our Homeroom, PE, and History teacher) being absolutely clueless about Spanish. At a certain point he had to concede and we started using the PCC video tapes. That was the case with a lot of the subjects. Our Biology teacher knew little about science, our physics teacher…yeah, the same. So, we got a lot of “green” teachers who were fresh out of college, but they were enthusiastic. I remember there was one of the older kids who graduated and went to HAC only to come back four years later as one of our teachers! It was hard to take him seriously though, since he wasn’t that much older than we were, and we knew what he was like as a student…

Anyway, I think if I could have chosen, I would have preferred to go to a public school. I had friends who did, and they seemed to get the same basics that I did, and they seemed pretty smart. None of the things most Christians fear actually went on in the classroom. Sure, my public school friends were a little more tolerant of things, but there didn’t seem to be any indoctrination going on. Plus, we had a perfectly good public school in my housing block that my friends could ride their bikes to in five minutes. My Christian school was 2 hours away. I certainly was envious of their commute, LOL!

Speaking of private Christian schools – sending your child to one is no guarantee they will be safe. In a local Christian school in my area, the principal of the school (related – oh the coincidence! to three school board members) was accused of raping a high school girl. I am sure, based on inside evidence that I have, that he is guilty. So all these holier-than-thou Christian school promoters still have to keep a sharp eye on their kids, no matter if they are in private or public school. Bad stuff still happens.

“ab ove maiori discit arare minor” means “from the older sheep the younger learns to plow.”

But sheep don’t plow, do they. What you should have wrote was

“a bove maiori discit arare minor,” which means “from the older ox the younger learns to plow.”

There’s not a lot in this posts that resounds with me. But some of the comments, now—

On the Christian education industry, Mountain says, “do not kid yourself- it is an industry and fortunes are tied up in it,” as if the same weren’t true—only more so—of the public education industry. Follow the money and you’ll wind up at Carnegies, Fords and Rockefellers. You think with all that idle money they had sitting around, those men didn’t help shape the manifold bureaucracy that is public education. Its compulsiveness, its disjointed curricula and facts train a child to seek relief from learning, relief like text messaging and facebook, mountain dew and pot. Public education rewards the studious regurgitators, who don’t ask questions. It’s logical to want a workforce like that if you’re an industrial kingpin. Furthermore, you’d also want the rest of the students—the jaded ones like most of us who hated being there—conditioned into adulthood to hate what they do from 9-5. What they really live for is Miller time! and spend most of their day at work living in the futurity of that relief. And that drives consumption always ever higher, as the law of diminishing returns makes it still harder to block out the pain of living in a time when even an accredited BA is barely enough to get you off the dayshift.

And I agree with Randy on accreditation, when he says, “Nothing but more paperwork that is properly filled out and then forgotten.”

Except to say that most of schoolwork I ever did seems to fit this definition as well. Except for the paperwork that was improperly filled out.

I’m not a fundamentalist Christian, and I’m sure they’d say the same of me. But those people DO live in the REAL WORLD (as opposed to the fake, I suppose, hm?), and have real emotions and problems just like the rest of us schmucks. So why all the negativity? Has some parochial school child made fun of you today? Has one condemned you to the fires of hell and damnation? Their parents are like the rest of us who want their children educated the best way they see fit. You might have a problem with the way they do it, but then again, isn’t their goal—that is, educated children—the same as someone’s in a public, charter or home schooling setting? So once you can agree on the essential, you can have a fruitful, maybe even enlightening, discussion on the particulars of education.

Standards are not the same thing as accreditation. My company is certified ISO9001 compliant by an out side auditor. It is a farce. Nothing but more paperwork that is properly filled out and then forgotten.

It seems my earlier question about Harvard’s accreditation was misread. I did not ask if Harvard was accredited. I asked what agency would dare cancel such accreditation. It is inconceivable. If it did happen, it would mean that the local no prestige community college really is a better deal.

Where do you go with a degree in bus ministry? The same place you go with one in early English Literature: the end of the line.