Insomnia

Bleah. After last night, despite a last-minute scramble with Kouryou-chan to get her into bed that saw us getting to sleep only half an hour late, I still didn't get enough sleep. Or too much, depending. Although the melatonin hit me like it always does and reliably sent me to sleep, I still woke up around three and couldn't go back to sleep. I tossed and turned for what must have been an hour, trying to get what Omaha refers to as "rest". It didn't help. I must have finally fallen asleep again, because the next thing I remember is hearing Omaha's alarm go off and wondering why she would set her alarm so early. It goes off again, and then Omaha comes and wakes me, telling me it's 6:40am. I have exactly ten minutes to get ready for the bus-- usually this takes at least half an hour.

Obviously I didn't make it to the pool. But my prep for it the night before meant that my clothes and accessories were ready, all batteries recharged, lunch pre-packaged. I just had to throw on my clothes and go. Even remembered to take my vitamin and anti-inflammatory with me.

I don't feel that good. I hope I'm good enough to keep up with work today. It should be a relatively light day; mostly testing the codepaths that I laid down yesterday, guaranteeing function contracts with asserts, and stuff like that. Boring, but routine. Nothing to get revved up about.

Do children have "rights" independent of their parents?

There's a paper circulating around the upper eschelons of education lobby groups entitled Testing the Boundaries of Parental Authority over Education, by Professor of Education Robert Reich of Stanford University. This paper apparently makes a lot of people, mostly homeschoolers, unhappy.

Homeschooling has gotten an interesting boost during the Bush years, one that I'm sure BushCo isn't at all unhappy to see. Conspiracy theorists have the following to say about BushCo's "Education Initiative": the unfunded testing and standards mandate will automatically cause some schools to close-- those schools that cannot meet the standards. Those students will have nowhere to go-- neighboring schools won't have the capacity to take them. Ultimately, BushCo will have the perfect excuse to provide vouchers and plenty of arguments to shoot down any objections. It's already happening-- middle-of-the-road parents are pulling their kids out of schools, alienated by the "test, test, test" attitude and "teach to the test" policies that deny their kids any real chance at an education worth its name.

Now comes the counter-blow to homeschooling. "Children are owed as a matter of justice the capacity to lead lives-- adopt values and beliefs, pursue an occupation, endorse traditions-- that are different from those of their parents." Seems more or less obvious to some of us; once they've left the home, our kids are free to do what they want. We only hope that the traditions we've shown them and the examples we've set for them serve them well enough. But Reich takes his contention futher: "Because the child cannot ensure the acquisition of such capacities and the parents may be opposed the state must ensure it for them."

By this latter part, Reich intends to formulate a theory of "just education" that requires home schoolers to follow social education mandates handed down to public schools. "The state cannot relinquish its regulatory role in education in cases where parents invoke their religious beliefs as a bulwark against secular authority," Reich writes. It's a direct attack against those who homeschool for religious or philosophical reasons:

"At a bare minimum one function of any school environment must be to expose children to and engage students with values and beliefs other than those they are likely to encounter within their homes. Because homeschooling is structurally and in practice the least likely to meet this end, I argue that while the state should not ban homeschooling it must nevertheless regulate its practice with vigilance."

I, for one, do not feel that the state has any legitimate authority over children, which is what is being asserted here. There is no compelling evidence that any given state's "secular authority" is functionally superior to the authority given in the home. The state no more has the right to make sure that kids get a "mandated" amount of exposure to "alternative points of view" then it does to ensure that kids get exposed to some arbitrary amount of advertising. Above and beyond the watchdog role of making sure parents do not visit upon their kids what they cannot legally visit upon other people by initiatory force, the state has no business "providing alternatives" to children.