Gud, am I wrong that, for a while (I want to say, beginning in 1998) the Kansas State School Board dropped evolution as a required topic? It was a whole big thing being reported at the time.

First people pulled their kids out of public schools. Then they started pulling them out of school altogether.

Although I don't think that home schooling necessarily means "hermetically sealed universe", I do like to remember that in a lot of places, the racial integration of public schools was followed immediately by the placing of white children into private schools. Which always struck me as a bitter, defeated thing to do, and the kids have to have come out the other end of that with some kind of screwed-up ideas about what's normal in today's world.

When I was a kid in Milwaukee, in the midst of school integration, I was the one of the only kids on our block to go to public school. The schools were good, but they were diverse and there was a LOT of white flight going on.

Fair enough, but I think that for the informed parent, it supports homeschooling.

Does it? One of my best friends from college went to a public high school in the middle of nowhere, Tennessee, where she got funny looks from both teachers and students for admitting she believed in evolution. But her parents made sure she had access to better science materials at home than the school was providing, and she made it through Northwestern as an anthropology major with no problems at all.

I think homeschooling has enough drawbacks and too few advantages that it should be considered a last resort, if that.

I don't think smart kids suffer too much from mediocre schools. I think they'll excel anyway, and they'll get happy teacher attention.

I think that REALLY depends on the kid. And the teacher. I had some mediocre teachers, including one who told my parents how happy she was to have me in class, since she didn't have to pay any attention to me.

Yup. I'd say most of the teachers I encountered paid me very little attention, because I was able to get perfect scores on all their little worksheets and fill-in-the-blank tests without any help. There were exceptions along the way, of course. I have enduring fond memories of my band director, the math teacher I had for four years running because he taught everything above Algebra I, my junior and senior year history teachers, and my AP English teacher. You'll note that all of those came fairly late in the process, though.

I do like to remember that in a lot of places, the racial integration of public schools was followed immediately by the placing of white children into private schools. Which always struck me as a bitter, defeated thing to do, and the kids have to have come out the other end of that with some kind of screwed-up ideas about what's normal in today's world.

Aww, Nutty, White Flight is still the guiding reality of many public schools. It pretty much defines the urban schoolscape.

They dropped it for like a year. Basically, the conservatives (that means far right wing Republicans in Kansas) got in power and removed the requirement. Then the conservatives all got voted out and replaced with moderates (that means regular Republicans in Kansas) who put the requirement back in. Since then the School Board has been trended more conservative, so they will probably come out again. I don't think evolution really ever stopped being taught during all of this though.

Does it?

Does it argue against homeschooling? If I have to actually cover material that my kid is getting wrong in school, I've started homeschooling, but not taken it all the way. There's a breaking point somewhere along that continuum, and one that depends on the parents' ability and desire.

As I said -- the informed parent in that situation can choose to keep the kid in school too. It doesn't dictate homeschooling.

They've pretty much given up on integration here in Kansas City, the flight to the suburbs and/or moving kids to the Catholic school system has made it impossible to do.

Have we seen this yet: [link] Judge Rules that California Same Sex Marriage Ban is Unconstitutional

Gud, most of the people I know here (Massachusetts--Toto, we've never been in Kansas) who object to the teaching of evolution in our public schools, don't object to teaching of the theory of evolution itself. They object to what they call the teaching of the underlying philosophy of naturalism. Is that true in Kansas too, do you think, or is it to the whole shebang?