The vast majority of public school districts in the United States are not nearly as logical as that.  If anything, swimming is a competitive sport; so not only would they not actually teach you to swim as a beginner, they wouldn't dream of letting you in the pool with your shoes on.

However, the YMCA sponsors swimming lessons for a very low cost.  Homeschooled children like my own take them during the school day, usually.  And the swim lessons sometimes include survival swimming as young as 3 months old.  Yes, you can teach an infant to swim.  I've seen it first hand.  But most moms would be hard pressed to do to their own child what is required to teach an infant to swim.  But once they learn, it's awesome to watch.

That's true also, but I'm not sure that it matters.  The vast majority of people either don't know that currencies are debt based, or they are of the mistaken belief that the US $ is still backed by physical gold held in reserve.  The failure of such a currency is entirely dependent upon the public's faith that it will still have spending value tomorrow.  The fact that we know better doesn't imply that we can predict the outcome.  As the saying goes, the market can be irrational for longer than you can stay solvent.  The fiat currency market has been irrational since at least 1971, and probably 1913; and that hasn't really matter yet.

While I agree that those are all nice, and I've already engaged my older children in most of those, my wife & I long ago agreed to invest time and money to teach a few things that we consider "life skills"; i.e. skills that any independent person might need to know how to do to save their own lives.

The first one on the list should be self-evident, but very few schools teach it.

Swimming.

No, I failed to make a recent backup since upgrading.  But no matter, I figured out how to trick my phone into unlocking long enough for me to turn on the 3G radio, and then once I logged in using my current gmail account, it decided that it was happy and let me enter my pattern in the normal way.  So I've managed to defeat my own phone's security, which was no small task.  I use a custom rom and it apparently had a few non-standard security tricks in play, including a 'tripwire' kind of thing that might have nuked itself if I hadn't managed to convince it that I was who I pretended to be within it's time frame.  Thank God I'd had previously rooted my own phone, or I'd have been screwed.

EDIT: I could tell it was doing some kind of tripwire countdown, because it was using the vibration function as some kind of timer notification.  I think that it might have been counting down using binary code, but I wasn't paying enough attention to be sure.  I know that it wasn't simply a regular repeating pattern of vibrations.  I can't find the original author of the rom, and it's very specific to my particular model of phone, and very well made.

I agree with your premise that a shift in the worldwide value 'standard' is underway, but there is no special condition to imply 1) that such a shift will necessarily be catastophic, since it's happened before without significant problems.  Most of the world didn't really even notice when Bretton-Woods failed, just kinda shrugged their shoulders and carried on.  Or 2) there is no certainty that the world would chose Bitcoin as the successor under the current state of geo-political affairs.

My toddler got ahold of my phone, and spent over an hour playing with the unlock patterns, until it hit it's max attempt limit and sealed my phone up without internet access turned on.  I've been trying to use android SDK to either fix those settings or backup the entire phone (which I failed to do since upgrading to Mycelium wallet) and both paths have been failures.  The phone is well sealed.

Any ideas as to how I can get the secret keys off of the phone using ADB connections over USB?

1) You might have to limit yourself to only one hooker at at time, that's a tiny back seat.

2) There's always some 'important' campus feature that would be very expensive to repair.

3) Yeah.  Well, I didn't get to go to Harvard either.  I was accepted to MIT, but dad said, "Congratulations son, now how are you going to pay for that?"  Turns out, the Montgomery GI bill stipend isn't enough to attend MIT.

My kids probably average around 3 hours a day, engaged in deliberate study of academic subjects.  However, that's just about every day, including Saturdays and most of what most kids consider "summer vacation".  They still complain about the amount of time that their studies (and chores) consume, right up until I threaten them with enrollment and a 7am bus ride.  When they are really small, they think the bus is cool, so I occasionally take them on a public bus trip. (navigating the public transit system is a useful skill in it's own right)  My younger kids are not really old enough for "school", at 4 & 5, and are so close together in size and age that most people assume that they are twins.  They are my rough & tumble boys, and they fight like Cain & Able.  There are a number of differing learning styles, and professional teachers have to learn techniques for hitting as many of them with each lesson as they can, in order to teach effectively to their entire class. This actually takes up as much class time as anything, and isn't something that can be avoided. But homeschooling allows the teaching parent to tailor the lesson to match the personality & learning style of the child.  This is a huge time saver, and very effective once it's well implemented.  What takes the most time is actual lesson planning, but I'm willing & able to spend the money to have that cognative labor performed by others, by buying curriculium developed for homeschooled children that fit their learning styles and our ideological parameters.  Currently we use Sonlight for my older children.  (sonlight.com)  But one can homeschool a child well for free, using nothing but a library card and a little guidance from a website like this one...

http://www.oldfashionededucation.com/

Or this one...

http://www.amblesideonline.org/

And other online resources such as this one...

http://www.khanacademy.org/

And this one...

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/


Money is a trade for time, in education as much as anything else.  BTW, my kids have access to both Kahn Academy & MIT's Opencourseware via their Roku.  The meatspace lecture model is a dying educational paradigm regardless of it's quality.

How random.  Bot, much?

Let's test that theory.  Get hammered, steal your father's favorite car, snort cocaine off of the back seat with a pair of hookers, and total the car into the founder's statue at your private school.  If they don't produce a horsewhip after that then you can assume you're safe.  If your mother says, "boys will be boys" then you're destined for Harvard.

Probably not often, but I wouldn't be so sure that it never happens.  I'd wager that there is a wavier somewhere...

Yes, but then there's still that issue with the horsewhip...

Perhaps.  Time will tell.

I have to admit, this didn't happen in my school, and for the most part neither did the kind of bullying that seems to happen too often these days.  There was, literally, no drugs or weapons within my school when I went there.  And I attended a private, all boys, high school as well; suit, tie and black leather shoes required.  We didn't have weapons there either (drugs, probably; but it certainly wasn't blatant) but we didn't consider a pocket knife a weapon at that time either.  My high school had a dedicated faculty position called the "disciplinarian" who was second only to the principal himself.  I'm sure you can imagine that any such behavior incidents were handled in a completely different manner as compared to the public school systems.  No one was ever 'suspended' from my school, and if you were expelled, it's a fair chance your parents wept for your lost future.  In my grade school prinicpal's office, she kept an old paddle on the wall, mostly to intimidate the students.  In my high school, the disciplinarian kept a horse whip on the wall.

Not exactly an ideal environment for low stress learning either, in recollection.

The average public school district budget nationwide was about $12K per year per student, K through 12.  Many private schools (particularly Catholic or Baptist elementary schools) are well under that number.  However, many private schools are much more than this number.  Decades ago, my parents sent myself, my sister and my brother to a private elementary grade school that charged $8K per semester.  It could easily be twice that now.

Logicly speaking, if we can afford the public school now with taxes, we can afford it without the taxes and paying for it privately.  That's a mathmatical truth.  However, we can't really afford the public schools' budgets anymore, and that is a major contributor to municipal debt and insolvency today.  So one can take that both ways.

You're welcome to it, but I would recommend that you correct my letter salad. I can tell I'm getting tired.

Good for you, but that makes you the exception, not the rule.  I'm sure that you already knew that, though.

Futhermore, homeschooling isn't expecially expensive, although it can be.  Private schools are much more expensive.  Public schools exist to provide a basic education for the middle class, which is a fine goal unto itself.  However, IMHO the system has been corrupted by personal and private interests, so that the public school districts have many hidden agendas which burden their budgets; resulting in a declining quality of education dispite a decades long trend of rising educational budgets.

And turning back to the topic of the thread, sending children into a forced social situation in order to learn to manage hostile personalities (what advocates might call, "toughening up") would be considered child abuse under any other context than education. I am of the opinion that the 8 year old "wimpy kid" learns nothing of lasting value by being exposed to an age peer bully; instead learning (at best) conflict avoidance or submittion to authoritarian personality types.  These are skills that can be taught as easily in a high school controlled environment, if they are really needed.  I, for one, have never had the experience of getting into a fistfight as an adult, particularly at work.  If you get beat up by a bully in school; you get to be suspended for a time, and get to see that same bully when you both get back.  Teh same experience as an adult in a workplace gets one of you fired and/or arrested while the other gets a lawsuit settlement for the "promotion of a hostile work envirnment".  School social envirnments don't translate well to the adult world, unless your adult world is a penitentiary.

Political crisis, sure. That may or may not lead to a currency crisis.

To a point, this is true enough.  However, the environment that a child is expected to learn within has as much as an affect on his/her outcomes as the motivation of the 'rents.


I don't need to look. The public school system, and even a few of the private schools, have repeatedly contacted my wife & I to get my kids into their "gifted & talented" programs.  That may be an experience unique to us, however, I can't be certain.  I know my own parents were offered similar conditions if they would remove me from the private school I was in, and put me into the public school.  I would have jumped at least one, and maybe two grades in the move.  My dad said no.  I was bitter about the whole thing at the time, but now I understand.

Public schools need the stats, private schools need the prestige that successful graduates bring.


This is a myth.  One that is not improved by the common name of "homeschooling", since it's a misnomer.  It's a rare day that my kids stay home.  My daughter has cross country practice four days a week right now, and an all day coop class on Fridays. Coop is an elective school, wherein the students take classes from other homeschoolers' parents.  I've taught Praxeology, (Whatever Happened to Penny Candy? and Whatever Happened to Justice?) and am considering offering a course on investing stradgeties (Rich Dad, Poor Dad; What the Rich Teach their Children that The Poor Do Not and The Clipper Ship Stradgedy) or Cognative Programming (How to win freinds and Influence People).  While some private schools do offer courses like these, I've never even heard of a public or charter schol offering anything like this, and that is another point at which you are at a disadvantage to private or homeschooled children with your education.  While it's possible for a child with truely invested parents to get a very good education in a public school, it's not possible for anyone to receive a complete education, simply because there isn't enough time.  Since all public schools, and most private schools, must focus on a general education; they can't really commit time or resources to the kinds of elective education that homeschoolers can.  If your father was an economist, it's more likley that you will be an economist or a businessman in a related field of work, because children really do learn from their parents and their parents friends.  As a homeschooled parent, I can introduce other children to the particular skill sets that publicly educated children generally don't have access to.  It's not as if the 1% is actively keeping this information to themselves, it's the very nature of publicly funded education that limits your educational opprotunitities.  Honestly, which is more likely to offer you an advantage in a career as an adult; Algebra 2 or Praxeology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxeology)?  Now, be honest with yourself.  And think about this, we teach all children mathmatics; why don't we teach all children Economics?

I would recommend any and all of those books, BTW.

EDIT: I forgot to mention my eldist son's electives.  He's much more of an academic then his sister, but still has a weekly bowling league. In the past, he's attented regular groups such as Choir, Music Theory, Karate, he has been in several church plays as an actor and backup singer.  My son is the introvert, like myself; so he really isn't 'into' social things; nor is he nearly the athelete his sister is (which isn't to say she's some kind of star, either), but has competed on a rifle team with his 22lr Marlin adn want's a competition class youth recurve bow for his upcoming birthday, so he can shoot in an archery team that is near our new house.  He will probably be taking a piano class soon, but we have to wait until I can get my father's baby grand moved into our new home.  That piano has been in my father's family for four generations at least, and looked rough when I played under it as a tot.  Yes, I was born into the 1% and I'm not ashamed of the fact that I was born with advantages that my family could provide.  As mentioned, my brother fell out of the 1% years ago dispite all his gifts, and has no visable prospects of returning by his own efforts.