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In a message dated 9/29/03 6:25:37 AM, holly@... writes:

<< Let's turn the table. What about the term "radical unschooler"? I
personally don't like it. >>

I don't mind it.

So you're stating where your beliefs lie, and I made a statement which
included where MANY people's beliefs lie (including hundreds of thousands of
Christian Homeschoolers).

How about having stated that you stop trying to convert me and others to your
minority view of terminology?

If "alley" means the same thing to most people and there's a dictionary
definition and lots of cities define "alley" to mean the same thing, then someone
campaigning to call "alley" something different and to use the word "alley" to
mean something particularly other can put up web pages and billboards, but
they're fighting the tide of language.

<<But they don't make
me radical--at least, not in the sense in which I use that word, of
wanting to overturn all of the 'establishment'. >>

That isn't what "radical" means.
If, in your mind, the word "radical" means to overturn the establishment,
please spend some time looking it up in dictionaries or in useage guides on the
internet.

<<Maybe it's just I don't have a great take on the word 'radical'. Maybe
it's just the way I don't care for labels of any kind, anywhere. But I
would no more call a group of people radical unschoolers than I would
call a group fundamentalist Christian or a group Christian
homeschoolers.>>

Okay. You won't. But I don't mind labels. They're called "nouns."

I know my dog is a dog, and I know she's a pet, and a blue heeler and an
Australian Cattle Dog. I didn't know at first. At first she was a dog-pound
puppy. Those labels don't hurt her. They're ways of communicating about her.

<<Labels are a lot of what we leave school to escape. >>

Your "we" should have been something different. I didn't leave school to
escape labels. First, I didn't "leave school." I finished it, continued it, and
became an employee of school.

My children didn't "leave school," they never went in the first place.

And the reason I'm glad they're home is to avoid structured delivery of
subject matter, not to "escape labels."

<<Just as most of the women on this list would probably
prefer that either female pronouns be used in non-specific writing, or
that constructions like his/her be used, because we KNOW that using male
pronouns almost exclusively creates a worldview which maintains the
importance of the male over the female.>>

You're proposing (speaking for most of the women on this list, no less) that
in referring to a mixed group, the pronoun "she" should be used primarily? Or
he/she, but if not he/she then "she"?

That's weird. I've never heard ANYONE propose that in the absence of he/she,
"she" should be preferable over "he." I've known (and done) lots of going
back and forth, or using "she" sometimes, as a reminder that we're not talking
only of boys, in a late-reading situation or whatever.

<<Labels are made to pigeon-hole people, to
avoid our having to see the individuality that lies beneath the facade.
First we pigeon-hole, then we dehumanize, then we deprive rights,
then.....well, how did the Nazis end up able to slaughter so many
people?>>

JESUS CHRIST!!! You think using a label is being a NAZI!?

Get a grip.

<<Fundamentalist Christian homeschoolers are people, too, working within
their own sets of values and worldviews. If we label and avoid, we
contribute to the adversarial relationship that exists. >>

Please read their stuff. It's not "adversarial."
It's God against Satan.
"You're either with me or against me," they say in sermons all the time.

I don't know how you were raised, Holly, but I grew up Southern Baptist and I
know what I'm talking about.

They don't WANT that adversarial relationship to fall. They built it and
they maintain it.

<<
I personally prefer to bring people together rather than divide or
maintain divisions. >>

Do it on your yourself in your own posts then, instead of disrupting this
group with talk of Nazis and other ranting.

In the military, people have a job to do together and they are made to get
along by threat of punishment, expulsion or worse. "Can't we all just get along
like in the military" isn't a legitimate argument to use of those for whom
the military won the freedom to be exclusive and separatist.

Have you actually read any statements of faith?
Do you really understand what those groups intend by them?

Sandra