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Prester John posted:Quick question for you and any of the other Goons whom attended one of these schools, what was integration into Public School like for you? Going to chime in on this since I had the homeschooling side of things and the private Christian school side (almost uniformly ABEKA/Bob Jones the whole way) up until my freshman year when I started in public school. English was never that bad, just getting used to reading real books and learning to interpret themes is different but not problematic. Writing was never a challenge once the idea of theme, tone, and that sort of thing is explained. Math was never too bad too. In reality, ABEKA math was pretty good for me up to that point and gave me very good fundamentals. They're utter poo poo past 8th grade though as my friends who joined late can tell you. Science was a serious problem for Biology. Like, learning about organs and anatomy as well as cells was 20 steps beyond anything done in these programs, and that's ignoring the whole evolution aspect. Chemistry and physics came a lot more naturally after, but I also had Bio as shock treatment before, so mileage would vary I imagine. Most of the kids I know who integrated later were awful at science if they went through full fundie Bio. History wasn't too difficult either, but I had always been interested in it and had a lot of books under my belt that were outside of ABEKA, so a lot of the gaps in the curriculum were filled ahead of time. World History was far more difficult up until around WW1. The enlightenment never happened to most of these programs, so I basically learned that fresh in the 9th grade. Really the biggest problem is the social aspect. If you come from one of these programs, you're likely socially stunted and awkward to begin with just by virtue of how vastly different fundie kids are to being around normal kids. I entered public school pretty much entirely because I wanted to play for the tennis team in my hometown, and the sheer amount of bullying and poo poo I took as a freshman was a wake-up call. I've always been fairly thick-skinned and un-good at being a fundie kid. I have to imagine the true believers barely survive. Honestly though, I got out in the nick of time. I got my head on straight and (unintentional slight humble brag) got out of high school around a 4.3 GPA with a 33 ACT, and I'm at a top 100 Uni/College now graduating a year early and hopefully headed to a good master's program. I credit my background for a tiny portion of that. My writing ability came from years of miserable ABEKA grammar, but science, math, and social studies pretty much had to be re-learned on the fly and I'm still recovering in a lot of ways (I'm still utter poo poo at science other than physics to the point where my Biology grad student girlfriend has to explain her work to me like she would a 4-year old). I know from the 20 or so kids I knew who were also homeschooled or in a Christian school that I'm the only one that made it out this well, and that really saddens me, because a lot of those kids would be doing great in life if they had any type of decent high school education behind them.
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Aug 22, 2014 04:39
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Okay, so here is a bit I've been working on for months on and off. It goes over some of the same materiqal already described in the thread but bear with it, it really drills down into what my experience was like. In A.C.E. it falls to the students to check, or "score" their own work. Once a page in a workbook is completed the student is to raise their flags and wait for a supervisor to come grant them permission to take their work to the "scoring table". At the scoring table is a copy of each workbook with all the answers filled in correctly, as well as red pens. A student then goes line by line with a red pen checking their own work, returns to their desk and corrects any errors found, then again raises their flag to get permission to "re-score" and check that any errors have now been corrected. As it turns out, being the completely bored and utterly unengaged student that I was, I was terrible at this. And that became a massive problem when my Supervisor (think teacher, except without actually teaching anything ever, having a teaching certificate, or having ever attended college for even a single day) gathered up all my PACE's from the past month and checked every single one for any "scoring errors", or mistakes I had made that I hadn't marked with a red X at the scoring table. Each of these was viewed as a deliberate act of rebellion, and each carried the penalty of a demerit. It didn't matter how trivial (literally undotted i's or uncrossed t's, i's before e's in the wrong order) they were all treated as heinous crimes. I can still remember the first time I walked into the classroom, coming back from lunch. I was in a good jovial mood, completely unaware of what was going on. But as soon as I saw that the Supervisor had all of my PACE's, I knew something was amiss. She skewered me with an enraged glare that terrified me. She refused to speak to me, so for nearly 20 minutes I sat at my desk unable to work, completely confused by what was transpiring, fear slowly creeping over me. Finally she came over to me. With a stern glare she told me that she had found 47 "scoring violations", and she was giving me a demerit for each and everyone. Terror swept over me. Demerits were a big deal. At 3 demerits you started accruing detention time. At 7 demerits you started accruing "Whacks", or blows from a wooden paddle the Pastor kept in his office. Each demerit past 7 was a whack, so I suddenly owed 42 whacks, I couldn't even comprehend that many. I was terrified. Whacks were a big deal, a big big deal. And I had never actually received one before. My parents were called, and a long discussion took place but I was told no details, other than that I was going to get whacked tomorrow. I didn't sleep a wink that night, a knot of terror in my stomach kept me awake. I couldn't even eat I was so terrified. I was nine years old. The day progressed slowly, agonizingly slowly, every hour the sense of dread and forboding grew. I hadn't been told how many whacks I was going to receive, or really any details. I was only told that it was going to happen at some point that day. I stared at the clock wishing desperately that it would be tomorrow already so that this could be over and done with. Sometime around 2 in the afternoon I vomited in the bathroom. Finally, sometime around 4, hours after school had ended, a Supervisor brought me to the Principles office. My parents were there, as well as several of the elders. They lectured me on my "willful disobedience" for about 20 minutes and warned me about the dangers of my "spirit of rebellion". They told me they were going to show me "grace" by only giving me one whack this time. I took it all in, shaking the entire time. Then we prayed. The Pastor implored the Lord to use this Whack to teach me the ways of righteousness, and to guide me to a spirit of thanksgiving for having adults in my life whom cared enough about me to discipline me this way. After we prayed the Pastor looked me in the eyes and said "Son, were going to instill fear of the Lord in you." (Every time this happened, and there would be many more times, he would say this exact thing right before he struck me.) Then I was bent over a heater, the Pastor hefted a thick oaken paddle. There were different paddles for different age groups. The one for Kindergartners was a switch, the one for teenagers had holes drilled in it to reduce wind resistance. The one for me was a thick oaken one about the size of a breadboard. Like lining up a golf swing, the Pastor traced a path in the air with the paddle, from my butt to almost the ceiling. The blow struck me so hard my whole body went numb, my head was pushed into the wall. Then the pain hit, the most pain I had ever experienced in my life, I started to wriggle and writhe, unable to cope. I couldn't breathe, I was choking on tears, completely overwhelmed. The Pastor grabbed me in a big bear hug while I squirmed, terrified of him. He made us pray together and made me thank him for this Godly discipline. And that was the first time. Thereafter, every so often, with no warning, and for no reason I could discern, my Supervisor would sweep up all my paces and inspect them with a fine tooth comb. I would always be out of the room when she did this, and I would come back to see my PACE's gone, and the whole process would repeat. I learned to live in terror of unexpected attention from authority figures, and over time I started to always be on guard, to never let myself get too relaxed. It always seemed like she would do this whenever I was happiest, whenever I was achieving and actually doing well. Each time it happened, more whacks and longer detentions were added. And each time I would promise myself that it would be the last, that I would try harder this time and make sure that I never missed a single mistake when I was scoring. But my Teacher always found plenty of scoring violations whenever she decided to look. She would spend over an hour sometimes inspecting my PACE's, sometimes going back and getting PACE's I had done months before and inspecting those as well. I tried so hard but it never seemed to make a difference, I always wound up shamed and beaten. They demanded what felt like the impossible from me. My whole existence became one of terror, dreading the moment an authority figure decided to check over my work. Mistakes that had escaped my notice from weeks before could suddenly rear up, each and every page of each and every PACE searched for every overlooked error. The mountain of evidence thrown at me out of the blue, no warning, no way of seeing it coming. The punishment was physical assaults on my person. No matter how hard I tried I could never be good enough to escape these seemingly random assaults on myself, I had always overlooked something, always made a bunch of mistakes, I was always wrong. I was bad, I was broken. The evidence was staring me in the face. My only hope was the pain these good people inflicted on me, the knots of terror that kept me awake at night was my righteous punishment from God for the spirit of rebellion I carried against him. I wanted to desperately to be good, to be found worthy, to be able to be accepted like the other kids, to have this stain washed away from me. I wanted to find a way to fear the Lord enough that I would stop being bad. My desperate pleadings to the Lord went unanswered, and it sank in that I was broken, perhaps hopelessly so. I withdrew into myself, hating myself. I deserved this pain, I deserved this fear, why couldn't I just do what I was told. I stopped all my hobbies and focused only on schoolwork, I didn't deserve to play video games or go outside like the other kids, I was bad. Once I stopped getting whacks, once I stopped sinning, once I got this spirit of rebellion out of me, once the beatings stopped, then I could be like the other kids. Then I could allow myself to be happy. But not until then. Months later, after my first round of whacks for scoring errors I was celebrating thanksgiving with my family. We were at the house of one of my cousins, it was a large party for our family with several dozen in attendance. One of my aunts noticed how quiet I was, how I wasn't out playing with my other cousins. She asked my Father about it. "Well" my Father began with a half smirk "He had some troubles at school, wasn't trying hard enough. So we decided to give him a couple whacks on the tush. Ever since then he's been real quiet and obedient, his teachers have all complimented how he never speaks up or gets in trouble anymore, he just puts his head down and does his schoolwork. I know some idiot liberals think you shouldn't hit your kids but its the best thing we ever did."
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Aug 22, 2014 04:44
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Prester John posted:
There are no words...I wish I could say something, anything meaningful to you for going through that but, I can't. I did a year at a fundamental school when I was a child because of financial reasons but my mum never bought into any of it and bailed the minute she saw what was going on. I'm, just so sorry you had to go through that Prester.
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Aug 22, 2014 05:26
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Athaalin posted:There are no words...I wish I could say something, anything meaningful to you for going through that but, I can't. I did a year at a fundamental school when I was a child because of financial reasons but my mum never bought into any of it and bailed the minute she saw what was going on. Thank you for this, it really helps that there are people empathetic to all this. It means a great deal. But I don't want to seem like I write these threads looking for sympathy, even though I am grateful for it. I write these to get the word out just that little bit more about what this poo poo is and what this poo poo does. It is my hope that in time ways will be found to remove this sort of insanity from society. I don't want other kids to go through what I went through. And I didn't have it all that bad. There are people who went to these schools whom when I read their stories I doubt I could have pulled through, I don't know if I'm that strong. I think of myself as pretty strong internally, but I do know for certain I have a breaking point, I've crossed it a few times. I know that if I had been locked up in solitary for a month like that poor girl at the Rebekhah House, well....whatever would have come out of that room wouldn't have been me anymore. I count my blessings. I had a ton of advantages for being in that situation. I was bright, curious, and strong willed. I was also an avid reader, which was part of the downfall of that whole system for me. Modern books were all satanic for one reason or another, but my school was in an actual old school building and had quite a selection of 18th and 19th century literature, which they would let me read without raising an eyebrow. If they had only known. For some reading Nietzsche is what makes them start to really question their beliefs. For me it was reading the various letters and posthumous works of Samuel Clemens, especially The Mysterious Stranger. I guess what I'm saying here in a roundabout way is that I'd rather it was me that went through that than someone whom couldn't have handled it. In my time on the streets I've met plenty of people who snapped under the load of a lovely childhood, and under different circumstances it could have just as easily been me. Considering the constant test of wills that my High School years were between me and my parents, if they'd had the money, they'd probably have sent me to a Strait Inc. type place. I wouldn't have survived that I don't think. As grateful as I am for the sympathy I get here with these threads, I am far more grateful for the chance to speak to so many at once and to do my little bit to get the word out. It ain't much, but change like this takes decades, and I like to feel that in my own little way I'm part of the solution.
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Aug 22, 2014 05:54
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Don't feel you have to answer this, but I am curious how you feel your mental illness(es) influenced your time at that school? It is a pretty hosed up situation for anybody but I have to imagine it would be astoundingly worse for someone that, by virtue of biology, deviates from the norm.
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Aug 22, 2014 06:06
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That is really hosed up. I hope you're saving all of this stuff because I would think there must be programs, researchers, etc, who would want access to first hand accounts like that. I get into arguments about corporal punishment with colleagues at work a depressing amount. Without fail defenders of it always say some variation of: "Well I was beaten as a child and it never did me any harm." Oh yeah sure, it's not had any negative effect on your moral compass at all, with the one tiny exception of the fact that you seem to think it's ok to use violence against defenceless children.
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Aug 22, 2014 06:23
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Shbobdb posted:Don't feel you have to answer this, but I am curious how you feel your mental illness(es) influenced your time at that school? It is a pretty hosed up situation for anybody but I have to imagine it would be astoundingly worse for someone that, by virtue of biology, deviates from the norm. I had few symptoms as a child, Schizoaffective usually emerges later. I honestly don't know how much influence it had, but I think part of the bullying I received was that the other kids could tell there was something "off" about me. I would say however that my time at the School had a massive influence on how my illness manifested over the years. I used to hallucinate demons and hear their voices screaming at me. Probably my worst delusion is when the biblical Enoch was sending me messages telepathically to prepare me for the coming war between Heaven and Hell. I had to train my awakening psychic powers for when the veil fell and literal angel wings popped out of my back, you see.  I made life decisions and changed jobs based on what Enoch told me. Always a fun day when I get to talk about that one to the Doctor. :iamafag:
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Aug 22, 2014 06:43
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Prester John posted:"Well" my Father began with a half smirk "He had some troubles at school, wasn't trying hard enough. So we decided to give him a couple whacks on the tush. Ever since then he's been real quiet and obedient, his teachers have all complimented how he never speaks up or gets in trouble anymore, he just puts his head down and does his schoolwork. I know some idiot liberals think you shouldn't hit your kids but its the best thing we ever did."  e: Every time I reread that post my desire for Obama to make the Tea Party's nightmare come true and initiate Order 66 2: Order Harder upon the fundies grows by a little bit. Gen. Ripper fucked around with this message at 07:02 on Aug 22, 2014 |
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Aug 22, 2014 06:48
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Thank you for sharing this- sincerely.
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Aug 22, 2014 06:57
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So, what is to be done? It seems to me that this is a sign religion is getting too much protection in America - Christianity is being bastardized as cover for blatant child abuse. How would the government go about ending these abusive practices and the abuses at places like Straight Inc?
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Aug 22, 2014 06:58
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AATREK CURES KIDS posted:So, what is to be done? It seems to me that this is a sign religion is getting too much protection in America - Christianity is being bastardized as cover for blatant child abuse. How would the government go about ending these abusive practices and the abuses at places like Straight Inc? Fund the CPS and report suspicious activity to them. That's it
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Aug 22, 2014 07:06
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icantfindaname posted:Fund the CPS and report suspicious activity to them. That's it Unironically this. We have oversight systems we just need to get the standards and regulations applied. For my particular little Cult I've been Facebook friending the current staff/students/parents. If I ever work up the nerve I'll post an open letter to the Pastor on my blog and tag them all. My idea is to openly explain what I went through and call him out on the physical/spiritual abuse, mention a few of the nuttier bits of dogma, call him out for some of the more well known examples of blatant favoritism/hypocrisy, and quote some of the particularly racist/insane parts of A.C.E. This group is pretty insular and I know the Pastor does not handle any form of criticism, let alone public criticism, well at all. I don't know exactly how he will react, but because the school is perpetually on the verge of shutting down from lack of funding, combined with the fact that there are moderate parents there whom use the place as a substitute for crappy local schools and probably aren't really aware of some of the insanity that goes on, he will have to react. My guess is it will be some combination of accusation/conspiracy theory of Satanic Oppression that my godless liberal self is bringing on poor noble him. Based on an exchange I had a few years ago with his son I also expect to hear "Yeah you were bullied but did you ever stop and think that you deserved it?" And probably some "little whiny liberal got spanked and uses it as an excuse to be a failure in life". It'll be ugly, but I expect it'll cause enough weirdness that the more moderate parents will pull their kids out and go elsewhere. I'm just hoping my laptop stays alive until I work up the nerve Prester Jane fucked around with this message at 14:20 on Aug 22, 2014 |
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Aug 22, 2014 14:13
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TheGreyGhost posted:They're weirdly friendly to Jimmy Carter though. Jimmy Carter was and is a deeply committed Christian, to the degree that absolutely nobody except the very fringe of the fringe had any doubt that he was serious about it. Of course, he's the sort of Christian that takes directives like "actually do things in the real world to help people" seriously so you can't actually support him politically, but on a personal and historical level it's okay to like him. Prester John posted:For some reading Nietzsche is what makes them start to really question their beliefs. For me it was reading the various letters and posthumous works of Samuel Clemens, especially The Mysterious Stranger. Mr. Clemens would have been thrilled to hear this, I think. Mark Twain posted:I am a preacher. We are all preachers. If we do not preach by words, we preach by deeds. What we do and say has its influence upon others, and in our daily life, though we be not clergymen, we preach to each other.
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Aug 22, 2014 14:52
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TheGreyGhost posted:ABEKA has by far the most rigorous math up until the high school level when they go into crazy town. Pro Click right here. I enjoyed the read from that, thanks. Here's the money shot: BoingBoing posted:This isn't about them being stupid. It's about who they think you are. Interesting trying to imagine rejecting set theory as a Fundamentalist. It's like, "Modernism is an affront to True Christianity, so let's make detours around every academic concept that offends us so our children grow up intellectually stunted and desperately unprepared for the outside world after high school/college." Religion or no religion, this type of approach is self-centered and toxic as gently caress, bordering on abuse. There needs to be a way to deal with these kinds of groups without the Freedom of Religion card being played to stonewall inquiries/reforms/etc.
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Aug 22, 2014 15:10
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TheRamblingSoul posted:Interesting trying to imagine rejecting set theory as a Fundamentalist. It's like, "Modernism is an affront to True Christianity, so let's make detours around every academic concept that offends us so our children grow up intellectually stunted and desperately unprepared for the outside world after high school/college." One of the videos posted has talk about how they view Aristotle "If he had performed some basic simple experiments". Don't forget they think they are the ones being "scientific." What you've got there is a rejection of natural law theology (the Aristotle/Aquinas is wrong edit: and this is very protestant) with a simultaneously appeal to the enlightenment (the not scientific enough). I've argued that fundamentalism does that in other threads. It's nice to have clear cut example I can point to when I say that now. Fundamentalism is also a rejection of the other reactions in Christianity to modernity (like dialectic theology). I was thinking about it last night and I don't think I can talk to my relatives about this. They would hate the things I believe (some of those other Christian reactions to modernity) and no outcome would be good. They'd hate my wife's beliefs even more (we've already not told them she has masters from a pretty liberal seminary). I think I'm going to have to be very careful the next I visit in Warren.
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Aug 22, 2014 16:50
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Prester John posted:This group is pretty insular and I know the Pastor does not handle any form of criticism, let alone public criticism, well at all. I don't know exactly how he will react, but because the school is perpetually on the verge of shutting down from lack of funding, combined with the fact that there are moderate parents there whom use the place as a substitute for crappy local schools and probably aren't really aware of some of the insanity that goes on, he will have to react. My guess is it will be some combination of accusation/conspiracy theory of Satanic Oppression that my godless liberal self is bringing on poor noble him. Based on an exchange I had a few years ago with his son I also expect to hear "Yeah you were bullied but did you ever stop and think that you deserved it?" And probably some "little whiny liberal got spanked and uses it as an excuse to be a failure in life".
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Aug 22, 2014 17:32
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A.C.E. and Abeka and Bob Jones are the kind of schools many conservatives are thinking of when they go on about school vouchers by the way. The people pushing it want you to think it's all about giving poor inner city kids the chance to attend high ranking parochial schools or whatever, but it's places like the A.C.E. schools that will receive the most benefit from such a policy. Also Prester John thank you for sharing this. No one should have to go through what you did. It's all incredibly infuriating.
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Aug 22, 2014 17:53
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Nessus posted:I wish you all the best with this project. I suppose that if you are in bad circumstances (as I recall, you are) it could perhaps support your argument even further - "this is what he prepares your child to be" and so forth - but that would be up to you. Keep us posted. To simplify a bit, I was homeless for two years, but that changed dramatically a month ago. I qualified for a program called DSHS (pronounced dishes) which pays rent+utilities for a single apartment for a year. My case worker is amazing and I went from applying for the program to moving in to my awesome new place (that she also found for me) in about two weeks. I have almost no furniture save a bed+frame, but really, truly life is good. It's a quiet gated apartment complex with a pool. I've got a fridge stocked with fresh greens, strawberries, spicy sausages, and even a little ice cream. I have my own coffee maker. I wake up and can decide what I want to cook, I love cooking and being able to do so every day is a real treat. I have a new benefits advocate and I should (fingers crossed) get my disability hearing in about 3 months or so. My new guy is some sort of genius at his job and has been batting 100% for the past 9 months or so. When he took over my case he fired some paperwork off to the government and got a call back IN SIX HOURS! with a request to clarify something in my case file. I wouldn't have believed it unless I had seen it myself. He also discovered that my initial application for disability was rejected by a medical doctor and not a psychiatrist, which means I have an even better chance of getting approved. I am happier and more comfortable than I have been in five or six years. My only concern right now is that my laptop is dying. (video card is dead, heat sink is dead, power supply literally held together by electrical tape, takes 5-6 attempts to boot up whenever it gets shut off, a good number of keys have popped off the keyboard and its kind of frustrating to type, etc) My only source of cash is $60 a week I get from donating plasma, and that tends to get eaten up in things like bus passes and dish soap, so its going to take me a while to save up to get a replacement. But that is such a minor problem, really. (My hope here is to save enough to get a decent desktop in time for WoW's new expansion, which drops right before my birthday.) I really am happy now. I really am. Prester Jane fucked around with this message at 18:07 on Aug 22, 2014 |
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Aug 22, 2014 18:03
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Prester John posted:To simplify a bit, I was homeless for two years, but that changed dramatically a month ago. I qualified for a program called DSHS (pronounced dishes) which pays rent+utilities for a single apartment for a year. My case worker is amazing and I went from applying for the program to moving in to my awesome new place (that she also found for me) in about two weeks. I have almost no furniture save a bed+frame, but really, truly life is good. It's a quiet gated apartment complex with a pool. I've got a fridge stocked with fresh greens, strawberries, spicy sausages, and even a little ice cream. I have my own coffee maker. I wake up and can decide what I want to cook, I love cooking and being able to do so every day is a real treat. It is really encouraging to see how your situation improves, man. Particularly contrasted with the nightmarish poo poo you're telling us about from school.
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Aug 22, 2014 18:26
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Aerox posted:So was this a mistake, and they essentially punished you for pointing it out? Or was this intentional, and the whole point was to force you into doing things even if you knew they were wrong, because you were directed to. Pretty sure it was the latter. A.C.E. is incredibly deep into control and submission to authority. It pervades the curriculum, even if not all the implementations are Prester John's. Prester John posted:Quick question for you and any of the other Goons whom attended one of these schools, what was integration into Public School like for you? Well, in my case I was in A.C.E. for 4th and 5th grade, then went to another Christian school (one that had its own, lesser silliness) clear until I went to college. The shift did not go very well for me. I actually had very little trouble academically, but the complete loss of the 'support structure' of community and chapel left me really confused and I couldn't make friends or work particularly well with my classmates on anything except classwork. A fight with depression (my parents insisted on repeatedly trying the "just suck it up and do better" solution for years, when actual medication cleared it up really quickly) and a very complex fight with my sexual orientation didn't help. I'm out and away from the whole shebang now, but I'm still not very social and haven't finished my 4-year degree.
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Aug 22, 2014 19:14
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This entire thread has been horrifying so far. No child should have to be put through mental and physical abuse like this. I found a list of ACE schools in Michigan, and one of them is not far from where I live. It says it's run by the Methodist church. Is your experience standard for all of these schools? I'm having a difficult time wrapping my head around a Methodist church running a school using discipline as you described it.
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Aug 22, 2014 19:48
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ZeeToo posted:but the complete loss of the 'support structure' of community and chapel left me really confused and I couldn't make friends or work particularly well with my classmates on anything except classwork. That is interesting. When I was on law review I had to go to the Bethel University (a conservative christian college) library to get a book to rack. That place felt WEIRD to me. The students were treated like middle schoolers. There were like den moms who were organizing their activities (this was at like 8:00 pm) in little groups. The place was immaculate, in a sort of overbearing way. The walls were decorated like a school, not a college. The guard at the gate wound up being the least oppressive thing about the place, even though "what business do you have on the grounds of this institution of higher learning" is a question I had never encountered before. My impression was that it was a place wealthy christian dads sent their daughters to physically prevent them from getting hosed for four more years. Having read this thread, that initial impression may be less judgmentally cynical than I thought.
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Aug 22, 2014 20:52
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Prester John posted:
Referencing earlier discussion of the A.CE. crowd and right wing evangelicals in general's attitude toward power and the sexes, the chart is possibly instructive. They have it configured as a loop around the rooster, with the hen being an inconsequential external input otherwise not relevant to the reproductive process. While chicken mothers perhaps don't have mammalian levels of investment in their offspring, if any party is to be represented as an uninvolved external contributor, it stands to reason it would be the sperm donor. But nope, give us the egg and gtfo, lady.
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Aug 22, 2014 20:57
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Prester John posted:Always a fun day when I get to talk about that one to the Doctor. :iamafag: I'm so glad you seem to have a sense of humor. This ... all of this is just horrifying and sickening. My concept of 'religious schools' was mostly a limited understanding of Catholic schools. This just seems like torture. Thank you for talking about it. I know it must be ... well, actually, harder than I can properly conceive of, having not gone through anything similar.I have to point out one thing, though.  When I saw this in the US Politics thread, I thought it actually sounded like a pretty good description of myself.  The person who wrote it and I probably disagree about the definitions of all the nouns, though.
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Aug 22, 2014 22:00
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Reading this thread makes me kind of weirdly thankful that I was one loving difficult child to handle. I went to a religious, Christian primary school here in the UK for the first five years of education. Nothing as serious as ACE mind, but lots of hymns and allusions to god. I was so drat obnoxious, loud and aggressive even after being beaten, that it cost me those precious formative years of education which I would have to later make up for. I feel like it gave me a sort of natural immunity to this kind of bullshit though, and even now I have such a deep skepticism of authority. Hey what do you know, an actual positive to being a tiny shitball.
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Aug 22, 2014 22:24
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Vavrek posted:I'm so glad you seem to have a sense of humor. No, I don't think you even disagree on the definitions. What you disagree on is the connotation. We think of Humanistic endeavors (and basically all the good non "lower taxes" answers on that one multiple choice question) as unambiguously good, moral, and upstanding things to do. The ACE people think that the above actions are the height of immorality and pure evil. You have to understand that, to them, rejecting God in favor of a humanistic view of the world and a government working to level the playing field for all is almost as fundamentally abhorrent to them as (and ethically equivalent to) incest, murder and (legitimate) rape, except that at least the liberal can recognize the error of his or her ways and need not be punished if they recant.
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Aug 22, 2014 22:33
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Wow. I think I might've hard a close brush with A.C.E. myself. For reasons I won't go into here, I spent grades nine through twelve being home-schooled. Both my parents work, so they found a local "home school academy," which gave us a curriculum of workbooks to go through. Basically I was teaching myself from the workbooks, with an occasional parent-supervised test. The workbooks were called PACES. The curriculum was heavily Christianized. And something like this was the last question on every English test. So I'm wondering if that place was affiliated in some way with A.C.E. The term PACE, the "recite scripture questions" and the Good Christian Cartoon Characters are quite a coincidence if not. If so, though, they weren't as extreme as the one inflicted upon Prester John - aside from the biology course, which was hilariously creationist, the books were legitimate educational material, if not especially challenging. The math was real math and even had some proofs in it, the art course covered a lot of different media and was kind of fun in hindsight, the entire third year of English was one big term paper project... and though everything was peppered liberally (har) with Good Christian Messages there was nothing overtly political that I can remember.
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Aug 22, 2014 23:52
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So, how is this poo poo legal? Or, if it's already illegal, how is it going on? To what extent are these abuses taking place today compared to past stories/anecdotes/experiences?
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Aug 23, 2014 01:54
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yikes- I just went to a christian daycare, despite growing up in a secular humanist household, because my mom worked there and it was free for my bro and I to attend, effectively doubling my mom's salary. Lots of standing in the corner for hours for having 'weird' opinions, but nothing this heinous. Like many, I had no idea this sort of thing was going on, aside from knowing some kids in high school who came out of homeschooling situations. They seemed to fall into two camps: the ones that were relieved to be at a normal school, and the ones that just looked terrified of everyone all the time.
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Aug 23, 2014 02:01
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Lustful Man Hugs posted:So, how is this poo poo legal? Or, if it's already illegal, how is it going on? To what extent are these abuses taking place today compared to past stories/anecdotes/experiences? As for the legality it depends on local laws regarding child abuse, and even if technically illegal the CPS doesn't have very strong powers and doesn't press this kind of stuff too much. As for prevalence compared to the past I don't really know. The mainstream is definitely better than it has been at any point in time; Corporal punishment has pretty much been entirely eliminated, etc, etc. But cults might be about as prevalent as they were 50 years ago. This is the kind of thing that requires actual statistics to judge. In general in the USA there's a lot of backlash against attempts to stop this stuff / interfere in people's freedom to raise their kids however they want. I know in at least a few European countries homeschooling is illegal, for instance. Trying to ban homeschooling in the US would raise hell akin to trying to ban guns. Same thing with corporal punishment, it's mostly gone now but it took a pretty monstrous effort to get rid of it because of the MY FREEDOMS people
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Aug 23, 2014 02:14
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Man poo poo like this makes me glad that I've influenced our facility to be as lenient and anarchic as possible. I mean sure, somebody has to sweep the floor after dinner, and yeah sometimes your rear end needs to get off Facebook and clean your room or come to group. But I really don't see the point of acting like they've done something wrong or need to be fixed, we are a place of refuge. Refuge from bullshit like this and worse.
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Aug 23, 2014 02:28
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icantfindaname posted:In general in the USA there's a lot of backlash against attempts to stop this stuff / interfere in people's freedom to raise their kids however they want. I know in at least a few European countries homeschooling is illegal, for instance. Trying to ban homeschooling in the US would raise hell akin to trying to ban guns. Same thing with corporal punishment, it's mostly gone now but it took a pretty monstrous effort to get rid of it because of the MY FREEDOMS people This. There is a tremendous amount of overlap between the Are Country, God, Guns and Guts, and homeschooling/fundamentalist types. My Cult was far from the only one that felt is already under active persecution from the Government. Government agencies were literally viewed as arms of Satan's influence on the Earth. Government agents were literally demon possessed servants of Satan (even though they didn't know it) and their attempts to inspect these schools were a part of Satan's never ending attempts to crush "True Christians". There is a weird dichotomy here that gets overlooked a ton too. Many of these "Rapture-is-right-around-the-corner" types expect to lose the battle but win the war. What I mean is they have already conceded inevitable defeat on this world, it is written that Satan will win here in the last days. But they also expect to be in Heaven watching from the clouds while judgement is poured out, and then Jesus will beat the Anti-Christ in a final mano-a-mano that wipes out most, but not all of mankind. Satan will then be cast into a lake of fire. After this the few remnants will rebuild and live in a 1,000 year reign of peace during which the raptured people will work to guide mankind to rebuild the Earth. Then after 1,000 years Satan gets loosed again for the final final battle that Jesus will handily win. The key here is they expect to be persecuted and they expect that no matter how hard they work Satan will ultimately win the day on everything from abortion to gay marriage. Satan will do this through the government. But they also are under orders to work their hardest to "save" as many people as possible before things get too bad, and they also expect that for a period before the Rapture Christianity will be outlawed and they will have to go into hiding and defend themselves like they were some sort of rebel force. So if you outright ban homeschooling, it will play right into this paranoia and probably more of them than you or I want to think about will go full Branch-Davidian. But it also won't matter because when this happens it means the rapture is for realsies just around the corner and whatever they do will have the sanction and protection of Heaven. Everything they do now, and everything they do in those "last days" will be running up the scoreboard for their Mansion in Heaven. I was taught that once in Heaven we would all get our own houses, and the size of these houses and their luxuriousness was a direct reward for everything we did on Earth that Jesus commanded. We used to joke about every prayer meeting "adding another floor" to our Mansion. Oh and we would also still have jobs of a sort and there would be a Hierarchy in Heaven and where you fell on that Hierarchy was determined by how pious you were in this life.
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Aug 23, 2014 02:40
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Lustful Man Hugs posted:To what extent are these abuses taking place today compared to past stories/anecdotes/experiences? No one really knows because no one has solid numbers and at this point obtaining solid numbers, or even decent educated guesses, is impossible. I would say that the trend has been away from Corporal punishment, which although it is very much alive in certain areas, its not an active selling point like it used to be. According to A.C.E.'s self reported numbers they had 8,000 schools in the 90's and 7,000 schools today, but that number may not really mean much because no one tracks the inflow/outflow between these schools and homeschoolers. Speaking purely on my own very limited observations, I would take a guess and say that there are fewer overall such places, but the ones that remain are entrenching themselves and becoming a great deal more shrill as a result of very much losing the culture wars. But poo poo like this is still happening. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LACyLTsH4ac
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Aug 23, 2014 02:47
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SedanChair posted:Man poo poo like this makes me glad that I've influenced our facility to be as lenient and anarchic as possible. I mean sure, somebody has to sweep the floor after dinner, and yeah sometimes your rear end needs to get off Facebook and clean your room or come to group. But I really don't see the point of acting like they've done something wrong or need to be fixed, we are a place of refuge. Refuge from bullshit like this and worse. What sort of facility do you work at if I may ask? I understand if you can't get into too many details.
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Aug 23, 2014 04:22
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Hey Prester John, were you ever told it was okay to lie if it was for God? I ask because it's kind of a hallmark of a certain brand of crap.
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Aug 23, 2014 04:36
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paragon1 posted:Hey Prester John, were you ever told it was okay to lie if it was for God? I ask because it's kind of a hallmark of a certain brand of crap. Kind of. I do recall a couple lectures on "To everything there is a season" meaning that in the service of God anything necessary was okay. I think the example given was being a caught spy (for lying). Or when the Israelite's slaughtered the Canaanites (for genocide). Also I think there were some other bizarre examples of totally evil things that might be okay if it was in service of God but its not something that came up very often.
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Aug 23, 2014 04:41
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Ah yes, for everything there is a season. Except homosexuality and being a single mother. Edit: I mostly heard it as a reason for it to be okay for kids to answer questions on evolution correctly.
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Aug 23, 2014 04:48
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Prester John posted:This. There is a tremendous amount of overlap between the Are Country, God, Guns and Guts, and homeschooling/fundamentalist types. My Cult was far from the only one that felt is already under active persecution from the Government. Government agencies were literally viewed as arms of Satan's influence on the Earth. Government agents were literally demon possessed servants of Satan (even though they didn't know it) and their attempts to inspect these schools were a part of Satan's never ending attempts to crush "True Christians". This is in general the best way to describe fundies and evangelicals alike, albeit I think the perspective on government agents is a little more nuanced. They've gone from the Branch Davidian "we are powerless" outlook to attempting to change the system through programs like A.C.E. or the infamous Kids in Ministry Jesus Camps and putting their people in places of power. They're starting to slump back into the anti-government sentiment because Bush has been out of office, and they're having troubles making the programs work. The reason the programs were doing well for them in the 2000's were because Bush was willing to hire Liberty/Bob Jones/Patrick Henry grads and there was a terminal career path. Now that the internet is proliferating and evangelicals are falling out of style, and with the whole Obama factor, they don't have the career track waiting, so they lost their sense of efficacy at the end. A.C.E. no longer gets you to Liberty then a GOP congressional office now, so the idea is to weather the storm until they can move back in while avoiding having the ground they've gained fall back. I know that most of the regular D&Ders have probably seen it at this point, but the best way to understand the mindset of this kind of Christianity is by actually seeing it. It isn't directly school-oriented, but Jesus Camp is very very very powerful and a good way to understand the political motives and operations of non-school outreach to kids and how they rope people in. It also gives you a pretty accurate idea of the kind of people who run fundie schools and the parents who are willing to send their kids towards that sort of thing. It's less focused on school, but it lets you understand the ethos, pathos, and logos of fundie movements (from how they see things like abortion to how they see themselves fighting back to how they organize themselves). To understand the actual logic of the movement though, you have to understand organizational theory in fundie terms. 1. Fundies only care about individual liberties in the sense that they need enough rope to run their programs. That's why they defend homeschooling and align with the GOP. They don't want a standard to meet because their goal is to change the standard. 2. The group outweighs any one person. This makes sense from the whole martyrdom aspect, but it also can be flipped on its head. Bob Jones, Pensacola Christian College, and Patrick Henry are all dealing with massive sexual assault cover-ups right now--especially the latter two. These schools restrict their environments enough (curfews etc.) that any outside criminal or involvement is implausible in the public eye--as such it absolutely has to be erased from existence. When the criminal is likely someone from within the college, they reflexively remove everyone involved and cover it up, because bad press about the organization makes them A. lose their theoretical moral high ground and B. destroys the just world fallacy that keeps their masses in line. It goes beyond the normal school cover-up because fundamentalist institutions stress being "from the world but not of the world". 3. Negative coverage acts like a pruning tool to these organizations. Gaining followers through the persecution act isn't the insidious part of the response. Of the new membership to support of join when a case like, say, Hobby Lobby comes along, they treat the negative press as a membership tool. By purging those against the status quo, the fraction of people who stay with the movement become integrated more fully to the core--pruning off the main growth for the purpose of a strong core. This is where radicalization happens and the movement becomes problematic and cult-like, because this is where people cede their autonomy to the group wholly. 4. The only way these groups fall off is when the tangible benefits to members start to fall off. Lack of opportunities out of fundamentalist institutions, economic downturns, and massive single-issue changes (e.g. Gay Rights) are what actually do damage to these groups. They're similar to the tea party in the first three points, but far more fragile to economic conditions and single-issue movements. Whereas the tea party has no trouble maintaining strict order over its members regardless of popularity, fundies don't have the same level of centralized structure that groups like the tea party are capable of. There are national organizations, but think of it this way. There can be dozens of denominations in a town that all vote the same way without directly communicating with each other or directly influencing each other, whereas strict political groups often order from the top down. As such, the vulnerabilities of lost faith in the platform actually impact the fundamentalist movement because there isn't a consistent hand of God/Koch there to continually blow smoke up their rear end. Fundies splinter and find new churches when things get bad enough and denying their infrastructure access past their education systems is the only way to really affect these organizations and mitigate them. Calling CPS is always an excellent move and can help countless kids going through what Prester did, but fixing the problem of these systems lies in essentially finding a way to dry up opportunities for fundies, which is what makes it a difficult sell to voters every year because of the whole having to argue for a group of people to be told to go gently caress themselves for going to Liberty aspect. Also, if you really want to see how loving far these orgs will go to insure their existence, take a look at what ABEKA's parent college is willing to do: trigger warning: Rape
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Aug 23, 2014 04:57
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paragon1 posted:Edit: I mostly heard it as a reason for it to be okay for kids to answer questions on evolution correctly. "You have to learn it, but you don't have to believe it."
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Aug 23, 2014 05:39
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Prester John posted:Oh and we would also still have jobs of a sort and there would be a Hierarchy in Heaven and where you fell on that Hierarchy was determined by how pious you were in this life. Heaven better be a union shop.
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Aug 23, 2014 08:02
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