Planned Parenthood Guilty of Their Own Accusations

On the Planned Parenthood website you will find a link on getting the facts on abortion. Just clicking around to see if they actually tell women what abortion is (you know to see if they are truthful in their presentation), I found them talking about "crisis pregnancy centers" - with full on scare quotes. Rather than tell you about it, read it straight from the horse's mouth so to speak.

Deciding what to do about an unplanned pregnancy can be very difficult. It may be made even more difficult by so-called "crisis pregnancy centers." These are fake clinics run by people who are anti-abortion. They have a history of giving women wrong, biased information to scare them into not having abortions.

These centers

* may not give you complete and correct information about all your options — abortion, adoption, and parenting
* may try to frighten you with misleading films and pictures to keep you from choosing abortion
* may lie to you about the medical and emotional effects of abortion
* may tell you that you are not pregnant even if you are. This may fool you into continuing your pregnancy without knowing it. If your decision is delayed, it could make abortion more risky. It could also keep you from getting early prenatal care.
* may discourage you from using certain methods of birth control that are very safe and effective

Crisis pregnancy centers often pretend to be real health care providers — but many are not. These fake clinics often trick women with false advertising. They may make women think they will be offered unbiased information and a full range of health services.

Crisis pregnancy centers also sometimes try to trick women by using names that are similar to the names of real reproductive health centers in the neighborhood. Many times, the crisis pregnancy centers are located very close to real reproductive health centers. This makes it easy for women to go to the crisis pregnancy center by mistake.
How do you avoid a crisis pregnancy center?

* Don't schedule an appointment unless you are sure it's a legitimate place.
* Ask friends, other health care providers, counselors, or other people you trust for the name of a real health center.
* If you are considering abortion, you can find a list of abortion providers on the National Abortion Federation website.

No health care provider should pressure you into a decision about your pregnancy. All real family planning clinics will give you information about all your options.

Staff at your local Planned Parenthood health center can help. They can give you information on all of your options — abortion, adoption, and parenting. And they can talk through your options with you so that you can make the decision that is best for you.

I love the bit about crisis pregnancy centers tricking women into believing they aren't pregnant. Are people really stupid enough to believe that line? Ok, maybe they are, I mean they believe that the government can fix the health care system. That aside, talk about the kettle calling the pot black. PPh accuses crisis pregnancy centers of providing biased if not false information to convince you to follow their recommendations while doing the very same to convince you to use planned parenthood's services.

Thoughts on the brain-training benefits of classical education

I was browsing the CLAA site today, and was looking at links to an axiom-based arithmetic text (deductive study - CLAA thumbs up) and to an early inductive arithmetic text (CLAA thumbs down). (Deductive study is first learning general principles and then applying them to specific examples; inductive study is first looking at specific examples and then extracting the general principle from them.)

While reading the intro to the inductive text, I was struck by how similar its aims were to most modern math texts. The author emphasized starting with concrete examples, rather than jumping straight into abstract, number-only work. He started with children's innate understanding of the four operations and built from there. He even advocated using manipulatives! He made a point of stating that his book taught math in a way that was aligned to how children naturally thought about math, and thus they could learn easily, even at young ages.

This is the same goal that most modern educators have - to take what we know about how people learn in order to find the best - easiest, most efficient - way to teach the subject. While people may disagree about which way is best, no one disagrees with the goal. Certainly homeschoolers, especially, have embraced the ideal of finding the particular approach to each subject that best fits their student(s) and how they learn. As for myself, I've spent a fair bit of time studying the latest research in cognitive science and second language acquisition, in order to find the best way to teach my kids.

But, as I was thinking about the differences between the two arithmetic books, it hit me just what it means to "train the brain." It's not just teaching via a particular (deductive) approach, but teaching via an approach that *intentionally* does not align with how people naturally learn. After all, if children naturally thought that way, then they wouldn't have to be specifically taught to do it.

So the fact that traditional classical approaches to some subjects (Latin and Greek, math) don't line up with modern research on the way our brains work is not a bug, but a feature. (Not, of course, that you can't use how people learn to help you design the best, most efficient way to teach things via a classical approach, but that will, almost by definition, be harder than (some) non-classical approaches.)

I had never thought about it that way before, even though it seems blindingly obvious, now.

Apparently Lutheran Theology *Does* Conflict with the Underlying Philosophy of Classical Education

I was discussing with my dh - a Lutheran pastor - the accuracy (or lack thereof) of The Latin-Centered Curriculum's (LCC) description of Luther's beliefs toward classical education, and ended up getting completely blown away.

Dh advanced the position that, however hard we may try to find the truth, we can only succeed in actually finding it with the help of the Holy Spirit. Basically, sin has so thoroughly tainted everything - including the natural world and our reason - that on our own we are thoroughly incapable of ever grasping actual Truth. Sin corrupted all our data, and there is no way that we - equally corrupted by the Fall - can even have the slightest clue what it originally was like. We may very well find out accurate facts about our sinful world, but they are - at best - twisted, distorted reflections of actual Truth. And truth mixed with lies is ultimately still a lie. Only through the Holy Spirit can we discover actual Truth. (It's just like how we can not help but sin except through the continual help of the Holy Spirit.)

(Natural law would be something of a special case. It is directly written on our hearts by God, and - like all works of God - it is perfect. But it was done after the Fall, and in response to it - the law wasn't needed when we were in perfect communion with God, after all - and thus doesn't suffer from the data corruption effects that the rest of God's perfect creation suffers from. However, even though the law is perfect, our reason - outside of God - is still flawed, and thus can't help but mix lies in with the truth.)

Well, that is depressing. And flatly contradicts at least some of the basic premises of classical education. Objective truth exists, but it is not knowable outside of God. Not only it is impossible to know Christ without God, it is impossible to truly know anything without God. Sure, reason alone could never save your soul, but apparently it alone can't do much of anything, period.

Yet, does this understanding of human reason and its limitations violate basic premises of Christian classical education? More to the point, does it do so in a way that makes it impossible to have a historically meaningful classical education that is also grounded in Lutheran theology?

Well, based upon this explanation of true Christian education, written by William Michael of the CLAA, I would say that authentic classical education that is authentically Lutheran is possible. He writes that "[t]rue education teaches human beings to seek truth, goodness and beauty by the use of faith-enlightened reason." Despite our disagreement on the efficacy of non faith-enlightened reason, I am in complete agreement with that statement.

But even so, the more I read about the Scholastics, and about how thoroughly they - and through them the Catholic church - were influenced by Aristotle's philosophy, the more I'm starting to agree with Mr. Michael. If a true classical education requires adopting an Aristotelian worldview (which is not an indefensible position to take), rather than just studying Aristotle's works, then it really *isn't* possible to have an authentic classical education that is also genuinely Protestant.

But is adopting an Aristotelian worldview required to have an historical meaningful classical education? That's the kicker - I'm still trying to figure it out.

Genuine Lutheran Classical Education - Oxymoron?

So says the founder, Mr. Michael, of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy (provider of authentic Catholic classical education, in an historically meaningful sense).

My first reaction was to reject his conclusion out of hand - He's Catholic, what else would he think? Certainly, Catholics and Lutherans disagree on several fundamental issues, and this naturally would be reflected in how we approach learning - a Lutheran education is an entirely different animal than a Catholic education. But the idea that Catholic beliefs are necessary to an historically meaningful classical education - that's crazy talk, right? Yet, as I considered his arguments, I got to wondering - does authentic classical education, in the historically meaningful sense (which is what I am striving for), incorporate principles and philosophies that are antithetical to Lutheran theology?

Michael, in describing the trouble non-Catholic students would have in his program, says that "it is a matter of fact that the principles of Protestantism and Evangelicalism are inconsistent with the principles of true classical learning. In other words, there can be no such thing as a 'Genuine Protestant Classical Education'."

However, many of Michael's points, while accurate with respect to generic American Protestantism, do not apply to Lutheranism. All of the cultural advantages he lists for Catholic families - the liturgical calender, the numerous saints to study and imitate, the Sacraments, the fellowship in two millennia's worth of Christian society, and the historical examples of other classically educated Christians - are all available to Lutherans as well (though there are differences - number of sacraments, how we consider the saints, etc. - which, while I consider them unimportant to his main point, I doubt he would agree with me).

Also, we do have vastly different definitions of vocation - which Michael sees as the most important difference between Catholics and Protestants with regard to the suitability of a classical liberal arts education. However, I just don't see the problem. Why does a lack of "religious vocations," in the Catholic sense, make a classical education less desirable? (I think I'm missing his point, here.)

As well, we do not hold to the "Protestant principles of knowledge" that he lists - Sola Scriptura, private interpretation, and disregard for tradition, all of which he claims will have to be abandoned to study philosophy properly - in the way that most American Protestants do. On the one hand, we don't place the Lutheran Confessions on the same level as Scripture. Scripture is infallible; the Confessions aren't. We believe them to be a correct explanation of the Scriptures, but if they were proven to be incompatible with Scripture, we would abandon the Confessions on that point and go with Scripture. However, we do believe them to be correct. And we reject the idea of the individual as the highest authority on interpretation - all Scripture interpretation should be in the context of the church (i.e. the Confessions). Teachings that violate the Lutheran Confessions are generally considered to be false, by virtue of having violated the Confessions. Yet we still explicitly deny that the Lutheran Confessions are infallible. It's a paradox - and in good Lutheran fashion we embrace it, upholding both poles, contradictory as they are, as equally true.

Yet for all our differences from American Protestantism, we still have fundamental issues with Catholic theology. Are these issues equally fundamental to classical education? (And how are these issues connected to classical education in the first place?) I'm not sure. But I'm intrigued. So I've been reading more on the CLAA site, as well as researching early Lutheran education (which was classical - and very similar to Jesuit education, in fact) and the philosophical underpinnings of traditional classical education. It's interesting. So far I'm still inclined to argue that genuine Lutheran classical education, at least, can exist, but we'll see.

K3 Diary - Informal Math

(I've been wanting to keep a log of sorts, recording what we've done, hs-wise - blog seems as good a place as any.)

Today R (3yo) was flipping through one of my books (Distler's "Teach the Latin, I Pray You"), and reading all the numbers she came to. When she said 11 wrong (said "one two two"; I've been teaching her to count the RightStart way - one-ten-one, one-ten-two, etc. - and sometimes she says "two" instead of "ten"; no idea why the second two, though, but she's been doing that consistently the past week or so.), I corrected her, and then said the page numbers (which happened to include 12) for her, first the RS way - one-ten-two - and then the regular way - twelve. That was so much fun that she flipped the page, so I could say the next ones as well. We did that through the mid-twenties. Then she gave me a number - 64, and we looked it up, plus a few more. Then she was done. Just five minutes or so, but every little bit counts.

What to do?

Yours truly has been extended a call. Now the question is, "what is the will of God for us?" It has always seem to me this is one of the toughest questions to ask. It is not like I can go to scripture and read, "Dr. Luther, you shalt taketh the call that cometh during the sixth month of the 232nd year of the land beyond the sea." So now I have to rely on those tainted sources of reason and feelings. Is that God telling me to take the call or is it heartburn. So, in my moment of indecision please pray for us as we consider this wonderful new opportunity to serve the Lord.

Look Mom! No instruments!

It is amazing some of the things you can discover by simply hitting a single button. The following group called the Voca People demonstrate the vast potential of the human voice. Check out the video. You won't believe what they do with absolutely no instruments.