Plus Boy Scouts news, student activists and the results of spanking your children.

What’s Happening Wednesday: The isolated homeschooler myth

If you don’t follow Linda Dobson’s blog Parent at the Helm, I strongly recommend doing so. She has tons of wonderful information on her blog and website that are really helpful when you begin to unschool. This week she posted a wonderful blog about how silly the myth of the “isolated homeschooler” is and I wanted to share it.

Have you heard that the Boy Scouts of America are going to put an end to their stupid policy on not allowing gays in scouts? That’s wonderful—except it only includes children. Scout masters still have to be straight.

This study on how parents around the world describe their children is really telling. Americans put more of an emphasis on “smart,” while other nations focus more on balance and—believe it or not—happiness.

A couple of teen activists are not happy about how their local schools and governments are running things and they are not being quiet about it! A young woman from West Virginia is appalled that her school is hiring sex ed speakers to spark fear into students’ hearts while a young man from Louisiana is disgusted with the creationist education happening in his state. Both are raising hell and I commend them on trying to change their communities, even when faced with plenty of opposition and threats from adults.  

And finally, here is a new article about the effects of spanking. There are plenty of studies depicting how spanking harms children, but now we are discovering that it leads to mental illness in adults, too.

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia