Pass the Kool-aid

What is it with Jim Jones references these days? I haven’t seen anything about him for a long time, and suddenly I see kool-ade references everywhere. There are a couple of forums I read (until this week anyway) and one forum has been accusing the other forum of being a group of “kool-ade drinkers.” The next place I hear it is on Sean Hannity’s radio show. Now, I’m not a huge Hannity fan, so maybe he has always called liberal sycophants kool-ade drinkers, but it’s news to me. Normally I don’t listen to Hannity; his voice grates on my nerves and I don’t have a lot of call to be listening to talk radio at 9 pm. But, the kiddos were prolific in their messes yesterday and hubby was gone at a meeting, so I sent the wee ones off to bed and Mary and I cleaned and listened.

He had Al Sharpton on, and what I listened to of the interview was interesting. Once you get past Hannity and Sharpton trying to talk over each other, there were actually a couple of nuggets of wisdom in there. Sharpton said he would be willing to go with a school voucher plan, if vouchers were available to all students. Which is similar to what I’ve been proposing for a while. I say reduce the property taxes (those renting get a credit based on the property taxes of their landlord) by 70% of anyone not in the public school system and provide a scholarship for private school for low income families, similar to the way Pell Grants work, but more generous (in terms of the percentage of expenses covered). Then you don’t have the public money -> religious education problems you get with vouchers, everyone can pick their education, and those who opt out of the system aren’t forced to pay for something they aren’t using. I keep the refund at 70% because we do have an obligation to make sure that every child has a chance to learn.

In case you can’t tell from my education plan, our family has opted out of the public schools. My oldest, Mary, is the only one of school age (she’s eight), but we plan on homeschooling all three of them when they are old enough. We homeschool classically, and by that I mean traditional classical, not neo-classical. What the heck am I talking about? I’m working on a post on trad classical and will try to have it up soon. I also will be posting some homeschool and trad classical related links and a list of the books I’m reading in a bit, maybe this evening, since hubby will be at yet another meeting. (Actually he is at the local gaming store playing Romans vs. Germans tonight.)