Today was the Oklahoma Natural Parenting Homeschoolers park day. It was a little on the hot side but we had a great time.

Pictures behind the cut!

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On Friday, we took a field trip to the University of Oklahoma Medieval Fair, the annual event which for three days every year magically transforms Reaves Park in the college town of Norman, Oklahoma, into an authentic park with a Medieval Fair.

Here are five-sevenths of our entourage, standing among the authentic Medieval straw bales. Abby and I are not pictured. You can more or less see Trixie’s ankle.

Princess Faith (see the crown?) tripped and skinned her knee on some authentic Medieval pine needles.

Faith and Abby rode authentic Medieval ponies…

…and an authentic Medieval elephant,…

…and posed for a Polaroid with “Cyaine,” the authentic Medieval mermaid.

And their faces broke out in authentic Medieval paint. (It seems to have mostly cleared up by the next day.)

So long, Medieval Fair. See you next year.

Gil likes the park!

Abby on the slide, mid-bump

Bede, standing tall!

Samantha, our friend, zipping down the slide!

Zak, our friend, at the house

Faith at home

Gil likes the sofa!

Bede was pretty tired I guess.

I’m trying to get some park day interest again. Tomorrow me and Renee are headin’ to the park around noon. If you read this and are in the OKC area and want to meet a gang of eclectic homeschoolers, we’ll be at Corbin Park at 13th and Tulsa.

With any luck I’ll even take some pictures!

Catholic relaxed/unschoolers who are a bit more like the gang around here than the folk below.

Central Texas unschooler, all growed up.

When Quinn Eaker dropped out of a Colleyville high school in the second month of his senior year, his mother was so happy she threw him a huge party. A hundred guests descended on their home to celebrate Quinn’s return to the freedom in which he’d been raised: days on end without classes, tests or grades, days free of any schedule, days for Quinn to learn what he wanted, when he wanted and how he wanted.

He returned to being unschooled.

This is his father, speaking about school educations being no guarantee of happiness or success:

[Steve] Eaker now looks back with some regrets. “I wouldn’t say I wasted 25 or 30 years of my life, but I do think a lot of my choices I thought I made weren’t really choices,” Eaker says. “They were fulfilling expectations I integrated into my personality.” If he’d had more freedom to explore other interests, he says, maybe he would have found not just a job but a passion.

Read the whole thing.

Sheep-in-a-Box from Owens Farm looks really nifty!

In George Orwell’s novel 1984, Winston and his fellows were subjected to a regular ritual called the “Two-Minute Hate,” a brief video montage of horrible images — crimes, murders, calamities, and such — at which the viewers were expected to boo and hiss. Then an image of the designated enemy would appear, so that the irate audience could channel their rage at this personification of evil, even though he was little more than a made-up scapegoat.

Nick Winkler, a reporter at KWTV News 9 television station, has almost doubled the Orwellian standard. Instead of a mere two minutes, he treated Oklahoma City to a full Three-Minutes-and-Forty-Seconds Hate, complete with cruel child abuse, beating, and murder! His designated villain was homeschooling parents, every one of whom, he implies, should at least be presumed a potential child batterer.

This hatchet piece against homeschooling was aired during the 10:00 news Thursday night. You can view the segment online yourself. What follows is a complete verbatim transcript of the libelous hatefest, along with still images from the show, and my own insights.

KELLY OGLE: As many as 20,000 children in Oklahoma are homeschooled, and many study harder and learn more than kids in public schools. But, as Nick Winkler found out, sometimes homeschool can be used as a cover for parents who neglect or abuse children, and there’s no law against it.

No law against what, Kelly? What can you mean? No law against neglecting or abusing children? Because if so, I’m certain you’re mistaken. Or do you just mean there’s no law against homeschooling? But let’s see what Nick Winkler “found out”:

NICK WINKLER: State law does not force parents to send their kids away to school. So some parents just write a letter to the school and keep their kids at home. It’s that easy.

Actually, it’s even easier than that, Nick. There’s no need to “write a letter to the school.” Unless you’ve already enrolled your children in a school, then you’ll need to withdraw them, and I suppose that should be done in writing. But no matter, it’s pretty easy either way.

What I’m really wondering at this point is, why is this man standing in front of the State Capitol Building at 10:00 at night? Didn’t he know they were closed? Nick and his cameraman drove the News 9 van all the way from the Griffin Communications offices at 74th and Kelley to 23rd and Lincoln, just so he could report Live from the Capitol, to say those three sentences! The dome behind Nick is to let you, the viewer, know that this is a Serious, Important Story about Government. Sometimes I find the conventions of television news unbearably silly.
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