Removing antibiotics from livestock wouldn't create a food disaster. At worst it would raise the quality of meat offered to Americans along with the price, but not in a catastrophic way.' It's already been done in europe - we're lagging behind, and so is the quality of our product as a result. http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/solutions/wise_antibiotics/european-union-bans.html

I raise antibiotic free meat. I know several other farmers who do as well. Modern agriculture techniques don't require that we keep animals in such poor conditions that they have to be sick all the time without antibiotics, and they don't require that margins be so slim as to require the growth boost that can be gained by feeding them in bulk. A far more modern view would look at the risks as well as the benefits.

Find a local farmer who doesn't use antibiotics - buy from them directly. In addition to my IT job, I have a small farm - we raise 45 - 60 pigs each year on open fields and without antibiotics in the food. We supplement the pigs grain with whey, acorns, and apples - the product we produce is of a much higher quality than is possible to find in a store, and by buying in bulk directly from the farmer I get more for my product and the end customer pays less.

There are good wholesome sustainable locally grown products almost wherever you are - find a small meat locker nearby and ask them or ask people at a local farmers market. If there is no one really close a lot of farms deliver - we sometimes drive up to three hours to deliver a pig (frozen and butchered) to a customer.

Can you prove you didn't just make that up? Because I'm pretty sure you did.

Three masters degrees actually.

Until recently we lived in a 'blighted' neighbourhood in a nearby city. We recently moved to a rural small town. I certainly don't homeschool for religious reasons and most of the homeschoolers I know don't either. I know a few that do and their kids are some of the most well adjusted I've ever met - there is no reason to assume that someone homeschooling for that reason is suddenly crazy or an inadequate instructor.

You make up some BS about how you 'saw every kid fail' or some such then you come at me about the phrase 'common sense'? My contention is that selecting the best possible teachers, trainers, experiences, schools, classrooms, techniques, etc. from all of those available to me is better than trusting my zip code to provide my child's education. It seems to me that most people, given the opportunity, would be easily able to see the zip code think is probably easier but certainly not the best way to go.

I'm not sure what part of exposing my child to far more higher quality educational resources you think means it's a 'trade school' but I guarantee they'll have more art, history, literature, and music depth in addition to math and science than was available at my high school - it's not hard to accomplish if you put some effort into it.

I home school because the quality of education available in a public school setting in appalling. Home schooling does not always happen at home - it means I control the education and tailor it to meet my child's needs instead of letting a lowest common denominator approach determine what my kid does all day while they are being baby say by strangers. There is still socialisation - though it tends to be with groups of kids of various ages instead of artificially segmented age groups created by recess time, and my kids get a lot more socialisation with adults.

Nothing you've said about home schooling or the people who do it has any real bearing on reality. I'm sure there are successes and failures, just like there would be with anything in life - but all you are providing to back up your accusations are blanket assumption and personal prejudice.

Perhaps what some teachers do is specialised - being a product of the public school system myself I'll say it rarely if ever came up in my experience. Most teachers I encountered were just reading the materials provided and asking the questions at the end of the book. I can do a lot better than that. I have the freedom to find and select the best resources and training guides, and when necessary, hire tutors to meet the educational needs of my kids. Biology? I already mentioned getting my 7 year old a weekly 'job' at the local large animal vet - at least part of that will be watching surgery. The idea that she'd be better served by sitting in a room with 30 kids keeping up with the least common denominator just doesn't add up. I know the qualifications of the teachers my child is exposed to - that's a lot better than wondering whether a public school teacher is even qualified to teach the classes they are responsible for at all.

The places where specialised training are needed are easily able to accommodated - there are privately funded student assessment companies, tutoring companies, classes of all kinds, and people with years of experience willing to provide training in exchange for a helping hand. Not to mention the fact that I still have to pay the same taxes to the school that people who use it pay - if the school happens to have a really excellent teacher for a subject I can sign my kid up. Once you start looking you'd be surprised at the opportunities available. It's a lot more work, and much harder than what most people do - I think it's very much worth the effort.

Some crazy people do crazy things for crazy reasons. Some home school, some of them send their kids to public school. So what? You pointing out that some people argue for home schooling by saying schools are training camps for dear leader is like me suggesting that your entire argument is based on those statements. The dialogue you've provided leads me to believe you're above that. Anyway - if your position is based on looking for reasonable opinions on slashdot you're on shaky ground. : )

Full disclosure (since this came up below) my wife is a college professor. We first became interested in home schooling after she saw how much better home schooled kids tended to do with the classes she taught and the experience of college in general.

What I describe is the method of schooling I do at home - I use my children's interests and abilities to guide them to education opportunities around them. It's not a 'trade school' it's common sense - selecting the best from the education resources around you and applying them.

You're own prejudices about home schooling are pretty clear - but being a part of the home schooling community I'm pretty comfortable saying you're wrong - at least about the motives of the people I've come into contact with.

My wife teaches college level history, english, and architecture classes - she has seen home school students go through her university and thrive. Being part of the local community of home schooling families I've also seen several success stories. I wouldn't normally have brought that up, since the problem with anecdotal evidence is that it's stupid, but it works as a rebuttal to your 'I saw a bunch of kids fail one time' argument.

You should learn to fix your own car - it's a rewarding experience - the brakes are especially simple in many cases. It sounds like you never tried, so I can understand your hesitancy. If you assessed your child's long term well being by spending hours researching the different options for education, interviewing teachers and home schooling parents, looking into the different methodologies of home schooling and the successes as well as the failures, then made an effort to make a deliberate choice for your child's future, whether it was public, private, home, or some combination of those - then no, you aren't "less engaged or dodging responsibility". Maybe you can still be 'engaged enough' but most home schooling families go through a long process like that before deciding to take the much harder path. I think 'less engaged' is often the case. I question your process (though not your intent) if you just decided to do what everyone does and dump the kids off at the school assigned to your zip code and assume your kids were being well served. They'll be adequately served perhaps, assuming they don't have any kind of special need. They may struggle a lot to find the things they are good at (especially if they are really good at them, since they may actually be penalised for trying to 'skip ahead') because they will be in a 'one size fits all' environment, but it'll be good enough I suppose. A surgeon is certainly concerned about my well being - if he were performing the surgery on 10 people at once and wasn't penalised if several died or had severe complications I'd concede your metaphor. A public school is not able to tailor the education of an individual to meet their specific needs. I can - it is in fact, my responsibility to do so. I'm glad public schools exist for people who can't do this, but I'll maintain it's second best (at best) in most cases. You're wrong about secondary education opportunities for home schooled kids - there may be some places they may struggle, but no more than kids educated at a public school, and certainly not in any place they can compete based on academics and experience, which is the case for most colleges.

My kids are taught by several different people (various classes, working out a deal with a local vet clinic for a kind of 'job shadow' every week, etc) My kids gets lots of stimulus from their peers - they have friends inside and outside the classes they take, and other activities they do throughout the week with other kids. They sure could turn out different - good thing the alternative isn't locking them in a basement all day or homeschoolers would sure be in trouble! I'm not on the fence - I can do a better job of providing my child's education when possible and coordinating it when necessary - I'm convinced most parents could do the same. Money is the only legitimate barrier for most people, but based on my own experience and the experience of people I've met I think most couples can afford to have a parent stay home even if they don't think they can. For most people, it's a question of how much importance they place on being able to have a parent stay home with the children. 'Learning' isn't something that has to happen in a class room, and the idea that 30 kids listening to one adult who may or may not be qualified in the subject read from a text and ask questions is the optimal way to provide education is severely lacking in credibility. Sending the kids to school is the path of least resistance and it's 'what's done'. There are arguments for doing that but 'that's the best possible option' is a hard one to defend. School takes the form it does in our culture because of the day care aspect of it - if that weren't a factor we'd all have education that combined real experience, specialised tutors and classes, and was targeted at the learning style and interests of the child.

And we see that you respond with venom before reading the actual post and well before assimilating the content. Well done. People like you make the rest of us look better.

We are a small family farm - we raise our pigs outdoors without locking them up. We feed them grain, but also hay, whey from a nearby dairy, and windfall apples from a local orchard. My customers know exactly where their meat comes from, I get more for my product than most farmers do, and they get a savings by buying a far superior product directly from me without having to pay for all the transportation and advertising costs in the supermarket. It's awesome. Seriously - go find a farmer who will let you meet the meat and only by from them forever. You won't regret it.

Link to some quick alternatives. I'm suddenly unsure if I ended up on kubuntu or Xubuntu. http://www.techdrivein.com/2011/05/top-4-lightweight-official-ubuntu-based.html

I ended up installing them after the recent upgrade. They provide a simple adjustable GUI similar to the 'ubuntu classic' but with the OS tie ins that the straight gnome packages don't provide. Making a user go through crap like that just to get to something that isn't painful to use is the kind of thing I used to praise Ubuntu for not doing. I commend them for putting together a tablet interface - good forward thinking. Forcing it on the PC is unnecessary and smacks of the kind of hardline control that irritates me about apple products. I've spent years with Ubuntu now and I thought my days of distro hopping were over - now I'm not sure. Thanks for alienating me Ubuntu - job well done.

No one is forcing you to install add-ons, and without that it's just a browser. Hooray! Now you can love it! No? Are you against the fact that they offer a decent product with the capability to modify and make changes to it easily? Maybe you don't like how Firefox is available on almost any platform? Or that it's free? Lemme guess - you liked firefox before it was cool, and now you're bitter.

A lot of my farm customers have started asking me to accept these folks - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwolla It's the worst named thing I've ever encountered, but apart from that it looks ok. They are a pretty new company, but growing fast. I did create an account with them, but have yet to accept payment using them.