Evolution, Philosophy, and the Existence of dodecahedrons

A funny post popped up on my Google homeschooling alert today. It comes from Fear of Ignorance and it's a post where the author lets loose his frustration with the Huckabee win and homeschoolers. His perception of homeschoolers is, like a lot of people's, more than a little off but he said something in his post that put a huge smile on my face.

There are dangerous ideas out there that you can’t risk your child being exposed to! Evolution, Philosophy, and the existence of dodecahedrons are all things your child is better off not knowing about.

Now why would that make me smile? Because here's a picture of what Catherine's been doing this week:


Those are the five Platonic solids. The one in the middle is a dodecahedron and it's the one Catherine constructed this morning. While she was putting it together we sort of wandered off topic and Catherine started talking about how words weren't real, just ideas. I mentioned that was true but that they described real things. We were pretty damn close to Platonic dualism! Plato himself also got a mention along the way. So there's philosophy. Evolution hasn't made it into our day yet (Although I was planning to read a post from The Angry Astronomer on Galactic Evolution) but 2 out of 3 ain't bad.

I invited the author over so he could take a peek at what some real homeschoolers do. He admits that he's only known one homeschooled person (that he knows of, of course) so I imagine he'd find a visit eye opening. Here's hoping he takes me up on the invitation and gets acquainted with some of us.