14 The Hampton Roads Messenger


Naval Academy Summer STEM Program


Are you interested in learning more about the exciting fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math? If so, attending the Naval Academy Summer STEM program is the right choice for you! The program is designed to encourage rising 8th-11th graders to pursue a course of study in engineering and technology throughout high school and college.


SESSION DATES Rising 8th & 9th Graders June 2-7, 2014 Rising 10th Graders June 9-14, 2014 Rising 11th Graders June 16-20, 2014


Learn more and apply now by visiting our website: www. usna.edu/Admissions/STEM The deadline to apply is 11:59 p.m. (EST) on April 15, 2014. We look forward to seeing your application and wish you the best of luck with the rest of your school year!


Our Faith


"Families and Faith" Author Predicts More Boomers Will Return to Religions


BY JANICE LLOYD NEW ORLEANS--Baby


boomers might not be that different from the Greatest Generation when it comes to religion. Like their parents, many boomers will attend religious services later in life. But unlike their parents, baby boomers are


more


likely to describe a deep, intense spiritual connection from a personal experience than a religious one from an institutional practice.


Many of them don’t know it


yet, said a researcher at the recent Gerontological Society of America conference in New Orleans, but growing old, regardless of what generation you belong to, brings on dramatic changes that can propel people to seek new meaning in religious services.


Vern Bengtson is the coauthor


of the recently published Families and Faith: How Religion is Passed Down across Generations (Oxford University Press, 2013). He based his findings and predictions on a 35-year longitudinal study he headed before retiring of 350 Southern California families and interviews with a subset of 156 families. The study’s scope spanned six generations from 1909 to 1988. The conversations explored spirituality, religious beliefs, intensities and practices.


Bengtson, 72, is a professor


emeritus of gerontology and sociology at the University of Southern California. He discussed


boomers,


the rebellious group born from 1946 through 1964, and known for spurning institutional models.


Question: Which part of the study


made you think many boomers will end up attending religious services when they currently do not?


the oldest generations had an uptick in


attending retirement.


Bengtson: We now know that religious


services It’s too early to have


gathered that data on boomers because they’re just starting to retire, but I’m willing to predict this will happen to them based on what we’ve observed in older generations and from what we heard in the interviews with boomers.


Q: You list examples in your book of young boomers saying they reject religion. “I do not want anything to do with it [religion]. ” And “I believe in God, but do not go to church.” How then do you make the jump that they will eventually go to a church or synagogue when they’re older?


Bengtson: When people get older, they retire and have more time to think about moral, religious and spiritual things. Our study shows this. It’s the life course. They will also face a serious illness or lose a loved one for the first time. The religious education of their grandchildren becomes a concern for some grandparents. Not


after


Volume 8 Number 7 Your Opinion Matters


Over 100,000 African-American Parents Are Now Homeschooling Their Children


BY DR. JAWANZA KUNJUFU We hear so much about the


plight of Black children and their low test scores. We have not heard that African American children who are homeschooled are scoring at the 82% in reading and 77% in math. This is 30-40% above their counterparts being taught in school. There is a 30% racial gap in schools, but there is no racial gap in reading if taught in the home and only a 5% gap in math.


African


What explains American


the success of students being


taught by their parents? I believe that it's love and high expectations. I am reminded of Booker T. Washington High School.


They were honored several


years ago for producing the greatest turnaround as a Recovery school.


The principal had the opportunity to pick and choose her staff and emphatically stated, "If you want


to teach in this school you must


love the students". Researchers love promoting that the racial gap is based on income, marital status, and the


educational background of the parents. Seldom, if ever, do they research the impact of love and high expectations.


Since the landmark decision,


Brown vs. Topeka in 1954, there has been a 66% decline in African American teachers. Many


African


American students are in classrooms where they are not loved, liked, or respected. Their culture is not honored and bonding is not considered. They are given low expectations - which helps to explain how students can be promoted from one grade to another without mastery of the content.


homeschooling


There are so many benefits to beyond


Most schools spendmore than 33% of the day disciplining students. And bullying has become a significant issue.


suspended and


One of every 6 Black males is large


numbers are


given Ritalin and placed in Special Education. These problems seldom, if ever, exist in the Homeschool environment.


Another major benefit is the summer months. Research shows that there is a 3 year gap between White and


all, but some are concerned the parents aren’t doing enough. They might have skipped a generation by not educating their own children, but they got older and discovered one of the most wonderful things in life and won’t want to miss an opportunity with their grandchildren.


Q: How do the Bengtson: The religious and


spiritual views of baby boomers set them apart from the other generations?


oldest groups


[born 1909-1931] were religious and went to church until a certain age set in when they found it physically too difficult to go anymore. When asked if they were spiritual, they said, “What’s spirituality?’’ They were more likely to link spirituality and religion to institutional practice.


to clearly spirituality spiritual


Boomers were the first generation differentiate


and religion. They said practice is not equal to


going to church. They are the first to associate spirituality with an emotion, an intense feeling of connection with God.


Millennials [early 1980s to early 2000s] said, “Religion — what’s that?” God is whatever you want it to be. They have much less of an awareness of religious and liturgical traditions.


Q: The number of “nones” in American society — those who said they claim no traditional


religious


affiliation — has doubled to 20 percent of the U.S. population in one decade. Does your research support or dispute that finding?


Bengtson: First of all, this is a varied group, and while it’s true of our Southern California sample, it isn’t true in all regions of the U.S. There are fewer nones in Southern and Midwestern states. Some of the nones are still looking to find a religion to meet their needs. Some are spiritual, but not religious. Some attend religious


between academics.


Black students. Some students do not read or are involved in any academic endeavor during the summer. Those students lose 36 months or 3 years if you multiply 3 months times 12 years (grades first -12) Homeschool parents do not allow academics to be forsaken for 3 months.


Finally, in the homeschool


environment, parents are allowed to teach their children values. Large numbers of parents are teaching their children faith based morals and principals. And many are teaching their


children did with not the free Africentric


curriculum SETCLAE. These children are being taught truths like, Columbus did not discover America; Abraham Lincoln


the slaves;


Hippocrates was not the father of medicine and that African history did not begin on a plantation, but on a pyramid.


Until public schools give more love, higher expectations, better classroom management, greater time on task throughout the entire year, values and the SETCLAE curriculum, we can expect to continue to see an increase in African American parents homeschooling their children.


services. And some are anti-religious. Q:


development of the “nones”? Bengtson:


What brought about the


answer. We have seen a high degree of intergenerational


There’s no single similarity


in nonreligion today, and the transmission of nonreligion from parents to their children can be seen to a far greater degree than in the past. Some of this is rooted in the 1960s and 1970s, a time of great social upheaval, when baby boomers switched to “no religious tradition” because they were influenced by changes in the larger religious


and cultural environment,


particularly the declining legitimacy of formal religious organizations. When they had children of their own, they passed on their nonreligious orientation.


Some alienated religion religious moderates agendas anti-gay, anti-abortion, have


“organized religion” a synonym for an


open-minded. Q: Is there any sign the nones will


redefine themselves and move toward stronger religious affiliations?


Bengtson: Our next analysis of our data on boomers will address this, but I can speak from a personal experience. I came from a conservative religious family. When I started to question my faith during college, my mother said if she had to do so she would pick Jesus over me. She ended up rejecting me. It broke her heart and mine. I was an atheist for 35 years. But when I retired, I walked into a progressive church on Easter Sunday, heard the choir singing and was utterly surprised by joy, as C.S. Lewis described his own later-life religious experience. I haven’t stopped going to church. If there is a heaven and if my mother is there, I think she’d say, “I told you so.”


who consider pro-civil


a dogma to tell them how to live their


agenda. Others don’t want lives. They want to remain


March 2014


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