I made some wry dad comment: Hindu gods at a Greek temple, ha ha ha. Literally jumping up and down with excitement, Desmond set me straight: "We're playing ancient times, Daddy, when there was trade between Greece and India! They traded stuff, and they traded ideas!"

Now, I'm not vouching for the soundness of Desmond's scholarship. Ancient contact between Greek and Indian civilization is plausible, according to historians, but entirely hypothetical. Furthermore, if it did happen it almost certainly did not involve motor vehicles. See, the way elephant-headed Ganesh and blue-skinned Vishnu are incarnated in Nini and Desmond's game, they look an awful lot like little die-cast metal cars. Specifically, they look like Snot Rod and Doc Hudson, two supporting characters from the Disney-Pixar "Cars" universe.

In a perverse way, that's highly appropriate. Our kids know about Ganesh and Vishnu -- along with Isis and Osiris, Orpheus and Eurydice, and a few dozen other mythological figures -- thanks to a pre-K and kindergarten home-school curriculum designed on the fly by my wife, Leslie Kauffman. (She calls it "Meet the Ancient World.")

Leslie is definitely drawing on some of the alternative educational theories that inform the home-school movement. These include the ideas of "unschooling" guru John Holt, the literature-based approach identified with 19th-century English educator Charlotte Mason, and the "classical education" model popularized in bestselling books by Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise. But it didn't start with them, or from some highfalutin desire to read our kids "The Odyssey." It all started with the hero of "Cars," Lightning McQueen.

As I wrote in the first installment of this series last month, home schooling sneaked up on us, or at least on me. It's true that Leslie knew about the rapidly expanding world of urban, mostly secular home schooling through online parents' groups, and was already drawn to alternative educational approaches. But right up until the moment she quit her lefty-nonprofit job early in 2007, when our twins were 2½, we were a pretty typical big-city, middle-class family, with two kids, two incomes and a full-time nanny.

One of the numerous screwy things about raising children these days, especially in a hotbed of social-Darwinist parenting like New York, is that by taking time off to hang out with a couple of toddlers, Leslie became a home-schooler by default. Neither of us completely understood this until it happened. But in an economy that essentially requires all able-bodied adults to work outside the home, and an environment where preschools for 3-year-olds have an intensely competitive application process (and can cost $15,000 a year), you can't opt out without making a statement, whether you intend one or not.

When Leslie started hosting a playgroup for preschool-age kids in our Brooklyn, N.Y., backyard, there was no major-league ideology attached. She was thinking she'd attract a group of like-minded moms and dads who were skipping official preschool for a wide range of personal reasons. As it turned out, those personal reasons dovetailed to a remarkable degree. Everybody who showed up to let their kids smash melons and chase bunnies in our yard was already opting out of the mainstream system, at least temporarily, which involved some sacrifice: time or money or both.

Almost all of them had either decided to home-school already (at least for a while) or were right on the cusp of that decision. Although the methods they chose as they moved forward with home schooling are all over the map, their reasons for doing it are roughly similar. They didn't feel comfortable about sending their kids to "school" at the age of 2 or 3, and wanted them to have much more open-ended, free-form play than most preschools and pre-K programs allow.

So at least for a while, the bunny chasing and melon smashing, and the trips to the Bronx Zoo and the New York Hall of Science, were free of any explicit educational intentions, beyond the universal goals of all exhausted parents of small children: to get through the day without unacceptable acts of violence, while demonstrating that the world is full of cool and exciting stuff. But as the months rolled on and the 3-year-olds in Leslie's group turned 4 -- the age when most public-school kids head off to pre-K -- their parents began to face the inevitable question: What do we do now?

We had always read tons of books to Desmond and Nini, and they were picking up letters and numbers more or less on schedule. But we weren't unschoolers, who resist all attempts at formal education and allow children to decide for themselves, within certain broad parameters, what to do and when to do it. We also weren't the kind of home-schoolers who were going to take someone's prepackaged curriculum -- there are a great many available, in every cultural and ideological flavor you can imagine -- and implement it on a regular and rigorous schedule.

Leslie experimented with some pre-K workbooks from a teachers' supply store, and they weren't exactly a smash hit. Desmond liked them pretty well -- he's a task-oriented kid who loves structured activities -- and Nini largely ignored them or responded to them by hopping up and down and telling stories about the silly animals in the pictures. (This is her standard modus operandi at all times.) As Leslie read and thought more about home schooling, she began to ask herself a basic question: What are our kids most excited and most passionate about? As she wrote in her blog recently, an answer quickly emerged:

One day last winter, when my twins were 4½, they were fighting back exasperation as they explained to their obviously dense mother the differences between Radiator Springs McQueen and Cruising McQueen, two [nearly identical] die-cast metal toy figures from the movie "Cars" ... Like many kids their age, Desmond and Nini had developed a fascination with the world of the Piston Cup and Radiator Springs. They had an encyclopedic knowledge of the movie's characters and personal histories and had developed the discernment to pick out small differences between the many versions of each. The characters loomed large in their imagination and play life.

Well, I thought, if they can have this complex connection to Lightning McQueen, Doc Hudson, and Tow Mater, why not to Isis, Osiris, and Anubis? Or Zeus, Athena, and Aphrodite? At a time when they were so clearly eager to learn about the world around them, might it be possible to introduce them to its history in an age-appropriate and systematic way?

For weeks after that, Leslie did research online late at night, or at the public library, in search of books, resources and materials for teaching an introductory approach to ancient history (including paleontology and archaeology) to young children. What followed, as she led Nini and Desmond through a pre-K year that encompassed dinosaurs, the rudiments of evolution, early humans and the Ice Age, ancient Egypt, the Old Testament and ancient Greece, came as an extraordinary revelation to me. Don't get me wrong: I've read the kids dozens of books and dished out hundreds of PB&J sandwiches, serving as a combination of substitute teacher, teacher's aide, librarian and cafeteria lady. But the conceptual heavy lifting has been Leslie's.

As a basis for an early-education curriculum, the ancient world is especially ingenious. There are any number of stories to read, which tend to converge in a fascinating way, and to form patterns and archetypes we can see all around us in modern life. At age 5, our kids have already grasped, without much prompting, that stories about floods and quest-adventure narratives show up all over the world. After we read Beverly Cleary's "Ribsy," a book about a dog who gets lost at a suburban shopping center and has to find his way home past many dangers, I asked them if Ribsy's long adventure reminded them of anyone else. They thought about it for a minute and seized on the answer with big, beaming smiles: "Odysseus!"

But it isn't simply that Nini and Desmond are enjoying themselves, have learned a bunch of names and stories I didn't know until I was much older, and may, just possibly, have received a basic foundation in cultural literacy that I'm not quite sure I possess now. They love it. They've devoured it all voraciously and begged for more. They demand stories from "D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths" over and over again -- Hades and Persephone, Jason and Medea -- and howl when it's time to close the book and go to bed. They recount their own versions: I remember one gruesome bathtub tale about Osiris' Hall of Judgment, where the hearts of recently deceased Egyptians are weighed against the Feather of Truth. (Nini takes particular glee in the crocodile monster, who stands ready to eat your heart if you've led a wicked life.)

They've built Mesopotamian ziggurats out of mud in our neighborhood park and repurposed Fisher-Price Little People to serve as the Olympian gods and goddesses. (You can easily acquire plastic figurines of the Egyptian gods, maybe because they're such striking human-animal hybrids, but Greek gods are in short supply.) As we've moved on to India and Hinduism in their kindergarten year, they used one of those plastic Barrels of Monkeys to build the monkey-bridge by which the hero of "The Ramayana" reaches the demon-island of Lanka. They know a lot more about Hindu theology and mythology than I do: "Daddy, Hanuman the Monkey King is really an incarnation of Shiva," Nini informed me the other night, as if it were only common sense.

She also told us recently that the Metropolitan Museum is one of her favorite places in the world -- along with the playground across the street from our house and Storybook Land, a 1950s-era amusement park on the New Jersey shore. Nini and Desmond and their friend Benny were regular visitors in the Met's Greek and Roman wing last spring, and even elicited some smiles from the notoriously grumpy guards. There just can't be that many people who show up there in costume. (Nini goes as Demeter, goddess of the harvest, in a crimson holiday dress and golden sash. Desmond is Hermes, messenger of the gods, in a pair of winged hightop sneakers. Benny gets to be Zeus, complete with painted cardboard thunderbolts.)

Now, look: Our kids aren't geniuses or prodigies, and their understanding of the ancient world based on a year-plus of reading storybooks and going to museums is a miscellaneous highlight reel, extremely vague as to chronology and context: Sue the famous T. rex, woolly mammoths frozen alive, Moses among the bulrushes, a few dozen mythological deities and their stories. As Leslie puts it, "Small children have no preconceptions about ancient history, no notion that it might be dry or remote or inaccessible. They also, however, have no real conception of time -- certainly not of millennia or centuries or even decades ... Teaching ancient history to small children, in my experience, involves not trying to explain historical causation or even spending much time discussing historical change: It's a matter, instead, of making introductions to the marvelous, beautiful and fascinating civilizations of long ago."

I should add that Leslie's also been doing an hour or two every day of more conventional kindergarten stuff. Our kids are fast-improving readers, and they practice handwriting, do art projects, sing the occasional cacophonous round of "Puff the Magic Dragon," and so on. If we do absolutely nothing more than we've done already -- if Leslie packs up the whole project next week, next month or next year and ships Nini and Des off to whatever school will take them (and believe me, we have those days) -- she'll have done something amazing. She'll have implanted in them a ferocious appetite for learning, and the idea that it's full of wondrous discoveries. They have absolutely no idea that some children experience schoolwork as thankless drudgery, or human history as a tedious assortment of facts, dates and dusty objects in vitrines.

After my earlier article, a bunch of people wrote me with variations on the question: Well, OK, tough guy, but how in the hell are you going to teach them calculus? I can promise you that neither Leslie nor I will be teaching them any such thing, and about the only thing to say is that we're well aware that eventually they'll need or want things we cannot provide. There certainly are home-schoolers with an ideological opposition to formal schooling, but that doesn't describe us or most of our peers. On balance it seems unlikely that we'll home-school Nini and Desmond all the way through high school. (Anyway, that decision will end up being as much theirs as ours.)

My perception, at the moment, is that whatever they do and wherever they go down the line, Nini and Desmond will be better off with the tremendous start Leslie has given them. We may be stuck with them for a while -- I suspect they'd be monumentally bored by first grade if we closed down our home-school program next year -- but there are worse problems to have. Right now, I have to go watch the story of how Ganesh got his elephant head (after losing his human one in an unfortunate misunderstanding), acted out by a couple of little kids with toy cars.

France is the latest country to experiment with providing cash incentives to underachieving students. And according to an article in Time magazine, this "capitalistic and non-egalitarian" idea has not sat well in a country where the public school system "embodies republican values that go back to the French Revolution."

The program is simple: Students at three vocational high schools in the suburbs of Paris will receive "reward payments" up to $15,000 per year for attendance and reaching "performance targets agreed upon by their teachers." These aren't straight cash payments: They can only be redeemed for "school-related projects" such as "a class trip abroad to improve foreign language skills, computer equipment for the classroom or driving lessons to obtain a license."

Sounds like pretty good stuff. But it does raise the question: Wouldn't kids be motivated to do better in school if attending school already included the opportunity to study abroad, work on decent computer equipment, or obtain a driver's license? And should one's opportunity to do so be limited by fellow students' attendance records and achievement? Couldn't one spend the same amount of money to put these programs in place and offer the spots to students who wish to participate and meet the entrance criteria? Doesn't the existence of "special" programs imply that the rest of school is kind of a drag?

Part of the reason vocational students are less motivated, according to Philippe Vrand, president of the Parents of Public Students Group, is because being sent to a vocational school in the first place implies to some students that they have already failed to achieve a place in a more traditional academic program; once there, many end up taking courses they aren't interested in because they can't find a slot in programs they do want. "We should spend this money making sure vocational students who wanted to learn cooking can get into these programs rather than being shunted into car repair because there was no room left," he told Time. "Instead, students are being paid to compensate for [their] boredom."

Considering that the courses many vocational students take will determine their future profession, it seems pretty crucial that they have the option to choose what that profession will be. But the French program is just another example of a worldwide trend of rewarding -- some might say "bribing" -- students to do well in school. And it makes one wonder: If you have to bribe the students, doesn't it already imply that the school system and parents -- people otherwise known as "adults" -- aren't doing enough to keep them interested and focused on their own talents and class work?

The programs are especially catching on here in the United States, and in many cases, the rewards are even more tenuously connected to academic achievement. An article published in USA Today last September rounded up some of the more popular programs, almost all of which involved direct cash incentives and/or fancy consumer items: Fourth- and seventh-graders in New York City can earn up to $500 for improving their scores on state exams; Baltimore offered $110 to students improving their scores; Atlanta paid students $8 an hour to attend an after-school program (the minimum wage was $5.84 an hour); students in seven states -- Arkansas, Alabama, Connecticut, Kentucky, Virginia and Washington -- could earn up to $100 for each passing grade on an Advanced Placement exam through a program funded by Exxon-Mobil; and Sam Scavella, a principal in Macon, Ga., offered iPods, movie tickets, dinner for two, and a chance to win a 26-inch television to students who attend Saturday study sessions.

These programs are popular, in part, because some of them seem to work. The Exxon-Mobil program was modeled on a program adopted in Dallas during the 1995-96 school year, now statewide in Texas, that was linked to a 30 percent improvement in high SAT and ACT scores and an 8 percent rise in college-bound students. Last June, the New York Post reported that two-thirds of the 59 schools participating in the New York City program saw their scores go up from previous years -- some as high as 40 percentage points.

The idea, of course, is to link school achievement to future earnings to kids who educators seem to think might not otherwise make the connection. Scavella, the Georgia principal offering iPods and big-screen TVs, is explicit about this. "If you do well in school, then you can afford a lifestyle that will pay you well," he told USA Today. And Rose Marie Mills, a principal at a New York City school where 90 percent of the students are below the poverty level, told the Post, "When they get the checks, there's that competiveness -- 'Oh, I'm going to get more money than you next time' -- so it's something that excites them."

Sure, going to college is one of the surest ways to boost one's lifetime earnings. And kids who aren't necessarily having that message reinforced by their parents might react well to a little external motivation. But the biggest gap between students at high-performing schools and underperforming schools is much larger than $100, $500 or a big-screen TV. In affluent school districts, academic performance is the competitive battlefield: Taking AP classes means college credit; students compete with their peers for higher SAT scores; and the reward is a place in a competitive school. Replicating that kind of environment costs an awful lot more than an iPod.

In bribing kids to do well in school, educators are following a road well trod by generations of frustrated parents. While I don't begrudge kids a few hundred-dollar checks, I have to say that next to having teachers that will nurture and encourage, say, one kid's obsession with writing, or teach another to build a rocket for a science fair, or help another to get a scholarship to study abroad, it seems pretty paltry.

The opinions of FBI psychologists and psychiatrists who reviewed the evidence suggest that she was right to focus her search for answers on Dylan's self-destructiveness. As "Columbine" author (and former Salon writer) Dave Cullen wrote in Slate on the massacre's fifth anniversary, experts have concluded that Harris was a psychopath -- his "pattern of grandiosity, glibness, contempt, lack of empathy, and superiority read like the bullet points" on a diagnostic test -- but Dylan Klebold was "a more familiar type. He was hotheaded, but depressive and suicidal. He blamed himself for his problems." Which means that although the psychiatrists believe Harris was bound to become a violent criminal, "Klebold, they agree, would never have pulled off Columbine without Harris." If Dylan hadn't befriended a psychopath who focused his rage outward rather than inward, he "might have gotten caught for some petty crime, gotten help in the process, and conceivably could have gone on to live a normal life."

In the 10 years since the massacre, schools and parents have put a great deal of effort into trying to understand what happened and how such violence can be prevented. Recognizing mental illness like Dylan Klebold's and understanding the risk it can pose to others as well as the child himself is certainly one part of the strategy. Stopping the Eric Harrises of the world, however, the ones who simply have no conscience, involves other measures. That's where zero-tolerance policies about weapons in schools and threats of violence come in, and at first glance, they appear quite sensible. We hear the stories about teenagers being expelled and prosecuted for bringing guns to homeroom or writing essays describing their own massacre plots, and in light of what we know about school shooters' behavior prior to their crimes, those reactions don't sound so extreme.

But what about a 6-year-old boy who brings a Cub Scout-approved camping utensil, including a fork, spoon and small knife, to school to eat his lunch? Delaware first-grader Zachary Christie is currently being home-schooled by his mother and facing 45 days in reform school for that transgression of his school district's code of conduct. Says the New York Times, "[S]chool officials had no choice. They had to suspend him because, 'regardless of possessor's intent,' knives are banned." In 2007, the same school district "expelled a seventh-grade girl who had used a utility knife to cut windows out of a paper house for a class project." State law was changed last year to allow schools more discretion in expulsions, after a third-grade girl was expelled for a year because she brought a knife to class to cut her birthday cake. ("The teacher called the principal -- but not before using the knife to cut and serve the cake.") But because the law didn't address suspensions, it left no wiggle room with regard to Zachary's punishment. Or Kyle Herbert's -- the 13-year-old was ordered to reform school after a classmate "dropped a pocket knife in his lap," and is now, like Zachary, being home-schooled by his mother. One wonders what parents are supposed to do if they can't stay home with kids kicked out under the zero-tolerance policy.

Such policies exist for understandable and even admirable reasons: "Education experts say that zero-tolerance policies initially allowed authorities more leeway in punishing students, but were applied in a discriminatory fashion. Many studies indicate that African-Americans were several times more likely to be suspended or expelled than other students for the same offenses." Removing the authorities' discretion undoubtedly seemed an easier way to level the playing field than rooting out racism. Unfortunately, that means little kids get thrown out of school for carrying camping gear or being prepared to share birthday cake. And according to at least one expert, it's not worth it. Ronnie Casella, an associate professor of education at Central Connecticut State University, told The Times, "there is no evidence that zero-tolerance policies make schools safer."

What does, then? "[O]ther programs like peer mediation, student support groups and adult mentorships," according to education experts who spoke with the Times. In the decade since Columbine, "the rate of school-related homicides and nonfatal violence has fallen," alongside an overall decrease in crime. Despite several subsequent school shootings that made national news (and several others that didn't), the evidence suggests that some progress has been made. Susan Klebold's essay in O might be one more step toward understanding what went wrong and how to help kids like her son before they become dangerous. But I can't see how suspending innocent children, forcing their parents to choose between sending them to reform school and staying home with them, is making anyone safer. Giving authorities both greater discretion to enforce school policies and some anti-racism training, on the other hand, might just be an improvement. 

This season, however, is different. Just a few weeks into the new school year, a parent alerted the Catoosa County Schools Superintendent that the Warriors were setting themselves up for a lawsuit, and the county reluctantly pulled the plug. In a press statement, Superintendent Denia Reese said, “The practice of the cheerleaders’ use of banners was in violation of the current state of the law as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals.”

The Warriors, however, aren’t so named for nothing.

On Tuesday, five hundred locals attended a rally in support of the cheerleaders and their signs. Speaking to the Chattanooga Times Free Press, cheerleader Taylor Guinn said, “I’m sad and I’m angry about it, because we’re being silenced for what we believe in. It was heartbreaking to know that our school system is just conforming to the nonbelievers … our freedom of speech and freedom of religion is being taken away.” 

There was also the inevitable “We Support the LFO Cheerleaders! LET THEM HAVE THEIR SIGNS BACK!" Facebook campaign, which is already over 12,000 members strong. And Fox news glommed on to the “Cheerleaders censored” story, calling it a “20 year tradition” despite the fact that it began earlier this decade. “It’s not fair” cheerleader Courtney told Fox, “that we can’t spread God’s word.”

The ban has found precious few supporters, even among those who enforced it. Superintendent Reese has said, "It broke my heart to have to tell those girls that they could not display that message on the football field. Personally, I appreciate their expression of their Christian values. However, as superintendent, I have the responsibility of protecting the school district from legal action by groups who do not support their beliefs.” Jerry Ransom, the school's principal, summed up his response by saying, "I hate it."  And Fort Oglethorpe Mayor Ronnie Cobb said, “I’m totally against them doing away with it. If it’s offensive to anyone, let them go watch another football game. Nobody’s forced to come there and nobody’s forced to read the signs.” 

True that, but the presence of the signs open up a whole bunch of issues beyond the mere legalities. Would the Warriors be cool with an opposing team charging through a few lines of Koran or, what the hell, the Iliad? Would they welcome an atheistic herkie jumper on the cheer squad? Or instead could this be considered a case of what conservatives so fondly refer to as indoctrination?

The good Lord, of course, is already an oft-invoked fixture of the sporting world. And the school maintains that no other teams have ever complained about the signs. But no one could seriously argue that the Warriors’ “freedom of religion” is being taken away. What they can’t express with the school’s taxpayer funded art supplies and on the school’s field, they can do on their own. In fact the school has gone out of its way to designate a special area outside the stadium for displaying religious signs, and principal Cobb told the press, “We’re encouraging people to bring signs to hold up in the stands.”

On Friday, students took the cue. They showed up for class sporting shirts  emblazoned with Biblical wisdom. And that evening, a sea of red-clad fans took to the stands, holding signs that said, “Warriors for Christ” and “You took HIM off our SIGN but you will never take HIM out of our HEARTS.” They painted Bible verses on their bodies. Front-running Georgia gubernatorial contender John Oxendine was there as well, Tweeting his heart out in support of “the brave cheerleaders” The team, meanwhile, had to settle for charging through a sign that uninspirationally read, “This is Big Red country.”

Though the Warriors may have to settle for drawing spiritual strength from the stands, the fight isn’t over though. There’s a school board meeting on October 13, and a rally is planned outside the Board of Education building. But God may already have forsaken the Warriors. Friday they lost to Ridgeland High School, 34-0.