Does dissing home schooling make you shallow?

My title is deliberately provocative, of course. It was prompted by this silly little list, "12 Signs You Were Definitely Home Schooled" (as opposed to being indefinitely home schooled?), which happened to pop up in my Facebook feed when a friend-of-a-friend shared it with a friend. (It is thus that Facebook, while killing blogging in several obvious senses, is also a friend to bloggers by giving them material.) 

The post is by Tiffanie Brunson, who is social media coordinator for the e-zine Relevant, in which her post appears. I infer that she was home schooled and is now critical of her upbringing. She also appears to think she is a humor writer, but in actuality the list just comes across as childish.

What struck me most about the list was its emphasis on ephemeral values such as being with-it and stylish. It seems that, having missed the opportunity (at the age of thirteen) to be a pathetic thirteen-year-old yearning to be "in" and look "cool" with the other kids at school, this critic of home schooling tries to live out that essential phase of life in her twenties.

Viz.

8. You Idolized Your Cool Cousins Who Went to Public School

It didn’t matter if they were Mathletes, AV club nerds or captain of the football team, if your cousins went to public school, they were the coolest. Maybe you even had cousins who got to wear one-piece swimsuits in public and listened to secular radio stations. You could have hung posters of them in your room and felt fine about it.

Tiffanie tells us at the outset that these are "12 things every home schooler experienced," though she later inconsistently (#2) says that "of course" that particular one (lots of siblings--is that a bad thing anyway?) was "not a home schooling requirement." The title, on the other hand, says that these are signs that you were definitely home schooled, which seems to imply a sufficient condition. The "every home schooler experienced" sentence seems to imply a necessary condition. Does she mean that all of these are sufficient and necessary conditions of being home schooled? The latter is certainly false, as several of them do not apply to quite a few home schoolers of my acquaintance. And of course, these are also not sufficient conditions, since it's entirely possible to have, e.g., lots of siblings without being home schooled. But never mind. One can't expect someone trying hard to be a humor writer to be logical.

As to #8, it's pretty foreign to me.

Moving on, the emphasis upon not very important things that other people get to do that "we poor home schoolers" didn't get to do gets stronger:

9. You Had No Idea What Yearbook Superlatives Were

Hardcore homeschoolers didn’t get yearbooks and didn’t have a graduating class to superlative-ize. They had to rely heavily on scrapbooking and home videos to capture sweet memories. Let’s be honest though, most of us would probably rather just forget.

I myself went to school (Christian school, but a bricks and mortar school), and I'm not entirely sure what she means by "yearbook superlatives." I edited my senior year school yearbook, which nearly gave me a nervous breakdown. (This was in the 80's, when you had to use black India ink to cover any part of the page you weren't filling with pictures if you did a collage.) So people wrote nice things or funny things in each other's yearbooks. That was cool, especially if it was a guy one had a crush on. But it wasn't that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things.

12. Your Fashion Sense Was a Bit Off

Denim frocks, scrunchies and similar things were cool when Bonnie Hunt wore them in the early ’90s, but they definitely were not cool when worn by 13-17 year-olds in 2006. And the list of things you weren't allowed to wear was likely too long to recount. A personal favorite: Graphic tees. Most homeschool moms were in agreement with the “no shirts with anything remotely questionable on it” policy. And it didn’t even have to be offensive.

Since I don't know what Tiffanie's mom considered "remotely questionable," I can't render an opinion on whether her graphic t-shirt bans were reasonable or not. But...the paragraph sounds pretty pathetic. The repeated use of the word "cool," for example. Actually, most of the home schooled teens growing up around me look quite normal, fashion-wise, though "normal" doesn't mean "immodest." So for the young ladies, especially, they and their parents have to do a certain amount of looking and perhaps spend some extra money to get around our current culture's determination that women dress like prostitutes.

Then there's this one:

10. You Never Experienced Prom

Since homeschoolers weren’t allowed to dance, proms were a definite no-go. But it wouldn’t be a weird subculture without creating a super lame alternative. Thus, you had prom-like gatherings where kids would dress up, get corralled into some sort of community or convention center and enjoy sugar-free fruit punch and salisbury steak. It was a little like going to dinner at your grandparents’ house, but with more taffeta and pocket squares and less fun.

Gosh, that's hilarious. Only it is, in fact, false. My local home school organization holds a prom, with dancing, each year, and has done so for enough years that I'm pretty sure Tiffanie's generation was included. I find it hard to imagine we are the only ones. Southwest Michigan isn't exactly the Hipness Center of the home schooling world.

But, again, I have to wonder if it really matters all that much anyway. Is prom this super-important rite of passage? Secular school proms are often...highly problematic, to put it mildly. I'm thinking here of getting drunk, sex-simulating dancing which any chaperones on hand have to be "meanies" and stop, and actual sex afterwards. Like a high school yearbook, prom is one of those things that a person's life can easily be complete without.

In fact, the "you never experienced prom" complaint, like "you didn't have a high school yearbook" strengthens the overall feeling that Tiffanie is taking trivial things and treating them as at least somewhat important--part of making sure a young person can make a successful transition into real life. But in all seriousness, how many people are helped in their future by having gone to prom, or hindered by not having had a high school yearbook? Or, setting aside career issues, is it really deeply personally enriching to have a high school yearbook? I suppose it might be in given cases. But by the same token, if it's personal enrichment we are talking about, there is no reason to think that relationships with siblings or other home schooled young people, or the activities carried out in those contexts (such as the co-op activities that Tiffanie sneers at in a different number), are not enriching.

This column, light-hearted as it is meant to sound, has a strangely culturally blinkered undercurrent: If you didn't have these specific activities, clothes, rites of passage, etc., you were deprived. And the specific ones in question just happen to be those common in secular American life. Isn't that a little narrow-minded? Yet ironically, the idea is supposed to be that it is the home schoolers who were narrow-minded if they didn't participate in all the "cool" stuff.

Every way of life has its pros and cons, and the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. I doubt that Tiffanie would write a similarly snarky column about South American tribesmen or Amish who don't have prom or high school yearbooks and don't dress in the latest, most popular American fashions. And she might have had some much, much worse experiences if she had not been home schooled, especially if she had been public schooled. Getting an STD at the age of 17 makes salisbury steak and taffeta look pretty good by comparison.

The idea behind her criticisms appears to be that there can be no such thing as a legitimate sub-culture that is different in part from the larger culture around. If you are part of an entirely different culture from 21st-century America, that may be okay, depending on specifics. But if you happen actually to live in 21st century America (or, presumably, Europe), and you aren't actually Amish, then you have to get "with it" or your kids will be deprived through not being cool in their teens and twenties. (Where the Mennonites fall on Tiffanie's child-depriving scale of coolness, I'm not sure.) Being in the world but not of it apparently doesn't extend to not going to a high school prom night.

At this point, as new generations grow up, there is a proliferation of "I wouldn't have done it that way" blogs and groups concerning home schooling as well as for other conservative countercultural movements. Some make good and important points. The antics of Bill Gothard of the ATI movement certainly needed to be exposed. I myself have said that the Christian "courtship" culture has come at a very bad time and that Christian parents need instead to be reclaiming a smart notion of dating, including casual dating. Even Tiffanie has one point worth considering:

Homeschoolers are awkward because they are, surprisingly, overconfident. Because most of our days are spent in our homes with our families, we just assume that whatever is OK to do at home is also OK everywhere else. Most of us learn the hard way that this is not the case.

I think she's right about that as a rough generalization, at least for some, and we home schooling parents do well to bear it in mind as a danger and try to counteract it.

But too often, the useful points get mixed up with a lot of shallow nonsense or worse.

What both parents and young people need to be thinking about is the intersection of eternal values and earthly practicalities. That is (no surprise) extremely difficult. In what ways might being un-cool become being unemployable or unmarriageable? Are those things that can be changed, or do they represent ways in which the world is demanding something wrong, and we must stick to our principles? Obviously, this will vary with specifics. At what point do decisions about just staying out of this or that cultural phenomenon (be it proms or Facebook or Twitter) stymie opportunities for friendships and future career to such an extent that our children end up helpless or problematically isolated? Have we made being countercultural an end in itself, to our harm and/or that of our children?

These are serious matters, matters with which every responsible Christian parent wrestles, whether home schooling or not. For my part, I hope and pray that my children grow up to be fully committed to the Lord Jesus Christ and also able to evaluate maturely whatever mistakes I have made. I'm afraid, though, that Tiffanie Brunson's approach does not match that mature, considered evaluation.

There are so many reasons to home school

From time to time I get drawn into a looong discussion of education with someone or other who just cannot fathom why I'm so against sending your kids to public school. One such was here. Another was here.

What will usually happen is that these discussions will start with some one thing--indoctrination into the insane transsexual agenda, sex education, an anti-Christian agenda, or some other issue. Interlocutors pretty much uniformly just do not understand how the education of the young works. Whether it is a Christian urging that we must send our kids into the schools to be "salt and light" or a non-Christian who thinks that there are a whole bunch of subjects in the normal school day into which worldview issues do not enter at all, there is a complete failure to comprehend the holism of education, especially education that takes place over a series of days, weeks, and months. Sure, there are a few subjects the content of which could in theory be taught in isolation from many other things, but so what? That's not what sending your kids to school is about.

But more: These people also don't understand that the reasons against sending your children to public school (and, I fear, increasingly not to many Christian schools) are so many and varied that whatever kicked off the discussion doesn't begin to represent the total strength of the case.

Often, even in those areas where a school might actually be able (if they wanted to) to leave out the worldview issues (math, say), the schools are messed up in some fundamental way related to teaching the subject. New fads come down the pike every other year, it seems, and now kids don't know their times tables, can't read, and are being taught basic operations like multiplication in such bizarre and counterintuitive ways that they come out mathematically illiterate.

Here is a link that gives us another of the umpteen gajillion reasons to home school: The insanity of the assessment culture, starting in early childhood. If interested, just read this carefully written, intelligently argued letter from two teachers (who are putting their names and presumably their jobs on the line) who are crying, "Enough!" It'll make you vow never to send your child to any school, public or private, that has jumped on the assessment bandwagon. I say "public or private" because it seems to me all too likely that even many of the bigger, more mainstream Christian schools have done so for reasons of keeping up with the Joneses educationally. After all, there's nothing inherently un-Christian about testing and assessing small children for hours on end until they go insane, is there? It's not a worldview issue, right?

That's right, it's not. It's just educational malpractice.

These teachers may, for all I know, be enthusiastic liberals. Maybe they are happy to be indoctrinating children into various left-wing ideas. Maybe they even believe in other wrong-headed educational methods, like look-say reading instruction. But they recognize this particular bit of blatant educational malpractice when they see it. Nor are they the only ones. (This one is about kindergarteners being tested to death.)

When you are considering how to educate your children, don't just look at one thing. There are so many things, and they all point in the same direction.

The perfect storm of sexualizing children--choice/consent devours itself

(I know, a long period of neglecting the blog and then two posts close together. That's pretty much par for the course in blogging.)

Scott W. at Romish Graffiti has a story up about the so-called "Free Kate" movement. The short story goes like this: 18-year-old lesbian girl had a so-called "girlfriend" who was only fourteen. Parents of "girlfriend" were not happy and secretly recorded telephone conversations, which are now being mulled over by the local prosecutor for the possibility of a trial for adult-child lewd actions, given that the older girl was an adult and the younger girl was under the age of consent. The state (Florida) does have a so-called Romeo and Juliet law which puts the crime at the edge. According to that law the penalty after conviction is less if the age gap was no more than four years. It looks like the age gap in this case was right at four years.

But the perpetrator's parents and tons of activist friends are defending her actions by trying to play the victim card, claiming that "everybody does it" and that the state's law against sexual activity between an 18-year-old and a 14-year-old wouldn't be enforced if the relationship were heterosexual. Her parents would be willing for her to plead guilty to a misdemeanor, but not to a felony. The latter is the plea deal that was offered by the prosecutor. (If she agreed to that plea deal, she wouldn't have to register as a sex offender.)

Here's an aspect of this that is very important: Increasingly the "everybody does it" line is going to be used to excuse adult-child sex. I predict it. It's as sure as the night follows the day. And the reason this is so obvious is because Planned Parenthood and other organizations are aggressively sexualizing our children at younger and younger ages in the school.

This incredible story, which I don't actually recommend people read but which I link to for purposes of verification, is an eyewitness account of a Planned Parenthood-sponsored teen "sexuality conference" that involved young teens discussing pornography with adults and a lewd table display depicting a little girl in pigtails riding a tricycle (!) with the name of a female body part in large letters over her head. Arguably a great deal of illegal activity was going on at this conference given the existence of laws against lewd discussions with and presenting lewd materials to minors.

This conference was not at a school, but the young people involved were (let's just say) obviously not home schooled. Planned Parenthood has sex education programs all over the nation and is trying to run even more, and this conference tells us what they think it is appropriate to present to young teens. You simply cannot have a society where the publicly funded schools are teaching all of your children about all manner of sex acts from middle school up while maintaining a strong social and legal opposition to sex with children. It can't be done. When officially approved organizations are coming into the schools and teaching them that they are sexual beings and can consent to sex from a young age, plus giving them all sorts of how-to lessons, how in the world is that compatible with laws against children's having sex? It just isn't.

Sure, sure, the lefties, if they even begin to admit the lewdness of Planned Parenthood's materials at all, will try to tell us that, hey, they're just encouraging pan-sexual exploration between minors, not between minors and adults. Not only is that far from comforting, it also rings hollow. If one of these minor girls whose innocence was ruined when she was twelve by GLSEN or PP in her school happens at the age of fifteen to have a "consensual" relationship with a young man (or a young woman) of twenty-two, it's really difficult to say why the perverted educators who taught her all this stuff in the first place have any solid grounds on which to object, or on which to uphold laws against the relationship.

In the "Free Kate" case, the lesbian card provides a good opportunity, because this involves an alleged victim group and is therefore especially effective. But since the argument is that heterosexual couples are already doing this and not being prosecuted (which by the way does not appear to be true), there is really no stopping this argument. It's not as though Kate's supporters and her family are arguing that the law should be applied more rigorously to heterosexual adult offenders! Far from it.

I do not see how the current trend in school sex education and the left's aggressive sexualization of minors can end short of at a minimum a push for lowering age-of-consent laws at least to something like thirteen years of age. Probably, it won't end there.

We're suffering the old curse: May you live in interesting times.

Be sure to home school your kids now, y'hear?

"Our highest priority is the safety of our students"

This story is an example of what is wrong with our public schools.

Let's suppose that the worst thing the story says about the teacher is absolutely true. He saw a 13-year-old who looked like he was about to strike another student. He picked up the 13-year-old by his ear and hair, put him in a choke-hold, took him outside, and threw him on the grass.

For this, he faces felony child abuse charges. You read that right. Possibly up to five years in jail.

This is insane. And the school has the gall, the utter gall, to pontificate that its highest priority is the safety and security of its students. Believe me, the school does not mean by this, "We fully support Mr. Cadwell for his desire to insure the safety and security of our students by protecting them from being beat-down by fellow students. We think law enforcement is insane to be prosecuting him. We will do everything we can to fight this unjust charge against a teacher who was attempting to protect a student." No. Somehow, I'm quite sure that isn't what they mean.

What, exactly, do they think is going to protect the safety and security of their students if not men (and I do mean men) who are willing to get physical in order to protect students from others who want to hit them? Are they relying on frowny faces? Maybe they have "no hitting other student zone" signs around. I'm sure that'll work.

Don't send your kid to public school. Just don't.

Soul-losing risk-taking

Over at W4 I've put up a post on the subject of how kids lose their Christian faith in college. Actually, I'm looking for information more than giving it. One theme that comes up again and again in the responses is the theme of the entire atmosphere of a secular college and how the Christian student feels immersed in it, feels lonely as a Christian, perhaps wants to try out some of the hedonistic experimenting his peers are trying, and is therefore almost looking for excuses to throw out his Christianity.

This leads me to wonder seriously about parents who deliberately send their children to live on the campus of a secular university. Nowadays, we have all heard the horror stories about the brain-washing PC residence hall sessions. But even aside from that, as one commentator put it,

It takes a lot of personal fortitude to hold onto what you believe in when everyone around you operates entirely on the presumption that it doesn't even exist. You have to be able to go home at night and think about it, you have to be able to drag yourself out early in the morning and go to church, you have to be able to say "eh, not this time" when good clean fun goes bad.

Right. So surely living in the dorms must make this effect particularly strong. Or so it would seem to me. I mean, what if there is no "home" to go to in order to get away from the atmosphere and think about it?

So I was thinking over reasons why parents and children agree to do this. These seem to me to include things like this: 1) The assumption that going away and living in dorms at college is a necessary part of growing up, an absolute rite of passage that it would be cruel to have your kids miss out on. 2) The worry that sending your child to a Christian college will not get him a good enough education and/or will not allow him to get a job. 3) The worry that sending your child to a local college, so that he can live at home, will not get him a good enough name on his transcript to allow him to get a job. 4) (Related to 3.) The assumption that, despite post-modernism and the death of the academy, there is enough objective difference in quality across disciplines between a more "elite" secular school and a secular school that no one has ever heard of that your child really will get a good education at the former and not at the latter and that you therefore have a duty to send your child away from home to go to the former.

I certainly understand that parents agonize over such decisions, and I don't want to sound harsh. But there is that whole thing in the Gospels about gaining the whole world and losing your own soul. This is not meant as an advertisement for Christian colleges. Christian colleges often have their unique problems, some of which arise from the fact that young people and parents go in trusting them and are therefore particularly vulnerable to faith-attacking professors and trendy movements (like the Emergent Church movement, for example). But I would say this: Question all of 1-4 if you have a decision of this kind to make. And try to do something other than sending your children away to be immersed in the "college experience" of a secular college. For what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?