The chapter in The Benedict Option on education ("Education as Christian Formation") is certain to elicit negative reaction. Indeed, at times it almost seems calibrated to do so. Dreher is here inclined to make absolutizing statements that alienate an audience.
Here is one: "Because public education in America is neither rightly ordered, nor religiously informed, nor able to form an imagination devoted to Western civilization, it is time for all Christians to pull their children out of the public school system." Apparently you can take your nuance and shove it. And I say this is as one who does not necessarily disagree with Dreher on this point. We, personally, have chosen to opt out of the very good public school system in our neighborhood in favor of home education. I think that most public schools in our country are a flaming pile of garbage. However, I do not think we are at the place where all Christians everywhere need to abandon the system. Indeed, given that 40% of public school teachers are Christian and that your tax money is being funneled into these institutions whether you like it or not, such a wholesale abandonment does not seem to be in the spirit of charity or integrity. Also, I don't know that the notion that the public school system is somehow unredeemable is proven. Dreher is unfortunately data-deficient in this chapter. Such a total claim requires more than anecdote for justification.
But maybe such an absolutist claim is required to drive an audience to think. Here are some questions I am asking:
- What are the teleological values of the public school system and do they conform to the faith I am trying to form within my children? And, maybe as importantly, do we even know?
- What is the nature of the influence of peers and the social values of the school on children? How do you measure such a thing? Formation is a long-term game; not something as simple as whether or not they are smoking behind the gym.
- Can you count on the few hours you get with them in the evening to act as an antidote to the secularizing impulse of public education?
- Are they actually learning anything in that building worthwhile or is this more functionally a daycare facility than a place of education? This is a big question.
- Are kids really cut out to be mini-evangelists in the walls of their schools?
These are all questions we ought to ask. They are questions I struggle to answer in the public school system as it currently stands. So, I am going to lay out what I think on the issue with some Dreher sprinkled in.
In an earlier post on the book I noted that Dreher feels strongly that strict media avoidance is a two-pronged need: one, for content; the other for the dependence it provokes. I think the same principle applies to education. It is not merely the content of the public educational system that I object to (though I do object in large measure to the sequencing--kids love facts and memorization, but we run away from this--and basic utilitarianism of the whole endeavor--gotta compete with China! STEM, STEM, STEM), but the sort of dependence on government institutions and the farming out of education to the caprice of the government that is implicit in the system.
Still, I think this decision ought to be left to the judgment of discerning parents. And we ought to be free to disagree, and maybe we should try to do that with charity. Parents don't enroll their kids in Christian schools because they don't care about the lost; parents don't enroll their kids in public schools because they don't care about the spiritual formation of their children.
But I will say something in response to one of the critiques of Christian schools and homeschooling that I have heard in the past that Dreher addresses here: Some critics of home/private schooling say that it is necessary for Christian students to be embedded within these schools to act as salt and light. Here is Dreher's response:
As popular culture continues its downward slide, however, this rationale begins to sound like rationalization. It brings to mind a father who tosses his child into a whitewater river in hopes that she'll save another drowning child.
Your mileage may vary on the chosen metaphor, but I think his point is basically this: the system is so inimical to our values as believers we can hardly expect our kids to do more than simply survive the onslaught they face within that system. To expect them to subsequently act as church bait is naive. Especially given the poor job the church in general does at equipping young believers and training them in the faith. There are ways of having the same endgame of outreach, putting your children in sports or arts programs, that allow the level of meaningful interaction with peers and help you get to know other parents that don't involve giving your children over to the government for 40 hours per week.
In a following post on the same chapter I will address the issues confronting Christian schools.
My last post on what Dreher calls the Domestic Monastery of the home got me thinking about the Neil Postman book The Disappearance of Childhood that I read last fall. I actually emailed Dreher a passage from that book that he posted to his blog. It's buried deep in that post if you're interested. But I thought I would dust off Postman a bit to interact with Dreher here.
Dreher's central metaphor for the family is that we ought to function within our homes like little monasteries, with fathers as abbots and mothers as abbesses. The goal is to create a rule of life for our families similar to what exists within the walls of a monastery. I really like that metaphor as a way of thinking about passing down meaning and truth to my children.
Postman's concerns are not as religiously motivated as Dreher's own, but the result of each man's diagnosis of culture is remarkably similar. Postman's concern is that the ideal of childhood, created by the inception of mass literacy, is being steadily and perhaps irreversibly denuded by our technopoly. In his concluding chapter, Postman floats a hypothetical question: Is the individual able to resist the techification of all things. His response is beautifully articulated and very Benedict-y.
The answer to this, in my opinion, is "No." But, as with all resistance, there is a price to pay. Specifically, resistance entails conceiving of parenting as an act of rebellion against American culture. For example, for parents merely to remain married is itself an act of disobedience and an insult to the spirit of a throwaway culture in which continuity has little value. It is also at least ninety percent un-American to remain in close proximity to one's extended family so that children can experience, daily, the meaning of kinship and the value of deference and responsibility to elders. Similarly, to insist that one's children learn the discipline of delayed gratification, or modesty in sexuality, or self-restraint in manners, language, and style is to place oneself in opposition to almost every social trend. Even further, to ensure that one's children work hard at becoming literate is extraordinarily time-consuming and even expensive. But most rebellious of all is the attempt to control the media's access to one's children. There are, in fact, two ways to do this. The first is to limit the amount of exposure children have to media. The second is to monitor carefully what they are exposed to, and to provide them with a continuously running critique of the themes and values of the media's content. Both are very difficult to do and require a level of attention that most parents are not prepared to give to child-rearing.
Nonetheless, there are parents who are committed to doing all of these things, who are in effect defying the directives of their culture. Such parents are not only helping their children to have a childhood but are, at the same time, creating a sort of intellectual elite. Certainly in the short run the children who grow up in such homes will, as adults, be much favored by business, the professions, and the media themselves. What can we say of the long run? Only this: Those parents who resist the spirit of the age will contribute to what might be called the Monastery Effect, for they will help to keep alive a humane tradition. It is not conceivable that our culture will forget that it needs children. But it is halfway toward forgetting that children need childhood. Those who insist on remembering shall perform a noble service.
I concluded my post last fall by saying the following in response (sorry to quote myself; that seems weird):
This is the solution Postman denied in the introduction he would give. And the solution must begin at the individual level, expand to communities of faith who unite together to maintain and reclaim what is humane in our tradition, and only then can it ever expand to enact mass change. All other paths of resistance are Luddites smashing the machines. That will not work as long as the majority love the machines. We have to restore a vision of the world that makes the machines superfluous. That will be extremely difficult. But if we value not only our children but childhood itself we will put our hand to the plow.
This, I take it, is the goal of the Benedict Option. Not to fully extricate ourselves from modernity, but to resist its dehumanizing impulses for the good of modernity. To help people see beyond the immediate and the pleasurable and find joy. To drink from the well that quenches our thirst eternally. It is a large and monumental task. But the evangelization of the world has always been the mission of the church. And I don't think it was ever meant to be easy.
Chapter 6 of Dreher's book is called "The Idea of a Christian Village." Here Dreher mostly looks beyond the walls of the church to the type of Christian community necessary to foster the type of spiritual formation we long both for our lives and the lives of our children.
He begins in an interesting, and perhaps counterintuitive, place: the family. One of the faults of conservative evangelicalism, at least as I've seen it, is the often insular view of the family we are tempted to hold. I've known parents who won't let their kids play a sport because they are concerned about allowing any other influencer into their children's lives. And while a myopic view of formation as family alone is wrong, it is undeniable that the family is of monumental importance for shaping the life of everyone in what Edmund Burke called the "little platoons." Therefore, it is an ultimately appropriate place to begin the chapter. Our greater life in the broader Christian community will emanate out from the life we live in our homes.
Here is how the section of the chapter on family, "Turn Your Home into a Domestic Monastery," begins:
Just as the monastery's life is oriented toward God, so must the family home be. Every Christian family likes to think they put God first, but this is not always how we live. (I plead guilty.) If we are the abbot and abbess of our domestic monastery, we will see to it that our family's life is structured in such a way as to make the mission of knowing and serving God clear to all its members.
The negation at the beginning is important. Most Christian families would say that "God comes first in this family," but when this claim is weighed in the scales it is often found wanting. We just need to acknowledge this. Such a claim is not something confirmed verbally but something borne out in our practices in the world and within our home. Are we bearing this out in the way we orient our home life?
But the affirmation is even more important: we are the abbots and abbesses of our houses. This is an ultimately positive view of what goes on within the home. In this role it is incumbent upon us to structure the lives of our families in a way that makes our familial mission clear. This instantly reminded me of Martin Luther's famous "priesthood of all believers" claim. As parents we are not merely passive vehicles in the formation of our children, but clergymen and women within our homes. How differently such a vision would shape our lives together. The practical applications abound. I will end with the one given by Dreher.
Dreher's concluding paragraph for this short section keeps the metaphor of the home-as-monastery intact. He advises:
A monastery keeps outside its walls people and things that are inimical to its purpose, which is to form its members in Christ. For families, this means strictly limiting media, especially television and online media, both to keep unsuitable content out and to prevent dependence on electronic media. (emphasis mine)
I love the double edge of Dreher's reasoning: we don't limit media consumption simply because there is unsuitable content involved. This as a sole standard lets parents off the hook. And I often hear modest content used as justification. "Well, they're not watching Game of Thrones so it's fine. This show is about pirates, and stuff. It's a cartoon, chill out. Daddy needs some me-time." However, according to Dreher we don't merely limit for considerations of content; we also limit our media consumption because we want to prevent dependence on electronic media. This is every bit as important to the actual content of what we watch or allow our children to watch.
Sometimes I feel like I bash on media and technology too often. I know my students get tired of hearing it from me. But then I think about how deeply addictive and worldview shaping my average student's consumption of media is and I just stop caring. The media we consume shapes us. The media we implicitly or explicitly endorse within our homes shapes our children. That's the content angle. But the way we lean on media to provide a break or quiet the kids down for a few minutes shows our dependence on a very capricious god. Which might in the end be an even bigger problem. Every time we lazy out and hand over the iPad or let Netflix cycle through episodes while we do our own thing we are willfully abdicating our influence over our children. We are training them to go to the glowing screen for relief and joy. We are selling out the job we've been given for 22 minutes of free time (that, using myself as a case study, most of us squander).
If we want our homes to be different, we need to conceive of our task in a different way.
In the debate swirling around Rod Dreher's new book, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, one of the persistent claims has been that Dreher is advocating some sort of broad withdrawal from American culture. I'm about 100 pages in and so far I simply cannot see how such a conclusion could be drawn apart from the willful desire to read such a conclusion into the text.
Not being one to prooftext, allow me to prooftext. From page 82 in the chapter "A New Kind of Christian Politics": "To be sure, Christians cannot afford to vacate the public square entirely." I don't know what sort of brokedown Google translator renders this back as "Grab your guns and head for the hills," but that is what some critics seem to see in such admonitions. It makes one wonder--and this is the cynic in me--if they actually read the book. Reading is so tedious. Throwing shade is considerably more fun.
Dreher's central point, and I'll stick with this chapter on politics for now, is that our whole system is screwed up and political salvation doesn't exist. Christians can't wait for the Republican on the white horse to ride in and restore the abandoned moral order. We need to be doing work, building institutions parallel to secular institutions that sustain and nourish our people in a dark time. Dreher marshals the examples of Czech dissidents Vaclav Havel and Vaclav Bendel to show an historical example of just such a counterculture. Frankly, I don't know how such a claim is in any way outlandish for a Christian. Indeed, one of the things that has struck me in my reading on the Benedict Option is how obvious much of it seems. Anyone who has read or even heard of Augustine's City of God ought to recognize just such a distinction in Christian history. St. Paul might have had a thing or two to say on the matter as well. We are always off base when we conflate a worldly kingdom with the eternal kingdom. Yet the temptation is ever-flourishing.
I'll end this mini-post (I'm sure this is the first of many on this important book) by letting Dreher talk for a minute. Here are two block quotes from the end of the chapter on politics:
"Here's how to get started with the antipolitical politics of the Benedict Option. Secede culturally from the mainstream. Turn off the television. Put the smartphones away. Read books. Play games. Make music. Feast with your neighbors. It is not enough to avoid what is bad; you must also embrace what is good. Start a church, or join a group within your church. Open a classical Christian school, or join and strengthen one that exists. Plant a garden, and participate in a local farmer's market. Teach kids how to play music, and start a band. Join the volunteer fire department."
Let's juxtapose that with the caricature of the critics: Buy a huge plot of land and put a bomb shelter on it. Make your daughters wear head coverings that they make on your home loom. Pray for the return of 1950s gender norms. Judge your neighbors... who are probably gay. Prevent your kids from having a life. Make sure they turn out as weird as possible.
I'd love to read an honest critique of that paragraph. Making music is hegemonic! Smartphones are making us smarter! More like, feast with your (white) neighbors! Seriously, what are people actually taking issue with? That paragraph is a beautiful vision of Christian engagement with the world.
More Dreher:
"But it can't be repeated often enough: believers must avoid the usual trap of thinking that politics can solve cultural and religious problems. Trusting Republican politicians and the judges they appoint to do the work that only cultural change and religious conversion can do is a big reason Christians find ourselves so enfeebled. The deep cultural forces that have been separating the West from God for centuries will not be halted or reversed by a single election, or any election at all."
I understand having quibbles here if you're a secularist who lauds the demise of belief in the West. I don't understand how you can have a problem with this if you claim Christ. And here I don't care if you're a liberal or conservative Christian. What's to dispute? We find ourselves enfeebled because we have enfeebled ourselves. We have refused to do the hard work of culture building, trusting instead to a Moral Majority mindset that uses the cudgel of the state to enact our morality. Well, we lost that fight. Conservative Christians should acknowledge this and restructure. Liberal Christians should acknowledge that the new moral order is not all sunshine and roses. However, conservative Christians seem more eager to get the club back in our hands than to actually making sure our own house is clean. Liberal Christians deny that there is any problem at all.
But if we can see through the lies on both sides we can see that the path forward for the church is increased faithfulness to the call to take up our crosses and die. That, ultimately, seems to be Dreher's primary interest: building up the church so that we can be of use to the world. I'll keep reading, but I have a hard time seeing how I'll end up disagreeing.
