Benedict Option 3: Should Christians Opt Out of Public Education?

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.

Raising Dragonslayers

In case it's not clear at first glance what is going on in this picture, this was taken during an interrupted dragon battle a month or so ago in my front yard. Dragons have long been the scourge of our neighborhood, hoarding gold, burning crops, eating livestock, etc. Fortunately for the Leawood district of Littleton, these two fierce youths moved into the neighborhood and have been fastidiously hunting down the local dragons, ministering the cold justice of forged steel to their scaly hides. Again, though it seems perfectly clear to any keen observer of dragon warfare, the weapons my children are wielding are as follows:

1) In my son's left hand is a sword for, and I quote, "stabbing into the dragon's flanks."
2) In my son's right hand is a dagger which some fools may dismiss as an inappropriate weapon for combat with a large, fire-breathing beast. Au contraire, the dagger is for stabbing the dragon's eyes. Furthermore, the dagger is a more fitting tool for this task than the sword, because "I can be more precise with a dagger." 
3) The black rope in my daughter's hand is so very clearly a whip that it barely merits mention, except to say that the purpose of the whip is to keep the dragon at bay while my son goes in with the dagger. 
4) The curved piece of wood in my daughter's hand is a bow for engaging the dragon from a distance while my son runs in with the sword for a good flank stab.

Do you even need to ask if they killed the dragon? With such tools at their disposal and a strategy worthy of Sun Tzu combined with the iron will evinced by their determined looks, how could they possibly have lost?

I came home to this scene after a day of work, a day spent thinking about how to educate the students put under my charge. As most of you know, we homeschool our kids. They spend their days at home with the exception of Thursday when they go to a homeschool group for science projects, music lessons, and group play with other kids. They know Latin declensions, can recite a 14 minute long timeline of world history, can skip-count up through the 15s, possess an encyclopedic knowledge of Greek and Roman mythology (we're about to start in on the Norse and Celtic myths), use metaphors in everyday speech, and regularly throw out such words as "cumulonimbus," "precise," "antagonize," and "articulate." 

And this knowledge accumulation is important to me. I trust that down the road it will help them to be wise. I wish more of the students that I teach had received this type of training in their youth.

But that's not precisely why we homeschool. 

People obviously have all of these preconceptions about what homeschooling is (usually how bad it is for the kids) and assume that the reason we are doing it is to shelter our children from the world. And to be quite honest, that is part of the reason. This world sucks. I am not scared of it, but I am cautious of the dangers it has for my children. I don't want to expose them to its worst features because some people think it's wrong to "shelter" your kids. Those people are free to do what they want with their own children, and I frankly don't give a tinker's damn what they want me to do with my little charges.

As to the concern of whether or not kids will socialize, I can't help but ask: "Why in the flip would I want them to socialize to their peer groups?" Just to use a small sample size, my son is playing soccer this fall with a cohort of five year olds from our wealthy suburb. Of his five teammates, I have heard three of them swearing, calling other kids mean names, and shoving people to the ground for no apparent reason. Again, they're five. And any notion that we can dismiss this because "boys will be boys" or "they're just kids" is an attitude that enables the sort of culture that creates five year olds like that (and also, incidentally, allows people like Donald Trump to exist). I don't want my son and daughter (and son on the way) to be "just kids." I do not understand why I would have to accept that.

The more positive reason that we homeschool is because I want my kids to be wild. I want them to slay dragons in my yard so that they can grow up and slay dragons in this world. Metaphorically, of course. Everyone knows the great knights already rid the world of real dragons. I want Owen to pull the (real) sword I bought for him in Kenya out of its sheath and freak out his grandma; I want him to polish it in the morning because Arthur polished Excalibur. I want him to be courageous and full of virtue. Say what you will for our contemporary system of education, but those two qualities are decidedly not the goal.

I am not interested in merely training the minds of my kids at home. I am interested in training their affections. I want them to not only know the Good but love it. We homeschool because I am convinced this process can take place best within the home.

We live in a culture bereft of wildness. And I want my kids to be wild. I don't want their noses buried in iPads even if they are playing "educational" games. I want their noses buried in books, bringing to life the stories they read through their imagination and not through passive sensory receptors. I don't want their minds shaped by movies and television shows, again even the ones that claim to be educational, and oh dear God especially not Veggie Tales. I want their minds shaped by the written word and by conversation with people smarter than them. I want them to build things and use their hands and pursue their passions.

I want to come home and find, as I did today, that my son has made himself a pair of missile shooters for each arm (toilet paper roll and construction paper for the strap, obvs) and that he colored a picture for his best friend using every different marker color and that he read the story of Beowulf and that he makes jokes out of mispronouncing names of Greek deities (he does it in all reverence, Hephaestus) and that my daughter has her history timeline memorized up through St. Augustine and can sing along with her terrible enunciation to dozens of hymns. 

I want other adults speaking into their lives and taking on key roles, but I want the number one influence to be my wife and me for as long as possible. Because no one will love our kids like we do. Ever. It is a sacred duty and an ineffable privilege. It is a limited period in which I can exert this influence. I will not squander it. To make a reference to Hamilton and a line that Elle runs around the house exclaiming, "I am not throwing away my shot." 

This gift is precious. And needed. This world is full of dragons. But it is perilously short on dragonslayers. 

Captain Fantastic, a review

One of the first pieces of pop culture I consumed after a two-week fast in Kenya this summer was the trailer for the recently-released film Captain Fantastic. Right away it looked like something right up my alley: a homeschool family with a passion for nature and a desire to not be sucked into the entertainment-obsessed, intellectually flaccid, consumeristic excess of contemporary America. If everything after that colon sounds self-righteous, you're not wrong, but I look around at the way so many children are being raised in our culture and it strikes me as inhuman, hollow, even depraved. I know I'm not perfect and I imagine I will find unique ways to screw my kids up, but I don't want any help from a media system and education system that seem designed to stultify thought and snuff out any allegiance to tradition and beauty. 

Anyway, on to the film. I'll summarize very briefly: the film opens on a family of six children being home-educated by their father, played brilliantly by Viggo Mortensen, in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest. The children's mother, never shown except in dreams, has committed herself to psychiatric treatment in New Mexico and kills herself (this is in the first act of the film and hardly counts as a spoiler as it sets the film in motion). The deceased's parents, appalled by the lifestyle embraced by their daughter's family and blaming her emotional issues on the dogmatism of her husband, banish them from attending the funeral. At the behest of his children and his own desire to honor his wife, the family packs up an outfitted school bus and heads south. Adventures and lessons ensue as the kids "impractical" training comes up against the realities of the "real world." If you want to know more, go see the movie.

Upon reflection I am still not entirely sure what I think about this film. There are moments of deep resonance for me: the father banishing the use of the adjective "interesting" as a non-word in describing literature. When his daughter then offers plot summary he presses her to go further into analysis. It seemed almost designed to warm my heart, as did the first night we see the children reading books around a campfire: a pre-teen reading The Brothers Karamazov, an eight-year-old reading Middlemarch. I want to scream to the world that this is possible. If we dumb things down for children they will go along with it and play dumb; if we call them to a higher standard they will rise to meet it. I enjoyed the impassioned oversight and planned formation combined with little hand-holding and independence. The kids are on a plan, but they are not guided through every step. Every minor wound is not fawned over and they are allowed to cry and grieve and get angry and yell as the situation warrants. I love that they saw the systems of our culture as poisonous in just the same ways I do and sought to avoid the corrupting nature of technology and entertainment.

But my appreciation of the film is not quite what I expected as I felt my soul stir in watching that trailer upon my return from Africa. My wife and I went to see the film at the Esquire Theatre on 6th avenue. We got there early and walked around the neighborhood chatting. At one point we made predictions for the movie; my main prediction was that, in order not to alienate their audience base, the film would go out of its way to distance the family portrayed from any semblance of religious conviction. There would be no Bible memorization scene, in other words, but I imagined a scene with someone quoting Nietzsche. I was wrong, but only slightly. They did not quote Nietzsche, they quoted Noam Chomsky. 

One of the main scenes played for laughs is when the family bus has been pulled over by a cop suspicious by the presence of six school-age children chilling in a bus on a school day. Rather than explain that, you know, we're homeschooled and this is America so chill, the kids all pretend to be religious fanatics, even holding hands and singing a hymn. The mortified cop exits the bus and the family is on its way.

I get it. Dumb, knuckle-dragging Christian homeschoolers. Haha! Not us. We're doing this to stick it to the man, man. But it felt forced and over the top. And it made--and maybe this was the intention?--Mortensen's character in particular look like a smug asshole. At one point the kids remind each other they are not to make fun of anyone. They all nod in agreement until one of the younger children reminds them of the caveat to the prohibition: "Except for Christians." Knee-slapping stuff, that. 

I don't think my main problem here is that the film takes shots at Christians. I am inured to that, mostly, at this point. I think the thing that frustrates me is that these people think they are better than Christians because they don't worship fairy tales. But, instead, they worship Noam F*cking Chomsky. They are members of an organized religion and they are worshipers. They just don't like what some other people worship. But is celebrating Christmas any less ridiculous than celebrating--and I am not making this up--Noam Chomsky Day on his birthday?

I think, in other words, that the family portrayed in this film has correctly diagnosed the ills besetting our culture but chosen the wrong cure. There is some virtue in opting out of the excess of our late modern age, but if it is filled with some equally vapid philosophy then what, really, is the point? I think this showed in the way the film was filmed as well. This was not a contemplative film; there were no questions being asked here. The lesson learned was simplistic and the compromise position adopted at the end made so many previous efforts nearly meaningless. The film took no time to pause, to consider the implications of the characters' lives, to help us find the beauty in the mundane, the everyday. Everyone they met was stupid or fat or stupid and fat. The kids were made judgmental and self-righteous by their withdrawal; they did not withdraw for the life and beauty of this world. 

This is the risk everyone runs by withdrawing; it is one I am certainly conscious of as we move into the homeschooling phase. But the end in mind for me is clear: I am removing my children from the world (for a time) for the good of the world, so that when they enter it their lives are governed by truth and beauty and goodness, so that in their efforts to glorify their savior and seek his kingdom they left up the one who gathers all people unto himself.

The Horrors of Homeschooling

I came across this lengthy article in Prospect by Kathryn Joyce profiling children who had been raised in fundamentalist home-schooling homes and escaped out of the miasma of Parental Control. I tend to chuckle, despite myself, when I read articles like this. Not that there aren't terrible homeschooling situations. Undoubtedly there are. And I feel real compassion for children who are raised to believe that any dissent from there parents is a sure route to hell. That is vicious and mean doctrine and should be spoken out against. In that sense, I have no problem with an article talking about some of these awful scenarios in which fundamentalist kids were raised. When this becomes problematic is when the anecdotal stories of abuse are slap-dashly used to represent the logical outcome of any homeschooling by Christians.

You can see this tendency in scare paragraphs ("scareagraphs"?) like the following: 

"What many lawmakers and parents failed to recognize were the extremist roots of fundamentalist homeschooling. The movement’s other patriarch was R.J. Rushdoony, founder of the radical theology of Christian Reconstructionism, which aims to turn the United States into an Old Testament theocracy, complete with stonings for children who strike their parents. Rushdoony, who argued that democracy was “heresy” and Southern slavery was “benevolent,” was too extreme for most conservative Christians, but he inspired a generation of religious-right leaders including Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson. He also provided expert testimony in early cases brought by the HSLDA. Rushdoony saw homeschooling as not just providing the biblical model for education but also a way to bleed the secular state dry."

Now I have never heard of Rushdoony, and maybe he is the rat bastard he is made out to be in this clearly objective paragraph, but really all this paragraph seems to be saying is "one douchebag favored homeschooling." He was too extreme for most conservative Christians, but he nonetheless "influenced" James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson. How? you might ask. Doesn't matter. Dobson, Falwell, and Robertson! You just have to recite the names of conservative bogeymen and let that do the arguing for you.

I imagine most of you know that my wife was homeschooled through junior high and went to public high school. I don't know if her parents have ever heard of Rushdoony, and they would surely be surprised by the notion of democracy as "heresy" but none of that matters--they were Christians and homeschoolers, ergo bad people who suppressed their children.

The whole article is about as well-researched as a term paper one of my old freshman writing students turned into me at K-State. There are stats about how many people give money to the Homeschooling Defense fund, but none that might give any indication about the percentages of homeschooling students who are disgruntled and felt the need to escape the Fundamentalist Philistinism of their parents. Joyce relies on horrifying anecdotes. A homeschooled teen was killed by her parents and they had a popular homeschooling book on the shelf. Although the book does not explicitly tell parents to kill their kids it is clearly implied. Spanking is a gateway drug to murder, after all.  

But anecdotes don't prove much, really. My wife and her seven siblings seemed to enjoy the experience of being homeschooled and most will probably homeschool their own kids (as we might well do ourselves). My wife's dad is one of her heroes, and her mom her example of servanthood and love. Should I use their anecdotes to cancel out an opposing one?

You can feel Joyce's frustration when she writes things like this: "Homeschooling now exists in a virtual legal void; parents have near-total authority over what their children learn and how they are disciplined." For shame, America! Letting parents teach their children and discipline them. Discipline is so medieval. Or this: "The amendment [in Pennsylvania] would enshrine in the Constitution parents’ 'fundamental right' to direct their child’s upbringing however they see fit, free of state interference." I think we used to call this being a family. And I think that is Joyce's most elemental problem with homeschooling: the state does not have complete control, but parents. It is a short road from that belief to advocating for children to being taken out of their home because any conservative parenting constitutes abuse. 

There are problems aplenty with parenting in our nation, but I am going to go out on a limb here and say that most of the problems are not emanating from the occasional over-zealousness of Christian parents. Clara helps moms deliver babies nearly every day with stories that would put to shame the sob stories of kids who weren't allowed to watch The Simpsons (incidentally, starting at an appropriate age, The Simpsons will form an integral part of our children's education; everything I needed to know about pop culture and America I learned from The Simpsons). She had a patient recently, eight months pregnant who is so addicted to alcohol that she drank hand-sanitizer while in the hospital to get a fix. How is life going to go for that kid? She has had numerous moms who were on meth and continued to use while pregnant. Others, less overtly extreme, just seem as if they do not care about their children at all. Often there is no father around. And I would imagine that these cases are relatively more common than an abusive homeschooling parent. But those cases don't rile up the target audience of Prospect to the same level of fear as that of the Christian Fundamentalist. Plus, they are only anecdotes as well. Most moms are drug-free, non-alcoholics, who will love their kids and try hard to raise them well. 

It is a complex world. Do abuses of homeschooling mean we should outlaw homeschooling? What about teachers who abuse children? Should we outlaw teachers? Does encouraging your daughter to value motherhood and children equate to naked patriarchal subjugation? What about just not giving a shit about your kids? Which is worse? Joyce doesn't want to answer complex questions. For her, it is not a complex issue. These disparate anecdotes are evidence enough, and her confirmation bias tells her everything she already knew.