My wife and I are gearing up for our eleventh year of
homeschooling. We started in 1995, after our two younger children,
Nathan and Anna, had completed the first grade and kindergarten in
a parochial school. They were close enough in age and talent for us
to start both of them in the second grade. This coming year they
will be high school seniors.
Our kids are all gifted with a tad more gray matter than the
average, I suppose, but we were never of an inclination to push
them ahead. One of the older two skipped a grade, at the suggestion
of the school he was in, but that was as far as we ever went with
the kid-genius business. We wanted a normal, leisurely paced social
and emotional upbringing for our children. Our principal reasons
for taking up homeschooling were moral and cultural rather than
intellectual.
The two older ones, David and Ben, did grade school and high
school within the system. As they made their way through, weird
things intermittently happened to shore us up (or wear us down —
whatever; it all seems like a long time ago now) for the plunge
into homeschooling.
There was, for example, the aging former nun who — apparently
smitten by a religious studies course she had taken a few decades
earlier — was applying an outmoded Bultmannian demythologizing
technique to her sixth-grade Bible class; or the eerie eighth-grade
teacher who, though plainly a fraud and ignoramus, was stoutly
defended by the administration against the parents’ complaints
about him (and was subsequently arrested for child molestation); or
the days when our sons would come home to inform us with innocent
fascination that America was the chief oppressor of something
called the Third World, or that crime is caused by something called
sinful social structures, or that the next pope might be a
woman.
In their Jesuit prep school, our sons were getting old enough to
be on to the scams. The required courses in “social justice” were
dubbed “Socialism 101.” The religion classes used older texts with
copyright dates between 1968 and 1978 — that is, the squirrelly
decade following the Second Vatican Council, before the Vatican
under John Paul II had started the endless effort to clean up the
mess. In strict conformity to the ad hoc norms cooked up during
that decade, psychology trumped religious sensibility, and moral
training, such as it was, took its cues from the secular culture.
Students were urged to get in touch with their feelings, whether or
not they cared to do so, and to obsess over their personal
troubles, and of course homosexuality was no longer deemed
troublesome.
But aside from what seemed to us a premature cynicism welling up
in our two older sons, they appeared to be none the worse for the
wear-and-tear of regular exposure to the abrasive smugness and
stupidity of the school’s superannuated liberal culture. Like most
of their friends, they were wise to the scams, and in any event the
training in math and science was first rate, as were a number of AP
courses in literature and history. The screwy parts of the
curriculum, we assured ourselves, could be thought of as a
relatively gentle initiation into the wayward pretensions of the
secular ethos.
Then came the two-by-four that broke the camel’s back. While
David and Ben were in high school, Nathan and Anna had started
grade school, and one day the mostly pliant parents were suddenly
informed at a meeting that a new sex education program was to be
imposed the following year. The educational theorist hired to
introduce the program seemed to me and my wife, and a few other
parents, to be from a different planet. Instruction in human
sexuality, we were told, would begin in the first grade.
Well, some of the parents, including my wife and me, put up a
brief struggle. I found myself writing a long letter to the
principal, using terms like “false anthropology” to describe the
ghastly program. If I had been more alert at the time, I might have
tried to couch my arguments in terms of the pop psychology
dominating the slender imaginations of the unhabited nuns and
ex-nuns who ran the school. I might perhaps have come up with a
term like “toxic knowledge,” now used rather freely by therapists
to refer to the emotional damage caused by a precocious ingestion
of information that the little ones just aren’t ready for.
Somehow, though, I don’t think it would have helped. There was
something about the hollow tones and empty stares we would get in
response to our objections. Jesuit theologian Edward Oakes,
alluding to the 1956 SF cult classic Invasion of the
Body-Snatchers, has recently coined the term “pod-people” to
refer to the trendies on the periphery of the Church. Like the
movie characters whose bodies have been seized by a coldly hostile
alien intelligence, the pod-people in the Church and the schools
look and sound generally familiar, but something about them is
vaguely off — something in their glazed eyes and distant looks
when you try to engage them in any sort of reflection on their
projects. Late in the spring of 1995, my wife and I suffered our
last encounter with the pod-people.
We took Nathan and Anna out of the school system. My own habits
as a college teacher, still more-or-less tangled in the system with
which my wife and I were now at loggerheads, gave me cold feet. But
my wife had become sufficiently adamant to stir the small wisdom
and smaller courage nestled somewhere down in my depths. Looking
back, I am certain we did the right thing, and I am still surprised
by the energy, the mutual support, and the strength of the
homeschool movement.
FOR ONE THING, THE MOVEMENT does not seem to be in any serious
danger from its hostile critics. Writing in the Jesuit weekly
America a few years before his disgrace and dismissal in a
sex-and-blackmail scandal, Milwaukee’s former archbishop, Rembert
Weakland, averred that his favorite kinds of parishioners were
those who write their checks and keep their mouths shut. The
American public school system — and its increasingly slavish
imitators in the Catholic system — is dominated by secular liberal
busybodies of a disposition analogous to Weakland’s.
They don’t like outspoken parents, and they sense that the kinds
of parents who would go to all the trouble of homeschooling are
exactly the pushy types they don’t want in their own system. It may
be of political and financial concern to them that some two million
American families now homeschool — but it is also indisputably a
relief that fewer parents are raising hell in teacher conferences
and PTA meetings, even as the system gets worse and worse. In an
odd twist, then, homeschoolers are protected not just by specialist
legal defense teams but by the very corruption that drove so many
of them to the homeschooling alternative in the first place.
Also of amazement to me within the close-knit homeschooling
community is the breadth of Nathan and Anna’s social life. Neither
of their older brothers was ever involved so much in the sports
activities, dances, and outings for which the two younger ones have
abundant time. In prep school, David and Ben would bring home hours
and hours of work every weekday, subsisting on about six hours of
sleep per night. The two younger ones are finished with their
schooling each day by mid-afternoon, have leisure time every day,
and, every night, get the ten hours of sleep kids that age
apparently need. They cover at least as much school material as
their older brothers did, yet they both have keenly mellow
dispositions in cheerful defiance of the DNA bequeathed them by
their high-strung dad.
As we gear up for their senior year, they look forward to
physics, advanced math, a survey of Western history and the
attendant literature, Latin literature, one modern language (still
undecided), introductory economics, composition and research
techniques, music, and Biblical studies. The materials available to
them through the homeschooling network are dazzling, and require an
outlay of less than a thousand dollars for the whole year.
And for all the occasionally daunting personal demands of the
regimen on my wife and me, very little of it is tedious. In the
event, it’s been rather a joy to bring an adult consciousness to
bear on material we hadn’t looked at since our own school days. The
Periodic Table, for instance, together with its fascinating
history, is downright spellbinding — not exactly what I recall
from my first, grizzly encounter with the scary chart 44 years
ago.
It seems strange, in retrospect, that the possibility of these
wonderful eleven years with our two younger children was opened by
a series of shabby crises. In an odd way, we are now grateful for
the earlier, unpleasant years that finally forced our hand. I don’t
suppose, however, that it would be of much purpose to go out and
thank the pod-people.
