Homeschool Whistleblowers and the Religious Thought Police

Home educators are perhaps the most mystifying group of people on the planet.  We are all dissenters of one kind or another.  Some flat-out reject mass education, others feel their special-needs kids cannot be served well, and many fear negative socialization, violence and bullying.  But the majority of home educators do the arduous work of schooling at  home for religious reasons.  These families were the pioneers decades ago who blazed the trail for the rest of us.   Most of mainstream America cannot fathom why sane parents would choose to spend every day and night with their kids.  The whole world thinks we are weird.  That's our burden to bear.  Thanks to this article, our job just got a little harder:
http://prospect.org/article/homeschool-apostates

Ms. Joyce begins her attack on Christian Fundamentalist home educators by telling a shocking tale of a young adult woman who is basically held hostage in her home by a mentally ill mother. For her to imply that this is emblematic or typical of home education is disingenuous at best.  It is a lousy introduction to what is an otherwise informative essay.

A few clarifications - I am not a fundamentalist, but I am a Christian, and I've home schooled for 15 years. We home school for academic excellence.   I've met hundreds and hundreds of home school families, most of them Christian.  It is safe to say no two families are alike.  As a population home educators are practically impossible to categorize.  We defy generalizations.  Not knowing any better, Kathryn Joyce stubbornly tries to categorize home educators but only succeeds carrying out a crazy witch hunt..  This is so regrettable because she does unveil other important issues - issues that merit more discussion.  But, the most worthy aspects of her essay are buried in her own bigotry.  More on this later.....

As mentioned, the most conspicuous flaw in this essay is found on the launch pad - the author devotes the first few paragraphs to the awfully sad,  extraordinary, and rather dreadful circumstances of Jennifer's schism with her parents.  News flash:  Correlation does not imply causation!  Jennifer's parents are a little nuts. Home school or not, these parents eventually would have been a force for poor Jennifer (and Lauren) to deal with.

After Kathryn Joyce primes the pump with this theatrical opening, she proceeds to throw many people and organizations (all of them conservative Christian in scope and sequence) right under the "religious-thought-police bus".  She has sat behind the wheel of this buggy for many years, but she seems only to steer toward Christians, cheerfully eager to plow them down.   She is a bigot and she is barreling around in the bigot bus, targeting Christian initiatives with all of the zealotry she seems to detest in others.

There are many ways she could have addressed some of the valid issues that exist in very conservative Christian home school circles.  An even-handed approach would have borne more fruit.  For example, this article would be more plausible, if it had included a discussion of what the Amish are taught in their homes and churches.  Additionally, if Ms. Joyce is truly concerned about what children are learning outside of this nation's state conditioning centers, she really should have included a discussion of ultra conservative Judaism, which is most analogous to the very conservative fundamentalist Christian. For example, in conservative orthodox Judaism, marriages are often determined by parents and it is frequently a financial arrangement.  Boys and girls are taught separately.  They are opposed to viewing secular movies and reading secular newspapers.  They are told to be fruitful and multiply.  This sounds like just the thing to get Ms. Joyce's knickers twisted, but she does not talk about them or other groups.

Kathryn Joyce is deeply interested in religious liberty.  Well, why doesn't she focus on the oppression of young Muslim girls?  Here, a storehouse of great exposés await her golden pen.  Imagine the good she could do by raising awareness of the ocean of brutality and subjugation in the extreme forms of this religion.   Instead she spends her time accusing Christians of evil-doing when they rescue children through adoption. Better those children should die slow and painful deaths from infection, neglect and abuse, right, Kathryn?  Anything would be better than having them cared for by Christians.

Also, I cannot  help but wonder why Kathryn Joyce did not give any space in her article to talk about the amazing achievements of home educated students.  It is a glaring omission.  It robs her thesis of integrity.

The Homeschool Apostates (the title of her essay) gave voice to a growing group of young adults who feel they were robbed of a normal childhood.  This is a terrible thing - a heart breaking outcome.  I am glad these young people have found each other and have a public forum for airing their grievances. Their parents may wish they had done things differently.  Many parents do and most of them did not home school.  But, I had no idea that there were homeschool recovery groups, and it was deeply challenging to read the personal stories of so many young adults on these homeschool refugee websites.  It is important to read how things can go sideways - it doesn't only happen in school families - it happens in homeschool families, too.   I am glad that Kathryn Joyce put these websites out there. Together, all of these recovery stories present a complete manual on what NOT to do if you plan to home educate.  Ideally, some of these stories would make it into the "new homeschooler info packet".

I do not want to detract from the stories of these defectors.  However, much larger than this apostate group (by several million) are the public forums for young adults who wish their parents had rescued them from a hellish existence in school.

Here's the thing - some conservative Christian families do go over board in my opinion.  I know families who do not allow their teens to date and where the "Master of the House" dad is viewed as an overlord.  There are some families who meddle constantly in their children's lives and who smother them with rules.  Some have a highly flawed approach to academics.  But, at the end of the day, this is no more my business than is the neighbor's kid who gets on a big, yellow bus every day and who at the age of 12 still cannot read.

Kathryn Joyce seems very alarmed by the fact that home education puts most control into the hands of parents.  Who else should have control over our children's lives - the marauding, predatory, minions in Washington?  It is obvious that this author wants everyone to have the same life views.  Yes, a mob of automatons would be a manageable mob.  Hmmmm.  Don't you wonder what Kathryn Joyce really wants?

In this article, she was trying to get at some of the flaws in home education but her hostility toward Christians derailed her effort.  Hate is a terrible burden to bear.  Ultimately, I think this author degrades herself with her evident hatred of Christians and the result is a lack of imagination in her research.

As the World Turns....for Labereelings

Another school year has grabbed me by the wrists, yanking me from one hour to the next, from one to-do list to the next.  Yet the days are not as jarring as they once were, now that there are just 2 young men to educate.  It should be so much easier and in some small ways it is.  But with John and Nora both living outside of the Laberee home, I have discovered a strange foe - an itinerant spirit.  My own heart has become part nomad, wandering through the house, through their rooms, and through the well-trodden alleys of my own mind searching for them and needing to engage them on some pressing matter, both out of habit and for the love of it all.  For the love of them.

An update on the fearless foursome:

John is starting his sophomore year at UPenn and rowing varsity ... for one of the top 10 college crew teams in the country.  Yeah, I'm just a little proud.  He's taking courses in Russian (that is, they are taught in Russian!) and he is enjoying history, psych, and more.  Oh, and a part-time job. Hope he takes those vitamins I sent!

Nora is in Hungary where she is taking her senior year of high school and a full load of classes, taught in Hungarian, of course.  She reports that it is tiring beyond description but she is enjoying her host family, the beauty of Hungary, the cool weather, her jaunts into Austria and her new friends.   She has already been interviewed by Hungarian television because of the essay she wrote describing why she wanted to go the Hungary.  She talked about the Hungarian story called "The White Stag".  It was a hit!   Do I miss her?  Well, I step into her bedroom every morning and spray a little of her perfume around the house.  Then, the rooms smell glorious, and I feel like she is near. Yeah, that says it all.

                 In Austria .... I think the Alps are behind her? Sooo proud of this cool customer.


Andy is enjoying his new role .... he always gets a front seat in the car and has seniority these days.  He began the school year with a party in Boston with friends he made while at Brown University this past summer.  With three AP classes, a course at Stanford's OHS, and a move up to varsity rowing, he has come to fully appreciate simple things like good sleep, good food, good coffee, and down-time.  He started strong this year and shows no signs of slowing down!

Hanging with some pals this past weekend.

And James has turned into a fanatical reader!  He consumes 2 books per week, minimum, but often 3.   All of the kids have been avid readers, but James has actually out-read his sibs when they were 10.  He has a very busy year with continued study of Latin, Mythology and Ancient History in our Classics Club, in addition to weekly fishing, art class, golf clinics, and one afternoon per week on a farm.  I can promise that getting muddy,while chasing goats and pigs, will be his favorite time of the week.  He was accepted into the Gifted Learning Program for middle schoolers at Northwestern University and will be taking some of his classes online this year, for the first time (!)

I don't think a day goes by that Peter and I don't marvel at how good God has been to us and to our family.  It is a great privilege to partner with our kids in life this way.  It is a great blessing to serve.

"As for me and my house....we will serve the Lord."   Joshua 24:15

Time ...

"...and time for all the works and days of hands, that lift and drop a question on your plate..."
T. S. Eliot

My home school years lurch one after the other, engulfing all of my faculties for months on end such that I hardly have time to look closely at the strange reflection staring back at me from that heartless mirror, and so I do occasionally give a gasp at how time has salted my hair and how it tugs without pity on all corners of my face.

I don't mind being surprised by the slithering, skulking, treachery of my own inevitable decline. Time does what time does.  The lines on my face are not what bother me about passing time. It is the perfidious nature of the deeds of time that brings me to my knees.  Time is a shameless charlatan.

When we decided to home educate, we knew we would not miss any of the milestones - we had reserved a front row seat in each of children's lives.  Every year, Peter and I acknowledge that when we are sharing a park bench quietly, many years from now, we will never ever regret the extra time we have had with each of them.  It is why we keep doing it.  That, and the fact that it's so darn right in every way.

So, we have given our time and it has been so right.

With great clarity, I can recall the look in each of their eyes when they cracked the code and took off with reading.  The daily casual breakfasts followed by rapid-fire discussions of current events, the palpable satisfaction for an essay well-written and the relief at completing a science project - with all of these things time lures me in, allowing me to imagine that the four of them have a place in my life that will never change and that I have an unchanging place in theirs.  No.  They all have very bright futures, that's for sure, but futures where mom and dad move to the background.  While we work hard to guide and nurture, ensuring success when that moment of separation arrives, we are completely flabbergasted when it all goes well, and they walk off into the sunset.

I have not experienced anything that so thoroughly unhinges and yet is a good thing.

With John back at Penn and Nora in Eastern Europe, I am unmoored.  Floating through the days, I realize that time has played a mephitic trick on me.  I thought things would never change.  I thought that we would be ushering in every Autumn together, every Winter, Spring and Summer, too.

But time has proved me very silly indeed.

Although I am temporarily stumped, Sir Time, I do not intend to change my ways, because, in the end, I really do win.

"So teach us to number our days, that we may get a heart of wisdom."  Psalm 90:12

A day filled with welcoming smiles .....

Today, my husband and I delivered our precious daughter to AFS Orientation staff in New York. The big smiles and open arms were such a welcome sight.   This encomiastic welcome lifted a heavy weight from our hearts and made it easier for us to walk back to our car, after the many hugs and kisses goodbye.  It's true, our daughter's chutzpah is the stuff of movies.  She has begun the venture of a lifetime!   In six months, we will go back to New York to pick her up, and in between, she is going to have an incredible new chapter of life at the foot of the Alps in Hungary at the Austrian border just 1/2 hour from Vienna.

Where she will be (and where the sun and stars will rush to meet her!)....

But that's not all.

When we got home, we took John back to UPenn to begin his sophomore year.  Again, every parent we met and every student we saw was wearing a smile from ear to ear.  Each person we met was happier than the next. At Penn, everyone knows they are lucky to be there and everyone shows it.  How much easier it is to turn around and walk back to the car when there are happy people surrounding your son or daughter!  His apartment this year might have one of the best views of any apartment in Philadelphia.

His apartment is on the very top floor  !!

The view is just stunning - a spacious 4 bedroom ... heck, I'm jealous !!

And so the day wraps up on a smile.  We said goodbye to Nora for six months and we sent our son back to college, halving our household's dependents in just 8 hours.  Again, I'm a little dizzy.  But the smiling faces we greeted along the way really did make all the difference.  

Dizzying summer.....

Summers should be restorative.  Mine rarely are.  I am so glad this season it almost over so I can merely continue the daunting job of home education while running a household.  I look forward to it like a vacation, and, well, that's just wrong, you know?

The summer (not yet over!) went like this....

At the outset, John was juggling three jobs but his "rowing" car went to car heaven in early June and he has not yet replaced it.  The challenges this lack of transportation presented to my life cannot be expressed using words appropriate for this blog (!) But, in spite of this, he held a job as a steel grinder, truck driver, welder and kept his job at Wharton Global Initiatives AND had an internship at a Russian law firm in Philadelphia.  Mercifully, this grew his bank account sufficiently to ensure that his stomach will not go empty during his sophomore year at UPenn.

Nora took a part time job at Wharton Global Initiatives, but in late June she left for Malaysia and Singapore, one of 16 hand-picked high school students in America to go!  She had an exotic and exciting time in the jungles of Malaysia and under the city lights of Singapore while doing sustainability research. (I, on the other hand, continued to teleport from Philadelphia to NJ at an alarming pace, to keep up with my other kid's lives.)

No sooner did I get her on the plane, that I had to turn around and drive Andy to Brown University where he took a pre-college program in DNA Science and Biotechnology.  He had the time of his life!  He did not want to leave, but two weeks later, I drove back to Rhode Island to get him and never missed a beat in my rocket-science, precision scheduling in service to the other busy Laberee-lings.  Before I knew it, the day arrived to head to JFK airport to pick up Nora!  Once home, Nora returned to her job at Wharton and her volunteer work at Academy of Natural Sciences.

And for a few days everyone was under the same roof.  But not for long.

Time to go back to Brown to deliver Andy to a competitive row camp and John was preparing to go to Russia for a few weeks and the paperwork needed for this transaction actually does require rocket-science.

Once I got John off for Russia, I headed back to Brown to get Andy.  Soon after Andy got back into life at Labereeland, John returned from Russia.   By this time, I had confessed to a nagging dizziness.

That brings us to the present moment.

While waiting for phone calls and texts from far-away places to get news about the safety of my brave travelers, I am sure I completed my tragic metamorphosis from brunette to grey-haired gorgon. The mirror does not lie.

The last leg ...the saddest leg of the summer....is preparing to send Nora, my rising senior, to Hungary, where she will live for six months.  This is in 4 days.

I can't post about Nora's departure yet, because I promised her I would not cry until she was up in the air.

heavy sigh....

Yes, summers are great.  But I'd much rather have September through May, than the bedlam of June through August !

Summer Reading binge....

This 10 year old was ecstatic when he learned that his favorite Erin Hunter series, The Seekers, had a sequel!!  It is called The Seekers, Return to the Wild.  Only a Seekers book could have interrupted his new passion, The Warriors, by the same author.  So he quickly finished the second Warriors book (a series of over 20 books!) to return to where his heart is, with Toklo, a Seekers bear.

I guess we will now be toggling between the two series, and at the rate of 1 book per week, he will finish this year!

                                                   Meet the Warriors:

Meet the Seekers:

Meet the animal-loving, enchanted 10 year old:

The wisdom of a liberal arts education ....

Regarding a liberal arts education - here is a sobering look at trends from Business Insider.  I have taken the liberty of pasting the whole article below, because every word is golden.  However, if you only read the following words, you will get the gist and I hope be inspired to read it all.

A 2010 study from Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa found that students majoring in liberal arts fields see " significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills over time than students in other fields of study." 

De-emphasizing, de-funding, and  demonizing the humanities means that students don't get trained well in the things that are the hardest to teach once at a job: thinking and writing clearly. 

My p.s.  -  With the US government exercising unprecedented control over the lives of its citizens, it is more important than ever before that we know how to think and express ourselves clearly.  Otherwise, we have nothing more than a global society of sheep.

The article:

The decades-long war against English and the other humanities has succeeded in many ways, which has had some unintended and very negative effects, according to a new report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Parents don't read to their children as much, K-12 humanities teachers are not as well-trained as STEM ones, federal funding for international education is down 41% over four years, and many college students graduate without being able to write clearly.

Although humanities degrees are not in total freefall, the bigger problem centers on the  decline in pre-college humanities education and in the liberal arts curriculum in college.

Humanities get a tiny fraction of the federal funding that STEM programs do. Many schools, public ones in particular, are already under huge financial pressure, so they're going to focus more of their energies on the things that they can get others to pay for:

Humanities Commission

That means fewer offerings, less faculty, and a decline in the sort of introductory and mandatory classes that used to be standard in college. 

The result is not only relatively fewer humanities majors but also a generation of students who get out of school and don't know how to write well or express themselves clearly. 

 The New York Times' Verlyn Klinkenborg, who has spent time teaching writing to both undergrads and graduate students at places like Harvard, Yale, Pomona, Sarah Lawrence, and Columbia'sGraduate School of Journalism, reports that kids are shockingly ill-prepared:

Each semester I hope, and fear, that I will have nothing to teach my students because they already know how to write. And each semester I discover, again, that they don’t.

They can assemble strings of jargon and generate clots of ventriloquistic syntax. They can meta-metastasize any thematic or ideological notion they happen upon. And they get good grades for doing just that. But as for writing clearly, simply, with attention and openness to their own thoughts and emotions and the world around them — no.

Those are undergraduate and even graduate students at some of the top colleges and universities in the country who have chosen to focus on writing to a certain extent. Things are presumably even worse elsewhere.

A 2010 study from Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa found that students majoring in liberal artsfields see " significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills over time than students in other fields of study." 

De-emphasizing, de-funding, and  demonizing the humanities means that students don't get trained well in the things that are the hardest to teach once at a job: thinking and writing clearly. 

CEOs, including Jeff Bezos , Logitech's Bracken Darrell , Aetna's Mark Bertolini , and legendary Intel co-founder Andy Grove emphasize how essential clear writing and the liberal arts are. STEM alone isn't enough. Even Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke recently gave English majors a shout-out.    

The point is that good writing isn't just a "utilitarian skill" as Klinkenborg  puts it but something that takes a great deal of practice, thought, and engagement with history and what other people have written.

Let's hope that argument keeps the field alive.