Resolution and Resistance in Teaching Reading

Last updated on: August 28, 2022 at 6:03 pm By Gene Veith

Being able to read well is the prerequisite for learning everything else. So teaching kids how to read is the most important task of primary education. But how to do that has been controversial. Now, though, research has settled the issue about the best way of teaching children how to read. But some teachers and school districts are refusing to follow the science.

Time Magazine, no less (not a conservative publication) has published an eye-opening article on the subject by Belinda Luscombe entitled Inside the Massive Effort to Change the Way Kids Are Taught to Read.

Traditionally, reading has been taught by phonics. That is, attention to the sounds the letters symbolize, which in turn are put together to form words. But since the 1980s, a different approach emerged and came to dominate elementary school reading curricula and classrooms. The whole language approach teaches children to recognize entire words visually, by what they look like. Students are also encouraged to identify words by their contexts, to “construct meaning,” and to immerse themselves in reading material relevant to them. The assumption is that learning to read can happen “naturally,” like learning to speak. (See this for a fuller account of the approach.)

Unfortunately, since the whole language approach has been introduced, reading proficiency rates have plummeted. In 2019, only 35% of fourth-graders were proficient in reading. Only 21% of low-income children, 18% of black children, and 23% of Hispanic children were proficient.

Yes, some children can learn to read with the whole language method, but the mental gymnastics it requires are beyond the comprehension of many other children. Good students can figure out how to read no matter what method is used to teach them, but others are at a loss when they are expected to “drop everything and read” when they don’t know how to read and the ability to do so is not coming “naturally.”

As university teacher training programs and curriculum publishers went all in for whole language, classical schools, homeschoolers, and traditionalist teachers stuck with phonics.

In 2000, the National Reading Panel, consisting of a large group of literacy experts, met to settle the issue of what method of teaching reading works best. Reviewing hundreds of studies, they issued a report that concluded that what students need in order to learn how to read well is phonics. That is to say, “phonemic awareness” (attention to sounds), “instruction in phonics,” the development of fluency, vocabulary instruction (learning new words), teaching the comprehension of texts, and preparing teachers to do all of these things.

Such a finding should be obvious. Our writing system is alphabetic, breaking down words into their constituent sounds that are symbolized by letters. School-aged children mostly know how to speak. If they learn 26 letters and 44 sound combinations, plus some exceptions to the rules, they can read. If they must learn the appearance of words, they will have to memorize thousands of shapes for basic literacy, and they will have no strategy to decode any new words they encounter. Mass literacy arose in the West because the alphabet made reading easy, whereas in, for example, China, whose writing system is based on ideograms–a complicated visual representation of each word–literacy until recently was restricted to a small elite. It is just harder to learn to read in the Chinese writing system. Whole language exchanges our alphabetic system for an ideographic system, with predictable results.

The National Reading Panel report is entitled Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction. This has led to further work confirming the superiority of phonics known as “the science of reading.” Since the report, some states have called for the implementation of “evidence-based” or “research-based” curriculum. All of those are references to the use of phonics to teach reading.

The Wikipedia article on Whole Language gives an excellent summary not only of the approach but also why the science has demonstrated conclusively that it does not work. For example, “Unlike language, literacy is not a human universal but a human invention (much as children learn to walk without being taught, but not how to drive a car or fly a helicopter).”

The new science of reading has led to a revival of phonics in many schools. Where “evidence-based” approaches have been adopted, reading scores have shot up. Nevertheless, opposition to teaching phonics has arisen from teachers, not because they disagree with the research but because they want to teach something else.

In the Time article, Luscombe reports on what happened in Oakland, California:

As a teacher in Oakland, Calif., Kareem Weaver helped struggling fourth- and fifth-grade kids learn to read by using a very structured, phonics-based reading curriculum called Open Court. It worked for the students, but not so much for the teachers. “For seven years in a row, Oakland was the fastest-gaining urban district in California for reading,” recalls Weaver. “And we hated it.”

The teachers felt like curriculum robots—and pushed back. “This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do,” says Weaver, describing their response to the approach. “So we fought tooth and nail as a teacher group to throw that out.”. . .“Those who wanted to fight for social justice, they figured that this new progressive way of teaching reading [whole language] was the way,” he says.”

After reading rates plunged with the “new progressive way of teaching, Weaver is working to bring phonics back:

Now Weaver is heading up a campaign to get his old school district to reinstate many of the methods that teachers resisted so strongly: specifically, systematic and consistent instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics. . . .

Ironically, though teachers invoked “social justice” to oppose phonics, the NAACP and other civil rights leaders are getting behind Weaver’s attempt to bring it back. This is because improving the lot of black children requires that they be taught how to read. It is not “social justice” when only 19% of black children can read. As Weaver said, “We abandoned what worked because we didn’t like how it felt to us as adults, when actually, the social-justice thing to do is to teach them explicitly how to read.”

Another catalyst for returning to phonics, according to Luscombe, has been the parents of dyslexic children, who simply cannot learn with whole language but definitely can with phonics. Their lobbying has caused state legislatures to call for “evidence-based” reading instruction. Some 30 states have enacted laws or new policies to that effect, and 18 have passed laws requiring that teacher preparation programs make sure teachers known how to teach phonics. Recently, New York City mayor Eric Adams has announced that schools in his city–the biggest school district in the country–would be required to use phonics.

This is case in which reality has broken in upon progressive educators, but many teachers are still pushing back against it in the name of their ideology. And, to be fair, because they were never taught to teach phonics and whole language is all they know how to do. The blame here goes to university Departments of Education. But things might be changing. Still, what Luscombe said about Oakland’s phonics program is telling: “It worked for the students, but not so much for the teachers.” She gives Kareem Weaver, the teacher who is working to bring back phonics, the last word:

“The lament is that when we started using new materials, the kids weren’t learning how to read, and to explain that, rather than looking at our materials and what we were doing, we focused on the kids and said, ‘Something’s wrong with them. Something’s wrong with our community. They’re too traumatized or too broken. Their families aren’t good enough. They’re poor.’ We explained the lack of learning in those terms, as opposed to saying, ‘Wait a second, what are we doing? And what did we do when things were working?’”

Photo via pxhere, CC0, Public Domain

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Eliminating the Constitution

Last updated on: August 31, 2022 at 8:32 am By Gene Veith

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Progressives are accusing conservatives promoting voting security as “attacking our democracy.” And they brand Trump supporters who rioted at the Capitol as “insurrectionists” who tried to “overthrow our government.” But some progressives are openly calling for the overthrow of our government. They are doing so by advocating the elimination of our Constitution and replacing it with a system of government that they think will better advance their causes.

We have blogged about proposals to replace our Constitution before. But now there are calls to eliminate all constitutions in favor of pure majority-rules democracy.

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, in article on the subject, cites MSNBC commentator and the Nation’s correspondent Elie Mystal who called the Constitution “trash.” He also cited Georgetown law professor Rosa Brooks for saying that we are “slaves” to the Constitution, which has become the problem for our country.

Their main complaint and that of other progressives is that the Constitution was “written by slave owners.” Such an ad hominem argument is not, strictly speaking, factual, since the Constitution is a collectively written document originally ratified by abolitionist representatives as well as slave owners and amended over the course of American history. Those who read the Constitution will find that the 13th Amendment (1865) eliminates slavery, the 14th Amendment (1868) affirms the rights of all Americans regardless of race, and the 15th Amendment (1870) forbids limiting the right to vote on account of race.

But Turley brings up a more sophisticated critique of the Constitution and of American “Constitutionalism.” The New York Times recently published an opinion piece by Harvard law professor Ryan D. Doerfler and Yale law professor Samuel Moyn entitled The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed.

The authors chastise their fellow liberals for trying to “reclaim” the Constitution with progressive legal theories or tinkering with the Supreme Court or making other changes. “The real need,” they say, “is not to reclaim the Constitution, as many would have it, but instead to reclaim America from constitutionalism.”

The idea of constitutionalism is that there needs to be some higher law that is more difficult to change than the rest of the legal order. Having a constitution is about setting more sacrosanct rules than the ones the legislature can pass day to day. . . .

But constitutions — especially the broken one we have now — inevitably orient us to the past and misdirect the present into a dispute over what people agreed on once upon a time, not on what the present and future demand for and from those who live now. This aids the right, which insists on sticking with what it claims to be the original meaning of the past. . . .

One reason for these woeful outcomes is that our current Constitution is inadequate, which is why it serves reactionaries so well. Starting with a text that is famously undemocratic, progressives are forced to navigate hard-wired features, like the Electoral College and the Senate, designed as impediments to redistributive change while drawing on much vaguer and more malleable resources like commitments to due process and equal protection. . . .

By leaving democracy hostage to constraints that are harder to change than the rest of the legal order, constitutionalism of any sort demands extraordinary consensus for meaningful progress.

This mindset would work against the project some progressives are pursuing of writing a new constitution, since that too would involve “constitutionalism.” What Doerfler and Moyn advocate in their essay is pure democracy, governance by statute, based on majoritarian rule alone. They exhibit a naive assumption that the majority at any given time will be progressive and will advance the progressive agenda. Sometimes a majority of Americans vote for Barack Obama and sometimes a majority vote for Ronald Reagan. One majoritarian government would likely dismantle the achievements of the previous government.

Even more problematic is that pure majority rule has no provision to protect the rights of minorities. Including the racial minorities progressives profess to defend. Without an overarching system of legal rights, which can overrule particular majority-passed laws–that is to say, without constitutionalism–minorities would have no protections whatsoever.

The authors say that we can break out of constitutionalism not by packing the Supreme Court–which continues to play the constitutionalist game–but to “pack the Union with new states.”

That link is to an astonishing article in the Harvard Law Review that advocates not just admitting the District of Columbia as a state, which can be done by a majority vote in Congress, but admitting its 127 neighborhoods as separate states! After all, the author frankly states, D.C. is reliably Democratic. Those 127 new states, or perhaps fewer, grouped into different configurations but enough to constitute with other blue states 3/4 of the states necessary to amend the Constitution, would then pass amendments that would dismantle constitutionalism by turning the Senate into an advisory body like the House of Lords and make other changes to turn America into a pure democracy.

Again, the naiveté is breath-taking. Those 127 states, under the current constitution, would have 254 senators and 255 electoral votes! The District of Columbia would have complete dominion over all of the other 50 states. Why would they give that up?

Plus, the talk of states raises the question of what would become of them? Would there still be state and local governments, each governed by majority of voters? If so, progressives would not like what some states would likely vote to do. Or is the idea that the whole nation would vote on laws for everybody? In which case, there would be no need for states at all. But that would effectively cut off local citizens from the ruling government, which would be far away and many times more powerful. This undermines the very virtues of democracy, in which people have a say in their government and choose their rulers. D.C., the big cities, and the populous coasts would have unlimited power, but citizens in flyover country would be cut off from democracy. This would be even worse in the absence of “constitutionalist” rights and processes to protect citizens and to sort out the jurisdictions.

Notice how this movement among progressives accounts for the aptly-named Democrats’ rhetoric on the “threats to democracy.” Not threats to the Constitution, though politicians in that party will have sworn to “protect and defend” that document in their oaths of office, nor threats to individual rights. Democracy is separable from those concepts in the minds of many progressives, and they are willing to sacrifice them accordingly.

Prof. Turley gives other problems with eliminating “constitutionalism” in favor of pure democracy. He quotes James Madison, the father of American “constitutionalism””

Pure democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. (Federalist 10)

Furthermore, as Plato notes, drawing on the history of Greek city states, pure democracies almost always devolve into tyranny. But perhaps, for some on the Left, that would be not a bug but a feature.

HT: Paul Veith

Image by Mara_J via depositphotos.com, attributed free license

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The “Fictionalist” Approach to Religion

Last updated on: August 27, 2022 at 11:17 am By Gene Veith

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I have heard it said that one can be Jewish without believing in God. I came across an article by a rabbi who tears that notion to shreds. But the problem he cites and the issues he raises are relevant for Christians–and those who claim to be Christians–also.

Warren Goldstein, the chief rabbi of South Africa, has written an article for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, a wire service, entitled Judaism without God? God forbid, says South Africa’s chief rabbi.

He is responding to an earlier article by Andrew Silow-Carroll, who describes the phenomenon as “fictionalism.” Silow-Carroll defines the term as “pretending to follow a set of beliefs in order to reap the benefits of a set of actions.” He quotes philosopher Philip Goff, who relates the term also to Christianity:

Religious fictionalists hold that the contentious claims of religion, such as “God exists” or “Jesus rose from the dead” are all, strictly speaking, false. They nonetheless think that religious discourse, as part of the practice in which such discourse is embedded, has a pragmatic value that justifies its use. To put it simply: God is a useful fiction.

Silow-Carroll gives the example of a Jewish professor who fasts on Yom Kippur and celebrates Passover even though he is an atheist. “It’s just what we Jews do,” he explained. “It keeps me connected to a community I value.” He went on to say, “When it feels like the world is falling apart, I seek refuge in religious rituals — but not because I believe my prayers will be answered.”

Silow-Carroll respects this position, seeing Judaism and religion in general in terms of actions, ethics, and ritual, rather than beliefs and doctrines. Fictionalists differ from humanists and new atheists because they keep God and the observances of religion, including prayer and worship, in the picture. They just think God is fictional, prayer is a useful form of meditation, and worship is beautiful.

I have heard from Catholic fictionalists, who say, “Of course, I don’t believe all this stuff, but I am a Catholic, and this is what Catholics do. Also liberal Protestants, including Episcopal bishops who publicly reject Christ’s resurrection, but soberly intone the Easter liturgy. In fact, much of liberal Protestant theology is fictionalism, denying the tenets of Christian belief while still carrying on the ministry of the church–preaching, teaching, leading Bible studies, conducting worship services, praying, singing hymns, and offering spiritual counseling–as being somehow valuable, even though they consider Christian teachings like the Trinity, the Deity of Christ, the atonement, salvation, eternal life, and the Word of God to be untrue. They don’t believe the Bible, but consider it to be a good piece of fiction, even though, as C. S. Lewis shows, fiction written like the Bible would not be invented until the 1700s.

I suspect this can be found also among evangelicals and even confessional Lutherans. Pastors, I suppose, have a profession to consider, so that if they lose their faith, they have to keep on in their jobs. They become fictionalists, either teaching their whole congregation to be the same, or, probably more commonly, keeping their unbelief to themselves, but persisting in the traditional forms.

I suppose in the latter case, the members of the congregation can still receive the sacraments and hear God’s Word from a faithless preacher. At least that’s what the orthodox side said in opposing the Donatist heretics. Meanwhile, some laymen might come to church to keep a spouse happy or because they enjoy the music or even because they think religion conveys psychological or social benefits, even though they don’t believe in it themselves.

Rabbi Goldstein refutes Jewish fictionalism, saying, among other things, that,

if you remove God from Judaism it ceases to be recognizable as such. When we say “may the Omnipresent comfort you” at a funeral , or “God who blessed bride and groom” at a wedding, or “God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh” during Kiddush, or “God is one” every morning and evening, and on our deathbed — these are all just fictions? If so, Judaism is meaningless; it becomes a system based on falsehoods. . . .

The only form of Jewish identity that has proven itself capable of surviving more than a few generations is one rooted in the complete embrace acceptance of the truth of all the factual claims made by Judaism, including belief in God and His authorship of the Torah. Throughout our long history no Jewish community has ever survived without a belief in the foundations of our faith. A pretend Judaism won’t cut it. Only the real thing is worthy of us and our children — and a guarantee for a bright Jewish future.

One could say the same about Christianity. A pretend Christianity won’t cut it.

This syndrome would be an example of “holding the form of religion but denying the power of it” (2 Timothy 3:5). Simply holding onto the forms is not just a matter of denying the doctrines of the religion, as fictionalists assume. It also denies the power that those doctrines testify to and that the forms of the religion convey.

As Hamann reminds us, doctrines are not just abstract ideas, to be debated or proven or refuted or disagreed with. Rather, they are mighty realities that we neglect to our ruin.

Put another way, religion without faith is dead.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

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The Inflation Expansion Act

Last updated on: August 27, 2022 at 9:29 am By Gene Veith

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By executive order, President Biden is canceling much of the college debt incurred from student loans. His measure will pay off $10,000 for former students making under $125,000 per year or $250,000 per couple. Former students who also took Pell Grants, outright grants given to lower-income recipients, will get $20,000 of debt relief. The average student loan debt is $39,351, with an average monthly payment of $393.

The administration is calling this action an extension of the HEROES Act, the 2003 law that allowed for suspension of student loan payments during national emergencies, the emergency back then being the 9/11 terrorist attacks. and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Today our national emergency is COVID.

HEROES is an acronym for “Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions Act.” Is COVID still a “national emergency”? And are the difficulties recent graduates have in repaying their loans really related to COVID? Haven’t they been complaining about this long before the pandemic?

Referring to the debt relief package as the “HEROES Act” is more Orwellian language, like calling the recently-passed bill for climate, healthcare, and raising taxes the Inflation Reduction Act. The justification for that title is that the increased taxes and more money for the IRS would reduce the deficit by $102 billion over 10 years.

Well, the student loan forgiveness will cost over $330 billion over 10 years. So much for the much-hyped savings of the previous bill. As the Wall Street Journal editors quipped, a more accurate name for the student loan package would be the Inflation Expansion Act.

The executive action also prolongs the COVID-relief moratorium on having to make payments on student loans, which has been in place since 2020, through to the end of the year, which will cost another $15-$20 billion.

The true cost is likely to be even more. Will freshmen enrolling this fall expect to pay back all of their student loans, if the upper classmen and recent graduates didn’t have to? In government, one-time relief measures easily turn into entitlements. Expect for the government to start subsidizing $10-$20,000 or more of everybody’s college expenses from now on.

And, once that happens, since the soaring cost of college has already been enabled by easy-money federal loans, expect colleges and universities to raise their prices another $10-$20,000.

The name of the program is telling. When the HEROES Act was first authorized, our heroes were members of the military, police officers, and firefighters. Today our heroes are evidently college kids and recent graduates.

Soldiers, cops, and firefighters likely don’t have a college degree. But they, along with the 65% of Americans who don’t have a bachelor’s degree will be paying for those who do.

This measure will benefit the Democrats’ main constituents, affluent college graduates. Over the course of their careers, they will make much more than the proletariat, whom leftists used to care about. For their financial woes, they are being told to “improve themselves” by going to college, as if blue collar workers–upon whom our productive economy depends–are of less value than white collar college graduates.

I know from personal experience, as someone who has drunk higher education to the dregs myself, sent three children to college, and spent some four decades as a professor and administrator in academic, that having to repay student loans is difficult for graduates just starting their careers.

But this debt relief plan is just unfair–to those who have already paid off their student loans, to those who will be taking loans in the future, and to taxpayers who didn’t go to college but now have to pay the bill for those who did.

UPDATE: To those who are arguing that President Biden’s “forgiving” student debt is like Jesus forgiving our sins, so that Christians shouldn’t object, Kylee Griswold points out that the whole point of the Gospel is that our debts to God are paid in full by the sacrifice of Christ. Yes, the government is paying off the debts by forcing taxpayers to cough up the money, but that is stealing, not atonement.

Illustration by Marco Verch, via Flickr, Creative Commons 2.0

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How to Be Really Transgressive

Last updated on: August 19, 2022 at 3:01 pm By Gene Veith

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Earlier this month, The New York Times, no less, published an opinion piece by Julia Yost entitled “New York’s Hottest Club Is the Catholic Church.”

It seems a cadre of cool kids–well, young adults–is embracing traditionalist Catholicism. Centered in the trendy “Dimes Square” neighborhood in New York City but going viral on podcasts and social media, this movement expresses itself with style as well as substance: the Latin Mass, rosaries, veils. “Reactionary motifs are chic,” says Yost. “Trump hats and ‘tradwife’ frocks, monarchist and anti-feminist sentiments.”

Yost says of this movement, “Its sensibility is more transgressive than progressive.” Young people like to rebel, and the postmodernist aesthetic itself seeks to be transgressive. But today, ironically, the status quo to be transgressed against is politically-correct progressivism. Yost writes,

Progressive morality, formulated in response to the remnants of America’s Christian culture, was once a vanguard. By 2020, the year of lockdowns and Black Lives Matter protests, progressivism had come to feel hegemonic in the social spaces occupied by young urban intellectuals. Traditional morality acquired a transgressive glamour. Disaffection with the progressive moral majority — combined with Catholicism’s historic ability to accommodate cultural subversion — has produced an in-your-face style of traditionalism.

But the issues go even deeper than this. There is a reason why, in Yost’s words, many young adults “prefer a system in which our moral obligations are not exhausted by the avoidance of wrongthink on race and patriarchy.” Woke progressivism goes against nature, the nature of young adults; that is, the natural needs that they yearn to fulfill at this stage of their lives.

These young traditionalists are repudiating “liberal-progressive dispensation that many young Americans find both malign and banal, she writes. “By disparaging traditional gender roles and defining human flourishing in meritocratic terms, progressive moralism militates against young people’s attainment of basic goods: marriage and procreation.” She cites popular podcaster and Catholic convert Honor Levy, who “has remarked that she was raised to ‘get a job.’ But her more profound desire was to start a family, a desire that conflicts with the imperatives of meritocracy.”

Yost admits that some of this trendiness may be more aesthetic than convictional, more performance than devotion. But Catholicism lends itself to aesthetics and performance.

I would think that conservative Protestantism could be equally transgressive, or even more so. Bring a snake handler from Appalachia to New York City, and I suspect he would shock even the denizens of Dimes Square, whether secularist or Catholic.

But I can understand how hipsters, punks, and Goths would be more attracted to Catholicism. There are limits, affinities, and class issues at play.

Could Lutheranism be similarly cool? Maybe. You tell me. I have definitely met quite a few cool Lutherans, though they seem different from the crowd Yost is writing about, though there are doubtless many parallels. Most of us Lutherans, I suppose, are of an age or stage in which we just don’t care whether we are cool or not, which may be the most transgressive gesture of all.

At any rate, Yost’s article has provoked a number of indignant responses that The New York Times would publish such a thing–such as Uh, Can the NYT Please Not Treat Catholic Reactionaries as a Fun Sexy Trend Story?–which basically prove her points.

One such example of an unhinged reaction against Catholicism and all Christianity, really, from the elite establishment is worth looking at in its own right, so tune in tomorrow.

HT: Steve Bauer

Photo: Young Adults in West–Mass at Chiswick by Mazur/catholicchurch.org.uk via Flickr, Creative Commons 2.0

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The Significance of the Home

Last updated on: August 15, 2022 at 4:24 pm By Gene Veith

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We often lament the disintegration of the family. Related, but not identical, to that is the disintegration of the home.

Yesterday we blogged about an essay from novelist and Christian convert Paul Kingsnorth reflecting on the significance of fireplaces, the Latin word for which is “focus,” in which he worried about the loss of “focus” in our homes. Indeed, he argues, in many ways our contemporary culture undermines the home and renders even those of us who have a roof over our heads to be essentially homeless.

From Kingsnorth’s essay The West Is Homeless:

Wendell Berry’s 1980 essay “Family Work” is a short meditation on the meaning of home, its disintegration under the pressures of modernity, and how it might, to some degree at least, be restored. Like so much of Berry’s work, it locates the centrepoint of human society in the home, and explains many of the failures of contemporary Western — specifically American — society as a neglect of that truth. The home, to Wendell Berry, is the place where the real stuff of life happens, or should: the coming-together of man and woman in partnership; the passing-down of skills and stories from elders; the raising and educating of children; the growing, cooking, storing and eating of food; the learning of practical skills, from construction to repair, tool-making to sewing; the conjuration of story and song around the fire.

In my lifetime, in my part of the world, the notion and meaning of ‘home’ has steadily crumbled under external pressure until it is little more than a word. The ideal (post)modern home is a dormitory, probably owned by a landlord or a bank, in which two or more people of varying ages and degrees of biological relationship sleep when they’re not out being employed by a corporation, or educated by the state in preparation for being employed by a corporation. The home’s needs are met through pushing buttons, swiping screens or buying-in everything from food to furniture; for who has time for anything else, or has been taught the skills to do otherwise?

Even back in 1980, Berry recognised that the home had become an “ideal” rather than a practical reality — precisely because the reality had been placed out of reach for many. What killed the home? Three things, said Berry: cars, mass media and public education. The first meant that both work and leisure could, for the first time in history, happen a long way from home. The second — “TV and other media” — have played a role, since the mid-20th century, in luring us all into a fantasy world of freedom from obligation, and a limitless, fun consumer lifestyle. “If you have a TV,” writes Berry, “your children will be subjected almost from the cradle to an overwhelming insinuation that all worth experiencing is somewhere else and that all worth having must be bought.” Finally, the school system is designed “to keep children away from the home as much as possible. Parents want their children kept out of their hair.” Schools exist to train children to fit into individualistic, consumer societies; to internalise and normalise their ethics and goals, and to prepare for a life serving their needs.

I hadn’t realized that no less than Wendell Berry, the widely respected author and thinker, provided such a conceptual basis for homeschooling in the 1980’s, before homeschooling became widely practiced.

Certainly the role of the home in “the growing, cooking, storing and eating of food” has changed. I just saw the statistic that, on the average, Americans spend only three dinners per week with their families.

Kingsnorth points out that in the pre-industrial times, economic labor was also centered in the home. The whole family pitched in with tending to the farm, or, in the case of craftsmen in the cities, making shoes, weaving cloth, working with metal, and selling the family’s ware in the markets. Industrialization sent men to work outside the home, and then feminism sent women to do the same. “The needs of business were sold to both sexes as a project of ‘liberation’ from home, family and place.” He says of his critique of feminism, “My point is not that women should get back into the kitchen: it is that we all should.”

Both Wendell Berry and Paul Kingsnorth believe, though, that the home can be recovered. We can, Kingsnorth writes, quoting Barry, “’try to make our homes centres of attention and interest’; to make them as productive and nurturing as we can.” Homeschooling has come back. Perhaps the technology that lets us work from home again, as our ancestors did, can play a part. Ultimately, though, “Making a home requires both men and women to sacrifice their own desires for that of the wider family.” And in a time when so many of us pursue our own individualistic desires to the point of not even wanting to have a family, that will be difficult. Though rewarding for those who discover the fulfillment that comes from selflessness, self-sacrifice, and love. That is to say, vocation.

Illustration: “A Happy Family” by Eugenio Zampighi (1859-1944), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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