By Vorjack

This is a continuation of my review for Robert Kunzman’s Write These Laws on Your Children: Inside the World of Conservative Christian Homeschooling.

Getting Testy about Testing

For an atheist who’s only experience with Christian home-schooling is the movie Jesus Camp, this book may come as a surprise. Many of the families are open minded and flexible — but only up to a point. It’s clear that they all fall on the right side of the political and religious spectrum.

None of the families are exactly getting a NCSE approved education on evolution. The families use books like Eagle’s Wings: Considering God’s Creation (A Creative Biblical Approach to Natural Science), books which are laced with biblical quotes and which give the standard arguments against natural selection.

Pullquote: “We’re going to be opening up our Kingfisher History Encyclopedia and read about how people evolved thirty million years ago from a speck of dust or whatever”

While Kunzman spends only a few paragraphs talking about this problem — really, does anyone find the above surprising? — it’s one of the most frustrating things about the conservative Christian home-school movement. Evolution is at once very simple (“dead organisms don’t breed”), and at the same time very difficult to really understand. As evidence, I suggest looking at all the misunderstandings we see from commentators on the science blogs.

Since evolution is so easy to misunderstand or caricature, it seems important that kids get an accurate explanation at the outset. It doesn’t bode well when one parent promises to discuss evolution with their child by saying, “We’re going to be opening up our Kingfisher History Encyclopedia and read about how people evolved thirty million years ago from a speck of dust or whatever; those are not things from which I’ll shelter them.” (203)

It would be wonderful to see some standardized testing that would ensure that the child has received an accurate understanding of the principles, even if they do not accept them. This will happen the day Billy Graham Jr. french-kisses the Pope.

Throughout the book, Kunzman suggests standardized testing for basic things like reading and math. The tests would be method neutral, but give an assessment of how much of the basics that child understands. While at least one mother subscribes to a service that provides such tests, most are actively hostile to the notion of any regulation or outside group interfering in their education process.

Passing on the Traditions

Pullquote: “I want my kids to think like me, not because I’m perfect, but because I love God and I want to follow him.”

Most of us are good pluralists, and want our children to grow up and have certain basic things: health, happiness, stability, and a willingness to allow others to have the same. How they go about achieving those things is negotiable. While most of us feel that we’ve found a way that works, we’re usually willing to allow that other ways may work better for other people. In other words, there is no single right path to take in life.

Broadly speaking, most to the parents in this book believe that there is one right way. While they pay lip-service to allowing their kids to choose their own path, they adamantly ensuring their kids learn all about the single correct path. They make little or no distinction between education and upbringing; the child does not learn math at school and morality at home, but should get everything as one package. Home-schooling is a way of life, a seamless part of the the whole.

Here’s how one mother put it:

“I want my kids to think like me, not because I’m perfect, but because I love God and I want to follow him. [...] I want them to look and say, ‘Mom and Dad showed us how to know God; they’re not perfect, they screw up, but they showed us’ — and I want those beliefs to become theirs, obviously. (212)

Contrast this with Robert M. Price. On a recent podcast discussing atheist parenting, Price suggested that parents teach their kids their own religious traditions and beliefs, but say, “This is what I believe, but I may be wrong and many people believe other things for many good reasons. You have to figure out what you believe yourself.”

This conflict is at the center of the debate: how does the parent ensure that their child understands the “right” way, while still allowing them the freedom to come to their own conclusions? What is the dividing line between education and indoctrination?

Each of the six families in this book are still grappling with this question, each fitfully answering it as best they can. Kunzman admirably allows each family to tell their own story, while still evaluating each with the eye of a parent and an educator. He provides no solid answers, but the insight he provides is absolutely essential to the ongoing debate.

Vorjack is a librarian/archivist and a public historian, living with his wife in history-soaked Albany, New York.

By Vorjack

My mother recently admitted to me that if she had it to do over again, I would have been home-schooled. This was a shock, since my mother recently retired after 40 years of being a middle school science teacher. My mother has resisted all attempts to get her to teach outside her field, yet she wanted to teach me math and history?

But she probably could have done better than the soccer coach who taught me health, or the English teacher who simply had us read from the history text book. There’s no way around the fact that our local school system was below average. There’s also the fact that I was an unmotivated student. Perhaps if she could have controlled my education herself, she could have kept me interested. Or at least insured that I got my homework done.

There are many reasons why parents might wish to home-school. On one side you have the liberal-ish “unschool” movement, which stresses the benefits of an individualized education. Even more extreme are the “no-schoolers,” who reject curriculum and allow the kids to study what they want, how they want. On the other end you have the religious sects who want to insure that their children receive an education that is compatible with their traditions, and prevent their kids from being exposed to harmful influences.

Home-schooling as a movement remains poorly studied. It can be traced back just over forty years, or just over twenty for the conservative Christian version. Differing reasons for home-schooling meet with different school systems and differing state regulations for home-schooling, resulting in a complex and diverse mix of experiences for both parents and children.

Studies of Studying

Pullquote: “The more of the system’s tentacles that you can break off from you, the healthier you’re going to be.”

That’s what makes Robert Kunzman’s book, Write These Laws on Your Children, so valuable right now. Kunzman has spent two years traveling across the country and visiting six families of conservative Christian home-schoolers. He provides us with six case studies, interlaced with essays about various aspects of the home-school movement, like the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) and Generation Joshua. While we still lack data about the movement as a whole, we can at least get a look at what’s going on inside those homes.

What we immediately find is that “what’s going on” depends on which home you look in. There is tremendous variety within the movement, and Kunzman looks at how each family deals with issues of education, citizenship, diversity and home-school regulations.

The families range from the Palmer family in a LA suburb to the Branson family in Tennessee. Debbie Palmer has a degree in Child Psychology and several years of teaching experience. Her nine children benefit from this, but one girl wanted art classes her mother couldn’t provide, so she was allowed to go to a public high school. Several of the children correspond with non-Christian friends, and the parents play hands-off.

The Branson family is different. Kunzman handles each case with balance and humanity, but it’s clear that sometimes things just aren’t working. The mother seems strained and impatient, and her teaching is haphazard. She’s dealing with seven kids, and has an older child in the hospital following a car accident; there are no substitutes for this teacher.

The father is a frequent distraction and an actual impediment to learning. He’s a big fan of corporal punishment, and a follower of Michael & Debi Pearl, authors of the extremely controversial To Train Up a Child. The father is also extremely anti-authoritarian — “The more of the system’s tentacles that you can break off from you, the healthier you’re going to be” — at least, he’s against every authority not his own.

As a mother who home-schools once said to me, “To be an effective home-schooler, you have to have the right teacher and the right student.” In other words, sometimes the best of intentions and all the resources in the world aren’t enough. What works for one family won’t necessarily work for another, nor will the same techniques work for every child in the family. The Palmer family has its problems, but seems to function smoothly. The Branson family does not.

To Be Continued …

As this is turning into a hefty review, I’ll break it up into two sections. Next time, home-schooling and evolution.

Vorjack is a librarian/archivist and a public historian, living with his wife in history-soaked Albany, New York.