Teaching Those Home-Grown Values
The best people I know home-school their children. As the birth of our third child approaches (in March), I look upon those friends with awe. And I wonder, is it more difficult than it used to be to raise children these days?
Well, it certainly depends upon what we’re comparing it to. Bearing and raising children before the age of antibiotics, for example, must have been a heartbreaking process. So many children lovingly brought into the world succumbed to illness. Diphtheria, whooping cough and tetanus, which we glide past with one vaccine, represented untold misery for millions over the years. One reason people had larger families then was that only a percentage of children born were expected to survive into adulthood.
It wasn’t just children who were felled by illness. Childbirth itself was an extremely hazardous process for women, and many, many men were left widowers with tiny infants to raise.
Today, almost all of us are mercifully free of worries about infectious disease, food, clothing or shelter for our children. But for many of us, other, though to be sure less calamitous, worries have taken their place.
We worry about raising children of good character and solid habits in a culture - emphatically including the public schools - that teaches all too many of the wrong lessons. Those who would like to raise respectful, hard-working, morally sensitive children uncorrupted by premature sexuality feel besieged by movies, advertising, television, popular music, the National Education Association and the U.S. judicial system.
Many conservatives, particularly religious conservatives, are looking for a way to escape or a place to create a counterculture. That’s what home schooling represents - an archipelago of dissenters stretching across the country, shielding their children from education fads, “values clarification,” outcome-based education, condom distribution, multiculturalism, drugs, sex and alcohol. (This is not to suggest that all public schools are infected with some or all of those troubles, but enough are to propel the home-schooling movement.)
Home schoolers tend to lace academic work liberally with Bible reading and prayer. Though this would not put them out of the mainstream of public education in the United States for the first 150 years of the republic, it is now the mark of a dissident.
Though I don’t think I have the talent, the patience or the time to home-school my own kids, it is impossible to read an account like that of Holly Kinch in the November/December issue of The American Enterprise and not be moved by the sweetness of her home school. She, a Cornell graduate, and her computer software-designing husband, Richard, have seven children.
“This morning, I am awakened by 3-month-old John wanting to nurse. … As I am dozing back to sleep, Mary, the 2-year-old, scampers into my bedroom and jumps in bed. … Somehow I slip out without disturbing the two bodies on either side of mine.
“Christina, age 4, greets me with a sleepy ‘good morning mama.’ Elisabeth (6) is up too. … She is at the table writing a story. … The girls help clear the table and clean up. They then busy themselves playing mommy, sweetie and baby - their indigenous version of playing ‘house.’ Time to get the boys moving.”
She wakes the boys by reading a chapter from Matthew. “After the Bible, we plunge on through ‘Oliver Twist’ until about 10:00. … Now the real juggling act begins. The girls want to go outside. Elisabeth needs to practice phonograms and reading. Mary is stuck trying to get into her shirt and is crying for help. James wants me to give him his writing lesson. Caleb has a question about unit multipliers. Josh is trying to engage me over ideas from the Conservative Chronicle about welfare. …
“After dinner, Mary gets the Bible so Richard can read the chapter from Proverbs for the day. She and Christina act out the lessons, which is great fun for all. Josh gets the guitar and tries to remember the chords Dad has been teaching him. Following a few tunes, the girls clear the table, and the boys wash dishes and vacuum the carpet.
“I am a mother at home teaching my children. I’m not employed, but I love my work.”
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