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Another Vote for Homeschooling

by Christopher Chantrill
May 23, 2004 at 3:00 am

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IN FRIDAY’S Wall Street Journal, Diana West announced that she had removed her twin daughters from school and was now educating them at home: home-schooling them, as we now like to say.  It seemed to her that there was no way on “God’s green earth that [she] could possibly teach [her] girls less than they learned in that school.”  She was referring to the elementary school her children attended in Montgomery County, Maryland in fourth grade.

Of course, on top of learning nothing in school her children were also subjected to a farrago of PC-centric narrative: Columbus viewed from the bushes by a Hispaniolan girl, Thanksgiving celebrated as a diversity of cultures, and a poetry project that turned the classroom into a Greenwich village coffee-house with everyone dressed in artistical black.  As the postmodernists have taught us, all such narrative is about power, and clearly the power interest at the Montgomery County schools does not privilege the middle-class culture of rules, roles, purpose, and discipline.

But won’t these two little girls lack socialization skills if they are educated at home?  Thank you, senator; I’m glad you asked me that.

In his magisterial Blank Slate, Harvard professor Steven Pinker addresses exactly this issue.  What is it that molds children?  Is it nature or nurture?  Is it heredity or is it parental influence.  Is it schooling or is it peer pressure?  As usual, the answer is startling and, in retrospect obvious.  The most important measurable influence is the genes.  The next most important influence would be parenting, right?  Wrong.  The research shows that parenting has almost no effect. 

So what does make a difference?  You guessed it: Peer pressure.  “In almost every case, [children] model themselves after their peers, not their parents.”  When we talk about the importance of a child’s “environment,” we think about “parents.”  But in fact, the important environment is the one the child experiences in the company of other children.

British psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple testified to this in a chilling piece in the Summer 2000 City Journal.  Back in the bad old days, when poor children went to school barefoot, his father was plucked from poverty and the slum by the public education system.  “Having been found intelligent by his teachers, he was taught Latin, French, German, mathematics, science, English literature, and history, as if he were fully capable of entry into the stream of higher civilization.”  In today’s progressive era, this opportunity is no longer available to the intelligent slum child.  “Today’s teachers assume that the slum child is fully equipped culturally by the environment in which he lives… There is no reason, therefore, to induct him into anything” or to bother to teach him anything.   As one 15-year-old attempted suicide told Dalrymple:  “They say I’m stupid… because I’m clever.” 

Another teenager, who developed an interest in French literature, was “mocked, teased, threatened, and humiliated… Excrement was put through her mailbox at home.”  Despite everything she went to college and then returned to the old neighborhood to teach French—until one of her students tried to rape her.

You can see where all this is leading.  If the decisive influence on a child—apart from genetic inheritance—is not parenting but socialization, at the playground, in school, and at the soccer game, then the one important thing a parent can do is to set their child down next to the right peer group, so their child will be socialized by children that are intelligent, curious, inquiring, and big hearted, rather than mean, ignorant, and wearing baggy pants down to their ankles.  The one thing for a parent to avoid would be a neighborhood where a kid could easily get mixed up with the wrong crowd.  The one objective for liberal do-gooders would be to make sure that underprivileged children that showed an inkling of intelligence would be streamed into schools that diverted them from the cycle of violence in the streets.

It’s not that hard to do.  It takes about six weeks in newly opened inner-city prep academies to turn little monsters into docile, well-behaved students, and thereby create a peer environment that values learning and the middle-class virtues of rule-following and good manners.

Diana West believes, like 49 percent of home-school parents, that her daughters can get a better education at home.  But what does such a general statement mean? 

The truth is that public education has always been trying to mess up our kids’ education.  The noble Horace Mann, founder of public education in the United States, was a cat’s-paw of Harvard Unitarians who wanted to cure Puritan children of their Calvinism, of Protestants who wanted to cure the Irish of their Catholicism, and of socialists who wanted to cure children of their individualism.

Today, it’s postmodernists that want to cure children of their Americanism.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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