Great Expectations

Again, this post started on Facebook, where a friend and fellow homeschooling parent sent me a link to an article in the Atlantic, Why Parents Need to Let their Children Fail.  Though the article does not mention homeschooling specifically, my friend felt the article might have some implications regarding homeschooling.

I recommend reading the article directly, but if you don't have the time, the gist of the article is a teacher's view of how so many parents today are overly protective of their kids, shielding them from natural consequences, and thus preventing them from growing up.  The author uses a powerful example of a student she gave an F for plagiarism.  When the mother came to her defense, the mother said that the girl didn't write the paper, she did.  Apparently, the mother was not only an enabler, but a plagiarist as well.  The article referred to a survey of teachers and professionals on how high-responsiveness and low-demandingness parents today overparent their children.  The author of this article felt that this overparenting leads to irresponsible and unproductive young adults.  This teacher saw herself as playing a small part in counterbalancing this trend by giving out Fs to lazy and coddled students.  Indeed, the teacher who wrote this article seemed to think that her most important lessons were not English, but moral lessons. She made the following statement about her role as teacher:

You see, teachers don't just teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. We teach responsibility, organization, manners, restraint, and foresight. These skills may not get assessed on standardized testing, but as children plot their journey into adulthood, they are, by far, the most important life skills I teach.

First of all, why is it this teacher's place to teach anybody's children values (i.e. "responsibility, organization, manners, restraint, and foresight)?  It seems I've read somewhere, several times, that most people believe it's the parents' job to teach values, not the teachers'.  Even if you allow that values are, to a certain extent, unavoidable for teachers to address, most people do not want teachers to consider values to be "the most important skills" that they teach.  Furthermore, this teacher had no evidence to confirm that the children actually learned to accept responsibility.  This teacher merely had faith that, through her consequences, some of the students might learn responsibility at some point in the future.

Another friend of mine (a former teacher--until she had enough!) recently told me some similar war stories from the classroom.  She had been an Art teacher for about eight years in two separate school districts--one largely minority and poor, the other mostly white and affluent.  Despite the poverty, chaos, and funerals, she liked teaching the poor, minority students more than the rich, white students.  The difference?  The rich kids had an attitude of entitlement.  The poor minority students, when they came to school, would show up in Art class and put forth at least some minimal effort.  If they couldn't draw, no one made a big deal of it.  For the most part, they just tried to have fun.  If their efforts were lackluster and she gave them a B or a C, they didn't complain much.  It wasn't like they were trying to get into Vassar.  If my friend did give a D or an F, it was mostly due to poor attendance or extreme defiance.  At that point, the administration often picked up the responsibility of discipline and handling the parents.  By contrast, with the affluent kids, there was a sense that her class was "only Art class" and the students expected an A for just showing up.  My friend had enough when she caught one of her affluent students cheating on an Art project.  She thought something was fishy when a cheerleader who couldn't draw a stick figure turned in beautiful drawings.  It didn't take much detective work to find out that the girl had someone else do the work for her outside of class.  My friend tried to give this pretty white cheerleader an F, but the mother fought her, and the administration buckled.  My friend's only consolation was that, from then on, the girl did her Art projects in class.

Now, with apologies to my friend, I don't wish to advocate plagiarism.  Nor do I promote cheating.  But I have to ask myself, "What does it really matter?"  The girl was popular, pretty, affluent, and her artwork was embarrassingly bad.  So, to save herself the humiliation, she had someone else do her assignment.  Was this cheating?  In high school, yes.  In real life, no.  In adulthood and in the workforce, people have other people do their work for them all the time.  It's called "management."  In fact, in most places of employment, the management makes more money than the regular employees.  In the real world, convincing other people to do work for you is a highly valued skill.  Drawing?  Painting?  Sculpting?  Not so much.  Realistically, same for plagiarizing.  Now, I'm not talking about copyrighted work.  I'm referring to things like policies and procedures, various form letters, and so on.  These types of writings are stolen all the time.  And why not?  Saves time.  Generally the borrowed versions are better than anything most people could come up with on their own.  And besides, most of business writing is fluff anyways.

My recollection of public high school is that I had two excellent teachers, a handful of surprisingly good teachers, and the vast majority were split between coasters and petty bureaucrats.  I don't wish to accuse my friend of being a petty bureaucrat--I'm sure she wasn't--but I also think there's something in the linoleum of public high schools that brings out the pettiness of even the most well-meaning teachers.  First of all, it seems to me that the vast majority of school teachers have had only one real job, teaching school.  I'm not counting the job flipping burgers, the ideal training ground for petty bureaucrats.  Nor am I counting the summers as a lifeguard at the pool, the perfect job for future coasters.  I'm talking about real adult jobs that require skill and intelligence.  For a teacher who goes from high school to college and onto teaching, his or her experience of reality doesn't extend much beyond the public school system.  As a result, simply through lack of exposure and inexperience, many modern teachers have a warped perception of how the real-world works.  They live in a vindictive world of "fairness" that only occurs in the oxygen-rich atmosphere of the public school system.  They can easily become Czars of their own classrooms, and they punish any student who fails to conform.

For the most part, I agree with William Glasser, MD, who has written prolifically on this subject, starting with "Schools without Failure."  With rare exceptions, children do not learn responsibility from receiving an F.  Instead, they learn that they are no good at that subject, and they learn to never apply themselves to that subject again.  This phenomenon is shockingly common.  Today, the majority of Americans would agree with at least three if not four of the following statements:  "I'm no good at Math.  I can't draw.  I'm terrible at spelling.  I'd rather die than speak in public."  A society that confesses incompetence at these most essential skills is educationally impoverished.  But the truth need not be so pessimistic.

In truth, most people are capable of developing minimal competence at all of these skills.  The problem is they have learned (mostly in public school) to give up trying.  Each of these skills requires a certain degree of determination and perseverance, but the school system has taught them that Math requires intelligence, Art takes talent, Spelling is innate, and Public Speaking is only for outgoing personalities.  Nonsense!  Talent is only 10% of the equation.  90% of what it takes to learn Math, Art, Spelling, or Public Speaking is practice. From a young age, educators should give students ample opportunities to practice each of these skills, without humiliation.  Instead, they should meet their students where they are and build from there by recognizing effort.

This is where homeschooling can easily outshine public education.  By allowing a child to work on each skill at his or her own pace until the child achieves mastery, homeschooling walks a child through a pyramid of skills without breezing past skills that will be necessary at later.  This is advantageous to both fast-learners and slow-learners.  A quick student can move onto the next skill and avoid the drudgery of stagnation.  A slow-learner can proceed at a more deliberate pace, actually mastering skills and dodging the frustration of never really understanding the material.

In his engaging book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell describes what it really takes to learn, the patience to work on a problem until you can solve it.  The thing that separates successful students from failing students is not raw intelligence, but the willingness to stay longer on a problem until it makes sense.  When students stop trying, they invite failure.  Gladwell makes a compelling case for how intelligence is really a small part of what makes a student--or an adult--successful.  Beyond endurance, students learn a whole set of skills that support their educational efforts.  Gladwell explains that social class is actually a bigger predictor of success in adulthood than intelligence, and this is not just because these folks are given better opportunities.  Middle and upper-middle class students learn assertiveness.  If they have been genuinely wronged by a teacher, middle-class parents are more apt to call for a parent-teacher conference.  Lower-class students, by contrast, tend to be more passive.  In this context, what the previously mentioned article called "overparenting" might actually be considered modeling useful social skills.  According to Gladwell, the responsiveness of middle and upper-middle class parents is actually what makes for better outcomes.  These students of responsive parents learn how to assert themselves with teachers and administrators.  Rather than avoid conflict, these parents model and the students learn problem-solving.  They learn not to be intimidated by authority figures.  If kept in proportion, these assertive parents and students might be pains in the neck, but they demonstrate the types of skills that people need to succeed in the real world.  But perhaps there's another factor that hasn't been considered.

Ever since the Child Abuse and Protection Act of 1974, there has been a paradigm shift in how people raise children.  Previously, it was the parents' job to prepare their children to become adults, and the teachers' job was to support the parents in this role.  Nowadays, the parents' role is merely to protect the children from harm, and the school system (starting with daycare and ending with college) takes on the task of preparing them for adulthood.  Often, this has led to a hostile relationship between parents and educators.  Under this new paradigm, it's only natural for parents to protect children from hostile educators, who no longer view themselves as serving the parents.  Indeed, if harm comes to the children, the teachers blame the parents.  And if the students are unprepared for adulthood, the parents blame the teachers.  A once harmonious relationship between parents and educators has become acrimonious as teachers no longer respect the sovereignty of parental rights and parents no longer trust teachers.

Prior to the Child Protection Act, parents expected children to be independent and resourceful.  Today, parents are paranoid that their children will be abducted by a serial killer.  Today's parents are prone to either hover over their children as they engage in structured activities, or parents plant their children in front of the television or game system.  The result is children who don't know how to explore, amuse themselves, improvise games, or resolve conflicts on their own.  As these same children enter middle-school and high-school, just when they need more autonomy, the school systems become larger, more competitive, and develop zero-tolerance policies.  Many students just don't have the social skills to traverse the gauntlet of secondary school.  As a result, many bright students fail.  No wonder the parents don't trust this process.  Habitually in the role of protectors, they merely try to protect their children from the mean principal and vindictive teachers.

The solution to this dilemma is twofold:  parental bonding and higher expectations.  If parents can regain their role as the most important influence in their children's lives, then they can have a positive influence on their values and behavior.  Yes, even in adolescence, it is possible (and used to be normal) for young men and women to value their parents' opinions most.  Today, however, young people value their peers' opinions much more than their parents'.  The same goes for all authority figures, including teachers.  Add just a little bit of stress--divorce, military deployment, poverty, disruption--and young people become indifferent to their parents and authority figures' admonishments.  Sure, students will feign lukewarm attachment to their parents and teachers, but in truth they only comply with requests so long as the parents or teachers provide for the student's perceived needs.  Buy them some new clothes, a cellphone, and a laptop, and they will comply for a while, until they have further demands.  In truth, today's adolescents have an one-sided relationship with their parents.  Young people take advantage of parents who are afraid to take charge for fear of being accused of abuse or neglect.  Parenting a defiant teen today is essentially slavery for the parents, who may feel no recourse but to respond to the teen's demands.

So, in response to this article, the problem is not overparenting, but underparenting.  Generally speaking,  highly responsive parenting is good.  But responsive parenting is not so good if the demands or expectations upon the child are low.  The trouble is that many parents today have relinquished their authority.  It starts at six weeks when they put their child in daycare.  By preschool, their children are institutionalized and compliant with the routine of rote education.  By fourth grade, however, most of their peers no longer consider learning to be cool.  So progressively from fifth grade through high school, students' main goal in school is to prevent their teachers from educating them.  As they grow, they become remarkably adept and subtle at thwarting the educational process.  By high school, the students are in charge.  Like inmates in a state correctional institution, they allow the guards/teachers to run the prison/school.

The reality of this scenario is too much for some students and parents to bare.  These students and families often opt for homeschooling rather than live the lie of public education.  I suspect this occurs mostly at either the top or bottom of the bell curve in terms of educational achievement or expectations.  Some low-motivation students coerce their parents into giving up on public education and sign up for homeschooling, unschooling, or cyberschooling.  These changes to homeschooling typically occur in junior or senior high, just as the student had disciplinary or academic problems.  Other high-motivation students tend to start homeschooling earlier, before the public schools can do much damage.  This often occurs at the behest of the parents.

Outside of homeschooling, the only other way to avoid this phenomenon is to start education much later, after the children have strongly bonded with their parents who are stable and reliable figures at home.  Daycare, preschool, and even kindergarten can actually hinder this process.  On the other end, schools need to expect higher standards of educational achievement.  Schools need to move away from mainstreaming and expect smart students to learn.  If students have stronger bonds with their parents, they will have more respect for their teachers.  In turn, the schools can demand higher competence from these students.  But this approach can only work if the vast majority of the families in the school buy into this high attachment and high expectation approach.  Until then, for high responsiveness and high demandingness parents, homeschooling remains the best option.

Conservative Resentment

This is in response to a post on Facebook about a letter written to the Waco Tribune Herald of November 18, 2011.  The article was titled, "Put Me in Charge."  Rather than get into a detailed political discussion on Facebook, I decided to address it here instead.

The article was apparently written by a 21-year-old woman who was offended by the vast numbers of people on the welfare rolls.  According to the preface, she was concerned about the future economy if the government continued to overspend on social programs (though I didn't see anything of that nature in her comments).  She proposed to fix welfare by putting her in charge.

She had in mind numerous sweeping reforms:  giving out free cheese, beans, rice, and powdered milk, but not giving out food stamps.  Drug-testing welfare recipients.  Putting recipients to work in a day program.  But worst of all to me, mandatory birth control via implants and tubal ligation.

While I understand the overall sentiment, this article is very dangerous for two reasons:  One, it is a clear case of emotional reasoning.  Two, it doesn't take into account the reality of the world today.  While some of the ideas sounded pretty good, like inspecting public housing facilities and expecting residents to take care of them, much like military housing, the overall sentiment is overly harsh and just impractical in today's world.  For any real change to be made, some fundamental things about our society would have to change first.

Periodically, I see people posting on Facebook about drug-testing food stamp recipients.  This seems to be a fairly popular idea.  In fact, Florida recently implemented such a policy.  But the state of Michigan already researched drug-testing of welfare recipients in Detroit.  The results contradicted many people's prejudices.  Only 3% of the food stamp recipients tested positive, and that was for marijuana.  None of the food stamp recipients tested positive for cocaine or heroin or any other drugs.  Hmm, could it be they didn't have the money to buy drugs?  Could it be that some drug addicts, especially those on cocaine or methamphetamine or opiates, don't care about eating, and therefore don't bother to apply for food stamps?  To me, this type of knee-jerk conservatism ironically smacks of liberal prodigality.  Drug testing costs lots of money and would only catch a few minor offenders and possibly harm children or families.

I think the bigger picture here is the attitude of the article.  At times, her comments seemed sadistic or fascistic.  Again, I'm not entirely in disagreement.  I know where she's coming from.  In my experience, those who protest most loudly about welfare are hard-working folks who put in 60-70 hour work-weeks in hard-labor jobs.  They figure, If I have to work 60-70 hours a week, then why should they get something for nothing?

But no one stops to ask, Why should I have to work 60-70 hours a week just to survive?  Adjusted for inflation, factory workers in the 1960s typically made the equivalent of a six-figure income in today's economy.  On top of that, in those days, overtime was actually paid not at time-and-a-half, but at double-time, dissuading employers from overworking employees unless necessary.  Nowadays, many of these hard-working folks are "exempt" from overtime as their base salary is more than one-and-a-half times minimum wage.  Their employers take advantage of this loophole and work them outrageously long hours.  In this way, employers save about $20,000 in health insurance by hiring one person to work 80 hours rather than two.  They also save on things like company trucks, workers comp, and so forth.  The point is that, in today's economy, the choice for most people is between working like an indentured servant or collecting welfare.  The best disincentive to welfare would be real jobs paying living wages and working reasonable hours.

A real change in the economy would probably require some measures against globalization.  In the 1960s, the U.S. still had a global economy because it wasn't viable to import and export everything on the scale we do today.  If you owned a television, it was manufactured in the United States.  Today, few (perhaps no) televisions are made in the U.S.  That means there are no comparable jobs for the people who used to make televisions, or for the children of the people who used to make televisions.  Granted, now many families can afford a television in every room.  But are we really any better off?

The one thing the complainers about welfare seem to miss is that perhaps these programs are the result of very deliberate and real decisions by those who are living in a different stratosphere of wealth.  Picture the men and women at the Bilderberg Group or at Bohemian Grove getting together and discussing the global economy.  They can pay a worker in China $2 an hour AND pay an American to collect SSI for around $3.50 per hour for a total of $5.50 per hour.  If they hire an American factory worker, they will pay anywhere from $10 to $20 per hour.  They save a ton of money going with the Chinese worker.  And to keep Americans from rioting in the streets and ruining the whole system, just sell 'em a cheap TV and give 'em some food stamps and SSI.  I'm not saying this is right.  I'm just saying that my imaginary scenario is more true than most people realize.  Getting angry at welfare recipients is not the answer.

This leads to the most offensive comments in the article about forced sterilizations and birth control.  From biology we know that there are two basic strategies for having offspring.  One is to have lots of babies and hope for some of them to survive.  At the extreme, insects and fish lay lots of eggs in the expectation that a few will survive.  At the lower end of this strategy, foxes have maybe a dozen offspring.  With this large litter strategy, most of the energy is invested in having the offspring.  Once the babies are born, very little time or energy is spent on raising them.  On the other extreme, humans typically have one child at a time.  Bears have two.  In these cases, the parents spend a lot of time educating and raising their young in the hopes that this education will give them the edge to survive and, in turn, breed the next generation.

In humans, both of these survival strategies can be seen, even though the overall biology is for one child to be born at a time.  Thus, in difficult economic times, the trend is not for parents to have less children, but actually for disadvantaged mothers to have a brood of children.  Demographically, we know this to be the case.  In our culture today, with some exceptions in religious families, the poorer the mother, the more children she is likely to have.  This is not necessarily single-mothers taking advantage of a glitch in the welfare system, it is simple biology.  The more children they have, the more likely at least some will survive.  She doesn't want birth control.  She wants to have babies.  It's programmed into her biology.

So the answers to the problem of welfare are far more complex than the simplistic comments from the newspaper in Waco, Texas would lead one to believe.  Living wages, globalism, healthcare, tort-reform, and family stability are just a few of the factors that contribute to the current situation.  I'm all for real conservative solutions to liberal prodigality.  But we have traveled very far down the rabbit hole, indeed.  It will take far more than fascist posturing to fix this problem.  But I don't see anyone really doing anything meaningful to fix it.

By the way, the writer in Waco didn't even address the most egregious of the welfare programs--Public Childcare Subsidies.  It seems that every solution to welfare only makes the problem worse, as if the solutions were coming from "The ABCs of Communism."

Why We Started this Blog

Several years ago, maybe a year before we started this blog, my wife and I were working on a book.  The working title was Judicious Christian Parenting, and we felt this blog would be a good way of promoting the book.  As we were writing, especially when we were ourselves struggling as parents, we sometimes asked:  "What makes us such authorities on raising children?"  In all honestly, the answer was, "Nothing, we are not particularly good parents."  Nonetheless, at the time, our children seemed to be on the right track and we felt we had a voice and something to say.  Turns out that, most of the time, we were the ones who needed to hear what we had to say.  Writing the blog and especially the book forced us to clarify our values.  As a result, some ideas that were more or less vague at the time have become crystal clear now.  If our mission statement was to clarify our Christian values, we certainly succeeded in that endeavor.  But I don't know if we strengthened our family or anyone else's.  As it says in the Scripture, our Christian values have sometimes turned "father against son, brother against brother (Matthew 10:35)."  Being a Christian is difficult.  So, in the midst of all this struggle, it's not hard to see why this blog and the Judicious Christian Parenting book fizzled out.  We wrote three or four tormenting chapters, hashing out the details.  But our message changed as we were writing, our audience narrowed, and we felt as though we were preaching to a very small choir.

If there was a good or genuine motive for writing the book, it was to argue against a trend we saw coming out of the Christian community.  Let's call it Reactionary Parenting, and the most extreme and dangerous advocates of Reactionary Parenting were the Ezzo's.  Essentially, Ezzo Parenting and its secular counterpart, Babywise, represented a rebirth of authoritarian parenting methods.  Based upon an Evangelical interpretation of Original Sin, the parents' job is to counteract the negative effects of their children's inherently sinful characters.  To this ends, the Ezzos instituted strict bedtimes and feeding schedules, and they discouraged parents from forming excessively emotional bonds with their children.  At best, the Ezzo method resulted in some well-disciplined and obedient children.  At worst, the Ezzo method was associated with numerous pediatric cases of failure to thrive, many adolescent examples of alienation, and perhaps many irreparable rifts in family relations.  Though Reactionary Parenting may have appealed to a number of Evangelical Christians, it clearly contradicted contemporary psychology and, more importantly, common sense.  Not to mention that it's based on a heretical interpretation of Original Sin.

Of course, there were reasons for the remarkable success of the Ezzo Parenting books, mostly as a reaction against the increasing prevalence of Permissive Parenting.  It seems that most modern parents want to be best friends with their children, and the results should be obvious.  Children, adolescents, and young adults are increasingly spoiled, insolent, and lazy.  They claim to be egalitarian judges of what they view to be right or wrong, and they dare adults to think otherwise.  They demand control over their own influences, lifestyles, religion, and morality, but without the requisite responsibility or self-support to make these decisions.  In their adult lives, they fail to meet developmental milestones at appropriate ages, but they argue that these milestones are simply outdated.  In the past, this form of adolescent relativism was strictly confined to those raised in non-religious families.  Today, even children who attend church-group several times a week will most likely develop these pagan values.  With each generation, children from Christians and pagans evolve from being obviously distinct to becoming indistinguishable.

For a solution to these parenting traps, we turned to an unlikely source, Diana Baumrind, an experimental psychologist with atheistic and socialistic leanings, who also happened to be of Jewish decent.   Baumrind had originally described three basic parenting styles:  Authoritarian (eg. Reactionary or Ezzo Parenting), Permissive (eg. modern Permissive or Democratic Parenting), and Authoritative Parenting (a parenting style that takes the best of either style).  According to Baumrind, Authoritative Parents are warm and open to the child's will, while also being directive and placing high expectations on their children.  Baumrind's three types of parenting proved an apt solution to much that was wrong with Ezzo Parenting as well as modern, Permissive Parenting.

We spent the first three or four chapters of Judicious Christian Parenting on Baumrind's three (actually four) different parenting styles.  It turns out that her categories are a good way of classifying different Christians.  Some Christians are Reactionary or Authoritarian, others are Progressive or Permissive, some are Laissez-faire or minimalist, and a few are Authoritative or Judicious.  We spent several years critiquing Progressive Christians and their Permissive Parenting styles, as well as critiquing Reactionary Christians and their Authoritarian Parenting styles.  But most of all, we racked our brains trying to figure out what Judicious/Authoritative/Interactive Christian parents would be like and how we could incorporate the best of these traits into our own parenting methods.  Implicit in all of this search was concern over the souls and futures of our children.  We wanted to raise Christian children, and we were well-aware that nowadays few  grown children follow their parents' religious practices.  We theorized that those children who do follow their parents' examples are not from Authoritarian or Permissive backgrounds, but from Authoritative families.

But we were also writing in a period of transition (or perhaps our writing and research led to that transition).  We went from being modern Catholics with ecumenical sensibilities (i.e. Progressive Christians with therefore somewhat Permissive Parenting Styles, virtually indistinguishable from most mainline Protestants) to becoming Traditional Catholics with a conviction that the Catholic Church, particularly the pre-Vatican II church, is the one true church necessary for salvation.  With this transition, our intended audience shrank to comparatively microscopic proportions.  We were no longer thinking about a generic Christian audience; we were thinking about Catholics, especially Catholics who, among other things, attend Latin Mass.  We knew that most Evangelical Christians, especially Christians attracted to Ezzo Parenting, would be unlikely to read our blog or book.  And we knew that the forces driving Progressive Christianity and Permissive Parenting had reached epidemic proportions, poisoning the modern Catholic Church, and therefore causing Western Civilization to lose its Catholic foothold on Christianity.  Increasingly, we were coming to see this modern form of Christian belief as "form without the content," or, as Kant might have said, "void."  In other words, in modern society, Christianity is merely a personal belief with only subjective value and no objective reality.  As such, Christianity without at least some reference to the traditional Catholic foothold is subject to caprice and abandonment.

The trouble for us as Catholic parents trying to raise Catholic children was that some of our children were already approaching adulthood.  Our older children's foundation in religious instruction was so weak that we stood little chance of raising them to be Catholic.  No, they had not been tainted by modern parochial education.  Instead, they had attended public school so they were brainwashed according to Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives.  And while they had received modern Catholic Religious Formation, their knowledge-base was remarkably empty.  If they had learned anything of substance about being Catholic, they had learned it from us.  At CCD, they socialized, did a few good works, and became indoctrinated into feel-good Catholicism.  Hardly anything likely to have a lasting impact.

Our oldest son, now a Junior in college, has one distinct advantage.  His college program has an emphasis on the study of the Classics.  There's really nothing like a study of Plato and Aristotle to set a time bomb in a young mind, leading to a certain kind of conversion before the age of forty.  He's unlikely to become a flat-earth Evangelical, and he might not become a Traditional Catholic, but a study of the classics is the perfect antidote to everything that ails modern education.  So we have great hope in his future religious formation, even if he is currently in the hands of the clumsy Brethren.  As Erasmus said, "In the land of the blind, a one-eyed man is king."

The progress has not been so clear with our second son.  We started home-schooling at the same time with all our children.  While the oldest was then a Freshman in college and escaped homeschooling, our second son was entering 10th grade.  He viewed homeschooling as a punishment, and his view of our motives was far from charitable.  So we have struggled with him.  There have been some hopeful moments.  But overall our relationship with him has been troubled.  We gave him plenty of time to get up to speed, but he only engages in short bursts.  Currently, he is showing no outward signs that he will either apply himself academically or religiously.  We have only two consolations.  One, we have been able to instill a small amount of religious instruction that he would not have otherwise received.  And two, homeschooling has forced his real level of motivation and adaptation to become evident.  In public school and later in a state university, he could have skated by until his Freshman or Sophomore year of college. Reality is sometimes painful, but at least we have not wasted years thinking he was okay when he wasn't.  Of course, we hope that he will eventually come around.

With the younger children, our optimism is almost inversely proportional to their ages.  As Lenin said, "Give me four years to educate the children, and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted."  A big portion of our hope is that we have pulled them out of the public schools and daycare system (okay, the younger children were never in daycare) before the modernists could inflict too much damage.  Similarly, the Jesuits (not a group I currently admire, but historically among the best) have a saying, "Give me a child until the age of 7, and I will show you the man."  There's nothing like instilling a small child with traditional Catholic faith--the Baltimore Catechism, the lives of the Saints, Catholic history including the Crusades.  They devour this instruction.  And it takes root in their souls, their characters.  Everything they do in later life will be informed by their current education, whether they become scientists or religious, men or women of reason or of faith.  Not only have we removed them from the secular indoctrination of modern education, but we have been able to provide substantive religious instruction.

My clinical supervisor, a child psychologist, recently told me something like, "Once a child becomes a teenager, there's very little you can do."  He explained, "An adolescent can come up with more ways to mess things up than a parent can invent to control the situation."  This is not to say that there is nothing a parent of a teen can do, but it does imply that parents of teens should be realistic about their expectations.  Essentially, parents of teens should strive to portray themselves as allies, without taking responsibility for the adolescent.  To children, parents are simultaneously antagonists and protectors, punishers and guardians.  But to adolescents, reality is the real antagonist, and parents need to withdrawal from their role as protectors.  This can mean allowing teens to make some stupid choices.  It can also mean being there emotionally but not financially when the choices inevitably fail.  This is a difficult dance, one that we as parents of teens are just now learning.  Of course, this dance would be much easier if we had already thoroughly steeped the children in our belief system prior to their brains leaving their bodies in adolescence.

Another theme with which we have struggled is popular media.  Earlier in the blog, in a post called i-Think, Therefore i-Am, we talked about modern technologies and inferred some thoughts on popular music and movies as well.  This is a difficult area.  For us, excessive restrictions in this area can quickly cause strife with neighborhood children, extended family, and our own children.  Perhaps our biggest struggle in this area is with our own laziness.  Honestly, it's easier to let the children watch television or play video games.  And we don't wish to start an argument with, for example, a visiting uncle or another child's parent.  To us, it is amazing how few adults have any real boundaries for what movies or video games children can watch.  This lack of discretion is partly a matter of social class, but it's also about Christian values, or lack thereof.

When I sat down to write this blog, something was weighing on me.  Oddly enough, it's taken until now for me to get around to it.  Something has happened in our culture.  I see it everywhere, but it's really hard for me to explain to unsympathetic ears.  Perhaps the most obvious example is daycare.  Sometime in the 1970s, mothers started entering the workforce en mass.  This created a demand for childcare.  Oddly enough, churches, the same institutions that might have been conveyors of traditional Christian values, became in large part the providers of daycare.  At first, they had "Mom's Day Out" programs, and later these expanded into 5 or 6 day a week childcare facilities.  This was logical, in a way, since churches had Sunday school facilities that were in disuse throughout the week, and they could make economic use of these spaces.  At first these programs provided childcare for children ages three and up, but quickly they started accepting children as young as six weeks.  Almost overnight, the majority of American mothers (80%) were dropping their children off at daycare as they traipsed off to work.  Here's what really bothered me:  I could accept daycare (among many other things) if it weren't for one particular phenomenon--it's as though this is how it's always been.  Sure, modern mothers may joke about how things were in the 1950s, when women "had to stay home" and "live boring and empty lives."  But this characterization is inaccurate by thirty years.  There were virtually no daycare centers until the 1980s.  It reminds me of a secular movie I once saw, The Lathe of Heaven, in which the main character dreams the world has changed, only to awakened to a world that has change as in his dream, only everyone else believes the world has always been so.  I have conversations about some of these issues with people my age or older than me, and I am stunned.  Don't they remember?  Do they really believe that, prior to birth control, people had frequent casual pick-ups?  Do they really believe that single mothers were ever so common prior to welfare and child-support laws?  Do they really think that children have always been so detached from their parents?  I can accept that some people believe that the vast social experiment that has occurred since the 1960s has been beneficial, but I cannot accept that it's always been this way.  What kind of Orwellian dystopia am I living in?

This leads to my fundamental and disturbing insight.  My liberal family, friends, and associates and I can disagree about values, but we should be able to agree on the facts.  I may not value daycare or birth control the way that other parents do, but we should agree about the facts surrounding the issues.  But this is not my experience.  All of the agenda-items in the vast social experiment require much propaganda or marketing before they can be implemented.  What's really remarkable is how fast the change is taking place.  Essentially, for society to forget living history and to believe that life has always been as it is today is a marker of hypnotic suggestion.  Call it education, propaganda, indoctrination, marketing, or hypnotic suggestion, there are forces that are purveying these forces upon our children and our society.  Even our Christian religious institutions are becoming purveyors of these social experiment agendas.

There are a few antidotes.  As I stated earlier, a study of the Classics can be such an antidote.  I would include religion in this form of study, if religion is studied critically and in historical context.  Various forms of critical thinking can be helpful but probably not sufficient, especially Geometry and Algebra.  Removal from the sources of indoctrination, for example, withdrawal from public schools can be important.  Limiting exposure to modern movies and television is helpful, though I might say that with older children critical analysis can be quite instructional.  Entrenched education in traditional Christianity is indispensable.

The forces of change in our culture are strong and hard to resist.  Some of these changes are mostly good, for example, the civil rights movement.  Others are mostly bad, for example, the secularization of our culture.  In principle, not one of these changes is entirely good or entirely bad.  But for small children, it's just better to believe the men in the white hats are good guys and the men in the black hats are bad guys.  They can learn to differentiate when they get older.  The trouble is that nowadays the public schools, the media, and the entertainment industry teach children that there's really no such thing as good guys and bad guys, that bad guys are just misunderstood and good guys are just the one's on our side.  In such a relativistic world, young people don't stand much chance of distinguishing the good from the bad when they become young adults.  God help us all.  

Homeschooling Dad, Year One Progress Review

July 2011: I would like to give an update on the progress of our homeschooling project, both the successes and the shortcomings, after starting last summer. Overall, I must say that the homeschooling experience has been an eye-opener for my wife and me. While homeschooling has been more difficult than we anticipated, it has also offering greater rewards, though the outcomes have not been equal across the board. With the younger children, we have implemented homeschooling with greater facility and enjoyed more obvious benefits. With the older children, especially our 10^th grader, we experienced glaring difficulties while the benefits were more subtle. Nonetheless, we continue undeterred--with a few battle scars, better strategies, and a lot more resolve.


 
For me, the homeschooling process became clearer after my wife had our seventh child in November and I took over as substitute teacher. Taking over the reins as pedagogue, I was determined to show my wife how to structure homeschool activities. I feel obliged to say that I was generally humbled by my inadequacies, while my wife gave respectful audience to my meager achievements. Mainly, I learned that homeschooling is essentially self-paced. Like they do in public school, I tried to breeze through lessons, administer the test, and move on to the next topic. If the children didn't do well, they needed to try harder. My wife explained that my approach was flawed and that education is cumulative. Each fundamental skill is used in building up to the next level of skills. The failure of public school education is due, in large part, to pupils moving on to the next skill without mastering the last lesson. As mastery of the next skill often requires competence in the prior lessons, they cannot consistently move beyond a basic skill level. In the United States, for example, a performance gap begins to emerge in public schools around 4^th grade as students move beyond basic arithmetic to general math skills. By the time they reach middle school or high school, the average student is so lost in math class that any attempt to understand Algebra is futile. And so, ironically, as much of my frustration was that public school was holding my children back, the best way for me to help them to move forward was to take my time and ensure that they understood the material.


 
The pace of our progress this year was slow at first, and the older the children, the slower the progress. I strongly suspect that the cause was not chronological age or socialization, but prior conditioning from their years in public school. For our 10^th grader, the most obvious problem was that he expected someone to go over each lesson with him individually. For the most part, homeschooling doesn't work this way. Homeschooling, especially the program in which my children are enrolled (Seton), is reading intensive. The children, especially the older ones, read a lot of books and write many reports. Compare this to public school where they have few reading or writing assignments, and where there are ample teacher lectures and multiple-choice tests. Our tenth grader was simply unprepared for the amount of reading and writing that his homeschooling program required. Concerned, I had him read aloud a paragraph, and his reading was fluid and appropriate. This is a boy whom the public school will miss for his PSSA (Pennsylvania System of School Assessment) scores. Though he is not a leisure reader, he has been consistently above-average throughout his public education. But to rank above-average from a pool of mediocrity doesn't say much. Quickly, it became apparent that his reading comprehension was sorely lacking. Sure, he could read aloud fairly well. But when asked to summarize what he just read, he was stumped. He couldn't remember. He was waiting on someone else to tell him what it meant, explain the significance, and tell him what he needed to know for the test. In short, he had been conditioned not to think for himself. Though we have met with considerable resistance from him, this scenario has only strengthened our resolve to continue homeschooling. For him, progress has moved at a tectonic pace, but he is gradually developing some skills as we become less tenuous. We are optimistic that he will have a major breakthrough this coming year.


 
Part of the reason we suspect a pending breakthrough with our 10^th grader is the trajectory of our 4^th grader this year. A very bright boy, our 4^th grader struggled until after Christmas time, began to catch on during the third quarter, and ended the year on fire. He, too, had major problems with reading comprehension, though he too was considered above average by the public school system. It was easier for us to figure out why he was struggling. Rather than read material from A to Z first, he went straight to the review questions and tried to find the answers in the text. For eighteen weeks, he told us, "But that's how they told us to do it in [public] school!" During a break home from college, our oldest son confirmed that, during this era of teaching-to-the-test, teachers are actually discouraging students from reading and encouraging them to scan the text for the answers first. That, our older son explained, was the only way to pass the test on time. Speed was another problem we encountered with him. For the past several years of public school, he has been repeatedly drilled on his basic arithmetic skills using timed exercises. He developed a degree of pride because he was usually the fastest in his class. A side effect of all these timed exercises has been a decrease in accuracy. His papers, especially in math, have been riddled with simple mistakes. Another problem we encountered related back to the "No Child Left Behind" and the "Do Away with Ability Grouping" mentalities. This problem, we figured out toward the end of the year, when he was already devouring his assignments. In the 3^rd grade of public school, he used the Saxon Math 2/3 text. We enrolled him in regular 4^th grade at Seton and received the Saxon Math 4/5 textbook. We assumed that they simply printed these books to be good for two years of school. We were mistaken. The Saxon 2/3 text is actually a second grade text, with some material for the next year previewed. In an effort to keep every caught up, the public school was a year behind, included my "gifted" son. So, when we enrolled in Seton, our 4th grader skipped 3^rd grade math, covered 4^th grade, and previewed 5^th grade. This turned out to be fortuitous because he eventually caught up, and as he became more challenged, his simple mistakes assuaged. And on a measure of achievement that I've been tracking, he showed amazing improvement in his math skills, as well as marked improvement in his reading.


 
His younger sister entered the 1^st grade this year, and oddly enough I entered the year perhaps most anxious about her progress and ended the year the most confident. Her reading, especially, was markedly improved. As a substitute teacher, I could easily see why teachers often prefer girls. She was on-task and enthusiastic. She took to her coursework like a frog in a swamp. She has been especially receptive to her religious education. We also did some pre-school work with her younger brother and some arts and crafts with the two-year-old. Juggling everything can be quite daunting, but overall the children have been enthusiastic and hungry to learn.


 
An ongoing concern that has gone mostly unspoken by my siblings and mother is that the homeschooling program is heavy on religion and light on science, and I have had the opportunity to ponder this objection. My general observation is that children have a tremendous aptitude for religion, but little comprehension of science. Conversely, teens and college students—especially those with little or no prior religious education--have almost no interest or comprehension of religion. And a scant few are motivated to learn about science. It seems to me that, while some ongoing exposure to science is important, saturating early education with science is a bit like teaching monkeys how to type. Not everyone IS a scientist. Children with natural scientific proclivities will naturally gravitate toward science education as they complete high school and enter college, unless their education takes the life out of the subject.


 
We did have one interesting science field trip in the break this summer. We went to the National Museum of the US Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. Walking through the huge hangers and displays, I was struck by the speed at which the technology progressed, especially from Wilbur and Orville Wright until about the end of World War II. Then, it seemed to me, that the rate of change slowed down, at about the time of Sputnik and the dawn of so-called modern education. Even the Apollo rockets were designed and built by people who read Shakespeare, wrote in cursive, and learned long division. Since then, most of the advances have been in size, electronics, and puzzle-solving. My observation probably contradicted the gross number of patents during recent years, but it seemed to me that most of the changes since the seventies have been refinements on technologies that already existed. It seemed to me that Alvin Toffler was wrong and that we are less shocked by the future than we are oblivious of the past. Again, at the Air Force museum, I saw an interesting contradiction between the progress of technology and the atrocities of WWII, Vietnam, and the Cold War. Though science may be an important topic, perhaps it was best understood by people who had a more classical education first.


 
On another note, our eldest returned from his first year of college having made the Dean's List twice and having studied Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, deTocqueville, Dostoyevski, and Tolstoy, among others. Though his public high school education was lacking, he is nonetheless a reader and his first year of college has filled in some of the gaps. And I think not coincidentally, he is a changed man. He has acquired a newfound determination, seriousness, and work ethic. I believe his newfound maturity comes from his classical education. So, it does appear that for some at least, homeschooling is not the only path toward the moral and intellectual development of young men and women.

The Teacher Who Couldn’t Read, Book Review and Springboard

    I was browsing recorded books when I came across this title, The Teacher Who Couldn't Read, by John Corcoran and Carol C. Carlson. A few days prior, an old friend and new acquaintance on Facebook had posted this priceless piece of doggerel to which I wanted to reply (especially about education), but resisted. In the background, I have been preoccupied with our own children's first year of homeschooling, the difficulties and the progress they have made. At first, I passed over the book about the illiterate teacher, opting instead for light science and history during my daily commute. But the title got in my craw for several days. I looked it up on Amazon and read the reviews. To my amazement, eleven of twelve reviews were positive. Only one review in twelve criticized the author for his checkered past, particularly for lying and cheating his way through his own education. The rest treated the author as a hero who had overcome adversity, and if he had done anything wrong in the past, it was only because he was a victim of inattentive parents, poor schooling, and—presumably—dyslexia. I thought about my own U.S. public school education, the drivel that passed for education and the focus on anything but book learning. I thought about a recent college visit my 10^th grader and I made to my alma mater, one of the better state universities in the country, and to which I wouldn't send my dog unless he wanted to be a linebacker. The more I thought about education, both our recent experiences as homeschooling parents and my own education, the more I realized I had to read that book. I went back and got it several days later.

     My instinctive response to the title was, "What nerve! What a fraud!" I did not approach this book with a sympathetic ear to the author. Not surprisingly, though the book was written in the first person, Mr. Corcoran was not the author; he had a ghostwriter, Carol C. Carlson. I did not protest the use of a ghostwriter except for the pretense of the story being told by Mr. Corcoran himself. The recorded book version was also read by a professional reader. My suspicion was that the title character bore a Glamour Shots-type of resemblance to the real person. Okay, this was Hollywood or Madison Avenue—actually it was Colorado Springs (Focus on the Family). No big deal. A little shining and buffing never hurt anyone. But the smooth and polished writing bothered me enough to go to You Tube to hear Mr. Corcoran speak. Well, the real person and the recorded book were similar enough to hear the resemblance, though the book's author came across as more nuanced and intelligent. Nonetheless, because Focus on the Family had listed the coauthor/ghostwriter on the cover, I was satisfied. It seemed that the now literate and born-again John Corcoran had some integrity. I decided to read/listen on.

    Immediately, it struck me that, though Mr. Corcoran was eager to provide excuses for his parents, they bore the brunt of the responsibility for his illiteracy as a child. His parents were both literate and reasonably educated (his father was a college graduate and teacher, mother was a high school graduate; both were readers). But it seemed like they didn't take enough time with his reading as a young student. Mr. Corcoran's early education involved multiple moves, three different schools in first grade alone. At school, he slipped through the cracks, understandable in his circumstances. But at home, no one appeared to be paying attention—neither his brooding mother nor his capricious father. Of course, Mr. Corcoran was hesitant to use harsh words concerning his parents' shortcomings. With the general public and Evangelical audience in mind, this was a prudent choice for this book. To me, however, his tone came across as sour grapes, simultaneously justifying his parents' inattention and inwardly wishing they could have done better. I'm not so inclined to excuse his parents from culpability. I found his father's behavior particularly troubling and self-serving. For example, his father was frequently changing jobs, and it was hard to imagine these moves were always necessary or beneficial. As much as Mr. Corcoran tried to sugarcoat his family, the facts seemed to shine through. I got the impression that, if it weren't for his parents' self-involved obliviousness, young John Corcoran would have learned to read.

    His school life was worse than his home life. Mr. Corcoran grew up in the Southwest. He started in the public schools, which failed at launching his education. After several years and relocations, he eventually went to parochial school. There, he attended class with many Hispanic children who were not only struggling with learning to read, but also grappling with learning English. In accord with the anti-Catholic tone of Focus on the Family, he told several negative experiences with Catholic schools (though the tales of being hit on the knuckles with a yardstick were missing). Mr. Corcoran recounted learning something about God in Catholic school, but he didn't understand the ritual or the Sacraments. And he told one obligatory tale of sexual abuse in which nothing actually happened but could have occurred had he not been vigilant. I was neither surprised nor unsympathetic nor convinced by the story of sexual abuse that wasn't. It was merely as predictable as his father's next move, which typically occurred just as the boy was starting to make progress. Toward the end of elementary school, John Corcoran went to a public school where progressive education was the norm. Under the tutelage of progressive educators, Mr. Corcoran was freed from the shackles of literate education. He was free to explore learning as experience, as social interaction, as group discussion. Though he retained some fondness for progressive education, he also admitted that progressive education virtually eliminated the expectation of literacy.

    By middle school and high school, Mr. Corcoran capitalized on, in my opinion, the biggest travesty in the American educational system—school sponsored sporting teams. Though he downplayed the advantages of sports, playing football and basketball helped him to be passed over from one grade to the next. Again, he had a stint of Catholic high school, which sounded a bit more arduous. But by high school, Mr. Corcoran was adept at flirting and getting girls to do his homework.

    After high school, he spent several years in community college, though he was still unable to read. I would guess that he as at that time was around a 2^nd or 3^rd grade reading level, though he insinuated that it was much worse than that. Undeterred, he developed various strategies for getting through, some legal and others not. By the time he went to a college in Texas on a basketball scholarship, he was a full-fledged cheat. He broke into teachers' offices and stole tests. Again, his athleticism likely allowed professors and administrators to overlook his behaviors.

    After college, Mr. Corcoran taught and coached in the California public school system for seventeen years. He developed a variety of techniques for hiding his illiteracy. Mostly, he used teacher's aides--smart students who led class, took role, and graded tests. (Many of my own public high school teachers employed these same methods.) He also taught a variety of courses through group discussion. He was a strong practitioner of progressive education. For example, he recorded the mini-series "Roots" and showed it in class. Discussion followed. (My own teachers used similar tactics.) Mr. Corcoran was hard-pressed to say that he was a "bad teacher," simply because he couldn't read. I felt that he lacked the courage to make this leap.

    After teaching, he went into real estate and property management, made a lot of money, but eventually filed for bankruptcy. In a period of despair, he finally entered an adult literacy program and learned to read. He learned to read through phonics, and he made a strong case for teaching phonics, proper English, and English-language education. On these points, he was clear and genuine. A few years after developing his basic reading skills, he became engaged in something like a combination of speech therapy and literacy combined. He had to learn and relearn his basic phonemes—watching his lips and tongue, listening to the sounds, and reading the letters simultaneously. (Oddly, this was the same technique I used to teach myself how to pronounce French phonemes.) It seemed that, without literacy as a youth, Mr. Corcoran had developed his own idiosyncratic ways of speaking and hearing. Working on these basic skills proved a major breakthrough for him. He reported that his reading level is now somewhere around the 8^th grade equivalency, hardly commensurate with his education but similar to an average adult American today.

    On the whole, the book was better than I expected. I left with a greater appreciation for the struggles of people, young or old, who cannot read. But I also had two serious misgivings. First, this book was an unabashed advertisement for the adult literacy movement. This I didn't mind, so much, except I didn't think that's where the focus needed to be. Adult literacy, it seemed to me, was like fixing recalls on automobiles without changing the manufacturing process of new ones. As important as remediation of adults who cannot read is, clearly there is something seriously wrong with the public education system in the United States. If there were only one teacher in America who could not read, then we would have serious problems. I suspect there are others. A teacher who cannot read cannot teach students to read, thus my dismay at the eleven in twelve positive reviews for this book. I applaud John Corcoran for learning how to read at age 48. But I cannot reconcile his audacity for being a teacher for seventeen years. I kept imagining what my grandparents' generation might have said about such a teacher. They wouldn't have been so kind or offered excuses. In recent decades, Americans have lost both common sense and common decency. Yes, John Corcoran has redeemed himself as an individual by conquering the demon of illiteracy. But as an educator, he has not even begun to reconcile the damage he has done. He was not merely a victim of illiteracy; he was a perpetrator of illiteracy.

     My second misgiving related to the testimonial aspect of Mr. Corcoran's story. As a traditional Catholic, I found Mr. Corcoran's conversion from lukewarm Catholicism to non-denominational Christianity both disappointing and predictable. Mr. Corcoran found vague generalities and feel-good spirituality more palatable than the ritual and dogma of Catholic faith. He's not entirely critical of the Catholic Church because clearly the priests and nuns did teach him about God. Throughout the story, even as a young child, John Corcoran prayed to God to learn to read. But the young John Corcoran was loathe to do precisely what Martin Luther first sought to destroy—he could not confess his sin, not to another human being, and certainly not to a priest in the confessional. Yes, I meant to say that his illiteracy was a sin! After all, it was his illiteracy that led him to a lifestyle of lying, cheating, stealing, and defrauding. John Corcoran was able to talk to God about his problem, his not being able to read, but he was unable to utter a word to another human being (except later his wife). This, it seems to me, is a fundamental flaw of not only Protestantism, but most Protestants. By doing away with the human intermediary for confession and the divine personification of reconciliation, Protestants warp the essential meaning and value of Christianity. In practice, this does not necessarily mean that Catholics are better people than Protestants, but it does imply that Catholics are more apt to admit when they are wrong. This corresponds with my life experience. In all honesty, I have scarcely known a Protestant who was readily willing to admit when he had done wrong. And so it seemed with John Corcoran.

     For example, I was amazed when Mr. Corcoran admitted that he had been married almost twenty years before he ever apologized to his wife. This was his primary character flaw—the inability to admit his weaknesses. Though his parents, schools, and language impediment may have been responsible for his not learning to read initially, the responsibility for his illiteracy through nearly a half a century was clearly his. He was not able to address his problem until he got honest—not just with himself and with God, but also with another human being. He credits his religious conversion for his increased honesty. I would say that his religious conversion may have been a step in the right direction because he was never really Catholic from the start. Clearly, a schoolboy who could have said, "Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa," would have addressed the problem much sooner.


 
    

Poverty Builds Character

Money problems have invaded my normally philosophical mind and taken over as of late. It seems like I worry about money all the time. Now, adding a new expense into the mix, we just sent our oldest son off to college. An already tight family budget has shrunk to ridiculous proportions.

For me, struggles with money can be especially acute because I grew up in fairly affluent circumstances. I often wish that I could provide for my own children a similar lifestyle that I took for granted growing up. As a youth, I went skiing in the Alps and the Rockies, and I never questioned whether my parents would pay for college. Now, as an adult, trips to Alabama and Ohio are budget-busters, and I'm beginning to see parents paying for college as just another mistake coming out of the sixties.

My wife and I have had more than a few arguments about paying for college over the years. She sees college as the student's responsibility, and I have seen college as largely the parents'. Like usual, I have resisted her viewpoint and learned the hard way that she was right. Aptly, our eldest son seems to have settled on a mid-ground between my wife's position and mine. To his credit, he has earned several academic scholarships through his university. But, partly due to his expectation that we would help, he didn't apply for additional scholarships or awards. For us, the bottom line is as follows: according to student aid, with six kids on a mental health income our total expected family contribution is $0.00. (Who am I to question the Federal Government?) Reality check! I am not my father. I do not make a six-figure income. I cannot afford elaborate ski trips, and I cannot afford to send my children to college. We will manage, somehow. But from this point forward, if my kids want to go to college, they have to hit the books and study, research educational institutions and opportunities, and apply for independent scholarships. Otherwise, they will be forced to accrue excessive student loans that an undergraduate education scarcely justifies. Or they can join the military. Or they can get a job.

Coming from my background, this perspective on paying for college is somewhere between heresy and high-treason. My mother and siblings believe that one should not have more children than one is able to send to college. (Eh Gads! My mother and her other children actually think Margaret Sanger was right!) Often, being a Christian, especially a traditional Catholic, can put a person at odds with parents and siblings. For me, this struggle has been at times quite painful. My family has made some very cold remarks about my large family and small income. Their most frequent criticism is this: "How are you going to afford to send them all to college?"

But, really, what's so wrong with expecting young adults to pay for their university education? Perhaps there is something inherently flawed with seeing higher education as a parental obligation. Financial responsibility begets personal responsibility. If the student is footing the bill—either through scholarships or loans or cash—he or she will be more apt to study hard and to learn something. But if Mom and Dad are paying the tab, the student will be more prone to partying and goofing off. Too many parents today see college as a transition period into adulthood. In reality, most college students are technically adults, 18 years or older. For those who approach college life seriously, college is just another variant—like the military or the workforce—of early adult life.

Unfortunately, very few students coming from public high school will have developed this level of serious scholarship, and if they do, they inevitably miss the most important aspect—the love of learning for the sake of learning. Today, most of the serious students are too busy chasing after grades or careers, and they denigrate the study of wisdom or general knowledge. Instead, they quickly jump on the merry-go-round of technological training and external reward. Whereas in high-school, their reward was good grades, in college their reward is looking forward to a lucrative career. Of course, there is nothing wrong in-itself with a profitable career, but when money is the only goal, there's a problem. The world really doesn't need any more smart accountants, lawyers, doctors, or CEOs. What the world really does need, however, are smart accountants, lawyers, doctors, and CEOs who understand the importance of values and ethics. These future ethical leaders are not simply chasing a carrot and stick, they genuinely love learning about their fields simply for the sake of knowledge.

Lately, I've been really worried about our oldest as he goes off to college, not just the whole finances aspect. I'm especially concerned about whether he had the commitment and perspicacity. Then something happened that gave me tremendous hope. Looking at his dorm room he said, "It's not as small as I remember it." Then he said, "I can't believe I have a whole dresser to myself." Wow! What gratitude! It was rather humbling for me, but all the sudden I saw that all of our struggles have been worthwhile. I've been really hard on myself for now being able to provide a better life for my children, and yet that very lack has helped to shape their characters in a positive way. I compare my oldest to myself at his age, and he outshines me in so many ways. At that age, nothing was ever good enough for me; he's incredibly grateful for a small dorm room. I expected things to be handed to me with little effort on my part; he works harder than I did at this stage. And what I did earn, I quickly squandered on the next amusement; well, not everything is all that different. But he's making progress.

More Than NOT

"Did you sign [name omitted] up for the 'Voluntary Drug Testing' program?" she asked. (My child and her child were both entering 7^th grade.) The other parent was referring to a program that was new to the public school at the time, "Voluntary Drug Testing." Starting in 7^th grade, parents could sign their children up for random urine drug screens and be notified of the results.

"No," I immediately responded. "I'm not going to have my teens subjected to random drug tests or mandatory counseling."

Her chin dropped. "Why not?"

"I've worked as a drug and alcohol counselor," was the only answer I could muster. Sensing that anything I could say would fall on deaf ears, I simply walked away. But a myriad of thoughts occurred to me. "What if the results are positive?" I thought to myself. "Does that then allow the school system to mandate drug and alcohol treatment? And if so, do the parents get a choice in which treatment provider the children see?" Though I am concerned and quite vigilant about ensuring my children do not use drugs or alcohol, in many ways I'm even more frightened of the drug and alcohol treatment industry. Often, especially in relatively mild cases of substance abuse, the status quo of treatment in the United States does more harm than good. Confrontational counseling—now unequivocally debunked (Miller & Rollnick 1991)—continues to be all-too prevalent. Watered-down theology and new-age spirituality are mainstays, and genuine religious practice is discouraged (eg. Bradshaw). No, I'm not about to turn over the decision-making process regarding my children's lives to the school system, police, and treatment industry. For me, declining the "Voluntary Drug Testing" program was an easy decision.

Nonetheless, that other parent's remark did bother me enough to talk about it later with my wife. Her response was something like, "If our teenagers don't think we trust them, then they might as well be doing drugs or whatever else we suspect them of doing!" My wife sees trust as a two-way street. The children need to know that they can rely on us, but we also have to trust them. Of course, we are cautious not to provide too much freedom, and we try to make sure they are not abusing their liberty. For example, when they come home from being out with friends, we talk to them for a few minutes. Occasionally, we may even check their breath. Most importantly, we do this in a nonintrusive, non-accusatory manner. In the words of Ronald Reagan, "Trust, but verify."

Recently, during a break, I discussed this "Voluntary Drug Testing" program with my clinical supervisor, a psychologist who specializes in the behavioral treatment of children. He had a different take on the subject. He had two major concerns with a school program such as drug-testing of teens. First, parents who sign up for this program are relinquishing their parental role and allowing the school-system to pick up the responsibility. Second, these parents are assuming that the school-system is competent to take over the task adequately.

My clinical supervisor compared the "Voluntary Drug Testing" to an ecological study on Driver's Education (Robinson 1980). The gist of this study was that, back in the late 1970s, the state of Connecticut cut funding for school-based, Driver's Education. Some of the school districts dropped the program entirely, while other districts chose to continue funding Driver's Education from their own coffers. This led to a natural or ecological way of measuring the effectiveness of Driver's Education, by comparing the motor vehicle accident rates between these large populations of youths, with or without school-based Driver's Education. The results were interesting. The school districts that opted out of the Driver's Education actually had lower accident rates, and the school districts that continued to have Driver's Education had higher rates. Did this mean that the Driver's Education was somehow to blame for the higher accident rate? No, that wasn't the problem. Upon closer analysis, it turns out that the students without the Driver's Education class waited longer to get their licenses and that delay accounted for the change in the accident rate. My clinical supervisor interprets this difference as a change in parental involvement. The parents of students with Driver's Training assumed that their teens were ready to drive. They relinquished the decision of when to allow the teen to get a license over to the driving instructor. The parents of teens without Driver's Training had to make the decision themselves. With first-hand knowledge of their teens' driving performance, they were more apt to delay the licensure, resulting in fewer accidents.

In a similar way, his concern about a "Voluntary Drug Testing" program at the school was that parents would become prone to relinquishing their parental role. These parents might be less apt to keep a watchful eye and nose on their children, and more prone to trust that the school's drug-testing would pick up any misbehaviors. Anyone with a slight knowledge about drug and alcohol screenings knows that these tests can miss a lot. There is no substitute for parental mindfulness. Besides, if circumstances warrant, parents can now purchase these tests over-the-counter at the local pharmacy. At least then, the parents (and students) can decide for themselves how to proceed and not be at the mercy of the school, police, and treatment providers.

This discussion is timely. President Obama's Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, is now talking about expanding the role of public schools. With single parents and dual-career families, parents are time-strapped to provide the kind of activity, supervision, and assistance that many students appear to need. Amazingly (to me, at least), many parents are more than willing to allow the school-system to pick up the slack. Couple this with an elitist attitude toward the families of "at-risk-youth," and many of these programs are likely to get the green light.

Meanwhile, we traditional Catholics and conservative Christians are pulling our children out of the public school system by the droves. It occurs to me: This "Voluntary Drug Testing" program can be seen as a metaphor for public schooling in general. By dropping our children off at the doors of the public school, we parents relinquish control. We leave the education of our progeny to people we barely know. By allowing the school system to educate our children, we trust that they are competent to do so. Yet, in the back of our minds, we know that the United States has one of the worst-ranked educational systems in the civilized world.

As obvious as the homeschooling decision seems to me now, our family has only recently joined the trend of Christians fleeing from the public schools. Five weeks ago, we started homeschooling. As such, I'm still sorting out various aspects of the whole decision. Initially, for me, the decision had a lot to do with setting more rigorous academic standards. This is clearly the case. Our homeschooling program, one of the largest, substantially challenges our 4^th and 10^th graders, who were both superb students in the public schools. In certain skill areas, particularly reading comprehension, they are struggling to pick up the pace in homeschooling. My dear wife—who does the lion's share of the teaching—is finding that homeschooling is more work than we anticipated, but with even greater payoff.

Increasingly, though, I'm becoming aware that academics are not the main reason that we or most parents are homeschooling. Children can learn math, science, and reading all day long, but if they don't develop moral character, all that education is for naught. On the subject of values, however, the public schools are mostly silent. Public schools try to create a values-neutral type of environment, but this approach has three fatal flaws as follows: First, values are the most important thing, and any teacher who tries to be mute on values often leaves out the part that gives the lesson meaning. Second, the goal of being values-neutral is a lie; individual values always seep through. Third, increasingly the public schools do endorse a set of values, those of the liberal-progressive, elitist movement. The result is an education that lacks meaning (eg. few modern children can explain the significance of the Pilgrims), lacks integrity (eg. teens will always pick up on their Health teacher's individual belief about premarital sex) and lacks justice (eg. school boards are increasingly banning books that exert morally upright values while making others of reprehensible value required reading). This situation is extremely dire. There is no way to remain in the school system and work from the inside to make things better. The only solution for Christian parents who are serious about their children's moral education is to withdraw them from public school.

The root of the problem regarding values for public schools is they cannot speak positively about character education. For example, public schools cannot rightly espouse the virtues of faith, hope, and charity. These are positive values, and as such relate to a specific set of religious beliefs. The only things that public schools can talk about in regard to values are feelings and behaviors. All of these behaviors are expressed in the negative. Public schools frequently address the importance of NOT using drugs, NOT getting pregnant, NOT treating homosexuals unkindly, and NOT being bigoted towards other groups of people. Thus, the fruit of modern education is a student who is generally nice and gentle, but otherwise lacks real personality or character. These students know nothing of vice or virtue, but only of avoiding bad behavior and hurting other people's feelings. Morality to these young people is not objective or open to debate, but absolutely subjective. Do not challenge their point of view; their pleasant façade will turn vicious. The best that modern education has to offer—if all of these NOT lessons are heard succinctly—is a two-dimensional person, a paper cut-out. These students cannot develop real moral character, as that requires rigorous thought, self-criticism, and positive moral instruction.

And so, as a newly franchised homeschooling parent, I have little fear that my children will use drugs, get pregnant, treat people unkindly, or behave in bigoted ways. My bigger concern is what types of positive traits they will develop and nurture. I want to raise children of moral character. And that's why I think parents choose homeschooling.