Is Home Schooling Indoctrination

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Musings on Education
Is Home Schooling Indoctrination?
By Ralph Lynn, Professor of History ret.
Baylor University

Editor’s Note: Ralph Lynn is a regular columnist for the Waco-Tribune Herald, in which these articles first appeared. At age 91, his pen and mind remain keenly sharp.

The jury on home-schooling will be out until somebody compiles an adequately lengthy and scientifically selected list of home-school people together with an objective appraisal of their adult records.

In the meantime, we might ask some questions and make the best guesses we can about the wisdom (or lack thereof) of this current movement in education.

First, what is meant by “education” in this essay?

Second, is education the right term for (probably) a high percent of what seems to be going on in home-schooling?

Third, will this type of education extend beyond high schools?

On the definition of education: Let us agree that all parents engaged in home-schooling are aware that their children must attain some degree of mastery of the testable, measurable subjects familiar to some degree to the general run of adults.

The three R’s with geography and history come to mind. Children also need some exposure to the worlds of traditional music and the graphic arts.

Obviously, parents must prepare their children for timely advancement up the educational ladder. But parents must be alert enough and honest enough to prepare their children for the job market if they have neither the ability nor the inclination to profit from schooling.

On the question: Is education the right term for (probably) much of home-schooling?

Far more important matters than the readily testable subjects are far more difficult to teach and measure.

Are the students learning to grant to people of other races the same human values they claim for themselves?

Are they ready to grant to people from whom they differ on social, economic, scientific, or religious questions the same possibility of being correct they assume for themselves?

Are they learning to analyze and evaluate what they read and hear, to question attitudes they have learned to approve without examination?

Are the parents teaching their children that they may need to develop the self-discipline to live on a low standard of living for a while in order to earn either the money or the education to do better?

In short, are parents educating or indoctrinating their children?

Finally, will this type of education continue beyond public school years? Quite naturally, an uncertain percentage of parents have been sending their home-schooled students to evangelical colleges, but fear is spreading that even these colleges may be on the slippery slope to secularism so familiar in our academic history.

To stem this tide, Michael Farris, a radically conservative lawyer, preacher, and champion of Pat Robertson, is busy establishing Patrick Henry College in Virginia.

At this staunchly conservative religious school-political party boot camp, dating (“serial infidelity”) will be prohibited, students will study evolution only to be able to refute it, and Christian lawyers will be produced—many of whom, Farris hopes, will begin to influence public policy as congressional staffers.

Gracious (or words to that effect)!

Will this movement spread, how long will it last, and when will these carefully protected young people be allowed to enter the real world?