Homeschooling is normal; modern education is not

The Washington Post has a sort of quasi-hit piece out this week about homeschoolers. The report describes a husband and wife who were raised in ultra-traditional conservative Christian homeschooling environments and who break free from their oppressive roots and start sending their children to a local public school. Yes yes yes. This is pretty par for the course for a mainstream media outlet. We get it. To be fair it sounds like these folks had a pretty rough and bizarre go of it. Their parents apparently regularly subject them to severe corporal punishment; they were “taught the Bible-based arithmetic necessary to calculate the age of a universe less than 8,000 years old;” they learned to mistrust “music with a beat;” as a young couple aspiring to marriage they were taught that they should use a “rod” as a means of “breaking [their] child’s will.” It sounds like they were raised in an environment of stifling, awful incuriosity and low imagination and wasteful authoritarianism. It’s at turns uncomfortable and weird and upsetting.

But naturally the Post is using this as a kind of stand-in for homeschool altogether. That’s the point. The media have to do this once every few years. The progressives who run our media do not like homeschooling, they mistrust it completely for its individualistic, decentralized trappings, and for the way it removes your children from being subject to extremist progressive ideology. Of course the triumphant denouement of this whole saga is the parents sending their own children to a local elementary school. They have broken the cycle of superstitious oppression and emerged into the bright sunlight of mainstream education. The account finishes: “Soon [they] were watching as their children, who knew the way to their classrooms, ran far in front of them.” Hooray! You see the allegory here? (If you don’t know what “allegory” means, maybe you were homeschooled.) Homeschool is bad, a public school is good. Think about it, fundamentalists.

I think the overall benefits of homeschooling have been pretty sufficiently explicated by this point. Of course you shouldn’t beat your children, or teach them the Earth is only 8,000 years old, or teach them to beat their own children in turn. None of this is necessary and some of it is outright bad. But you can certainly avoid all of those things and still homeschool very well. This is not difficult. Just don’t do those things, teach your children well, and you’ll find success.

Yet beyond the obvious well-documented pedagogical advantages of it all, here’s one of the best parts of homeschooling: It’s just more normal. It really is. I get that it’s looked on as the counterculture these days, but that’s only a recent designation. In the main homeschool is simply a more normal way to structure your home and family life. (And “normal” in this case is of course synonymous with “good.”)

You might not feel that way when you drive by a crowded elementary school and see all the kids tramping in with their lunch boxes and backpacks and everything. That looks normal, at least outwardly so. But it’s not. Sending your kids to be raised by strangers eight hours a day, five days a week, nine months out of the year is abnormal. It’s odd and unsettling. Why did you have a child in the first place, if only to do this? Can you think of anything in your life you desired so strongly, and love so fulsomely, that you also resolved to voluntarily put away from yourself, for more than half of your waking life, at the earliest possible convenience? It makes no sense at all to me; I cannot understand it.

Of course in doing this you essentially cede most meaningful influence over your child to the school authorities to which you have surrendered him. Who do you think will have more of an effect on your child’s upbringing: You, who sees him for a few sleepy and/or cranky hours every day (minus time for homework), or his teacher, who sees him for many hours, every day, at his most awake and alert? Is this normal?

It’s actually very abnormal. So it’s doubly depressing to see this depiction of a onetime-homeschooling family whose only idea of breaking free from the old bad paradigm is to go fully in the worst opposite direction. You can do better than this. You can homeschool your children without subjecting them to a harmful ideological regime; you don’t have to reject the failures of your own upbringing by embracing your own terrible new failures. Modern standardized education is a very weird thing; homeschooling, when done right and good, is positively ordinary, in the best way possible. Do not allow partisans to trick you into believing otherwise.