[Rod Dreher 03/16 07:55 AM] Well, my atrophied butt is ready to shuffle and galumph away from this chapter (and without even discussing the philosophical principles behind the Arts & Crafts movement, alas). I know! Let’s move on to the education chapter. In it, I focus on homeschooling as a CC ideal. (Please hold your accusations that I am trying to say that people who don’t homeschool are bad parents who don’t care about their kids. I do not say that, nor do I believe that. So let’s please not go there).
We can talk about the merits of homeschooling as a conservative phenomenon for the next couple of days, but as I’ll be traveling again tomorrow, and will only be able to check in and out, I want to toss out a question to the group. Crunchy cons are supposed to be big on communitarianism, on building community. But what does it say about their intention to build community when they remove their kids from the public schools? What will it do to the public schools if they take their kids out? And won’t it hurt those homeschooled kids not to get to know kids like them?
In brief, my answer is that I would not put my child in a school where I didn’t think he would get a decent education just to make a social point. More important to me, though, is the kind of moral and cultural environment he would be in. The disorder, in all kinds of ways. I talked last night to a child psychologist who used to work in administration in a public school district in a very wealthy suburban county on the East Coast. He told me that he and his staff did a study a few years back of chronically disruptive elementary school students in their district, who had become a big problem. What they found, in the end, was that most of these kids’ parents were more or less letting them watch TV nonstop, and giving them little attention or discipline. And these kids, in turn, were bringing this antisocial behavior into the classrooms.
I mentioned to the psychologist that his former county is one of the most prosperous in the country, so he’s not talking about the children of the poor. “No,” he said. “These were children of the middle and upper middle class.”
A teacher I know, who teaches in one of her state’s top-rated public schools, told me that she feels like more of a social worker than a teacher some days. She said that so many kids come to school having had to raise themselves – middle-class kids, not poor kids – because they have no dad, or both parents work, or this or that. She said their home lives are chaotic, and it shows in their schoolwork and behavior. She too stressed that this is a cultural matter not limited to the poor and working poor. And yet, she said, parents expect the schools to raise their kids for them, to teach them “values” – basically, to socialize the kids.
Well, look, not all public schools are the same because not all places are the same. In general, though, we get back to Alasdair Macintyre’s observation again about a loss of common culture, and commitment to some pretty basic virtues. Do you really want to throw your kids into that kind of mixmaster, or do you want to form a new kind of community with other homeschoolers who share more conservative pedagogical and moral values? And if so, how do you reconcile that with a desire for stronger community in general? Discuss.
