| Education or Indoctrination? The Home Schooling Alternative by Freeland Chew
In the second quarter of the seventeenth century, the state began its encroachment on the responsibility for the education of young American minds. Revealingly, Puritan-dominated Massachusetts first discerned advantage in the regulation of developing minds-it doesn't take much suspicion of the Puritan outlook to suspect that social control was more of an end than was scholarly enlightenment. In 1636, the Massachusetts General Court appropriated 400 pounds to help establish a college in Cambridge. With the addition of the name Harvard the following year, an ostensibly secular arm of Puritan dominion was born. The college was given the responsibility of training suitably rigorous ministers and schoolmasters, and its success over the next several years laid the groundwork for a web of schools throughout that notoriously rigid province. The first compulsory education law in the colonies followed in 1642. By 1647 each Massachusetts town was required to establish grammar schools and to provide a schoolmaster to teach reading and writing. Then and now, the widely accepted and irrefutable argument that an informed populace is the cornerstone of a healthy society, especially in one ruled by a republican form of government, begs an important question: Educated by whom, and to what end? For within the answer to this query lies the fine line which separates education, with its potential to broaden the mind, and indoctrination, which unquestionably narrows it. Certainly, in light of the historical record, the general tenor of Puritan designs cannot be questioned. Within fifteen years of the enactment of a compulsory education law, independent-minded Quakers were being executed. The subsequent generation witnessed the raging current of irrationality that led to the Salem Witchcraft Trials. Maintaining Puritan hegemony was a prime responsibility of public institutions in Massachusetts, the school system included. As we observe the political correctness (devaluation of reason-derived knowledge, the endorsement of an emotion-based perspective, disdain of the lessons of history while rewriting the same, etc.) masquerading today as public education, little except the content of the reigning philosophy seems to have changed. Despite the success of the Puritan establishment of government schools, matters elsewhere remained largely unaltered for over a century. During the period antecedent to the American Revolution, state-mandated education remained largely isolated in Massachusetts. The vast majority of America's founding generation, whose learning and insight so changed the world, acquired their wisdom in a very individualized manner. And, however much Massachusetts shared worthily in Revolutionary glory, its place as a fortress of conservative reaction was established soon after. In this, its education system could not have failed to play a role. Elsewhere in the colonies, the period surrounding the American Revolution was, along a broad front of issues, a golden moment in history. To an extent unmatched since, responsibility for the education of the nation's youth remained in private hands. Despite some rare collectivist notions concerning schools on the part of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush and others, the state remained at a considerable distance from the concerns of education. Under the prevailing philosophic paradigm of Reason, erudition and culture were recognized as an individual concern. The Nineteenth Century: the State takes overYet Reason, as America's founders knew it, was abandoned, and increasingly an ability to further collective goals was attributed to, and urged upon, the state. In tune with the general political alignment of nineteenth-century America, intervention by government in a growing range of affairs that included education was generally a component of Whig, and later Republican, politics-for throughout the nineteenth century it was conservatives who furthered state control. Democrats typically resisted this trend-and some resisted it powerfully. At once, both reminiscent of the Puritans and portending the present, state involvement in education was sought in the name of the economy, maintenance of morals and a unified culture. Intervention in education and other areas became more pronounced as classical American liberalism, represented by Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Democracies, immolated itself in the cause of slavery. By the twilight of the century, true liberalism was dead as reformers adopted the means, while denying the ends, of post-Civil War conservatives. At the same time, the mystical metaphysics characteristic of German Idealistic philosophy, so prevalent in the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, began to take hold in America, and with it came a high regard for the centralized Prussian school system-the birthplace of universal compulsory education. In the closing decades of the century, the ascendant ideas in American education were those of German philosopher Georg Hegel, whose philosophic formations, being both mystical and collectivist, were diametrically opposed to the ideas that animated the early American Republic. Increasingly, the individualistic perspective that had typified American ideology was subsumed under a collectivist ideal that just two generations before would have been recognized as wholly alien. Education became, as in the Puritan era, less a vehicle for a student's fullest personal development than a tool for integrating the individual into a society molded by authority; an authority increasingly vested in Hegel's mystical state-the Divine Idea on earth, or, as he phrased it, "the march of God in the world." The Twentieth Century: Hobson's choiceThe influence of Hegel and German Idealism on John Dewey, renowned education reformer, was profound. Dewey's impact on American schools was equally so. To Dewey, himself raised in Puritan Vermont, "the brain is primarily an organ of a certain kind of behavior, not of knowing the world"-a conception that could not have been more at odds with the acquisition of knowledge under the philosophy of Reason. The influence of his thought has continued throughout this now aged century, to the point where educational options are today often limited to one of two perspectives-the product of Dewey's ideas and a reaction to it. On one hand, there is the politicized and watered curriculum taught in public schools, where knowledge is relative, self- confidence is a birthright, failure is often banned under a psychological rationale, and ethics requires self-sacrifice to wherever the democracy is being led. Here, gifted students often shift for themselves while young sugar addicts, brain structure impaired by continuous television watching and a lack of adult interaction, command the instructors' attention. The monopoly characteristics of public education are singularly ill-suited to modern diversity. In an often unrecognized effort to shoe-horn individuals into a pre-conceived mold, those who fit the cookie- cutter poorly are given the stimulant Ritalin in an attempt to improve their malleability. The methodology is far more subtle than that of the Puritans, but the goal is familiar. On the other hand is the costly private alternative. While in many cases substantially more dedicated to at least superficial education, it too often comes pre-packaged with mystical metaphysics, an epistemology based on revelation, and biblically impressed ethics. Many home schooling parents see no reason why logic and rational thought should be discarded when arriving at these critical components of philosophic structure. Religiously based education explicitly dismisses reason in addressing these elements of human existence, while the state- authorized perspective typically considers them only in a spurious collective sense. This fact powerfully suggests why home schooling parents believe that the learning requisite for life in the twenty-first century is not to be found in either camp. When one ponders the fact that public schools reflect the philosophical Idealism of Hegel and Dewey (metaphysically mystical and epistemologically impotent) and a worship of democracy (externally derived ethics), the differences between the two options become much less real than apparent. Home Schooling: Real education for individual excellenceToday's accelerating surge in home schooling stems from the growing rejection of these two alternatives. It runs much deeper than the simple assertion that the "schools aren't doing the job." Home schooling parents see the current education system failing to open the minds of its students while it endeavors to prepare them for a society it comprehends ever more poorly. More and more, these parents are asking themselves: "What is the goal of education?" Many have decided that stock answers like "to become a functioning member of society" are meaningless in the growing chaos of our age. And to "prepare for future global competition" suggests even a greater vacancy of purpose, considering that the state continuously misjudges the future, and apparently is dedicated to stamping out knowledge-conducting competition anyway. The phrase "global competition" itself suggests that state- sanctioned education is increasingly seen as trade school for future soldiers in economic warfare. In their parents' youth, trade schools were reserved for those who, for whatever reason, exhibited an incapacity for higher education. Occupational training, as opposed to education, is, and will remain, important. But it seems rather presumptuous to proceed with career training of children prior to their acquiring a rudimentary education, and at any rate when they are too young to participate in the choice. When parents choose to home school, the decision reflects education being valued for itself-and it is esteemed too highly to be entrusted to anything as muddled as the current educational system. The acquisition of knowledge is a life-long endeavor, and the pursuit of this quest between ages six and eighteen cannot alone justify placing one's child into what is essentially a state-run institution. Among those whose intellectual journey has proven at all stimulating, the point that individuals teach themselves becomes obvious. Home schooling only extends the validity of such a realization to a younger age. Cognizant of a growing confusion at the highest levels of our society, parents increasingly are reassuming not only the responsibility for assuring that their children are able to think for themselves in a way that enables self-education, but also the task of instilling in their offspring an acceptance of their responsibility for determining an ethical standard of conduct for themselves. When a parent functions as, or arranges for, a tutor, ultimate responsibility for education remains where it belongs-with the individual. In undertaking such a responsibility, parents set themselves against the social tide that has turned many children into little more than wards of the state. Properly approached, the child retains the bubbling enthusiasm that is the hallmark of young learners constructing an intellectual framework into which later acquired data can be assimilated. In a world where a constant barrage of "facts" regularly overwhelms intellectual structures inadequately formed to organize them, the absence of a proper framework guarantees the confusion that is the distinctive outcome of modern education. The methods and focus of home schooling parents are as varied as the personalities involved. In this lies the strength of a home school education. In a society as complex as modern America, we can no longer assume that the narrowness inherent in both the state-financed school system and its Christian-based alternative can possibly offer the flexibility necessary to open the minds of our children. Bibliography: Durant, Will, The Story of Philosophy, Time Inc., New York, 1962. Healy, Jane M., Endangered Minds, Touchstone (Simon & Schuster), New York, 1990 Kaestle, Carl F., Pillars Of The Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1789-1860. Peikoff, Leonard, The Ominous Parallels, Mentor, New York, 1983. Rothbard, Murray N., Conceived In Liberty: American Colonies In The 17th Century, Arlington House, New Rochelle, N.Y., 1975. Freeland Chew has his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and a Master of Science in Systems Management. He has been a student of history since the age of 12, when he discovered Winston Churchill's "History of the English Speaking Peoples" in his father's library. It was from a serious and self-directed study of American history that he developed the individualism that characterizes his perspective on events current and past. He lives in Mammoth Lakes, California, where he and his wife own an art gallery and home school their two young daughters.
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