Jan. 26, 2007

Greetings. This is Dan White and this is Issue 7 of Homeschool News & Views.

I hope that you homeschool parents are enjoying the time you are spending with your beloved children. Ours are all grown now; our laps are empty. Oh, they do sit on my lap once in a great while, but it kinda hurts. They’re big.

In one of the previous issues of Homeschool News & Views, we discussed how the public school bureaucrats are now trying to make their large, crowded mega-schools into smaller schools within the bigger schools. They have discovered that the smaller the school, the better the students do. The smaller schools have less money, worse equipment and cheaper facilities, yet the students there do better.

It’s the same general principle as living in the city or living in the country. We live in the country -- very country. I think that statistically we have more cows in our county per capita than any county in the country. In urban areas when they greet each other they might say “How do you do.” In Texas, they might say “howdy.” Here in the Ozarks we just say “Moo.” “Glad to moot you.”

A couple of times I have had a mechanical problem while driving on the country roads around here, so I called somebody to come pick me up, and then sat in the vehicle to wait. I sat there, relaxed and tried to get in a little reading while I had time. Not possible. Too many people kept stopping trying to help me.

When we first moved to the Ozarks, I was not used to the extra friendly ways of the locals. I was driving around and I noticed that women kept waving at me. I had never experienced that before. That was 20 years ago, and I concluded that those women were really pleased at having such a handsome man move into their area. I told Margie that she was really, really lucky to have latched onto such a handsome man, and all the local women just couldn’t keep from waving at me. She discretely pointed out that the men were waving at me, too.

They were all waving. That’s the way it is in this part of the country.

With schools, smaller schools are better. My dad went to a one-room school for 8 years, and then left school to work in the timber. I guarantee you he could out-read and out-cipher most of today’s graduates from these 1000 student schools.

The principle is, as has been shown by the results in the schools, that smaller is better. Where does this principle stop? It goes all the way down to one family, as has now been proven by a generation of homeschooling. A one family school is the most effective, the most nurturing, the most positive environment a student can have. Then social activities are in addition to that.

Today sending young children to thousand student schools is accepted as normal. People sometimes think that if you don’t send your kids to these education factories, then your kids are really missing something. But we must remember that historically, these edu-marts are abnormal. They have not existed before modern times. Even the smaller schools of today, with only hundreds of students, are totally abnormal historically.

These government mass education factories are a relatively new social experiment. They have come into history only at this later stage, first entering through totalitarian Germany and through communist countries.

All those people down through history who did not attend school in a crowd of a thousand, did they miss something? Were they socially deprived?

Well, they made it for thousands of years that way.

I think the main arguments against homeschooling are these two:

1. homeschool teachers are not qualified and therefore the students can’t receive a quality education;

2. homeschool students are not well socialized.

The first argument can be measured objectively. That is, homeschool students can take the same tests as public school students, and the scores can be easily compared. Early in the homeschool movement, this argument was made strongly by the public school people, and was accepted by most as being true. However, after a while it became obvious that the homeschool students were far outscoring their public school competitors on every type of academic test.

That argument is not stressed quite as much now.

Now it seems that the most frequent argument used against homeschooling is that they are not adequately socialized.

The supporters of the left wing government schools will probably never let this one go, because it cannot be objectively measured. There are many points to be discussed with this, and over the last 30 years, many millions of words have been used in discussing it. I want to discuss what I think is the biggest single point about public school socialization.

It is quite true that Christian homeschoolers have now been shown by a generation of results to be the most well socialized of all education types, if you accept it. They are the most likely to have stable families and to be leaders in their communities and churches. However, the left wing of our society today does not necessarily accept that as being well socialized, do they? After all, the historical family is where women have been subordinated, and children have not been given their rights to choose their behavior, according to the left. Conservative Christians, for sure, are repeatedly described by the left as one of America’s great problems, so any one who chooses to be a worker in a conservative Christian church would inevitably be described by them as not being well socialized.

When the left wing says that Christian homeschool students are not well socialized, what they mean is this:

If you go to our schools, you are well socialized.

If you don’t go to our schools, you are not well socialized.

This is like the argument which evolutionists make. A number of very intelligent scientific people have recently questioned the absurdity of evolution. The evolutionists respond that:

All reputable scientists support evolution.

Who is a reputable scientist?

One who supports evolution.

They can’t lose that way, can they?

Defining acceptable socialization is the same way. The public school supporters say that homeschool students and Christian school students are not adequately socialized. How do we tell if a student has been well socialized? Simple. That is a student who attends their schools. How do we tell if a student has not been well socialized? Simple. That is a student who does not attend their schools.

What does it mean specifically to be socialized in their schools? What is it exactly that the Christian homeschool students are missing?

Here’s one thing.

Horace Mann, in the 1840’s, was instrumental in getting the government into education in America. He visited Prussia, an area which later became part of a unified Germany, and copied their model of education. That model gave the government, and not the parents, control over the children. His education plan had three parts.

1. Attendance must be compulsory. Basically all students would be forced to attend the government schools.

2. Teachers would have to be certified by the government.

3. Schools would be owned, operated and controlled by the government.

Of these three points, the Mann group believed that the second, government certification of the teachers, was most important. They said that “if we teach them what to teach, they will teach what they have been taught.”

John Dewey, like Horace Mann a strong influence in US education, but who lived in the twentieth century instead of the nineteenth, said, “You can’t make Socialists out of individualists – children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone is interdependent.”

His goal in education was to take individuals and make them alike. He wanted to socialize them in a socialst school system into socialists.

Lenin, one of the founders of Communism in Russia, said, “Give me your four year olds, and in a generation I will build a Socialist state.”

Hitler said, “Let me control the textbooks and I will control the state.” In fact, in 1938 Adolf Hitler outlawed all forms of education in Germany except his state schools.

Today Germany again has an education law identical to Hitler’s. Christian homeschoolers are being thrown in jail in Germany or having their children taken from them because they do not want to participate in the government schools.

A German court ruled that two homeschool Baptist couples lost their authority over their children in educational matters. The court said that it acted “in order to protect the children from further harm.” It declared that the parents had exhibited “a stubborn contempt both for the state’s educational duty as well as the right of their children to develop their personalities by attending school.”

In other words, these Christian homeschool children were not being well socialized, because they didn’t attend the government schools.

The director of the local education board of the county where these Baptists live said that they could not allow homeschooling because it is “a right of the child not to be kept away from the outside world. The parents’ right to personally educate their children would prevent the children from growing up to be responsible individuals within society.” Another education official stated that the obligation to attend a government school follows from the “right of a child to free education and maturation.”

Unless these Christian homeschool kids attend the government schools, their personalities will not develop and they will not be responsible citizens, says the German government. They will not be well socialized.

But what do the government schools teach?

An older German man, Hermann Stucher who did homeschool his children in Germany even though it was illegal by German law, supported these Baptists. Stucher called upon all Christian parents in Germany to withdraw their children from the public schools. He said that the government public schools are run by “neomarxist activists propagating atheist humanism, hedonism, pluralism and materialism.”

So the government schools teach humanism and pluralism, just as they do in America. Humanism is the belief that there is no higher God, and that humans are the highest beings in existence. Pluralism is the rejection of one religion, or one way to life. In other words, pluralism is the rejection of Christ. “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” NKJ, John 14:6.

Stucher, then, was threatened with being charged with treason and incitement of the people against the authorities, a charge which the Nazis used against the people they were not able to control. The authority which made that threat considers homeschool as treason because they say the obligation to attend school is a civil obligation, that cannot be altered.

All of this is the same argument that the public schools make against homeschoolers in the US. If you don’t go to the government schools, you are not being adequately socialized. How do they know that homeschoolers are not being adequately socialized? How do they measure that? How do they know for sure that homeschoolers are not being socialized?

Because they don’t go to their schools.

Another German authority said about a Christian family: “You and your children are not living in isolation on some island but rather in an environment posing intra- and extracurricular situations where you’ll have to accept that your world view will be curtailed.” He said that homeschooling could not be allowed as “children should not be encapsulated or kept apart from the outside world. In these cases, the parents’ rights to personally educate their children would prevent the children from growing up to be responsible individuals within society.”

This is just what people have said in the US. Homeschoolers are socially deprived, because they keep their kids away from the real world.

In US schools, the hard turn to the left came in the 1960’s. The schools began to teach Values Clarification, from a million seller book by that name. That taught students to clarify their values, or really to disbelieve what their parents taught them. Concepts of right and wrong were eliminated, and sex sins weren’t so sinful anymore. The schools lessened their emphasis on actual subject learning, and increased their emphasis on values learning. The schools suffered a vast dumbing down, and students began to graduate without being able to read, write or calculate well. American history courses began to teach how bad America was, and how good all the other cultures are.

Phyllis Schafly of Eagle Forum said that, “By the 1990s, public schools effectively adopted a modis operandi described by Hillary Clinton as the village should raise the child. Public schools have become fortresses in which the administrators exercise near-absolute power to determine the students' values, morals, attitudes and hopes, while parents are kept outside the barricades.”

A German court in Giessen said that if parents do not agree with the religious or anti-religious teaching in the public schools, the state does not need to heed parent’s educational principles when creating content for the public schools. On the contrary, the parents must accept the educational aims, content and methods of the public school, even if they contradict their religious convictions.

US judges now repeatedly rule in the same way. For example, one US court ruled last year that a public school can teach students "whatever information it wishes to provide, sexual or otherwise," and that parents' right to control the upbringing of their children "does not extend beyond the threshold of the school door."

Ultimately this battle is all about God. Christian homeschools and Christian schools teach God. Government schools teach against God.

Make no mistake about it. This is all about God. The socialization that a Christian homeschool student is missing is the teaching that the God of the Bible is not God, that sodomy is just an alternative behavior, and that anyone who says it is wrong is anti-social.

Government school pupils are now taught that they must accept diversity, and that diversity is the same thing which Christianity has taught for 2000 years as terrible sin. America’s classrooms are now directly teaching that homosexuality is good, they are showing students depictions of such behavior, they are requiring students to act out their approval of this, and they are taught that conservative Christians are bigots. This is what they mean by being adequately socialized.

An objection against Christian homeschooling is that the students are not well socialized. This is because Christian homeschooled students mostly grow up to be Christian, while the public school kids overwhelmingly do not.

The objective of the left wing which controls the government schools is to create a society where the Bible, God and Christ are totally kicked out, just as they have done in the schools.

They are succeeding. They are changing America from an outwardly Christian nation to a nation where conservative Christians are mocked as “America’s Taliban” and “homophobes.” They are changing America from a democratic republic to a government run state, where government bureaucracies constantly get bigger and where government continually assumes more control of people’s lives. Moreover, they have convinced many people that if you don’t send your children to their schools, to turn them into anti-Christian pluralists, then they are not being well socialized.

If you support the public schools, then this is what you support. It’s not just education. It’s God all the way. Christian homeschools are for Christ. Government schools are against Him.

On the other hand, if you are homeschooling, don’t worry at all about your children missing the socialization of the left wing government schools, either in the US, or in Germany or Europe. Give your kids a big hug; do chores with them; play games with them; do a Bible study with them; have a family prayer with them; and other such anti-social activities.

This is Dan White with Homeschool Helpers. God bless the Christian homeschoolers.