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Docta Ignorantia LIII Homeschooling Today: Problems and Possibilities As we are all aware, the homeschooling movement is experiencing problems and possibilities attendant upon its successes. I would like to mention some of these that seem to me important enough to merit our joint attention. There is a growing number of black-market (unapproved) private schools hiding under the homeschooling statutes. There is a growing amount of indiscriminate certification of homeschooling teachers and student accomplishment. There is a growing tendency for public school administrators to use homeschooling as a convenient sewer to flush out their headaches. There is a growing reaction, in the name of tired old 1960s cliches which didn't work then and won't ever work, against positive developments in cooperative (home/public/private) or shared schooling. And finally, there is now more than ever an incumbency upon homeschoolers to articulate their ideals in terms of a commanding appreciation of genuine literacy and the right of society through regular channels to ensure that a high standard of literacy is universally achieved. I would like to examine each of these aspects in turn. Black-Market Private Schools These are being set up by business people for parents whose real affluence is something less than their intention. The children are quartered on public property -- usually municipal and county libraries -- and reported to their public school districts, if at all, as homeschoolers. The parents of these children have no commitment to homeschooling, no intention to do the work that homeschooling is and no desire to face the fact that they are operating outside statutory standards as well as their private means. Unscrupulous business people are appeasing such parents' pretense and drawing profit from illegal operations they have set up for that purpose. As state and local officials get word of these black-market private schools, they will seek a normalization of statutory compliance, in pursuit of their duty. And it hardly needs saying that any official effort to rein in renegades such as the business people and parents just mentioned is likely to materially affect the operating room currently enjoyed by legitimate homeschooling parents.1 Indiscriminate Homeschooling Certification Some homeschooling parents -- even leaders of the movement -- are causing certification to be ascribed to parents who are not really qualified to homeschool and to students whose academic accomplishment is not really of the nature to which they are certified. Statutes and the intention of statutes are thereby deliberately subverted and the entire homeschooling community endangered accordingly. The rationale for such subversion is that of the counter-culture: we cooperate or appear to cooperate with hegemonous authority only so long as doing so suits our purpose as we autonomously calculate that; ultimately, no one can tell us to do anything at all, much less enforce upon us anything they might tell us to do. This is the philosophy of Nominalism, which, by the way, underlies our modern "science." Counter-culture folks feel justified in doing anything they feel like doing and are happy to operate without accountability or supervision. Of course, Nominalism is one of the two modes of anarchy which, besides being communally destructive, will in the context under examination compel regulatory action that endangers the flexibility currently enjoyed by legitimate homeschooling parents Historically, the philosophy of Nominalism produces fascistic social, political and economical combinations such as the Roman Curia and its related European, African and American Fascist movements of this century. The same tone and tint is heard and seen in the counter-culture, where it has been latent since before the ugliness called Woodstock. Petulant Public School Administrators There is an increasingly widespread tendency among public school administrators frustrated by parental neglect of unruly children to simply declare those children homeschoolers as palliation of their consciences and the statutes when in fact they are expelling the students and are fully aware that the parents will evince no more interest in their children as expelled than they did when they were in school. This activity is essentially an illegal one. It is entirely understandable. But it is illegal because homeschooling is a decision of the parent, concretized by their signature on the Declaration of Intent form, and no public school administrator is competent to force a parent to sign that form or to sign it for them, either actually or virtually. A public school administrator has no statutory basis for declaring a student a homeschooler. They are out of compliance with the WACs and RCWs if they do this. When an administrator takes this course of action, they invite both civil suit and regulatory action that endangers the flexibility currently enjoyed by legitimate homeschooling parents. Reaction Against Cooperation Life does not stand still. Circumstances change. Every action produces consequences of indeterminate number and character. The success of homeschooling has driven numerous subsidiary activities. We are unable to see much less to assess all of these. But some major ones we do see and are already assessing in several ways. The one I want to highlight here is the coincidence of homeschool and public school interests. This coincidence has been latent from the beginning of homeschooling -- which began before public schooling did -- and has been showing itself variously in Washington State for several years. Details vary considerably around the state, but the fact and expansion of the coincidence of interest among homeschoolers and federal, state and local public education decision makers is here to stay. Ultimately, the homeschool paradigm is driving all federal, state and local efforts to bring the public education system back from near uselessness to genuine cultural significance. Against this movement towards coincidence are heard voices in the homeschooling community. The arguments put forth in opposition spring from a reactionary disposition, one which, instead of facing facts and forwardly, demands to face fantasies and backwardly in a spasm of sentimentality for what is gone and can never return. A metaphor here is the growth of a child and the observations of its parents. The baby mother carefully holds to her breast, reveling in the intimacy of only this relationship, is soon walking and talking. The baby does not exist now. It is gone and cannot return. The child, too, transforms by nature into something else and that child which tickled everyone's fancy and lisped and learned in such a sweet, high-toned voice is now sprouting body hair and talking with a huskiness we did not even notice until we listened to a recording of their speech made only two years ago. The child does not exist now. It is gone forever. It will never return. And now it is thinking of exploring this world with increasing independence, wanting to find its own destiny, to live out its own life. And can the parent participate in that life? Very little and eventually not at all. The parent's job must finally end with their exit from this world or before, depending on circumstances, which change and vary. The point, obviously, is that this life is flux and change. Nothing in this world is permanent. Permanence has to be sought in the depths of the soul, in the nonmaterial, the all-embracing reality we feebly and callously call God but which cannot be identified with any part or whole of anything cognizable with these roughhewn, unsophisticated five senses we so inordinately value. Today is different from yesterday and tomorrow will be different from today. To try to foist yesterday -- or, what we foolishly imagine was yesterday -- onto today or even tomorrow is impossible. It is also the nature of fascism, a thing we thought was put in its place some years earlier but which burdens us today through an array of new costumes: counter-culture, punkers, rockers, grungers, skin heads, fundamentalists, homosexuals, racial separatists and blamers, tribalists, etc. Some homeschoolers are inclined to deplore the coincidence of homeschool and public school interests. They do this on the basis of an appreciation of public school decision makers that may have been accurate yesterday, at least in part, but may not be accurate today, at least not regarding all public school decision makers. A case-by-case examination of public school decision makers' attitudes today will easily turn up freshness and flexibility that homeschoolers would rightly not have expected to find even five years ago. And too, attitudes of public school decision makers with which we were familiar ten and more years ago can still be found, though rarely in the same form or conveyed with the same vehemence as they were then. Everything changes over time. We are not living under a Nerovian persecution, after all. And Hitler is dead. And so is Joe Stalin. And so is John Dewey. We need to remonstrate ever so gently with reactionary homeschoolers and encourage them to test the waters of homeschool/public school cooperation. They have to do this eventually because as their children grow they require the resources of the public school system in order to help prepare for their life's work. If gentle remonstration will not soften hearts and fortify intellects, we should try something a little more austere than gentleness. And if that does not work, then we need to let such people go their way and not factor their reactions into our planning. A High Standard of Literacy Homeschoolers need to be preemptive towards officials seeking normalization of statutory compliance, on the one hand, and towards bumptious renegades and truculent reactionaries who invite "normalization," on the other. The way to do this is to articulate our ideals in terms of a commanding appreciation of genuine literacy and the right of society through regular channels to ensure that a high standard of literacy is universally achieved. We need to solicit and obtain significant agreement on a statement such as the following: Education is the primal and primary activity of an individual, a family, a society, a nation and a government. Education is eugenics. Each individual has a right to learn. This is not a civil or statutory right but a primal (human) one, a consequence of inalienable nature. Each individual has a responsibility to educate themselves, within the limits of their capacities, so that they are useful to themselves and to society. Children have a primal right to be educated by their parents. Parents have a primal right and a primal responsibility to educate their children. This right is anterior to a government's statute compelling education of a certain kind, meaning philosophy, at a certain place. However, this right is posterior to a government's responsibility to ensure that all citizens capable of learning come up to a specified standard of literacy. Parents' responsibility to educate their children is primal, of inalienable nature, and exceeds in importance every other responsibility a parent has, whatsoever. Primally, the constituency of our system of education is a student. Individuals and society are happy and prosperous when each individual is leading out, from within themselves, their own inner necessity. Education = ex + ducare = to lead out from. The agenda of education is the destiny of a student. That destiny is primarily inner-directed and secondarily outer-directed. Primarily, educators ask, 'What can we do to facilitate this person's becoming who he or she really is?' Secondarily, educators ask, 'How can we ensure that this person labors and consumes in a manner which contributes to the general welfare?' Always the issue is, What is literacy? What is an educated person? There are two aspects to this question, one absolute and one relative. The absolute aspect is the philosophical one, which is our grasp of human nature, our anthropology. The relative aspect is the societal one, which is our understanding of what the community needs at each moment of its existence. These aspects may be summarized this way: education trains the heart to be pure (absolute aspect) and the hand to be skillful (relative aspect). An educated person is one who has cultured taste, who is able to discriminate between the eternal and the ephemeral. The publisher of a weekly tabloid here in King County, Washington, has been orchestrating a media wave of publicity in order to hide the true nature of and create the appearance of legitimacy for a black-market private school he and other not-as-affluent-as-they-wish parents started under the custodianship of a race track handicapper turned private school tutor. To get his job done, the publisher has deconstructed a word coined by John Holt and given it a meaning which no educator would countenance for an instant. The word is "unschooling." The meaning Holt gave this word was, learning not defeated by the intellectual vagary and personal abusiveness which so often accompany the time spent in a public or private school. The meaning the publisher gives this word -- something Holt and other educators would never countenance -- is, a student determining their learning environment and content on their own, from their own resources. The publisher's use of "unschooling" is an amateur's fantasy and a pedagogue's nightmare. Insofar as it can and no doubt is being used as a cover for genuine parental neglect, it is also another sad piece of business for the truant officers and courts, who have now before them yet another rupture of common sense and good breeding by the conceited ignorance of a bumptious layman. Education consists of the expansion of inner necessity from within a student supplemented and actively fostered by a constantly-adapting pedagogical mixture of direction and assistance from without a student. These two aspects, the inner and the outer, are primal and inseparable. The publisher has offered to eliminate one of the aspects, the outer one, in pursuance of a reverie which is at odds with reality. The publisher is using this fantasy to cover a black-market private school which his children attend so that he may evade the necessary statutory accountabilities that regulate private schools. But he is doing more than that. Students of this black-market private school are registered, if at all, as homeschoolers -- a thing they are not but one used to hide what they are, which is truants. By producing a media wave about it, this publisher is trying to manufacture a patina of legitimacy for an illegal operation he has set his heart upon, associating its being with the legal reality of homeschooling, which he has deconstructed as "unschooling," by which he means -- and, let it be said, has accomplished -- a genuine chaos. He is doing what cigarette and alcohol advertisers do: give a thing a media presence to give it the appearance of legitimacy. If it's in the public view it must be good, right and true ... right? Well, that assertion/assumption is the essence of what we call McCarthyism: "It says right here that ...", or, "I have papers showing incontrovertibly that ...." If it's in the media it must be true ... is the hymn of advertisers and others who play the prank of hiding what they're doing by diverting attention to an appearance, an illusion. a decoy, a bogus thing, a red herring. This is classic McCarthyism, classic fascism, classic advertising, classic media hype. In the process of hiding a black market private school under the skirts of homeschooling, now defined by him as something akin to the destruction of education, children, the family and culture herself, this Puget Sound tabloid publisher is inviting administrative intervention in his family and professional life as well as regulatory action that endangers the flexibility currently enjoyed by legitimate homeschooling parents. A Q U I L A N O N C A P I T M U S C A S
Adwaitha Hermitage
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