How Home Schooling is Transforming America

The Freedom Movement

The home school movement is in reality a freedom movement. In other words, it has more to do with recapturing freedom than improving education. That home schooling has improved academics for the youngsters being so educated has been clearly demonstrated by the superior test scores that home schoolers invariably get as compared to the scores of public schoolers. But if you hang around homeschoolers long enough, the distinct impression you come away with is the overriding notion that parents want the freedom to take charge of their children’s education, the freedom to choose teaching methods, books, academic programs, and the freedom to decide how their family’s TIME is to be spent.

Last spring I spoke at large home-schooling conventions in Florida, Ohio, Maine and Massachusetts. The words that drew the strongest applause pertained to freedom, getting government out of education, getting educational bureaucrats off the backs of home schoolers. By asserting their desire to free themselves from our statist, humanist government educational institutions, home schoolers are proving that these government institutions are not only unnecessary but that they have seriously undermined and harmed family life.

The government schools have not only tried to create generation gaps between children and parents, but they have also deliberately embarked on a program to alter children’s values so that they are in conflict with the values of their parents. Prof. Benjamin Bloom, in his famous Taxonomy of Educational Goals, wrote:

The evidence points out convincingly to the fact that age is a factor operating against attempts to effect a complete or thorough-going reorganization of attitudes and values....

The evidence collected thus far suggests that a single hour of classroom activity under certain conditions may bring about a major reorganization in cognitive as well as affective behaviors.

And so, behavioral scientists like Bloom and his colleagues have been hard at work devising the techniques to be used in classrooms to thoroughly reorganize the attitudes and values of a child regardless of whether or not the child’s parents approve of what the educators are doing. The implication is that the educators believe they have a preordained right to reorganize a child’s values and attitudes without the parent’s consent. And that “right” is derived from the belief that the state owns the child. In fact, the new education reform program passed by Congress—Goals 2000 and the School-to-Work law—is referred to as a Human Resources Development System, in which the individual is regarded as an economic resource to be developed by the state for the state’s purposes.

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony writes in The Roots of Reconstruction:

The first and basic premise of paganism, socialism, and Molech worship is the claim that- the state owns the child. The basic premise of the public schools is this claim of ownership, a fact some parents are encountering in the courts. It is the essence of paganism to claim first the lives of the children, then the properties of the people.

And so, by reclaiming their freedom from the state’s educational institutions. Christian home schoolers are also reclaiming their children’s lives for God. Their children belong to God as do each one of us, and God has given parents the responsibility to educate these children in the knowledge and love of God.

Transformational Impact

It goes without saying that, in time, the home school movement will transform America. In the first place, it is already creating among Christians a growing awareness of the family as the most important cultural and social unit of the nation, an awareness that the family shares equal status with church and civil government under God’s sovereignty. It is only when God’s sovereignty is denied by humanists, pagans and neo-Christians that Christian freedom is lost. In fact, it is only under Biblical Christianity that true political freedom under limited government has been possible. That’s what we had in the early days of our nation before the forces of liberalism, socialism and atheism created the almighty, overpowering state.

It is thanks to the enduring power of the U.S. Constitution as a spiritual and legal force, that parents have been able to reassert their rights as parents. While courts and bureaucrats have contested that right, the idea of freedom is still so fundamental to the meaning and existence of America that even the worst of the statists finds it difficult, if not uncomfortable, to argue their case of ownership of the children in the court of public opinion. This is particularly so when the state schools have produced such high levels of functional illiteracy, thereby demonstrating an incompetency of incredible magnitude.

It is not surprising that Michael New, the twenty-four-year- old U.S. Army Specialist who refused to wear a U.N. uniform in Macedonia when ordered to do so by his superior, is the product of a Christian home schooling family. He wrote:

The Army had taught me that the wearing of a uniform, or the accoutrements of a uniform, was a sign of allegiance and faithfulness to the authority or power so signified. As an American fighting man, how could I wear the badges and insignia of another government? I had taken an oath to the United States of America and no other. I had sworn to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, to obey the orders of the President and those in authority over me. But the Army oath I swore upon enlistment doesn’t bind me to blind obedience, but specifies that obedience must be “according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, so help me, God.”

Congress makes all regulations governing the land and naval forces, and the experts in the military on the wearing of the regulation uniform are the sergeants. So I asked my sergeant how we as American soldiers could wear a “UN uniform” and still be American soldiers? The response I got was not what I expected: I was threatened with court- martial, imprisonment, or a less-than-honorable discharge, if I did not wear the “UN uniform.”...

My stand was not merely a matter of conscience, but was a result of my understanding that an objective standard doesn’t make allowances for what I think or feel about it. I firmly believe that our Constitution is the final word, and I had sworn to uphold this objective external standard. (The New American, 9/2/96)

Christian home schoolers are doing the same thing when they uphold parents rights and responsibilities pertaining to the education of their children. They must rely on God’s word as the source of their parental authority and the Constitution as the objective protector of those unalienable rights.

It should also be noted that Howard Phillips, founder of the U.S. Taxpayers Party, is a home schooling parent. Howard is an uncompromising, unequivocal defender of the U.S. Constitution, and the platform of the party calls for a federal government that strictly adheres to that Constitution. It should therefore surprise no one to know that Dr. Rushdoony, who addressed the U.S.T.P. at its convention in August, strongly endorses the philosophy of government espoused by the Party.

Dialectical Compromise

Recently, on a TV interview program, Richard Darman, President Bush’s budget director who persuaded the President to compromise with the Democratic Congress and approve a tax hike, described his philosophy of governing as a process by which the two parties in Congress compromise on all substantive issues in order to move the government forward. What he described was the dialectical process whereby the country is moved steadily leftward in a socialist direction. The idea that someone might be uncompromising and unequivocal in defense of a position has no place in the Darman philosophy of government, and that is why he could not understand the Christian conservatives who had expected Bush to keep his promise not to raise taxes. And so, it can be said that it was the Darman dialectic that lost Bush his re-election.

Because homeschoolers have had to take an uncompromising and unequivocal stand on their rights to educate their children as they see fit, they are in direct conflict with those who believe in the dialectical approach to government. The idea that the government must “move forward” regardless of where it is taking us is totally contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution, which places strict limits on what the government can do and should do, particularly when it concerns the basic rights of the citizens.

The home schooling movement is indeed transforming America, one family at a time, creating a grassroots leavening that will gradually make itself felt culturally, academically, spiritually, and politically. A whole generation of young people educated at home without the brainwashing of the state is hound to be more independent and entrepreneurial in its pursuit of careers, be more aware of individual and parental rights, and have greater understanding of the American form of government. Many of these home schoolers will feel obliged to enter politics so that they can become the legislators who will restore Constitutional government to this country. Just as Michael New felt a deep obligation to do what his conscience said he must do, so will thousands of other home schoolers understand the necessity of upholding the Judeo- Christian values of the founding fathers if we are to preserve freedom and justice in America.