"Write These Laws On Your Children"

Write These Laws on your Children: Inside the World of conservative Christian Homeschooling

Robert Kunzman, a former public school teacher who presently teaches college education courses in Indiana devotes two years to immersing himself in the lives of six different conservative Christian homeschool families scattered across the country. His observations provide experiential access to those who would like to know more about what they are debating when they debate issues relating to the conservative homeschool movement.

My take on Kunzman is that he is a fair man whose intent is to serve as an observer more than a judge. One walks away from the book believing that they have experienced conservative Christian homeschooling for what it is. As Henry David Thoreau puts it in Walden,

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, . . . I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan- like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”

I obviously cannot declare that all the children who comprise the focus of this study are being well served or poorly served. There are of course costs and benefits. I can say that many if not most of the children that he observes are not being given an opportunity to chose between numerous ways of seeing the world. This is not to say that kids in public or private schools are. Ultimately, the school system can be a monolithic place of indoctrination as much or more powerful than an isolated family.

Certainly many home schooled children in conservative Christian homes are being allowed to consider multiple points of view. Are they put in a situation where those other points of view get a fair fight? Probably not. Should they? I will let the reader decide.

A good book for anyone interested in seeing where the groundwork for future cultural conflict is being laid down.

Question for Comment: When is the first time in your educational life where you can remember being given a free choice between competing world views and one of them was not what you were raised with?