I have this fantasy that I am a young, talented athlete who has achieved a major milestone in my sport. In my dream I have just left the field, tired, sweat-drenched but triumphant with adrenaline still flowing. I am being mobbed by reporters for their obligatory, on-the-spot interviews.
"How does it feel to be the youngest ever…"
"What a come back. How did you get your confidence back?"
"What was the turning point in the match?"
Someone tells me that I have a phone call, that the President of the Unites States of America is on the line. Through the noise and commotion, on international television with all the microphones and cameras shoved in my face, I take the phone and say, "I will not be used by you. You will not make my personal achievement that has nothing to do with you or your corrupt government a vehicle for your political gain." I drop the phone and exit the press area with my trophy and my integrity.
My fantasy comes to mind around this time of year, when the Scripps Howard spelling bee, National Geographic geography bee and homeschool children are in the news. The pundits love homeschool winners, turning them into a statement against government schools – although speaking out against government schools is a noble endeavor at any time, mind you. The children's impressive showing in contests of esoterica becomes proof that homeschooling "works" and that government schooling doesn't.
Even more troublesome is the conclusion that the Mackinac Center's Samuel Walker draws in his May 24th commentary ("Homeschoolers Make the Case for School Choice"). After a chronicle of recent homeschool trivia champs, Mr. Walker uses a kind of logic that my little brain simply cannot follow, saying: "Is it any wonder that there is a vital, forward-looking school choice movement to allow parents a wider range of educational choices for their children?"
School choice is the euphemism for government funded education welfare with a bit of flexibility thrown in. The individual achievements of thoroughly independent families that homeschoolers are have no connection whatever to the education welfarism advocated by school choice proponents. My decision to homeschool has everything to do with barring the corrupting influence of government from my family's life and nothing to do with promoting a government takeover of private schooling. How could the two possibly be confused?
Seems Mr. Walker and most of his colleagues “don’t get it.” There is a widespread lack of understanding of education’s and, more specifically, homeschooling’s true nature. Part of the problem is the mistaken notion that schooling is equivalent to education. Another part is the word homeschooling, since it conjures the image of the government school model transferred to our kitchen tables. Both these errors lead to the penchant for measuring academic success the way the government does – through contests, test scores, and their adjunct, college admissions.
Leaving aside the valid arguments against these being true indicators of academic prowess, let me help the pundits with their confusion: education is not the measurable acquisition of massive amounts of facts. Rather, education is the lifelong search for truth, wisdom and virtue. Clearly, government bureaucratic agencies geared to the indoctrination of other people's children cannot possibly satisfy this definition of education. To the contrary, they are education's antithesis. Once this definition and its implications are understood, the confusion about the nature of homeschooling magically disappears, and any attempt to equate winning a contest with being educated becomes plainly absurd.
Homeschooling success cannot be measured by the existing techniques of tapping into a child's brain. Here's our dirty little secret: there are homeschoolers who read below grade level, who haven't figured out long division, who have no idea where Madagascar is. Yet these families are every bit as successful as the McCarters, the Millers, the Bartons and all the rest. They are learning what they chose to learn, when they chose to learn it, and under the guidance of the people who love them most in their search for truth, wisdom and virtue. And they don't need vouchers, non-refundable tax credits or any other government sponsored meddling to do it.
Homeschooling's greatest value is not found in academic achievement. It is found in liberty. If my son never locates Lop Nur on a map, if my daughter never correctly spells succedaneum, what does that matter? In our over-politicized, propaganda-dominated world, they have escaped the dead hand of government. Their minds are free.
And that is the grand achievement for which homeschool families deserve congratulations.
June 10, 2002
