Home Schooling Offensive

There isn't much spare money in Eastern Kentucky--for anything but religious education that is. When a schism developed in the Rowan County Christian Academy two years ago, funding quickly materialized for a new K-12 Christian school that was ready to open for the fall 2005 semester.

But the larger schism is within the middle and upper middle-class of rural and Southern states like Kentucky. The majority of the bankers, small businessmen, administrators, government officials teachers, doctors in small towns like Morehead, KY seem to be aligned with the larger urban and secular culture in the United States. They serve on local public school boards, work on the parent-teacher committees, promote science teaching in the school systems, support school theater programs, and engage in health outreach to rural areas.

However, another chunk of the middle-class is so profoundly alienated that they are seeking to create a network of alternative Christianized institutions. Promoting home-schooling is a big part of effort to create an insular, Christian culture. The Rev. R. Albert Mohler, Jr. of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary has called for an "exit strategy" for public schools while the Southern Baptist Convention and other evangelical groups are debating resolutions for an "exodus" toward home schooling.

So, what is so repulsive about public schooling to the hard-core evangelical community? Of course, evangelicals object to mandates against school prayer, initiatives in sex education, teaching of evolution, and tolerance toward gays. Nevertheless, what I hear a lot from home schoolers though is fear of "peer group influence" on religious children.

According to the Considering Homeschooling Ministry, "homeschoolers avoid harmful school environments where God is mocked, where destructive peer influence is the norm, where drugs, alcohol, promiscuity and homosexuality are promoted."

Believe me, there is very little if any mocking of God in public schools in states like Kentucky. But peer influence is the norm and rural kids are pushed by the other kids toward booze, pill-popping, blow-jobs, and premature sex with older guys. Like the larger American society, public school can be a tough, unforgiving and corrupt place where kids can lose their way easily in the complex web of school demands and peer-group temptations. Nevertheless, evangelicals take a very narrow and short-sighted view of the issue. Instead of obsessing so much about the temptations of peer group culture, evangelicals should focus on making schools, and indeed American society at large, into a more forgiving place.