Proud to Be Right by Jonah Goldberg

Author:Jonah Goldberg [Goldberg, Jonth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-06-202942-3
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

12

IMMERSION EXPERIENCE

Caitrin Nicol

I was a baby revolutionary. I was not aware of it when it began, except to observe that I didn’t ride the school bus, didn’t have “homework,” and didn’t use a lunchbox—all of which seemed hopelessly glamorous by their absence. What I had instead was less tangible or easy to appreciate at the time: an organic rhythm to the day, a devoted teacher with complete creative freedom, and an infinite amount of time to read. Lincoln beautifully described writing as “the great invention of the world”: “great, very great in enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and space.” In company like that, though I was a class of one, I was not alone at all.

In the past decade, there has been an exodus from school. The National Center for Education Statistics estimates that in 2007, 1.5 million American children were educated at home—five times the number in 1990, when I didn’t go to kindergarten, just a few years after the powers that be stopped sending truant officers to knock on people’s doors. I like to call this wave the Revolution partly because, at a purely impressionistic level, it seems like the sort of people to whom revolutionariness is theoretically appealing are more likely to find it disturbing—there’s no telling what the social conservatives are up to out of sight!—and partly because “the Revolution does Shakespeare,” for instance, has a nice ring to it. (This is what my mother does these days with my younger brothers and their friends and any other homeschoolers within her gravitational pull: she directs them in full-blown productions of Shakespeare plays. Practicing a scene is an opportunity to talk about the characters, the tension, the context, the words; going over lines is an opportunity to imprint stretches of the greatest English ever written on the memory for good. I mention this as an example of the way that the new outré educators handle the responsibility of teaching.)

Parents choose to homeschool for any number of reasons. Mine kept me home because there are not enough hours in the day to justify parking a young child at a desk inside a room for mind-boggling amounts of time when there are so many other things to do. For every reason to homeschool, there is a chorus faithfully protesting it, and like most controversies in education policy, it is not actually about education policy. The most common concern by far is socialization, which as often as not has a political angle. This anxiety is nicely summed up by an op-ed that a commentator by the name of M. J. Andersen published in the local paper when I was in eighth grade, which, with equal parts bathos and condescension, pleaded with conservatives to keep their kids in school. At the time, it got my friends and me all riled up, and we dashed off an outraged letter to the editor about all the different people that we knew;

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