Frank Schaeffer, former evangelical proselytizer and author, attempts to explain the hatred expressed in the tea-party protests.
A big part of the answer to understanding the heightened climate of outright hate and fear of the "other" is the home school and Christian school movement.[snip]
It was about protecting your children from Satan in other words the United States government's long reach through the public school system.
To protect your children from Satan -- in other words mainstream, open patriotic and pluralistic America -- you either kept them at home where mom and dad could teach the children right from wrong or sent them to a cloistered private evangelical/fundamentalist school. At home or in school you used curriculum prepared by the likes of James--beat-your-child-and-dare-to-discipline-Dobson, RJ-slavery-was-a-good-thing-Rushdoony, or many and other right-wing anti-American activists. That curriculum presented "secular America" as downright evil. Hating the USA became next to godliness.
[snip]
If you wonder who it is that's both running and underwriting organizations such as the Family Research Council, Focus On The Family, Freedom Works and other organizers of the 9/12 March and who are the most faithful followers the likes of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh or viewers of Fox News your answer is: it's the home school/Christian school generation of men and women now hitting their thirties and even forties who might as well have been raised on a different planet.
That's a perspective I've never considered. I don't think I've ever met anyone who was home-schooled. Even in the 1960s when I went to high school in Northern Virginia I don't remember any mass movement away from the public schools in Annandale or Alexandria. That's not to say there wasn't one, but it sure didn't hit the headlines of the newspaper I delivered every afternoon or, more importantly, my fellow students at Thomas Jefferson High School. High school kids being what they are (gossips, among other things), I think we'd have heard conversations like "Did you hear that so-and-so is going to home-school next year?" or "Hey, there's a Christian school opening up and I heard that Jane and George are going there next fall."
Read the whole essay; his take is interesting.
Posted by Linkmeister at September 14, 2009 09:33 AM | TrackBackAnd consider this in the light of the new research from the Univ. of Texas:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/214989
which makes it all too clear that very small children, if given NO guidance by their parents on why some people have different colored skin than they do, try to solve the problem themselves and conclude, in a classic tribal way, that people who look like them are better than people who don't look like them. (The kids whose parents DID talk frankly to them about race concluded that people with other colored skin were pretty much like them.)
Frankly, I thought this was why we had public schools. I personally know several people who home schooled their kids, only one couple of whom are secular humanists (also they're in Canada).
Posted by: hedera at September 14, 2009 02:49 PMAnd now having read his essay, I believe him completely, but I'm not sure what we can do about it. This has been going on for decades and I've been worried about it since the late 80s when it became clear that the Christian right was deliberately infiltrating local government elections, which are easy to win, and especially school board elections. Freaky stuff.
Posted by: hedera at September 14, 2009 02:55 PMThis rings absolutely true to me. I taught undergrads at the University of Virgina, and saw it all the time. (I also went to public school in Alabama, and saw it there as well.)
I would add that there is a substantial minority of home-schooled kids who are bright and overachievers, but their families are not homeschooling them to protect them from Satan.
Posted by: Juli Thompson at September 15, 2009 08:13 AM"I would add that there is a substantial minority of home-schooled kids who are bright and overachievers, but their families are not homeschooling them to protect them from Satan."
That's right, Julie. That's why my daughter-in-law is home schooling her two oldest kids. They were getting bored in public schools because they would learn the lessons quickly and then have to wait while the teachers had to work with the more average kids to get them up to speed. All too often the really bright kids are the ones "left behind" in our schools nowadays. The teachers just don't have time to enrich the lessons for the ones who can quickly master the concepts needed to learn the subject.
Posted by: Illanoy Gal at September 15, 2009 11:17 AM