HA Editorial Team

Celebrating One Month of Speaking Up

April 17, 2013May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team7 Comments

Celebrating One Month of Speaking Up

It’s hard to believe that it was just a month ago that we launched Homeschoolers Anonymous. So much has happened in so few weeks! This is really due to the amazing and wonderful support that you, our community of friends and family and advocates and peers, have so graciously provided.

In a mere month, our WordPress blog has reached nearly 100,000 views. More than 260 comments — almost universally positive — have been made on the site. Our Facebook page has received almost 300 likes. Our most popular post to date, a crosspost by blog partner Kierstyn King (“Sex™ (and the lies I was told about it)”), has been viewed over 3500 times; the second most popular post, R.L. Stollar’s “Homeschool Confidential, A Series: Part One,” has over 3000 views. Michelle Goldberg covered our story on the Daily Beast. We’ve also received coverage by the Daily Mail and Lez Get Real, both Google News providers. We’ve also received inquiries from other major media groups and will keep you posted on those developments.

This is a very difficult project. If you have any experience at all with the conservative Christian homeschooling world, you know how defensive they — we, really — have been, are, and will likely continue to be. You can see how afraid some of us are about speaking out with our experiences. Qualifications and disclaimers abound. The fact that such fear exists, merely about saying one has had a personally negative experience in homeschooling, is indicative that something has gone awry. No one should feel afraid of speaking up about abuse or hurt or pain. That is why we feel this community is so important and necessary. We want to create a platform for sharing and healing. We want to be a voice in defense of those who have been hurt.

It’s truly been a wild ride. We’ve been accused of being nut jobs, anti-God, anti-homeschooling, a vast liberal conspiracy manufactured by Obama, the NEA, and the ATF, and opportunists that want to take advantage of abuse victims in order to achieve vast fame and fortune.

But as someone much wiser than us once said:

Haters gonna hate.

We’re here and we’re not going away. We will continue to share stories, we will not be silenced by intimidation, and we will do our best to represent our collective voice accurately, compassionately, and strongly.

Thank you for your encouragement, support, and love. We are very grateful. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

In honor of our one-month anniversary, we’ve decided to take our top search terms — the phrases that people have Googled that have led them to us — and ask each HA Community Coordinator and Blog Partner to write a paragraph about one of the search phrases. (Some of us went over this paragraph limit.) This was presented to them as a creative challenge. They could write whatever they’d like that they thought was important to say to whoever might be drawn to our site because of the phrase in question. To make this a bit more challenging, we intentionally switched up who wrote about which search term, so it’s different than what that person might normally write about.

The idea is to highlight both the diversity of our voices and the unity of our mission.

So, without further ado, we present to you the first ever group post from Homeschoolers Anonymous!

*****

“homeschoolers abused” — by R.L. Stollar, HA Community Coordinator

Not all homeschoolers experienced abusive situations. Not all homeschoolers have the same story. The fact is, homeschooling is a vast and diverse phenomenon that includes different religions, different political beliefs, and an immense variety of educational philosophies and teaching styles. But from my own personal experience in the conservative Christian homeschooling subculture, I can confidently say that — within my particular subculture — there is a tendency to operate from an “Ideology First” mentality, instead of a “Children First” mentality. And when you elevate the importance of ideology over the humanity and well-being of kids, you can easily create cult mentalities. And cult mentalities can cause immense hurt and pain for so many people. They can create emotional, mental, physical, and sexual abuse.

Not all homeschoolers experienced abusive situations. But many have.

Not all homeschoolers have the same story. But there are striking similarities.

I want their stories — my story, our collective story — to be heard. And if you listen with an open heart and mind, maybe you can help us make homeschooling better in the future.

*****

“homeschoolers anonymous” — by Libby Anne, HA Blog Partner

Why homeschoolers anonymous? I think I understand why. The first time I met someone raised in the Christian homeschooling subculture who had, like me, grown up in a homeschooling family and then questioned and left the pervading ideology of that family and subculture, I was overwhelmed. Before, I had felt alone. Like it was just me. Invisible, unnoticed, an anomaly that people didn’t acknowledge, or even know, existed. When you realize that you’re not alone, that it isn’t just you, everything changes. And some of those who visit Homeschoolers Anonymous may still be in the closet or on the wall, unready or unable to make the leap, to say that there was something wrong, to speak about and acknowledge the hurt and the pain. And that’s why we’re here.

*****

“stand up for my children” — by Vyckie Garrison, HA Blog Partner

I know this will be controversial, but when I was asked to write about the search phrase, “stand up for my children,” I immediately thought of the period of time when all the abuse and dysfunction of our Quiverfull lifestyle culminated in a nasty court battle when I left my ex-husband and sued for custody of our six children who still lived at home.

My lawyer told me that I would need at least three people who would be willing to write affidavits for the judge stating that they were aware of abuse in our home. I was extremely discouraged because I believed I had done such a good job of covering up for my husband and protecting his reputation that nobody, with the possible exception of my mother, had any clue that there was anything amiss in our “big happy family.”

Undaunted, a fellow homeschool mom started making phone calls, and in about a week’s time, was able to gather more than 20 affidavits from friends, family, and acquaintances who all testified that they had been aware that the children and I were being abused.

That’s over twenty Christians who could have stood up for my children and spared us all those years of abuse.

I understand that as evangelical Christians we were all taught to fear the evil government social workers, but looking back now, I can honestly say that the court-ordered involvement of CPS was one of the best things that ever happened for my family.

I have plenty of suggestions for intervention and support (see the NLQ FAQ: How can I help my Quiverfull friend?), but if you clearly see children being abused or neglected, please call this hotline and get the family some outside, professional help: 1-800-4-A-CHILD.

*****

“homeschool uniform denim jumper” — by Nicholas Ducote, HA Community Coordinator

Jumpers, especially the denim variety, were the unofficial uniform of the homeschool mom. My mother had an entire closet full of jumpers in an array of colors, but none rose above her knee. I can count on two hands the number of times I’ve seen my mother wear pants in the last decade. I wish it wasn’t so stereotypical, but a quick Google search of the terms “denim jumper” will bring you to www.denimjumper.com – “your source for everything homeschooling.” Most Christian homeschooling sub-cultures emphasize modesty in young women, especially in reaction to what they see as an over-sexualization of young girls, but their attitudes often read like an unironic guide to rape culture (i.e. The Rebelution’s Modesty Survey). In short, women are told their bodies can make men lust and, in a revolting twist of logic, the immodest women is responsible for “defrauding” the lusting man. Young women are encouraged to hide their curves behind baggy jumpers or long skirts and modest tops. Fashion, they are told, only serves to bring excessive attention to the superficiality of a woman. Modest, godly women do not need to appeal to a man’s lust. Instead, she strokes his ego by serving in the cult of domesticity.

*****

“homeschool cult” — by Anna Ruth Fuller, HA Community Coordinator

Think about what a homeschooler looks like. What comes to mind? If images of religious children passing out pamphlets or holding signs comes to mind, you’re thinking too narrowly. If images of hippies unschooling their children comes to mind, you’re again thinking too narrowly. Broaden your thinking.

Homeschooling occurs everywhere and for all types of reasons. The same is true of public schooling and private schooling. How you choose to educate your children is your choice. However, it is important to remember that in all of this, children have a right to their own views that aren’t necessarily your own. This is true no matter what type of schooling they undergo.

So what happens when parents do not respect a child’s right to their own worldview? Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking about letting your children run amok. There’s a difference between pure hedonism and having a worldview.

Not letting your children choose their own worldview is a dangerous road to take. It might seem like a good idea at the time since it is easier to control a child’s thoughts than to guide them. Most parents these days recognize that guiding their chidren’s thoughts is the way to go, but there are those that still cling to controlling them.

It is considered bizarre to isolate your children from the world so that you can protect from worldly things. We are becoming a global society with the advent of the Internet. Preparing your child for the different worldviews they will face (and more importantly, how to respect them for what they are) is crucial to that child’s success. Yet there are many Christian homeschooling parents that purposefully decide to isolate their children from all of this. It is this type of homeschooler we are bringing to light here with our stories.

This brings me to my topic. One of the most popular search terms for our site has been ‘homeschool cult.’ When I learned that, I began think about whether we were really part of a cult as Christian fundamentalist homeschoolers. According to Wikipedia’s article on cults: “The word cult in current popular usage is a pejorative term for a new religious movement or other group whose beliefs or practices are considered abnormal or bizarre by the larger society.”

This definition makes me think we weren’t part of a cult. To have been a cult, we would have needed to have been unified religiously somehow. We weren’t. Each of us went to churches in conflict with each other on various minutiae. There was one thing that united us and that was the need to reclaim this country for the Christian God. Our parents wanted us to dream of a Christian nation and placed that first and foremost in our minds by excluding the teaching of other worldviews (thankfully this didn’t happen nearly as much to me as it did to others). We were trained up in debate to help us become better lawyers and politicians to lead this new country to its destiny. So in reality, we weren’t part of a cult in the religious sense. While there were certainly practices and behaviors that could be seen as cult mentalities to outsiders, we were less a part of a religious movement and more a part of a political movement.

*****

“homeschool and abuse and fanaticism” — by Kierstyn King, HA Blog Partner

This is a touchy subject, because you’re screwed in the eyes of parents or vehement pro-homechooling-beyond-all-reason-crowds from the start. The fact is, this sentence and search term oddly defines my experience in a very succinct way, and like the lonely oppressed girl over here, it’s not a good thing. Homeschool and abuse and fanaticism don’t have to be related, but sometimes they are and here’s how: parents have the idea to homeschool, they then are told they must homeschool to essentially indoctrinate their children to their cause (fanaticism) which in some way or another usually is along the lines of “taking over the world” (who doesn’t want world domination?). Of course getting to that point means squelching the life out of the individuals you’ve stopped seeing as human and started seeing as arrows – focused solely on your needs, wants, and purpose you deny basic rights, dignity, and sometimes the security of unconditional love to the child you’re supposed to care about above everything else (abuse).

The unnecessarily necessary disclaimer here is: obviously not everyone is like that (but some people are).

*****

“why all of the attacks on homeschoolers” — by Julie Anne Smith, HA Blog Partner

I have been homeschooling my children for the last 20+ years. When I hear about “attacks” on homeschooling, I suspect there could be some confusion. Taking a closer look at the attacks, generally, it is not homeschooling in general that is attacked (ie, the education of one’s children at home), but more specifically, a lifestyle connected with the “Homeschool Movement.” The Homeschool Movement is associated with practices and ideologies not even remotely related to scholastic achievement, e.g., full-quiver lifestyle, patriarchy, purity and modesty teachings, etc. These practices and ideologies have had mixed, and sometimes very sad results. The methodologies employed to enforce these lifestyles can also be troublesome. The Homeschool Movement must not be confused with homeschooling. I believe homeschooling to be a valid and exceptional option for motivated and capable parents who have a vested interest in the proper education of their children.

*****

“homeschooling and mental illness” — by Latebloomer, HA Blog Partner

For a well-informed and supported parent, homeschooling may be an excellent way of supporting a child suffering from a mental illness. It could allow for high quality personalized instruction, easier access to appointments with medical professionals, and protection from peer bullying. Unfortunately, the combination of homeschooling and mental illness also has the potential to do great harm. For instance, children with mental illness can go undiagnosed for much longer if they do not regularly come in contact with trained educators and medical professionals. Distrust of those resources is very common in fundamentalist homeschooling circles, where parents are much quicker to blame unusual behavior on rebellion and worldly influences. An additional concern is the potential for harm when a child is homeschooled by a mentally-ill parent. The child will often be far more affected by the parent’s mental illness because of the increased time spent with the parent and the lack of time with other adults. For such children, the parent’s paranoia, depression, narcissism, etc, define their entire childhood and hinder them from developing positive and healthy relationships with others even in adulthood.

*****

“which is more effective for learning homeschool or public school?” — by Brittany Meng, HA Blog Partner

So you’re wondering which is more effective for learning: homeschool or public school. To answer this question more effectively, you should add the phrase “for my child.”

It all depends on what your child needs to be an effective learner. Here are a few issues to consider about the effectiveness of homeschooling for certain ages and needs.

Elementary school: Homeschool can be very effective for Elementary school because children often need one-on-one time to learn basics like reading and math, which are foundational for a strong education. If your child needs extra help in these subjects, homeschooling might be a good choice. On the other side of the coin, if your child is advanced in these areas, homeschooling might be good for your child as well. Nothing squashes the natural love for learning faster than a child who is bored. Homeschooling allows you to move at your own pace.

Middle School: Let’s just face it—middle school stinks for most people. Homeschooling will not remove all awkwardness, angst, self-doubt, or attitude problems from your child. However, if social issues are getting in the way of your child’s academic success, homeschooling may be a good option for your family.

High School: By this point, most young people are able to voice their educational and social needs. These wants and needs should be taken into consideration. This is also the point where parents need to consider how capable they are to meet the needs of their child, especially if he or she wants to go to college. I believe that homeschooling can be effective in high school but only with a strong outside support and supplemental network: classes at a local high school, community college, and/or homeschool co-op.

Personally, I believe that homeschooling becomes less effective for learning the older the child gets but this is a blanket statement. Only you can determine what your child needs.

You also have to consider the needs and abilities of your family: finances, time commitment (contrary to what many people think, your child needs as much academic attention from you in 1^st grade as he does in 10^th grade. Kids need accountability, motivation, and a sounding board for ideas), a strong support network, and whether or not you actually want to homeschool. Even if you feel that homeschooling would be the best option for your child, if you don’t want to homeschool, don’t do it. Homeschooling is a huge commitment. You can’t toe the water; you have to jump in with both feet. However, some states allow your child to be homeschooled by someone else. Check into all your options.

When choosing the best learning option for your child, it is important to consider what you and your child need and want both academically and socially. So, which is more effective public school or homeschooling? It all depends on your child.

*****

“pscyholgoy of bad/evil” — by Lana, HA Blog Partner

In conservative circles parents often have a tendency to refer to their children as all good or all bad. In public — that is, among other conservative families — kids often are forced to play the role of the perfect family, the perfect godly family. I felt this a lot as a child when we did cookouts with other homeschool families, or a respected homeschool family came over for dinner. I had to smile and pretend that I was godly (whatever that means) while everyone talked about how we were great and the future of America. At home our house was in shambles, but none of that mattered around our friends. Perhaps this alone would make a child go crazy. Why is it necessary to fake it? Why weren’t we genuine? Was it all in my head that my home was dysfunctional? Was it my fault when I was unhappy? Was my friends’ home totally perfect? These are legit questions that I and many others have experienced, but the confusion goes much further. For every time a child is praised as good, its likely that he or she is shamed as bad for the most ridiculous things at home. I was taught that I was not dressed until I wore a smile. If I did not wear a smile, I was ungrateful. If I expressed frustration (that admittedly did get out of hand sometimes), I was disrespectful. A simply bad act is escalated as totally evil or rebellious. There are plenty of homeschoolers who had it much worse, directly being called evil for not being submissive to an abusive situation. And so the soul is torn between good and evil. Sometimes kids just need to be told they are human. We aren’t perfect. We aren’t all bad. We’re human.

*****

“living my life” — by Heather Doney, HA Blog Partner

What my life was supposed to be was set. One story said that because I am a woman, by the time I was 30 I was supposed to have been married for a decade and have somewhere between 3-6 kids, homeschool them in a nice house, and be involved with a local church. The other story was that I was supposed to have a mid-level office job where I wore business suits and cute pumps, had a comfortable salary with decent benefits, ho-hum dates with guys who wore nice watches, and appletinis with the girls on weekends.

Neither are my life. I truly thought I was supposed to somehow make one or both my reality, that they were in fact the going realities available, but now I know they weren’t, at least not for me. I knew it just didn’t feel right, but I somehow figured I’d still end up in one or the other. I didn’t. I’m still just me, and while I do own a business suit and those cute pumps today, I generally wear flats or leather boots with jeans. I have only a laptop computer, not a cubicle, to go to. If I’d wanted a baby already I expect I could have had one, but I didn’t. I don’t go to church and I don’t even like appletinis (or guys who wear expensive watches, for that matter).

So while I didn’t want my life to look like either of these so-called options, I didn’t know what it should look like. What I knew it shouldn’t look like was what I call “living in the meantime.” I lived in the meantime for a few years and meantime mode is where you just let life happen to you, figuring it knows what is best, not-so-patiently waiting until it resembles one of your ideals. The scary thing is it likely never will. You can easily spend your whole life in meantime mode, waiting on serendipity to rescue you, and the thing most people forget about serendipity is that it isn’t just some happy accident or eureka moment that breaks you out of your ordinary life. Serendipity is what you find while you are out looking for, working on, and doing other things. Because serendipity requires action, it is a lot harder to find while in meantime mode or while you’re living someone else’s idea of your life, just going through the motions.

So to me living your life is not about doing one thing or another but about breaking out of that. It is about actively writing the next chapter to look differently, resetting the script, welcoming the changes, courting serendipity. It is about “if you build it, they will come.” In order to do that you have to do something scary though – be real about the person that you know you are, not stuck on the one you feel you “should” be. You can’t go squeezing yourself into a role that makes you look like you’re wearing somebody else’s style.

To live life, forget the ideal life someone else created for you and said should be yours.

Be brave and write your own story.

Why I Blame Homeschooling, Not Just My Parents: Reflections by Nicholas Ducote

April 17, 2013May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team50 Comments

By Nicholas Ducote, HA Community Coordinator

Author edit to clarify my call for more oversight: I recommended intra-community policing in my post. State action should be a last resort. Those that care to preserve their parental rights to homeschool need to hold other parents accountable. Unfortunately, fundamentalist homeschooling communities are often isolated from anyone who would question the parents. I don’t have a solution, but I know we can’t just assume the status quo will fix things. Hopefully, projects like this will scare other parents enough to make them confront other parents. But let’s be honest, do you see that happening in these sort of communities? Most of these people laugh at the idea of children having rights and would never support anything that encroaches on their ability to teach their children whatever they want. If you suspect child abuse or neglect in a family you know, please report them to Child Protective Services.

Homeschooling, as a method of instruction, is not intrinsically bad, dangerous, or damaging. I saw many children raised in homeschooling who were not abused by religious fundamentalism – even if they were Christians. However, as a society, we have to realize that the current state of homeschooling gives parents unique power over their children. Yes, many homeschooled children are a part of co-ops, interact with neighbors, and have relatively normal social interactions. But other homeschoolers are isolated in rural areas, with no contact with neighbors, or the outside world. Abuse develops in these environments because there is no oversight from outside the parents and, if criticism if lodged, the parents are defensive. To many homeschooling parents, homeschooling (the method) is part of a larger worldview that involves rejections of secularism, science, and academic institutions.

I developed claustrophobia, a generalized anxiety disorder, and panic attacks in high school. At the time, I assumed my panic attacks were the result of the Holy Spirit convicting me of my sins. The most common trigger for my panic was sexuality. As a teenager, I would often shake uncontrollably after masturbating. Homeschooling can make children feel trapped because they are literally never away from their parents. When I was quasi-dating girls in high school, behind my parents’ back because they wanted me to court, I would have a mini-panic attack when the phone rang – scared that my parents would find out. When I got in trouble it meant a few hours with mom and dad, crying and arguing about what God told them to do, ending in me feeling completely trapped. When I woke up the next day, I had no choice but to bottle up my anger, shame, and humiliation and go “do” homeschooling. In ATI, many leaders preached about how listening to rock music would literally result in demonic possession. This is abusive to teach to children. To this day, I struggle with anxiety before I fall asleep. I was taught, by my parents and by ATI’s leaders, that demons were very real and they could possess rebellious Christians. Many in the homeschooling movement conceptualized the “culture war” as spiritual warfare — the secular humanists were literally portrayed as the minions of Satan.

Spiritual abuse is a difficult term for many people to wrap their heads around. It may seem like we are trying to say that raising children in a religious tradition is abusive, which we are not. However, I can say that when homeschooling is mixed with religious fundamentalism, abuse almost always occurs.

There is a distinction between religious fundamentalism and mainstream religions. I once told my mom, “I would have been fine if you stayed Baptist. It’s when you drifted into fundamentalism that hurt me.” What many people fail to realize is that most parents don’t wake up one day and decide they need to start controlling their childrens’ lives and prepare them for the culture wars. Yes, my parents are to blame for subscribing to fundamentalism, but the homeschooling community and movement are also to blame.

In many states in the 1990s and 2000s, homeschooling parents received most of the curriculum, instruction, and indoctrination at state, regional, or national conferences. There are a myriad of institutions and groups that formed the movement, so it is impossible to point to a single root cause of the abuse in homeschooling. But I know abuse doesn’t just happen because of bad parenting. The bad parenting that people indict was being advocated on stage before thousands of people. There is a reason why so many homeschooling alumni share stories and experiences. Tens of thousands of homeschoolers attended state Christian Home Educator Fellowship (CHEF) conferences, where they were exposed to

The Harris family and their beliefs about Biblical courtship
David Barton and Little Bear Wheeler’s revisionist history
Evangelical leaders that scared everyone about the evils of secular humanism
Michael and Debi Pearl’s harsh ideas on corporal punishment and misogynistic ideas of gender roles
Huge book sales populated mostly by Christian fundamentalist textbooks — advocating creationism, teaching math based around the Gospel message, or other “educational tools.”

All of these ideas circulated around the homeschooling communities and trickled down to local CHEF chapters.

Parents’ responses have been mixed, but many of them see our blog as a tool to take control of their children away from them. Parents emphasize their rights to raise their children however they want. But, as a society, we have already decided that parental rights end where abuse begins. Thus, one of the main issue in this debate becomes whether or not a homeschooling environment is emotionally or spiritually abusive.

You might think this is only a problem of the past decades — that now, in this new zenith of modernity, fundamentalist homeschoolers that spiritually abuse their children are dying out. You would be wrong. Yes, there is growing momentum behind secular homeschooling, but there is no hard social science about homeschooling. At this point, observational data is almost all that exists about homeschooling and its demographics. We know very generally how many people homeschool and for what reasons. But ten states do not even require the parents to inform them of their childrens’ “enrollment” in homeschooling.

This is the start of an important conversation about homeschooling. I am opposed to religious fundamentalism in all forms and I believe that the abuse that occurs when fundamentalism is allowed to dominate homeschooling has no place in the modern world. I’ve heard so many Evangelicals and homeschooling parents mock the Islamic madrasas for their religious instruction, but fundamentalist homeschooling isn’t different by much.

To those homeschoolers who are afraid of this exposure, it’s time to own up. These abuses happened, the community’s leaders encouraged it, and the community does not regulate itself. If the homeschooling community is not willing to regulate itself – lest a parent tell another parent their methods and ideologies are abusive! – then someone else will.

I am tired of sitting around hoping that the abusive fundamentalist culture within homeschooling will die out. I don’t want it to die out, I want to trample it out so that no other children face the sort of abuse I, and many other, went through. Part of the means telling the honest, visceral truth about what happens in many homeschooling homes. Yes, abuse is ultimately the fault of the perpetrators, but why does everyone leave the homeschooling community blameless for how it brainwashed my parents?

The issue of abuse in homeschooling is an issue of the distortion of parental rights and the reality of systemic indoctrination.

You cannot stop the abuse without exposing the advocates.

We Need Advocates: Philosophical Perspectives’s Story, Part One

April 17, 2013May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team34 Comments

HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “PhilosophicalPerspectives” is the author’s chosen pseudonym.

*****

In this series: Part One — We Need Advocates | Part Two — A Tool In Someone Else’s Culture War

*****

As a kid, I remember seeing national media stories about homeschool families like Kevin and Elizabeth Schatz, who beat their daughter to death in 2010, or Banita Jacks, who in 2009 was convicted of murdering her four daughters.

I clearly remember having conversations with my mother about how “those people weren’t really homeschooling” and how our family and friends were getting it right. We talked about how they weren’t really part of any home school community, and their parents were just trying to get away from the responsibility they bore for the abuse they inflicted, by claiming the title “home schoolers.” The home school community distanced itself from these stories, claiming that the abuses of a few “nutjobs” shouldn’t impact the rights of the whole homeschool movement.

It’s been interesting to hear the same lines come up in response to the stories shared on this blog. In comments on other sites, I’ve read many things like, “you could find 30 abused kids in any school system!,” or “these kids’ parents were just crazy. That’s not what home schooling is really like!” It seems like many people invested in the homeschooling movement are reading this blog in the same way my mom read stories like the ones mentioned above — as extreme examples of abuse from people on the far fringes of the homeschool movement. I’ve read comments that go so far as to dismiss these stories outright. More people, though, lament the suffering they read about, but make comments that distance themselves from the problem. These extreme cases are hard to catch, the sentiment goes, because these families never show up to homeschool groups or 4-H clubs or churches or anywhere we (homeschoolers) might be able to intervene. “These kids were totally isolated! It’s not our fault!” they declare, explicitly or implicitly.

This is misguided.

For many of us who are sharing our stories, our families were not on the fringes of the homeschooling movement — we were at its center. Our parents were the ones running the debate leagues, and founding the AWANA programs. We were the ones winning awards, respect, and acclaim. We are the poster children of the homeschooling movement.

And yet, we suffered serious abuse and neglect, and no one intervened on our behalf.

As a survivor, I started asking why. I was (almost constantly) involved in a myriad of extracurricular activities, and none of the adults in my life intervened in the neglect I experienced. They either didn’t notice, or didn’t care.

This is what isolation looks like in the homeschooling community.

I interacted with many adults outside of the homeschool movement, in many different contexts, and I honestly don’t think any of them had an inkling of what was really going on. Homeschoolers have always been trained to put on our most adult, most mature face to the outside world. This has to with the ways we’ve been socialized and the pressure we face to be walking proof of the “success” of homeschooling — but that’s another post. Regardless, we’re excellent at being polite and reciting (often eloquently!) the ideas we’ve been taught. We therefore often make a very positive impression on outsiders — I can’t tell you how many times I was told how grown-up, how mature, how insightful I was when I was a tween. Most of the adults outside of the movement were so blown away by my irregularity (and my ability to discuss the classical origins of astronomical nomenclature) that they never asked deeper questions about my education or physical well-being, let alone about the emotional and spiritual abuse that was present in my home.

I also regularly interacted with adults within the homeschool movement, where parents should have been able to notice what was happening — and still, no one spoke up. Many of them didn’t (and still don’t) consider what many of us endured abuse — it’s just part of the process of “training up a child.” Many bought into the same vision of religious indoctrination and corporal punishment. The “us vs. them” mentality was huge, and “them” was often Child Protective Services. I’d still be surprised to hear of one home school parent reporting another. Even when the “moderate” parents didn’t agree with the techniques of the more fundamentalist ones, the “rights of the parent” continuously won out over the rights of the child. This line of reasoning is currently being used by the HSLDA to justify the refusal to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The combination of these factors created a unique culture that fosters and covers up or ignores the abuse and neglect that happens at the center of its community. The case against Sovereign Grace Ministries, an evangelical denomination that promotes homeschooling, is just one example. We’ve experienced it, and we’re hurt. There was a deep sense of community in the homeschool movement, and many of us, as kids, trusted deeply in its people and institutions. Now that I’m an adult reflecting on my experiences, I feel betrayed. The people I trusted perpetuated the systems of indoctrination that harmed me, and facilitated my parents’ neglect.

This is what isolation looks like in the homeschooling community.

The invitation that this blog presents to the homeschooling community is to begin to take abuse, neglect, and indoctrination seriously, and refuse to look the other way. The children of homeschooling need advocates, and our parents aren’t always looking out for our best interest. Neither is the HSLDA.

To be continued.

Home Is Where The Hurt Is: Mary’s Story, Part Six

April 17, 2013May 13, 2020HA Editorial Team14 Comments

Home Is Where The Hurt Is: Mary’s Story, Part Six

HA notes: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Mary” is a pseudonym. The following series is an original non-fiction story that spans 33 pages of single-spaced sentences. It will be divided into 10 parts. The story begins during the author’s early childhood and goes up to the present. At each stage the author writes according to the age she is at.

Trigger warnings: various parts of this story contain descriptions of graphic, often sadistic, physical abuse of children, apologisms for religious abuse, deprivation of food, as well as references to rape.

Extra trigger warning: this particular part of the story also involves a description of rape.

*****

*****

Part Six: Losing Control

We sit there as she walks from room to room of the house, trashing every room as she goes through it. She comes back in the living room and says we have 15 minutes to get the whole house spotless. Abby and I go in our room, but I don’t even try. I know that I’m going to get beat no matter what and I know that it is impossible for us to get it all clean in 15 minutes. Abby is crying again and trying to clean the room. She looks desperate. She says that she knows she should be able to get it cleaned up in time the way Mom wants it. I tell her that it is pointless but she begs me to help. I try for her because she looks so weak. I cry inside for her. I can’t let her see me cry because I need to be strong for her.

I try to make her feel better. I tell her that we are princesses in disguise and that Mom is the evil person that we will be able to punish later when our father comes to save us. She smiles a little and we work hard.

Mom comes to the door and screams that we are not working hard enough. She grabs Abby and yanks her into her room. As I listen to her cries of pain, I yank on a pair of shorts under my pants as fast as I can to try to add more padding. I am next and she tells me to pull my pants down this time. I know I am in more trouble. She sees my shorts and gives me extra spankings with the belt and then tells me I now have a 10 page paper on lying. I try to pull my pants back up and get out of her room as fast as possible.

We only have 2 minutes left to clean the house and we haven’t even finished our room.

We don’t make it before the timer goes off. Back in Mom’s room we go.

I try to keep count of the spankings to keep my mind focused on something besides the pain. I refuse to cry. I know that’s what she wants and I won’t give it to her. Wait, was that 120 or 130? I’ve lost count again.

After that round of spankings, she trashes the house again and we start all over.

I know this is going to go on for the rest of the day. We haven’t even finished our regular chores for the day or started our school work. All of today’s school work is going on our undone lists. Mine is about 5 note book pages long. She says that we will only get yucky meals till we are completely caught up. I know it is impossible.

As we start to clean the room again I let my mind wander. I am a princess again. My father is away for a long time and my stepmother is forcing me to be her slave. I just keep hoping that my father will come home and rescue me soon.

Oh no! I just heard the front door slam. Dad is home. That means another meeting and another round of spankings. At least this round of spankings will be from Dad. He doesn’t spank as hard.

*****

“LEE!!! WHY ARE THE CHIPS IN THE WRONG CABINET?? YOU ARE SUCH AN IDIOT! THE CHIPS HAVE BEEN IN THE LAUNDRY ROOM CABINET FOR YEARS! CAN’T YOU DO ANYTHING RIGHT?!?”

Why is Dad letting Mom yell at him like that? Mom is treating him like a child. Maybe she will get mad enough and leave the house. Yes she is! I hear the door slam and the car roar out of the driveway.

Abby and I look at each other and sigh a sigh of relief. I pray while we finish cleaning that she gets in a car wreck and dies. I hate her. I want her out of my life.

After we finish cleaning, Dad asks us if we have eaten today. He tells us to eat a bowl of cereal and then go to bed. It’s after 9 pm.

We climb into bed and Abby goes right to sleep. I lay there and start thinking.

It starts happening again. I feel myself losing control of my mind again. I start getting chills.

I’m laying on some pavement. I don’t know where I am but I look up and am surrounded by four men looking at me in a way that I don’t understand but it terrifies me. I suddenly realize that I am naked. One at a time they start doing things to me. I don’t understand what, but it hurts. After they are done, they start laughing with an evil laugh. I still can’t figure out why I can’t get up.

They have me tied down somehow. One of the men walks away and comes back with sheets of ice. He starts covering me with ice and laughing. I don’t understand the looks they are giving me. What is funny?

I am freezing. Then they all come over and start peeing on me. Why are they doing this?

I am screaming for them to stop. This goes on forever. Finally they stop. One of them brings over a bucket of freezing water and uses it to wash me off. Then they all start to do things to me again. This time I really don’t care because I am so cold. At least them being on top of me is warming me up.

Suddenly the side door slams and I am jolted back to my room. I realize that my hand is between my legs and I am all slimy and wet and it’s not pee. I don’t know what that stuff is but I think it’s gross.

I sneak to the bathroom to clean up. I try to be quiet because I know that Mom is home again. As soon as I have cleaned up, I rush back to my bed again. Abby has woken back up and is crying. We both know that Mom is about ready to come yank us out of bed again. We know that we didn’t get the house cleaned like she wants it.

We sit and hold each other while listening to Mom and Dad fight and scream. Even if she doesn’t come get us up, we can’t go to sleep with that going on. Sure enough, a few minutes later she storms in our room and screams for us to get out of bed because we didn’t have permission to go to bed. She yells at us to all go into the living room. She screams at Dad to bring our desks in the living room. She says that we are not allowed to go to bed till we each have 20 undone school assignments done and passed.

I look at the clock. It’s 11. It’s going to be a very long night.

She says that if she finds us asleep at all then we will get a ton of spankings. She lays down on the couch and goes to sleep with the belt across her lap. I know we will be here all night. I try to work on the school work but I am so tired I can’t think. I lay my head on my desk for just a minute.

I wake up with a sharp pain across my back. I jolt up and see Mom standing over me with the belt coming down again. This time it hit my head because I arched back to stop her from hitting my back again. She yanks me out of the desk and then the belt lands across my chest. The swings keep coming.

She stops and pulls me off the floor and shoves me back into the desk. She wants to see the math page that she told me to work on. I can’t figure out this problem and I asked her for help, but she says that she isn’t going to help me because I should be able to figure it out on my own. She says that I am stupid because I can’t figure it out. She says I can’t be her daughter because a child of hers can’t be that stupid.

*****

It’s about 4 am now and she finally gets tired enough to want to go to bed. She says that we can finally go to bed but we will resume this in the morning. Abby and I go collapse in our bed.

The next thing I realize is that I am cold and soaked. Our whole room smells like pee. No! I peed in the bed again! I wake Abby up and try to get the sheets changed on our bed as fast as I can without waking Mom up. It is so hard because her room is right across the hall. I can’t do it and Mom storms in our room. She calls me a baby. She says that I should still be in diapers and that she is going to tell everybody how I am such a baby.

It’s about 6 now and she decides that we have to stay up. I start to let my mind wander again. If I don’t, I won’t survive. This time I have been kidnapped and sold as a slave and I’m praying that my father will find me and save me. Why does my father never actually save me?

*****

Yay! Mom is getting a headache! She says that she has to go lay down. I know that she will sleep a long time because she didn’t sleep last night. She goes in her room and shuts the door.

I head to my room and crawl under the bed. I am so tired… my mind drifts….

Am I dreaming or is this real? I honestly don’t know anymore.

To be continued.

We Had To Be So Much More Amazing: Samantha Field’s Story

April 16, 2013May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team23 Comments

Samantha Field blogs at Defeating the Dragons, and she was recently featured in a Christianity Today story entitled, “Finding Faith After Spiritual Indoctrination.”

I’ve been reading the stories Homeschoolers Anonymous has published since it launched, and at first didn’t feel comfortable sharing my own experience with homeschooling, since it was unlike most of what I was reading. But, through reading these stories, it’s helped me come to grips with some of what I went through.

I’d like to start out by clarifying that my experience was fundamentally different– and yet, somehow, eerily the same. I spent most of my childhood in an Independent Fundamental Baptist (IFB) Church, and for that reason we were never part of the larger homeschooling movements — at least not organizationally. We didn’t use PACES, I’d never even heard of ATI until I went to Pensacola Christian College, we never went to any conferences, I didn’t travel in debate. In fact, reading about these stories made me slightly jealous; because of the cult-like environment of the church I was raised in, I never had the opportunity to interact with anyone outside of my church. I had one friend — one — from the time I was 9 until I left for college at 17.

But, until recently, I would have said that my experience with homeschooling was a favorable one. I started studying logic in third grade, I started studying Latin and Greek in fourth grade, I started reading the classics of the literary canon at nine. I skipped fifth grade entirely — fifth and sixth grade in math. I always tested extraordinarily well — I started testing on the graduate level in seventh grade, and I got a nearly-perfect score on the verbal portion of the SAT (I deliberately answered one of the questions “wrong” because I felt that the question was asking for a “liberal” political opinion). When I went to college, I maintained a 4.0 GPA my freshman year, and made the Dean’s List for every semester thereafter. I never needed to study — in fact, attending classes always felt like I was being “spoon fed” my education, when I had grown used to learning everything I needed to know simply from the reading. I went to graduate school and got a Master’s degree in English — and, again, did very well academically.

It took me a long time to realize that the academic excess I experienced had its good and ugly moments. The good was that I was an excellent reader, and I became a fairly decent writer and editor. It also gave me a lot of time to study music, and that paid for my first year in college.

There are a few ugly sides, and the first was the extraordinary amount of pressure I felt academically. I imagine many, if not most, homeschoolers can attest to the unbelievable amount of expectations we had to live up to. We had to be so much more amazing than any other kind of education. My parents were immeasurably proud of my achievements, and they lovingly wanted to “show me off,” but the constant pressure to perform resulted in a sense that the pressure followed me everywhere– even into college. I felt like I was constantly and unceasingly being evaluated by everyone I knew. I became an overachiever — to the point where several of my professors repeatedly had to tell me to calm down, relax, and do less work or I was going to kill myself.

Another facet of how homeschooling failed me was in mathematics, and I think my experience is fairly standard. Both of my parents are incredibly intelligent — my father works in a STEM field, and my mother did very well in math. However, while I was in high school, neither of them had a college education (a sacrifice my mother made, ironically, in order to stay at home and homeschool us) — and I was surrounded by an attitude that women didn’t belong in STEM fields because we’re just not suited for it. Our brains aren’t wired that way. So, I grew up believing that part of my identity of being a “good, godly, Christian woman” was being terrible at math. This became a self-fulfilling prophecy, even though I excelled in geometry and musical theory (which somehow were “artsy” so I was “allowed” to be good at them). When I met my husband, some of our conversations centered on his insistence that I would be good at math if I ever tried — and my insistence that no, I wasn’t. Until, one day, he explained algebra to me on a road trip. And it made perfect sense– so much sense, in fact, that I wondered why it had seemed like complete gibberish before.

And some of the things that get so heavily praised in the homeschooling movement ended up being unhealthy for me in the long run. We were isolated– we called it “being called out” and “separate,” and we laughed at people who asked us about “socialization.” We went to Wal-Mart in the middle of the day, and someone would inevitably ask what I was doing there. I would say that I was homeschooled, and without exception they would ask if I was “special needs.” And then, inevitably, I’d have to mount a defense for homeschooling.

As I’ve moved into my adult life, I’m beginning to see how deep the influences go. While we weren’t involved in any type of official organization, I grew up familiar with the Pearls, the Wilsons, and the Vision Forum. I read Beautiful Girlhood and believed that daughters should stay at home until they’re married. Now, I find it incredibly difficult to interact with people in a group setting, and it has nothing to do with not being familiar with “pop culture” (although that is occasionally a factor). I am completely hopeless at reading people, I don’t understand basic social interactions, I can’t navigate basic things like class discussions — even though I am articulate and outgoing. I’m frequently disabled by self-consciousness and nerves, and find it difficult to find a balance between silence or speaking too much. I don’t know how to do simple things like create boundaries with people.

I’m moving toward healthiness, slowly. It’s difficult, and hard going, but it’s happening. And part of my recovery is recognizing that even though I pretty much had the “ideal” homeschooling experience, it was still unhealthy.

Looking Back At My Fundamentalist Homeschooling Past: Sheldon’s Story

April 16, 2013May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team5 Comments

The author of this piece writes under the pseudonym Sheldon at his blog, Ramblings of Sheldon. This piece was originally published on Reason Being on December 20, 2012. It is reprinted with Sheldon’s permission. He describes himself as “a former Christian fundamentalist” who “is now a semi-closeted agnostic” that writes about “his fundamentalist past, his beliefs now, and the cult known as the Independent Fundamental Baptist denomination, which his sister was a part of (and he also had some personal experience with).”

Recently, I have begun to start thinking about homeschooling, how I feel about it now, and how it has affected me in my life.

Two things have really gotten me started thinking about this. First, my sister decided to homeschool her children. And second, I read recently an article on the Patheos blog, Love Joy Feminism.

As I have talked about in the past, my sister was once a part of the Independent Fundamental Baptist cult — more specifically, the First Baptist Hammond/Hyles Anderson College complex. This complex was, until this summer, run by the infamous pastor Jack Schaap, who is now awaiting sentencing after a guilty plea on federal sexual abuse charges.

Thankfully, she left that group about 3 or 4 years ago. But she just traded a fundamentalist cult for fundamentalism lite (the Southern Baptist denomination). It’s a vast improvement from where she was, and both she and her kids are happy in this church. But I feel she’s dealing with what Lewis of Commandments of Men, the brilliant anti-cult/anti-fundamentalism blogger, calls the Halfway Houses effect.

Some people, like her, don’t want to give up fundamentalism entirely. They have come from such an extreme cult life background that even other fundamentalist lite groups like the Southern Baptist denomination, etc, feel refreshing. (Which is pretty damn sad when you think about it).

One of the ways she is going through the Halfway Houses effect is the decision to home school. I was just at her house in the Northwest Indiana suburbs of Chicago this past week, and she was showing me the curriculum she was using.

It was the same atrocious Accelerated Christian Education (A.C.E) curriculum we were raised with. I spent my whole school life with it, first in a IFB affiliated private school, then in home school. She spent from about 5th grade to graduation with A.C.E curriculum in that same private school, which is what unfortunately got her introduced to the Independent Fundamental Baptist cult, where she remained until recently.

(If you really want an eye opener, read some of the A.C.E survivor stories at the blog Leaving Fundamentalism, for just how bad A.C.E itself is, and how many of the schools who use it act towards their students).

I knew she had been using the curriculum for a while now, but to actually see those books sitting on her table, it was a mountain of flashbacks, and definitely not in a good way. I thought she would know better, after what she has been through, but I guess it all feels like home to her.

I could go on and on about the problems of fundamentalist home schooling and of the private school culture within those groups, but I think Libby Anne of Love Joy Feminism says it best. Libby Anne was raised up in a home in the Quiverfull movement. Her family’s beliefs were very similar to Independent Fundamental Baptist cult that my sister fell into head first. Like Quiverfull, the IFB also rejects birth control except for in extreme circumstances (such as a future pregnancy putting the wife’s life in danger).

Reading an article from her last week made me think about my current feelings on home schooling.

First of all, do I think home schooling in and of itself is harmful? No.

There are many families who do their best to educate their kids at home while exposing them to the world around them, and encouraging them to keep an open mind. There are even atheist families that home school.

There are many reasonable circumstances that would lead a family to home school their child, from having a child who has a serious physical illness, to having a job that causes a family to move often (such as one parent being a solider). Then there’s always the desire to have one’s children get one on one attention, to help them learn.

However, using homeschooling as a tool to isolate your children from the outside world is wrong. I’ll even go as far as to say it is emotional abuse. Fundamentalist groups deliberately use home schooling this way so that their children are rarely, if ever, exposed to people they don’t agree with politically or religiously, or to people who they feel are “evil” (such as people in the LGBT community).

When someone like this is isolated to such an extent, the basic social skills that most of us learn at a very early age are not developed. I will not say that this was the only cause for the problems that I have now in relating to people. It’s more than likely something I was born with, but this isolation only made far worse.

Not only are social skills impaired, knowing how to deal with normal classroom life is affected, as well as things like changes that come by moving out of home. Libby Anne talks about coming to tears more times than she can remember in her attempts to adjust to living away from home after being in such an isolated environment. At least she had a solid group of people who helped her to work through the stress. In my case, it led to a nervous breakdown.

Simple things that everyone around me knew, such as where the little pop up desk was on the side of the auditorium style seats in most class rooms in that college, (or the fact they even existed), was unfamiliar to me, in so many thousands of ways, and people kept expecting me to know it all, and I didn’t. Just like Libby Anne, I didn’t know how to write a foot note for an academic paper.

All of this, combined with a cultural disconnect from other people, led to a miserable time and downright debilitating depression. People who have never been through this don’t realize just how much everyday conversation and interactions are based on the culture around us. I love the way Libby Anne talks about this in a post on socialization:

I sometimes wonder if one reason so many home school parents cannot seem to understand the real meaning of the socialization question is that, having been socialized themselves, they cannot imagine what it would be like to not be.

They don’t understand what it feels like to be a foreigner in your own country. They don’t understand what it feels like to not be able to fit in. They don’t understand what it’s like to berobbed of the ability to be normal because they have the ability to be normal. Parents who home school may choose to be different, but their children have no such choice.

When I read this, I reflected on both my family, and all the families that I have encountered that home school, or send their kids to fundamentalist private schools, she’s right. All of them grew up in what could be considered normal families, attending public schools, usually with parents that were either non-Christian or were only casual followers of a religion. What’s even more ironic is that many of them were baby boomers who experienced the decadence of the 1970′s. They have no idea what this kind of isolation does to someone.

This isolation and this culture that is hostile to the outside world and everyone in it will cause two extremes in the people who were raised into it. Either people will be hesitant to leave, because it’s the only life and way of thinking that they know — a perpetual Stockholm syndrome, like my sister is experiencing. Or it will drive people to leave it, like I did.

Most people of younger generations who were raised in this system are fortunately going the same route I did. The hostility towards the outside world is one of the primary reasons why younger generations are leaving fundamentalism at a very fast pace. A 2011 study by Christian polling group Barna researched most of the top reasons listed for young people leaving the churches. They had something to do with their broader rejection of the outside world, and isolation from it (which is the major aim of the fundamentalist home schooling movement). Whether that is their rejection of science, hostility towards outsiders, or hatred of homosexuality, this isolationism is starting to disgust the people raised into it.

I can only hope that this trend continues.

Of Isolation and Community: Jeri Lofland’s Story, Part Two

April 16, 2013May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team11 Comments

Jeri’s story was originally published on her blog Heresy in the Heartland. It is reprinted with her permission. The first part of Jeri’s contribution to HA is “Generational Observations.”

I took the bus to Willow Hill Elementary for kindergarten and first grade. At recess my friends and I would play hopscotch, jump rope, explore, or make-believe together. Occasionally, they would invite me to their homes to play or for a birthday party. I was active in Sunday School, too. Though I was too shy to say much to them, I knew many adults at church and in my neighborhood. My parents were part of a small fellowship group and the families did lots of things together: picnics, fireworks, a hayride, swimming at the lake.

When my parents became homeschoolers, our social circle tightened. Mom was afraid the state might “take us away” if anyone reported us. One sunny morning she hauled all of us to the grocery store at what seemed like the crack of dawn to get her shopping done before “school hours”. I still played with the kids next door, but only on designated “play days”. We had the same church friends for a while, and I looked up to my Sunday School teachers, but we left our church because some people there were displeasing God. Yes, it was confusing. I rarely attended Sunday School (or youth group) after that, even when we were in churches with other kids my age. Most of my socialization now was with other homeschoolers: sledding parties, picnics, occasional field trips and converging on fields and orchards to glean free produce.

As homeschooling gained popularity, we became less concerned about being put in foster care. But then my parents joined a new group: ATIA. The Advanced Training Institute (of America) was an elite level of membership for followers of Bill Gothard and his Institute in Basic Life Principles (formerly Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts). My parents had attended his seminars for years. Now his homeschooling program offered a way to get the loyal, loving, godly family you always wanted. Financial freedom, stronger character, better health, and fulfilling family relationships included! Plus, all the educational materials, from math to language arts, were based directly on the Bible!

We moved across town that summer, to a farmhouse in the country. My dad started his own business: it was different to have him working from home all day. And we embarked on the new ATI adventure. Our social circled narrowed even more from that point, consisting of church acquaintances (we changed churches every few years) and conservative homeschooling friends. We saw my grandparents twice a year at most; while skeptical of many of our religious quirks, they tried not to rock the boat or criticize my parents to us kids. There were no trusted adults in my life that didn’t defend my parents’ beliefs and lifestyle choices.

We joined a larger evangelical church and my parents were admired for their dedication. With six children now, we could really fill up a pew. Now in my mid-teens, I longed to make friends but had little in common with my peers there. Many of their activities (movies, concerts, parties, sports, even jobs) were forbidden in my family. There were hardly any other homeschoolers. I looked forward to ATI conferences where I could meet others my age that dressed, behaved, and thought like I did. A few became penpals and are still friends today.

Later, we moved to even more conservative churches where homeschooling was the norm. At home, there were babies to change, toddlers to feed, and children to educate; my help was sorely needed, and often appreciated. I had a friend at church, and meeting for lunch together was a rare and special treat. There were no boyfriends, no dates. St. Paul said we should be content with food and clothing. I had a bed and three meals a day and could earn a little spending money from my dad besides. Now in my 20’s, I tried to use my loneliness to push me closer to God. I tried to mentally prepare for a life of singleness if necessary, while yearning for a soulmate of my own.

I was 22 when I moved out of state to work (unpaid) for one of Gothard’s “ministries”. My social network was limited to other cult members (we attended only churches that had been “approved” by the leadership and shopping outings were on an as-needed basis). Chores at the center were mandatory, as was scripture memory and attendance of daily morning Bible studies. Still, I made new friends from all over the country and savored the chance to live and work with peers.

After six months of volunteering for room and board, the law dictated that the Institute put me on the payroll. With only $13 left in my checking account, I was relieved to hear this! I was a minimum-wage employee for one year, moving from the Oklahoma center to the Indianapolis compound to the “Headquarters” campus in Illinois, working in three different departments before I was summarily fired because Gothard felt my 20-year-old brother threatened his authority. My parents called me late one night to tell me that Bill Gothard wanted them to pick me up the next morning and take me home to Michigan. He didn’t tell me himself, nor did my boss. Being ignorant of life “on the outside”, I had no idea how abnormal this was, but it hurt like hell. I started packing my belongings. My dad arrived at noon, I shook hands with the man I would marry two years later, and we headed “home”.

After a year and a half of full-blown work for the cult, this trip was surreal—like going back in time. I sipped my Arby’s Jamocha shake and tried to sort out what was happening. I felt discarded, displaced, separated from friends without a chance to say goodbye. For weeks, I cried myself to sleep. I was in a place I did not want to be, and I’d had no say in the decision. In my grief, I found comfort in stroking one of the new barn kittens; it died. My mom miscarried what would have been a 12th baby. We heard that another young man who had also been exiled from the cult had drowned on the Fourth of July. The ATI director left his wife for his secretary. The whole world was going crazy and it was taking me with it.

Over the next year, I started taking more responsibility for my own life. I had my first job interview, worked part-time, visited other church groups, began to consider college courses, and applied for short-term placement with an overseas missions organization (Wycliffe Bible Translators). I spent a summer studying linguistics at the University of North Dakota and meeting all kinds of cool people from around the world. I loved college, even the exams! Away from my parents and the cult for the first time in my life, I bought my first pair of jeans, my first pair of shorts. I went to the movie theater with friends! I had my first sip of wine, my first taste of beer. I explored different churches, and enjoyed music that had once been forbidden. I spent time with guys who intrigued me, and turned down a guy who didn’t. I played my heart out on the piano. When my parents tried to exert control over my [male] friendships from hundreds of miles away, I was conflicted. I cried, but I complied.

In the fall, I flew to the Philippines where I spent ten difficult yet glorious months learning from the best mentors I could have asked for. The Wycliffe base at Nasuli was a humming multi-cultural haven set in a natural paradise. Though I assisted the missionary-linguists in their work, mostly I was being healed. From the security of friends and coworkers who loved and accepted me, I began dissecting my past and daring to think for myself. Tentatively, then with greater confidence, I let myself question the cult. I let go of deeply-embedded fears. I allowed myself to grieve over my experience with the Institute. I saw what a respectful, caring community looked like.

Nasuli was so unlike the churches and training centers I’d been part of. Here, individuality was valued; the group drew strength from diversity of opinion and expression. Instead of pasting a smile on the surface, these men and women spoke honestly of their emotional experience, both positive and negative. Rather than demanding perfection and informing on those who failed to measure up, these people tolerated each other, quirks and all, often making excuses for a neighbor’s idiosyncrasies. And nobody ever minded having fun.

The Beginning of a Conversation: Sarah Jones’ Thoughts

April 15, 2013May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team4 Comments

The following piece was originally published by Sarah Jones on her blog ANTHONYBSUSAN with the title, “Homeschooling: Creative Alternative or Brainwashing Tool?” It is reprinted with her permission. Sarah has a master’s degree in postcolonial culture and global policy, and another degree in international studies. She was an Evangelical Christian at one point in her life, then a feminist member of the Emerging Church, and now describes herself as “agnostic, leaning atheist. Still a feminist though.”

The Daily Beast’s coverage of Homeschoolers Anonymous has reignited the perennial debate over the homeschooling movement and parents’ rights. As a former homeschooler, this is an intensely personal debate for me: I disliked the homeschool experience and I remain deeply critical of the Christian curriculum my parents employed. My own experience is not identical to the stories detailed in the Daily Beast article. I did not grow up in a Quiverfull home and my parents eventually became wary of the movement’s fringes. As a result, they did agree to send me and my brother to private and then public school. They’re not homeschool activists in any meaningful sense. Nevertheless, this article resonates with me, and I agree with the premise put forward by the members of Homeschoolers Anonymous: that homeschooling left me totally unprepared for the real world, and facilitated religious abuse.

"I hope that this Daily Beast article marks the beginning of a critical national conversation." — “I hope that this Daily Beast article marks the beginning of a critical national conversation.”

Before I continue I want to make it clear that I understand that homeschooling isn’t intrinsically a social evil. Done well, it can certainly prepare children to excel in higher education. Moreover, I don’t intend to argue that the alternatives are without flaw. The state of public and private schools in the US is a valid concern. I’m not going to summarize that debate here, but I’m referencing it in order to show that I do understand why parents (like my own) may make the decision to homeschool. I’m concerned by a specific branch of the homeschool movement, and its emphasis on religious indoctrination.

Certain common themes emerge from the Daily Beast story. Readers are introduced to adults who spent their formative years engaged in a battle against secularism. There is much praise for homeschooling’s ability to encourage children’s natural gifts, but as these stories demonstrate, many Evangelical and fundamentalist families encourage these gifts in order to advance a specific ideological agenda. Those of us raised in the religious right will recognize the rhetoric. We’re meant to be culture warriors, engaged in battle to return America to its Christian roots. Homeschooling is meant to create a pure environment. Christian parents are free to teach (read: train) their children in an atmosphere free of secular corruption.

For obvious reasons, this attitude toward education lends itself easily to abuse, particularly when you consider that most of these families adhere to traditional gender roles that revere the father as the head of the household. When your father is your chief disciplinarian, spiritual adviser, breadwinner and the principal of your school, a patriarchal structure is so firmly entrenched that the possibility of addressing domestic abuse is incredibly unlikely. Additionally, it reflects the belief that children are the property of their parents, that children have no rights, independent of their parents. The potential consequences this attitude poses for the children subjected to it are evident from the Daily Beast piece and from the other stories provided by Homeschoolers Anonymous.

There are additional points of concern; namely, the overlap between this fringe and Christian reconstruction. R.J. Rushdooney, truly the father of contemporary Christian reconstructionism, advocated homeschooling as an alternative to secular education. Later figures like Michael Farris continue to champion homeschooling as a religious obligation for Christian parents. Precociousness is considered evidence that homeschooling works. In the comments of the Daily Beast piece, you’ll find at least two adolescent homeschoolers engaged in a passionate defense of the movement. They repeatedly cite their personal success, and the successes of their homeschooled peers, as evidence of homeschooling’s superiority.

As a homeschool alumna, I don’t credit my own academic success to my parents’ decision to homeschool. If anything I believe I’ve succeeded in spite of it. I’ve never received accurate scientific instruction and I had to re-teach myself history and government. My decision to pursue political theory at the graduate level is partially inspired by this drive to strip my thought process of the misinformation and bias I learned as a child. Similarly, I reject the belief that my current progressive views are derived from mere rebellion, as many current homeschoolers like to assert. Those of us who object to the movement do so for valid reasons, and I hope that this Daily Beast article marks the beginning of a critical national conversation about children’s rights and the need to better regulate home instruction.

Putting Children First: Karen Loethen’s Thoughts

April 15, 2013May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team3 Comments

Putting Children First: Karen Loethen’s Thoughts

The following piece was originally published by Karen Loethen on her blog Homeschool Atheist Momma with the title, “Still Looking for Disadvantages of Homeschool?” It is reprinted with her permission. Karen describes herself as “a homeschooling mum of two children (ages 15 and 12) and the wife of an amazing man.” She and her family “are Midwestern Americans, currently living in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.”

I’ve been wondering, do I write pro homeschool stuff because I am simply reinforcing my insecurities about homeschooling?

No.

I write it so that others can find pro-homeschooling stuff easily.

But today I am motivated to explore the truth behind negative homeschool experiences. I have been reading websites of homeschool alum who are very unhappy with their homeschool experiences and blogs of suspect homeschoolers. I’ve been reading stories by homeschool alum, adults who feel “weird” and “odd” and in pain and who have serious difficulties relating to the world at large, who report abuse, neglect, serious emotional damage, and hugely poor parenting. I am overwhelmed, today, with the negative homeschooling experiences for some children and adults out there.

While we can not reparent any of these wounded people who are trying so hard to heal themselves, we can offer them our love and seek to understand their claims. We, as homeschooling parents, should never attempt to discredit someone’s story (as I have seen on some of these sites). No, instead, we must learn from these experiences and offer these people our love and compassion. And offer them our thanks for being willing to share their stories. It takes courage in this world to stand up and disprove the majority. And, besides, they are people who are courageously, fearfully offering their life stories, hoping for healing.

If you go there, write nothing, or write only messages of love and support. It is homeschooling parents who are insecure and fearful themselves who do not allow these voices to be heard without confrontation. I understand that fear, but these boards are not the place to put one’s own issues out there.

As one woman at the Homeschoolers Anonymous website said, today, homeschooling is often portrayed in the media as some great and noble cause or as a quaint, folksy version of the Great American Dream. I’m grateful for the “improvement,” as homeschool has had a fairly dreadful rep for a long time. Sadly, some of that rep is well-deserved. I must also add that most of the stories (all the I have read today, in fact) share a fundamental Christian motivation or Evangelical basis for their isolationist and authoritarian approaches to their homeschooling and parenting. This is not the point of my post, but it is an essential piece of the puzzle.

I think of homeschooling as an extension of, as a part of, parenting.

In my mind there is no way to separate the two.

I think we should all have the right to freely educate our children without state involvement. But this presupposes that all adults are capable of making healthy and wise choices for their families and we know that this is not the case. But whose job is it to decide who should and who should not homeschool? No one is sitting in an office making lists of people who can and should become parents. Anyone can become a parent regardless of maturity, ability, mental issues, all other issues, etc. Parents of all ability levels have always existed in the world.

Maybe we can all agree that not all people who are parents should have been parents.

Similarly, not all people who homeschool should homeschool.

To homeschool, to parent, to the best advantage of one’s children, a parent needs to be mature enough to put the needs of themselves Last on the List and the needs of their children First on the List. A person suited to homeschool and parent children must have no philosophy, culture, or creed that puts anything, anything ahead of the good of the children. A person well-suited to parenting and homeschooling children is a person who is willing and able and apt to reflect upon new information and evidence and use that evidence and make changes, improvements, adjustments when necessary. The person adequately suited to parenting and homeschooling is a person who takes the time to learn about a variety of educational and parenting options and looks at those options carefully, making decisions based on what makes a better human being from each child.

And more, I believe that the best approach to parenting, in my opinion, is a person who manages to believe in their children, who even believes in the human race! I believe the more successful parent and homeschooling parent is one who finds humor in life and looks for fun. I believe it essential to think well of people. I think it necessary to put Love at the center of family life. I think it necessary to be a self-aware adult. And I think it necessary that I spend time locating my own issues, growth areas, and limitations. And seek to improve myself.

Yes, I can be a bit serious about this.

I believe that adults owe it to themselves and to their progeny to become the best people they can be.

Because when they don’t, it’s the kids who suffer.

Homeschooled Girls and Trash Cans: Latebloomer’s Story, Part Three

April 15, 2013May 13, 2020HA Editorial Team10 Comments

Homeschooled Girls and Trash Cans: Latebloomer’s Story, Part Three

HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Latebloomer” is a pseudonym. Latebloomer’s story was originally published on her blog Past Tense, Present Progressive. It is reprinted with her permission.

*****

*****

Part Three: Sexuality, the Elephant in the Room

"At Reb Bradley's church, my family found a culture of people who were also trying to ignore the elephant in the room." — “At Reb Bradley’s church, my family found a culture of people who were also trying to ignore the elephant in the room.”

My mom walked into my bedroom and handed me a heavy biology textbook. “Read chapter 13,” she told me, breathless and blushing. Then she rushed out. I opened to the appropriate chapter: “The Reproductive System”. That was my entire sex education; I was 17 years old.

I think we can all agree: sex education should probably be done by people who have said the word “sex” out loud at least once in their lives.

My parents’ denial of sexuality couldn’t stop puberty, and couldn’t stop our curiosity about sex. Instead, their attitude clearly showed us kids that we could never go to our parents with any questions or concerns that were related to our sexuality or genitals. For me, I found some answers around age 11 when I looked up “sex” and “puberty” in the encyclopedia. Later, a hidden copy of “What Solomon Says About Love, Sex, and Intimacy” in my parents’ closet provided hours of heart-throbbing reading.

Not every homeschooling family is so repressed about sex, but at Reb Bradley’s church, my family found a culture of people who were also trying to ignore the elephant in the room. A favorite theme of Reb Bradley was sexual purity and “Biblical courtship”. He was fond of referring to 1 Timothy 5:2, which says, “Do not rebuke an older man but encourage him as you would a father, younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, younger women as sisters, in all purity.” According to his interpretation, all young men were to treat all young women as sisters, absent of sexuality.

Paradoxically, Reb Bradley also taught that these single “siblings in Christ” should not be allowed to mingle freely with each other because of temptation…..wait, what? How are you supposed to treat someone as a brother or sister if you’re not allowed to spend time with them? I guess Reb really didn’t believe that platonic friendships were possible between the genders after all. I think even Jesus himself would have gotten disapproving looks like the mingling teens in the back row if he came to Hope Chapel. After all, “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus” (John 11:5)–if Jesus was close friends with single women even in ancient Jewish culture, then why was it forbidden at Hope Chapel?

So how could an honorable young man find himself a wife in this gender-segregated culture? Ideally, he had to notice a girl from across the room–for her godliness, mind you, not her body–and approach her dad to ask permission to court her. Without knowing much about her, he would have to prove to the dad that he was serious about a relationship with the daughter.

If the dad thought the young man was suitable, he would inform the young man of the physical boundaries of the relationship, such as when/if they could start to hold hands. The dad could also control the frequency of contact, monitor emails and phone calls, and require all interaction happen in the presence of other family members. It was encouraged but not Biblically necessary for the father to ask his daughter for her opinion of the young man, regardless of the age of the daughter.

I saw this courtship process attempted once in Reb Bradley’s own family. However, even with his courtship “expertise,” Reb’s involvement was not able to prevent a lot heartbreak, drama, and broken friendships when the courtship ended. And even Reb’s involvement and teaching couldn’t prevent at least three of his six children from having premarital sex, including one unwed pregnancy. I am not saying this because I think his kids are bad people–they certainly are not. I’m only saying these things because Reb Bradley is still trying to sell himself as an expert on family relationships and courtship. His materials give other parents false expectations of the outcome; people who take his advice should not expect better results than the man himself has been able to achieve.

When I started college at age 22, I determined to give male friendship and dating a try. It was very difficult at first. Because I was paranoid about flirting or being attractive, I had trouble relaxing and just being myself. However, I was encouraged to persevere because I could see the benefits right away. Long conversations with guys helped me see the world differently and let me experience a different style of communication. Once I could interact freely with guys, I stopped developing crushes on every boy I saw. I started to gain confidence about myself, and I started to see what type of guys I got along with the best.

Compatibility, not just character and beliefs, is important to consider when selecting a spouse. This is something that the couple can only determine for themselves by spending lots of time together, not only in groups but also alone. No wonder Reb Bradley tries to downplay compatibility; he wants to keep the father in charge and he wants the father to control the sexual aspect of the relationship as well. That’s why he teaches singles that they can make a marriage work with anyone, and it’s better for their sanctification to marry someone really different from themselves.

In case anyone cares, even though I dated a few different people in college, I was still a virgin when I married. However, I was surprised to learn that my virginity wasn’t the “gift to my husband” that I was led to believe. My amazing husband, himself a virgin at marriage, honestly didn’t care about whether or not I’d had sex before. Additionally, we both found that physical closeness helped us maintain emotional closeness and openness with each other throughout our dating relationship. The process of getting to know each other mentally and emotionally is gradual, so why should getting to know each other physically be so abrupt? We were both very happy that we allowed some sexual progress in our dating relationship, and we both feel it has helped us to have a healthier sex life in our marriage.

For me, what I’ve learned is that there is no use in denying that we are sexual beings, and no benefit to fearing it or trying to hide it. Accept yourself, take responsibility for yourself, and make your own choices. You’ll find that sexuality is not such a scary and powerful monster when you stop treating it like one.

*****

To be continued.

Homeschoolers Anonymous

An Archived Blog

Author: HA Editorial Team

Celebrating One Month of Speaking Up

Why I Blame Homeschooling, Not Just My Parents: Reflections by Nicholas Ducote

Home Is Where The Hurt Is: Mary’s Story, Part Six

The Beginning of a Conversation: Sarah Jones’ Thoughts

Putting Children First: Karen Loethen’s Thoughts

Homeschooled Girls and Trash Cans: Latebloomer’s Story, Part Three