Author: HA Editorial Team

40 Ways to Help Homeschool Kids in Bad Situations, Part One

HA Editorial Team16 Comments

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HA note: For this two-part post, we asked members of the Homeschoolers Anonymous community the following question: If you grew up in a bad or less-than-ideal family and/or homeschooling environment, what are things that people around you (other family, friends, community members, etc.) could have done to help you and make your life better, more tolerable, etc.? We edited and compiled everyone’s answers into a list of 40 suggestions and will present those suggestions in 2 sets of 20. Each set is a group post compiled from various people’s answers.

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1. Compliment the child to the parents in front of the child.

Even if the parents shoot down the compliment, it might be one of the kindest things the child has heard about themselves in years.

2. Let them overhear you offer to include them in your own family events/outings.

Even if the parents refuse, it might offer the child hope for the future and give them a self-esteem boost.

3. Give them opportunities, however small, to express their own feelings or thoughts.

Tell them it’s ok to have feelings and thoughts, especially if they’re super repressed. Ask them if they have dreams, and if they don’t know how to dream, try to show them what it means to think about a future. Tell them about cool occupations, about sports, about music, about dance. That might seem like torture, if it’s something their parents won’t allow them, but maybe it will give them something to hang onto and look for in the future. Find ways to rekindle their inner fire.

4. Believe women who say they’re being abused.

Believe women who say they’re being abused, and support them in leaving their husbands. Don’t tell them to pray more, submit more, anything more. Help them get out, and help them and their kids through the transition.

5. Call children’s services if you suspect abuse or neglect.

Always call; what you see is only the tip of the iceberg.

6. If they come over to your house for some reason, a meal for example, don’t let them/ask them to help with dishes.

Don’t let them/ask them to help with anything, including table washing or sweeping — or anything housework related. Chances are they have a ton of that at home, and they think it’s their duty in life. Give them ice cream or start them a movie, or talk to them happily as you wash their dish for them. It might be really confusing for them. But it will be good.

7. Encourage them to dream of careers.

Encourage them to dream of careers beyond gender role ideals by remarking on what they’re good at. They’ll remember it for years and years..

8. Encourage them to dream big.

My “adopted grandpa” was convinced that I would be chief justice of the supreme court one day. Now, since I didn’t go an ivy school that’s highly unlikely, but that was one of the few voices I heard other than my parents who actually took my goals seriously. In the broader homeschool community there was usually a, “That’s nice, she thinks she’s going to be something more than a stay at home mom,” subtext.

9. If you want to risk being entirely cut out of the child’s life, offer to lend parent-unapproved books and movies for cultural education.

Maybe give the cover reason of helping them understand more about the culture for witnessing to the “lost”. Then be careful not to shock them too much with your choice of material if they are not ready for it.

10. Attribute their successes and their great personality traits to them, and them alone.

None of this “your parents must have raised you right!” or “you must have great parents” or “[parents] did a good job on this one!” Let the kids know they deserve praise for their own accomplishments. They are not their parents’ puppets or pet dogs.

11. If a parent tells you they’re being harsh or strict with their children, don’t praise them for doing so.

Don’t praise them for doing so or encourage them to be even harsher or stricter. You don’t necessarily need to assume they’re wrong — not every parent is narcissistic like mine — but you should always keep in mind that the parent you’re talking to is a potential abuser.

12. Tell them that fun doesn’t have to be edifying.

Happiness is enough for its own sake. Harry Potter is awesome and will not lead you on the path to hell. Most people are pretty decent, even if they swear, do drugs, or talk about sex. You can befriend people who aren’t perfect. It’s okay not to be perfect — just being yourself is a form of perfection. Being human is the greatest gift we have. Kindness is the best guide for morality I’ve found. Watch Star Wars.

13. If there’s a way to communicate to home schooled kids that the outside world isn’t this awful place on the brink of collapse, do it!

Help them realize there is more than one way to live a happy, fulfilling life.

14. If you notice they don’t have a lot of friends, for the love of Pete, be a friend and help them make some! 

Suggest music similar to what they already like/listen to so they can listen to it at work or in their car and give it back to you without being in trouble. Offer books they can read while they are on their lunch or smoke breaks, or in Sunday school.

15. If they are stressed out about family, do your psychoanalyzing silently.

It is very likely they’re being gaslighted at home and otherwise mentally/emotionally abused. Process in your own head. If you suspect something, ask around how to appropriately intervene. Don’t embarrass yourself or them.

16. Let them know it’s never wrong to question.

Truth will stand up under scrutiny. Question down to the foundations, and when you get to a wall of assumptions or tenets or axioms you can’t get past, ask yourself why. Question your beliefs and question the reasons for your beliefs. Question authority. That’s not a statement of rebellion, it’s a search for truth. Truth will always prevail, and if/when your beliefs come out whole on the other side, you’ll be that much stronger in holding them, because the hard questions are behind you.

17. If you have your own kids, invite just the kids over.

Befriend the parents if you can and then invite the kids over often. When they are with you, don’t ask them to do any work, let them sit at the table while you talk about parenting gently, being happy your kids are growing and making their own decisions, how to write a transcript, when to apply to college. Tall about anything the kid needs to get to college and anything to crack the ideas about harsh parenting and gender roles and submission.

18. Tell the kids about other school experiences.

Even just seeing public schooled kids’ textbooks and homework in their car or laying around the house caused the beginnings of doubt for me. The program my mom used liked to say that homeschooled kids averaged 3 grade levels ahead of public school peers. Seeing homework revealed that wasn’t true. For me at least. Especially in math and sciences.

18. Check in on them regularly, personally or through your church.

We lived in three places where the churches we attended never checked on us. Like, we had one car and my dad had it all the time and no one once asked if we need help going to the doctor, grocery shopping, or if we wanted to have a play date or anything like that. A simple “Hey, do ya’ll have enough food to go on the table?” or “Would your kids like to come over and play?” would have been very nice.

19. Accept them.

Even if they are different, even if they seem a bit odd, shower them with acceptance. They need acceptance, not judgement.

20. Love them.

Listen to them like they matter because they might not get much of that. Simple little gestures like telling them it’s okay to be sad or saying ‘you can do it!’ ‘I believe in you’ or ‘I am proud of you’ can stick in their mind for years.

Part Two >

Orange Hair and Feminist Leanings: Mallory Faulkner’s Story

HA Editorial Team6 Comments

Homeschoolers U

To those it may concern,

Hi! My name is Mallory, and I’m a Sophomore at PHC. A friend forwarded me your request for stories about experiences with the college, so I thought I’d tell you mine.

My experience with PHC has honestly been wonderful.

I’ve wanted to come to this school since I was 14. In 2011 and 2012, I was lucky enough to be able to come to TeenCamps and had an absolutely amazing time. I had always been a weird unhappy outcast in conservative Christian homeschool circles, even being raised in said circles. I got to PHC and was instantly welcomed and loved and made to feel as though I was a member of a family, orange hair and feminist leanings and all.

I am a self-identified feminist with a tendency for crazy hair colors, rock music, inappropriate humor, and combat boots. I was a little apprehensive about being a full time student at PHC, especially with the dress code. I knew it was what God wanted me to do, though, so I went and found out I was completely wrong. I tend to keep my hair a bit more conservative at school in the interest of being professional but I’ve found friends who like music even louder and harder than mine, people from all walks of life who share my faith and sense of humor and still get good grades. I’ve been blessed enough to find friend who share my views and ones who will challenge them as well.

PHC has been accused of being narrow minded and a bubble environment. Some of that is true.

PHC can be a bit of a bubble and we all share a common Christian background but it’s surprising how much diversity there is within that. The faculty and staff have worked very hard to create an environment where students are allowed to discuss, think through, and hold many different views. Dr. Spinney, for instance, teaches History of the United States 1 and 2. He spends a lot of his class time moderating student discussions on various moral issues including Aztec sacrifices, women’s roles throughout history, and policy questions like the Mexican War. He usually states his views on the debates and what he believes to be the truth at the end of class but allows students to discuss whatever they’d like. He, above all, never insists in any way that students agree with him.

All of the professors try to strike a balance between expressing their views of truth and allowing for other ways of thought.

They make mistakes sometimes, of course, but they’re very good at striking that balance. My experience has been that, many times, Dr. Favelo, who teaches History of Western Civilization 1 and 2, goes out of his way to make students consider points of view other than their own. Our Theology professor, Dr. Cox, is especially good at giving an even handed overview of all points of view on any given subject – even subjects of theology that are rather controversial such as speaking in tongues.

This is getting long so I’ll wrap it up.

I really can’t sum up my time at PHC in one email. There have been so many moments where I’ve been challenged academically, emotionally, and spiritually. My time there has stretched and grown me in some ways I could never imagine. PHC has also given me a loving community and a family that accept me just the way I am. None of us are perfect, and PHC has it’s share of frustrating bureaucracy and the growing pains that come with a new and expanding community. However, these people know my quirks and they respect me, worship with me, challenge me, and encourage me on a daily basis.

My time at the college has been some of the best of my life. 

The Reluctant Rebel: Gemma’s Story, Part Four

HA Editorial Team5 Comments

Homeschoolers U

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

< Part Three

Part Four: Junior Year

I started my junior year with a panic attack as my mom and I drove back onto campus.

Of course, I had no idea what I was experiencing at the time—the overwhelming sense of dread or drowning, my heart beating wildly, fighting the sudden urge to flee the car, the campus, the world… By the time we parked, I had composed myself enough to articulate something like “I don’t want to be here anymore” to my concerned mother. Terrified and on the verge of tears, I gritted my teeth, got out of the car, and resumed life as usual.

It was the worst semester yet.

Dean Wilson and the Office of Student Life had retaliated to the loosening of certain rules the previous year by revising the rule book, especially the dress code and the music and movies standards.

The dress code at PHC had always been two-pronged. During normal business hours, students were required to dress in “business casual” outside of their dorms. One purpose of the dress code was to describe the rules for this professional dress code. The other purpose of the dress code was to maintain modesty standards. The burden of this second prong of the dress code fell primarily upon the women (though men sometimes got in trouble for “rebellious” hair styles and such).

This particular edition of the rulebook had revised the dress code for women on both counts. It clarified certain aspects of the professional, business-casual standards in such a way as to exclude certain modest, but patently unprofessional looks, like denim jumpers. It also re-worded the modesty code in a rather confusing way. There was outrage from the students on both counts. Apparently, some of the more conservative students were upset because they literally did not have enough clothes left to dress themselves according to the professional standard. (I happened to be in favor of the professionalization of the women’s dress code.) This half of the new rules was almost immediately rescinded.

The backlash over the modesty rules, however, prompted a women’s-only chapel to explain and clarify. In this chapel, the female students were informed that the modesty standards were worded in such a way as to give a positive impression to outside inquirers and prospective students. We current students, however, should understand that we needed to hold ourselves to a “higher standard.” This higher standard, apparently, was a little too “high” to codify in the actual rulebook, lest outsiders or prospective students think us too restrictive. Their solution to this dilemma was to install a volunteer “dean of women,” the wife of a member of the college’s Board of Trustees, who could help us with our wardrobes and decide for us what was appropriate, and what was not.

I do not mean this story in any way to besmirch this woman or her family. She was a kind, fair, and well-intentioned person. Most of us women were happy to have a sympathetic female authority figure on campus to talk to, and not just about our wardrobes.

But I want to emphasize the absurdity of a dress code written so vaguely and arcanely that this kind, patient woman had to come to our dorm rooms and endure hours of “fashion show” by exasperated and cynical female students, and to decide (often to our disappointment) which items of our clothing passed her test and which did not.

The movie standards had been updated in response to the advent of laptop computers with DVD players in them. When the college began in 2000, students mostly watched movies in communal lounges, on college-provided televisions equipped with censoring devices for bad language. There may have been explicit standards for movie content—I don’t remember—but the fact that movies had to be watched in public, and that random people routinely walked through the lounges at any time of day or night, meant that most people self-censored effectively.

But once students could watch movies on their laptops in the privacy of their own dorm room, the administration saw a need for explicit rules governing content. I don’t remember the details, but I do remember they were strict enough to exclude Braveheart, and indeed, Braveheart was even mentioned specifically as an example of a movie that failed to meet the content standards.

I will leave you to ponder the irony of a campus full of homeschool graduates forbidden from watching Braveheart.

I don’t remember the details of the music rules either, but it was around this time that iTunes introduced the ability to share music libraries across a shared network. The entire campus was a single network, so suddenly we all had access to each other’s music libraries. This was fantastic for those of us who were audiophiles. Apparently, it was also a great opportunity for pharisaical students to go spying. Most people with potentially offensive music had the good sense either to hide their libraries from the network or, at least, to give them anonymous names. This didn’t stop the pharisees from sending out pompous all-student emails expressing their shock and horror over, for instance, the vaudevillian gruesomeness of Decemberist songs they had stumbled upon over the network. Would Jesus listen to music like this?? As with most other things, the message—explicitly or implicitly—was that those of us who enjoyed such music were insufficiently Christian.

This all took place in the first couple of weeks or so.

The rest of the semester went by in a blur of exhaustion, depression, emotional breakdowns, and 6-8 hours a day translating Greek. I was also taking two courses from a psychopathological Sovietologist who dressed (and thought and taught) like it was still 1985. She trimmed her nails into little triangles, like bird claws, and tapped them ominously on the table during class. On the first day of class, she described how she once woke a student sleeping in her class by slamming a heavy textbook onto the table next to his head.   She held her classes at 8am on purpose, because she knew we were all exhausted and she wanted to… I’m not sure what she wanted, actually.

But she seemed to enjoy torturing her students.

She deliberately withheld information from me that thwarted my ability to make good grades in her class, and then blamed me for not knowing what she decided not to tell me. She called me into her office on various pretexts, only to berate me to the point of tears over my grades. Then, after ruining my chances in her classes, she refused to sign off on my application for a study-abroad opportunity, telling me that, as far as she was concerned, I “had no future in academia.”

I decided to transfer. Up until this point, at least the wonderful professors and classes had been worth enduring all the BS from student life. Now, I had nothing going for me. My panic attacks and emotional breakdowns continued with growing intensity. I couldn’t take it anymore.

But I wanted to transfer to another private, liberal arts school nearby, so I could stay in touch with my friends. My parents didn’t want to pay for that out of pocket, and there was very little scholarship money available for transferees from non-accredited institutions. My only other choices were to attend a state school back home, or find a way to make PHC work.

It was a choice that just didn’t feel like much of a choice. I stayed.

I switched majors to get away from the Soviet psychopath, and moved off campus to get away from the culture and give myself some space to breathe. These changes made life tolerable, for a while.

I don’t want to imply that we never had a good time at school. My friends and I enjoyed some amazing times together and grew so close I couldn’t imagine life without them (a decade later, I still can’t). It’s just that most of the things we enjoyed doing, even if they weren’t technically against the rules, would have been “disapproved” of by the campus monitors.

For example, we all loved music and movies. It was hard to take the new campus media rules as anything but a personal attack. So we took our activities off campus. We watched forbidden movies in various students’ off-campus housing. We went to indie rock shows at the Black Cat and other clubs in the city, losing ourselves in the anonymity of the crowd, away from the eyes of the watchers, pretending to be normal for an hour or two. We wore our hand-stamps to class the next day like a secret sign.

The media was more than just illicit entertainment; it helped us process our experiences and emotions. The lyrics of longing, loss, and defiance by bands like the Mountain Goats and Neutral Milk Hotel became our mantras.

I am gonna make it through this year

If it kills me.

                        – The Mountain Goats

Now we must pack up every piece

Of the life we used to love

Just to keep ourselves

At least enough to carry on

                        – Neutral Milk Hotel

Needless to say, all of us still professed Christianity—a requirement for our continued enrollment, at the least. But the legalism, religious bullying, and anti-intellectualism we encountered at PHC had pushed us away from the evangelicalism of our youth and sent us in search of other expressions of our faith. Most of us found our way into liturgical traditions. Near the end of my junior year, a younger journalism major approached me and a group of my friends about a story he wanted to write. He had noticed a correlation between students like us, who had a deep academic interest in philosophy, history, or literature, and attendance at liturgical churches. He asked us our opinion about that connection, and why we chose to attend Episcopal or Presbyterian churches rather than the evangelical churches that most PHC students went to. He assured us that his story was only for a class assignment, not for publication. We believed him and answered candidly.

His story was published in the campus newspaper. The administration went ballistic.

We were scolded, mocked, accused from on high with the same old charges: snobbery, intellectual elitism, and the unsubtle implication that we were deficient Christians at best, and more likely wolves in sheep’s clothing. The local Presbyterian pastor and Episcopal priest were temporarily banned from campus. Fellow students began making snide comments about “popery” and “vain tradition” in the lunchroom or in class. The author of the article tried to defend himself, and us, and the whole thing blew over by the next fall, but it was one more nail in the coffin. No matter how I tried, I would never be good enough for these people.

Most of my friends graduated that year. Being the “intellectual elitists” that we were, they scattered to various graduate programs across the country. Only a couple remained in DC. But we all stayed in touch, emailing or chatting weekly if not daily.

That summer, I stayed in DC and interned for the federal government. At this point, the physical symptoms of the pressure I was under became undeniable and troublesome. I was exhausted. I would commute to and from work with my boss, and despite my best efforts, I would fall asleep in the car. Sometimes I would fall asleep while he was talking to me. Sometimes I would fall asleep at my desk. Most days, I would get home from work, eat something, and go straight to bed. I was always cold and could never seem to get warm. My hair fell out in handfuls. Everything felt like it was spinning out of control. I stopped doing things I enjoyed in my free time because I didn’t feel strong enough, or energetic enough, or happy enough to enjoy them.

That drowning, panicking feeling was with me daily now.

I turned 21 that summer and celebrated like most 21-year-olds would. But it was hard to enjoy it. Technically, because I was in the DC area and my internship was for credit, I was still subject to the PHC rulebook. My birthday celebration was definitely against the rules. And it’s hard to enjoy normal things like that when there’s always the possibility, no matter how remote, that some talebearer might have gotten lost in Adam’s Morgan that night and seen you walk out of a bar.

Part Five >

Doug Phillips on the “Yin and Yang” of Marriage

HA Editorial Team7 Comments

yinyang

By R.L. Stollar, HA Community Coordinator

I was reading “The Big Box Series” over at Scarlet Letters, a blog exploring the Christian homeschooling subculture, the Christian patriarchy movement, and women’s and gender issues within Christianity. I came across a post featuring one of Doug Phillips’s lectures, entitled “How to Evaluate a Suitor,” on marriage and being “unequally yoked.” Scarlet Letters makes interesting connections between Phillips, Rushdoony, and implicit racism; the post is worth a look. But what I was most intrigued by — since my M.A. focused on Eastern philosophy and religion — was his truncated and highly inaccurate understanding of Eastern philosophies and religions. Take a look:

There is no relationship in the entire earth in which agreement is more necessary than marriage. It is the most heightened level of agreement that is necessary in marriage, because two people become one. It’s the only relationship that we have in which two become one, physically and spiritually you become one. And so if one is at complete differences with the other, you’ve got a formula for disaster. That’s the Buddhist philosophy of yin and yang. Good and evil coexisting together, both in a constant state of war to create a one. That’s Buddhism, that’s Daoism, that Confucianism. It’s not Christianity. We don’t believe in yin and yang. We believe the two should be one, they need to be in agreement.

I mean, my main reaction is just: LOL.

My more detailed reaction would be:

1) “Good and evil coexisting together in a constant state of war to create one” is not the Buddhist philosophy of yin and yang.

2) “Good and evil coexisting together in a constant state of war” is more of a Hindu concept, which for some reason didn’t even make it onto Phillips’s list of religions.

3) Relating “good and evil” to yin and yang is a American/Westernized thing; it’s not a faithful interpretation of yin and yang in their cultural and historical contexts.

4) Buddhism is not the same as Daoism.

5) Daoism is not the same as Confucianism.

6) Confucianism is not the same as Buddhism.

7) When “yin and yang” is properly understood, Christianity actually does express similar sentiments.

I will not bore my readers with a detailed explanation of Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism. But I would like to at least explain “yin” and “yang” briefly, because — hey, I rarely have the opportunity to apply my M.A. directly in my work with HA. I might as well take advantage of this rare opportunity.

So here we go:

Both yin and yang are traditional Chinese characters. Here’s yin: 陰. Here’s yang: 陽. If you notice, on the lefthand side of each character is the same “mini-character”: 阝. 阝signifies a mound or hill.  When combined with 侌, which signifies “cloudy,” you get what we think of as “yin,” which signifies the cloudy or shadowy side of a hill. On the other hand, when 阝is combined with 昜 (which signifies “bright”), you get “yang,” which signifies the sunny or bright side of a hill. Thinking of a hill is probably the easiest Intro to Yin and Yang I could give you: it’s the same hill, but it has two sides: a cloudy side and a sunny side. The sides aren’t “in a constant state of war”; rather, they’re two sides of the same coin and — despite unique characteristics and personalities — work together in harmony.

Which, if you think about it, is an interesting metaphor for marriage.

I am absolutely fascinated by the foundational Daoist text, the Dao De Jing. So here’s the main passage (Chapter 42) in that text that discusses the traditional Daoist understanding of yin and yang:

Tao gave birth to the One; the One gave birth successively to two things, three things, up to ten thousand. These ten thousand creatures cannot turn their backs to the shade [yin] without having the sun [yang] on their bellies, and it is on this blending of the breaths that their harmony depends.

To be orphaned, needy, ill-provided is what men most hate; yet princes and dukes style themselves so.

Truly, “things are often increased by seeking to diminish them and diminished by seeking to increase them.” The maxims that others use in their teaching I too will use in mine.

Show me a man of violence that came to a good end, and I will take him for my teacher.

Most every chapter in the Dao De Jing begins with some universal principle and then applies it to how a ruler ought to govern. In my opinion, the Dao De Jing is primarily a political treatise about the nature and application of power; it’s not a religious statement. To put it in “Christianese” terminology, it’s about “living in the tension.” In this case, it’s political tension: a wise ruler knowns how to non-violently embrace and marshal opposing political elements to his own advantage. (Which, again, is an interesting metaphor for marriage, albeit Machiavellian.)

But that’s just Daoism — and that’s just one interpretation of one Daoist text written by one Daoist. How Daoism (as well as Buddhism and Confucianism) thinks about and applies the idea of yin and yang is as diverse as how American Christians think about and apply the idea that humans are made in God’s image. It’s completely sloppy (and unfair) to just group all those religions and their denominations together and make sweeping generalizations. For example, some American Christians think the “humans in God’s image” concept necessitates we accept and love LGBT* individuals; other American Christians think the same concept justifies bigotry and discrimination. If American Christians wouldn’t like being made into unfair caricatures, they ought not make unfair caricatures of other religions and people groups.

Making unfair caricatures of other religions and people groups is a serious problem in the Christian homeschooling subculture and American Evangelicalism in general. (It’s also a problem that plagues other cultures. No uniqueness here.) I have talked about this previously in my “How I Learned to Stop Being Afraid and Love Other Religions” series. When I realized that curriculums and ideas created and advocated by everyone from David Noebel to Ken Ham to Worldview Weekend to James Dobson was passing on nothing but soundbites and straw men of other people’s beliefs, I felt upset. And confused. If homeschool leaders actually want to raise up a generation that is taken seriously in the public square, they owe that generation the truth. They owe it an accurate and generous understanding of opposing viewpoints: whether those viewpoints be Buddhist, Daoist, Confucian, or even atheist.

When homeschool leaders (or former ones like Doug Phillips), throw everything from Buddhism to Confucianism to Daoism into one box and cannot even understand a basic concept like yin and yang, how is that any different from Richard Dawkins throwing those same religions — but also Christianity — into the same box and declaring, “A plague on all your houses”? Remember Jesus’s Golden Rule: “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them.”

Which, incidentally, Confucius said 500 years prior: “Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself.”

Better Late Than Never — The Senior Testimony I Never Gave: Adina’s Story

HA Editorial Team7 Comments

Homeschoolers U

HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Adina” is a pseudonym.

I never gave a senior testimony at Patrick Henry College — not because I was an introvert or hated public speaking (I was a government major and I love an audience), but because I was afraid of what I could and could not say.

Now that I’ve had time to look back on my experiences at PHC let this be my senior testimony.

I started at PHC way back when there was still a “strong” distance learning program so I was physically on campus for only my Junior and Senior years of college. I fought fiercely against the stay-at-home-daughters movement all through highschool to be able to attend PHC at all, and my first two years of college I studied at home through DL for several reasons. First, it was significantly less expensive than moving to Virginia, and second, I would be able to spend more time with my family (read: remain under my father’s direct authority and command) for an extra two years.

Those two years spent in DL were hardly much more than an extension of my homeschooling. I’d in my living room reading and being intensely antisocial, though the latter was not entirely my own choice. I was one of two girls at my church at that time to actually *gasp* attend college. I loved my classes, read all of the assigned reading, and couldn’t get enough of what I was learning — but there was no real change in my life. My story here will therefore only be about the last two years of my undergrad career.

I arrived on campus a starry-eyed, twenty-one year old, insecure junior, thrilled to finally be “on my own” at my dream college trying to conceal as best I could that I was one of those uncool homeschoolers who’d been raised wearing skirts, surrounded by ATI and stay at home daughters, and was currently mired in a dreadful pseudo courtship situation.

I honestly don’t know what I was expecting when I came to PHC, but I got something very different. My insecurity and self doubt made it extremely difficult for me to make meaningful friends for quite a while and I was too embarrassed and jealous of those around me to really confide in anyone or let myself get close to anyone. I spend the majority of my first semester hiding in the stairwells to study and avoid people. I even took to sleeping under a table in the dorm study room to be away from my roommates.

From hundreds of miles away my dad tried to control my relationship with my boyfriend and I foolishly let him.  He would talk with my boyfriend for hours on end about intensely personal things about which no one has a right to ask anyone but perhaps their closest friend. My boyfriend would come away emotionally drained and exhausted, telling me he didn’t think he could endure any more. Our relationship wasn’t worth these cross examinations and detailed regulations from thousands of miles away, he said. Though I hated it, I never thought to question my assumption that courtship was how every godly relationship was supposed to happen, and hearing him say he wanted to give up tore my heart apart. What little confidence I had plummeted. I’d lived twenty-one years learning to shut down emotionally when my dad started talking and this man I loved couldn’t seem to endure it for event a few months. If I could deal with it for a lifetime without gaining anything, why couldn’t he pull through a few months to get me? I felt trapped and worthless.

What I had thought was a vibrant relationship with God deteriorated to nothing as everything came crashing down around me and my dream college became a nightmare. I hardly slept and I felt so depressed I cried every morning when my alarm went off. I got sick almost immediately after moving to campus and remained sick for three months. First a normal cold, then bronchitis, then the flu, then strep throat — but I think I only missed four or five classes total. Unless I was completely knocked out sick, I would still struggle to class and chapel, and then huddle with my blankets and soup until the early morning trying to keep on top of all my classes.

I made few friends my first year because I’d trained myself to keep people at arms length, and the friends I did make seemed incessantly needy. I was drained from dealing with my struggling relationship, the nearly constant venting and advice-giving my friends seemed to want, my work and school schedule, my health, and my lack of sleep. I felt invisible, angry, confused, alone, and by the end of my first year I was completely disillusioned with PHC. I’d expected a place of release, freedom, encouragement, and happiness, but instead I’d only found depression and intense insecurity.

The summer between my junior and senior year was both heaven and hell for me. Heaven, because I stayed in Virginia to work and lived with one of the few close friends I’d made, and hell because my boyfriend and I broke up. We got back together less than a week later, but the breakup deeply affected both of us. In a way though the breakup was a turning point for me. It was the lowest point of my existence, and from there I was able to build.

When we got back together I finally realized that the way my parents had been handling my relationship with my boyfriend was abusive, inappropriate, and damaging. While the breakup had been partly my fault, it had also been theirs because I’d allowed them a level of control in my life that was horribly harmful and they’d ran with it. And so for the first time in my life I stood up for myself. I told my parents that my boyfriend was my future and that our relationship deserved respect. I told them that I would make my own decisions for myself as an autonomous human being – and then I ended the conversation.

I cried and shook like a frightened puppy after that conversation. At twenty-two, a senior in college, I was terrified that somehow God would send fire from heaven to strike me dead for my “defiance.” But nothing happened.

My senior year I moved off campus into an apartment with my best friend, worked part time, held down an internship in DC, went to class part time, and finally began to enjoy my life. My boyfriend and I rebuilt our relationship, I consciously let people into my life and took others out, reached out for help when I needed it, established boundaries in my relationship with my parents, and began attending church regularly again. I timidly told my story when my friends returned for the fall semester and I heard nothing but encouragement, congratulations, and support. Where I’d expected smirks or confused back-pats of pity, I instead found nods of agreement and understanding. I suddenly realized all that I had in common with those around me. Many of us were stumbling through the first stages of independence, struggling against being suffocated by controlling parents, and reeling from the revelation that God was not who we’d been taught he was.

I was still very unsure of myself at times, but I began to learn things I’d never known before. Respect is a two way street, relationships must have boundaries, disagreement isn’t dishonoring, and respect doesn’t mean obedience. For the first time in my life I also realized that my relationship with my boyfriend was exclusively our responsibility. My parents had no right to try to control it, and I was hurting myself by letting them have that power. It’s still hard at times — almost paralyzing — to look at myself and see that I am learning these things so late in life.Sometimes I wonder if I’ve been forever screwed over.

When my class began giving senior testimonies I didn’t know what to say. As I looked back over my previous two years all I saw was pain and disillusionment. Really that is an unfair characterization since I did have incredibly bright, happy spots as I would later see, but my life was so tumultuous at the time I couldn’t see any pattern of progress or goodness. I saw the wonderful friends I’d made there — both among the student body and the faculty — but I couldn’t get past the fact that my life had fallen apart while I was there and I felt like I was left trying to put it back together alone.

Now having put some distance between myself and my time at PHC I can see what was really going on. If you’d asked me what I thought of my time at PHC while I was there I would have most likely said it was all awful and nothing could make me ever willingly repeat it. Now I can see that the destruction PHC brought on my life was a God-send. It’s true, I did fall apart at and because of PHC, but it was the painful falling apart that I needed.

I’m reminded of the section in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader chapter 7 where Eustice loses his dragon skin. He peeled off layers himself and thought he was free each time, but until he was deeply torn by something else — someone else — he was not truly free. My dragon skin was the buildup of twenty one years of legalistic religion that completely obscured God’s true nature, and PHC was my Aslan — painfully and agonizingly tearing away what I’d been confined in to reveal who I was truly made to be.

I will be the first to say that PHC isn’t for everyone. There are people who have gone there and had terrible experiences and I don’t pretend those don’t exist. I’ve seen students be cruel, heartless, inconsiderate, and downright wrong in their treatment of people, and I don’t want anyone to misunderstand me and think that I’m saying anyone who comes away with a bad taste in their mouth after coming to PHC is lying. I’ve known people who got incredibly annoyed with the level of immaturity displayed by some of the students there, and I’ve seen it too — I won’t deny it. Sadly I was probably that cruel, heartless, inconsiderate, immature, downright wrong student at times. It took two years at PHC to change me.

What I will deny is that PHC is furthering the abuse that has taken place within certain extremely conservative homeschooling circles. You see, it was at PHC that I was first treated as an equal. I was respected at PHC. I was there that I was told that I could be whatever I sent my mind to. At PHC I learned to have a voice for myself, and together with some of my closest friends we took those first baby steps towards understanding who we were and that we deserved respect and should have the final say in our own decisions. It was first at PHC where my mind was more important than my gender. This is my experience.

I can’t finish here without bring up PHC and patriarchy (I hate even typing that word). PHC is associated with patriarchy, I won’t deny it. But the association is a good one, not a bad one (let me explain before you fry me – I hate patriarchy. It is an evil, cruel, disgusting manglement of Christianity that disgusts me). PHC is associated with patriarchy because it is one of the only colleges that the broken children of patriarchy are allowed to go.

When I came to PHC, the dust of patriarchy clung to my clothes, despite the fact that I thought I’d already shaken it off. It was PHC that helped me truly clean the scum of patriarchy and legalism from my life. It was my professors and my classmates that made that long hard journey with me. PHC’s proximity to those caught up in the patriarchy movement give it the ability to understand and meet the needs of those who come from that background. Had I gone off to a different school that wasn’t so close to the homeschooling community there would have been no one to understand my background and sympathetically help me along my journey out of that type of upbringing.

PHC played a very important role for me and for many of my friends as well. It looks conservative enough on paper that controlling homeschool parents will “allow” their children to attend there when they wouldn’t ever dream of letting them go to any other college (that was my experience — PHC was hard enough, I know my parents would never have let me go anywhere else, and I wasn’t in a place in my life to do something without my parents’ “blessing”). Once at PHC, those students who come from that type of background are able to unlearn everything wrong they’ve been taught and re-learn who God really is and what Christianity means in a setting of mostly sympathetic, understanding fellow students and professors.

PHC is a safe place for these homeschoolers to venture out of their background in a world of otherwise understandably confused people who wouldn’t know how to help. The skirt-wearing courtship-enduring freshman me wouldn’t have survived very long anywhere but at PHC.

As imperfect as PHC can be, in my mind it will always be the “halfway house” between my upbringing and where I am today. It was painful and agonizing, but ultimately the best thing that ever happened in my life and I thank God every day for the destruction I underwent at PHC. It saved me and I would be a mess if I hadn’t have gone. It is for this reason that I want PHC to continue on strong: so it can continue to save the broken children of homeschooling.

Now you’ll have to excuse me because I have a date with my fiance.

The Reluctant Rebel: Gemma’s Story, Part Three

HA Editorial Team4 Comments

Homeschoolers U

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

< Part Two

Part Three: Sophomore Year

I had apparently made enough “progress” by the following fall semester, my sophomore year, that I was allowed to return to a wing with my friends and my old RA. However, it wasn’t long before I came to the definitive conclusion that Dean Wilson was an evil man by watching how he “counseled” one of my roommates who was dealing with a serious personal issue. He engaged in some of the most blatant, disgusting, misogynistic victim-blaming I have ever heard come out of a man’s mouth, and left my roommate even more grief-stricken and overwhelmed than she had been before.

Somehow it was easier to see the evil clearly when it was being inflicted on someone else.

That year, my RA and another popular student wrote a petition to the administration for the loosening of some of the more restrictive rules, especially regarding the interaction of male and female students. This petition was actually relatively successful, and in the aftermath it seemed like people could breathe again. I remember going to an off-campus basketball game shortly after this and seeing girls and guys in the bleachers, rubbing shoulders and leaning back against each other’s knees—just like normal college kids would do. It made me happy—my friends and I acted like this in high school. It seemed normal and familiar.

I also remember, in the time between the delivery of the petition and the administration’s positive response, my RA hiding—literally hiding—in her dorm room, ducking from the view of the window, or sitting in the hallway trying to breathe and slow her rapid heart beat. She had done the right thing, but she was terrified of Dean Wilson, and of the nameless atmosphere of fear we were all drowning in. She laughed at the absurdity of her “hiding,” but the feeling was real and we all knew it.

Academically, the school was living up to its reputation. In fact, I think one of the reasons the student life issues were so important to everyone is that we had so little chance to socialize as it was. Most of our time was spent studying, trying to conquer the unconquerable mountain of work we were assigned. My classes were extremely difficult, but very rewarding. Most of the professors seemed genuinely to enjoy their students. Some would routinely hold court in the dining hall between and after classes, answering questions, doling out advice, mostly just joking around or facilitating lighthearted debates.

But there was a growing split between the administration and the Office of Student Life, on the one hand, and the academic side of the school, on the other. We started to articulate it even then to outsiders who asked: the education here is great, but the culture is oppressive. Dean Wilson took it personally that the professors—and let’s face it, many of the students—were smarter than he was. He and his favored students started ruminating on the pride of intellectualism, the vanity of worldly philosophy, and the greater goodness of purity of heart and devotion to Scripture. It was spoken of as an either/or dilemma—smart, prideful, sinful people vs. lowly, humble, pure people.

It was around this time that several friends and I had started a campus group called the Alexis de Tocqueville Society. We semi-regularly published a journal of academic writing, book, music, and movie reviews, and opinion pieces. We also hosted guest lecturers on a variety of topics, from international relations to medieval literature to film criticism. Our stated mission was to further intellectual dialogue on campus. It was definitely an intellectually-focused club, but our mission was to serve the campus as a whole, not to show off. But ATS attracted the “wrong” kind of students, and it wasn’t long before “ATS” became a byword for “troublemakers.” We embodied that “intellectual elitism” Dean Wilson hated so much, and the administration began to view us with suspicion.

I now recognize this anti-intellectualism and many other of Dean Wilson’s teachings in what has been written recently about Bill Gothard and other authoritarian homeschool leaders.

For instance, Dean Wilson repeatedly admonished us not to take up another person’s offense—a teaching so bizarre and idiosyncratic I recognized it immediately when it appeared recently on the Recovering Grace website. Another example is this page from the ATI Basic Seminar textbook. Again, I discovered this only recently, but was shocked to see how neatly it summed up so much of what the students branded as “rebels” endured from our fellow students and from Student Life and the administration:

Basic Seminar Page

I know these teachings seem commonplace to those who grew up in systems like these. You have to imagine how bewildering and alienating these judgmental attitudes seemed to those of us who literally had no context to understand how we were being perceived, or why. I didn’t go into college wanting to be a rebel. I was a good, homeschooled, Christian girl. I memorized Scripture by the chapter, volunteered at AWANA, and played praise songs on the piano. I’d never even had a boyfriend before college. But at PHC, just by living my (good) life and being myself, I was branded a “rebel.” It was like there was this invisible line I was constantly crossing, which everyone could see except me. The only people who made sense to me were the other “rebels.” After a while, it just got psychologically demoralizing. I don’t even know what you people want from me, so fine, I’m a “rebel.”

Dean Wilson was a strong adherent of Doug Wilson and the Pearls. In our weekly small-group wing chapels, we were given writings from Wilson and the Pearls to study and discuss.

Here, for example, is the actual handout we studied in one wing chapel, probably during the 2003-2004 school year. The name and book title are mysteriously missing, but anyone familiar with the material can recognize it as a page straight out of Debi Pearl’s Created To Be His Help Meet.

ctbhhm

From what I’ve heard, the men were indoctrinated with these materials even more than the women. It wasn’t like everyone on campus necessarily accepted these things at face value—in my wing of relatively fashion-forward women, I remember us all kind of giggling at one piece of Doug Wilson’s that condemned high heels. But even if everyone didn’t accept them, the presence of these writings and teachings added to the overall atmosphere. Now, it entered the minds of everyone that girls who wore high heels were sluttier than girls who didn’t. Now, wearing heels meant something it hadn’t meant before.

Mike Farris has recently distanced himself from people like Gothard, Phillips, Wilson, and other extremists and has claimed that he rejects their teachings. I think it is true that he, personally, does not hold to many of their more extreme beliefs.

But he allowed these extreme views to circulate on his campus with a stamp of official approval.

He allowed his hand-picked Dean of Student Life and this dean’s favorite, very conservative students to dominate the campus culture with their extremism. He should have known this was going on. If he knew, he never said anything.

And Mike Farris had no qualms about saying something when he thought something needed to be said! Once, a student wrote an article for the student newspaper with the Slate-esque headline of “Why Bono Is A Better Christian Than You.” This piece prompted Farris to respond with an entire chapel sermon on why cursing is bad and demonstrates that one is not a true Christian. Afterward, he spoke jovially with the author of the article, slapping him on the back in a “no harm, no foul” kind of way. But not surprisingly, this response had a chilling effect on the further publication of controversial pieces in campus newspapers.

Another time, Farris got wind that some students had been dabbling in libertarianism. This prompted another chapel sermon, a fiery one in which he denounced libertarians as no better than child molesters.

So it’s not like he ever hesitated to address campus trends that bothered him, publicly and personally.

My best guess is that Mike Farris and Paul Wilson personally benefitted from a campus culture of total submission to authority. Many ultra-conservative students came from backgrounds that said parents, pastors, and government must be obeyed without question and respected without complaint. Questions and complaints were no better than defiance, and defiance of authority was an unforgivable sin. It was very easy for these students to add “college administrators” to that list of unquestionable authorities.

Knowing what I know now, I can see where that mindset comes from. At the time, I thought I was surrounded by a bizarre species of human who spoke some kind of foreign code. At least, I never could seem to get through to them with normal English words, or logic, or questions like Where in the Bible does it say it is evil to question a college administrator? And many of them—especially the young men—didn’t even seem capable of looking me in the face when I talked, or acknowledging anything I had to say. I think Farris tacitly (and Wilson explicitly) approved of this state of affairs, because it gave them power and control over the student body.

That, or he just didn’t know that his students were being forced to study patriarchalist writers and imbibe cultic teachings under the guise of not only administrative, but religious authority—but he really, really should have known.

One final example of the split between the academic and student-life cultures on campus came towards the end of my sophomore year. A reporter from the New York Times, David Kirkpatrick, came to visit the campus for a story he was writing. Reporters were on campus all the time. PHC was huge media bait during its first few years in existence, and the administration was only too happy to show us off to the world. At first, it was kind of fun to interact with reporters, but after a while, you just feel like a specimen being examined. I guess it never occurred to the administrators that it’s actually really hard to pay attention in class when there’s a massive camera in your face. The students joked about campus being a “fishbowl,” a double reference to the utter lack of privacy within and the constant prying eyes from without.

At any rate, when David Kirkpatrick arrived, he came to visit my class. I was taking a course called “Modernity, Post-modernity, and Society,” a political theory elective intentionally modeled on a graduate-level, seminar-style course. We were reading and discussing Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition on the day Mr. Kirkpatrick sat in on our class. At the end of the class, he complimented the students and the professor on the level of engagement with text we had displayed. He himself had read The Human Condition—in graduate school—and he noted that we had handled the text as well as any of his graduate classmates had.

I was, of course, pleased with the compliment—but even more pleased that this reporter from the New York Times had seen the good side of PHC, the academic side, before encountering whatever weirdness he was sure to find if he hung around long enough.

And it didn’t take long at all. By the time I got to lunch, he was in the dining hall, surrounded by a table full of girls in long prairie skirts. The article led with a photo of students walking on campus, noting that students “may show affection publicly only by holding hands while walking”—one of the more arcane rules from the rulebook.

There was no mention of Arendt or graduate-style seminar courses.

Part Four >

Soy Makes Kids Gay and Babies Masturbate!

HA Editorial Team25 Comments

Screen Shot 2014-07-30 at 1.47.52 PM

By R.L. Stollar, HA Community Coordinator

On Monday, one of the stories we received for our “Homeschoolers U” series about Patrick Henry College experiences mentioned a curious anecdote. The anecdote involved a PHC freshman who believed soy products make people gay. Here’s the story according to Lillia Munsell:

Midway through my first semester, a fellow freshman insisted that soy milk turned people gay. Trying not to choke on the ridiculously expensive dining hall food, I asked what he meant. “It’s the estrogen,” he explained to me with all the confidence that came from studying high school biology at the kitchen table. “It turns people gay. How else do you explain California?” I don’t know how to explain California, but this did explain the rumors about my lactose-intolerant Cuban friend who poured soy milk over his cereal and said deviant phrases like “what the hell.”

While this story might just provoke laughter and ridicule towards a freshman who would believe such asinine pseudoscience, it might be better to direct that laughter and ridicule towards the source: the so-called educated adults from which that student learned the pseudoscience. And honestly, you don’t have to look far to find them.

This student was a homeschool kid attending Patrick Henry College. The man who created PHC, Michael Farris, is a self-declared “buddy” of Joseph Farah, the editor of WorldNetDaily, a website that pretends to do legitimate journalism. (In fact, one of Farah’s own kids has attended PHC.) Farris has featured Farah on HSLDA’s radio program, Home School HeartBeat. That program is where Farris mentions Farah is “my buddy”. Farah has returned the sentiment, making Farris an exclusive WND columnist in 2006.

You know what else happened in 2006?

WND published a series entitled “SOY IS MAKING KIDS ‘GAY.'”

Yes, WND ran a six-part series by James “Jim” Rutz, a dominionist who wrote a book called Megashift that teaches you how to “prepare yourself to take part in a total makeover of Planet Earth.”Rutz’s soy series is full of ridiculous pseudoscience about soy. Here’s an excerpt:

There’s a slow poison out there that’s severely damaging our children and threatening to tear apart our culture…

The dangerous food I’m speaking of is soy. Soybean products are feminizing, and they’re all over the place. You can hardly escape them anymore…

Soy is feminizing, and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality.

But Rutz is not alone in fearing the evil power of the soy bean. Nor is he the first. In 2001, half a decade before Rutz wrote “SOY IS MAKING KIDS ‘GAY,'” Debi Pearl — yes, homeschool guru Debi Pearl from No Greater Joy Ministries — wrote an article entitled, “Soy Alert.” Pearl, unfortunately, was entirely blind in 2001 as to how soy makes kids gay. But she was fortunately enlightened enough to realize another danger of soy:

Soy makes babies masturbate!

Yes, you read that right. I’ll let Pearl try to explain:

We regularly get letters from parents that are shocked and horrified to have discovered that their babies, as young as 18 months, are, without doubt, masturbating. It is a shocking but growing phenomenon. Some of the problems are associated with small children clutching vibrating toys, but not in all cases. Yet, there must be a predisposing prompted by hormones. Could it be caused by the hormone element in soy formula?

Pearl never answered the question. Which is convenient for her. But she also insinuated that marriage problems could be related to soy:

If your husband lacks leadership and male dominance, but you seem to have a strong assertive drive, then stop eating soy and do some research.

All of the “evidence” she found led her to a rather gloom conclusion:

Soy is a drug, like many herbs. It is too powerful of a drug to use freely as a food.

But fear not. Pearl discovered a biblically-based solution:

When men try to improve on what God gave, it should be questioned. Cereal should be grains; milk should be the way it was in the Promised Land; meat should be as it was when Jesus fed the multitude, or when Abraham fed the angels of God.

With homeschool “leaders” like Debi Pearl and “news” sources like WND teaching these myths, it’s no wonder a homeschooled college freshman at PHC thought they were real. Hopefully he has learned real science since then.

Hopefully, too, homeschoolers will start demanding real science from their leaders and news sources.

***** UPDATE: It seems the source of these myths might very well be the Weston A. Price Foundation (WAPF). WAPF is a lobbying organization that is immensely popular in homeschooling circles (just take a look at the comments on this popular homeschool blogger’s post). Homeschool curriculum company Sonlight sells the Foundation’s foundational textbook, the cookbook Nourishing Traditions. (It’s hard to exaggerate the adoration some homeschool families have for the book. It’s right up there next to the Bible.) According to WAPF itself, “The most prominent group warning about the dangers of modern soy consumption would be the Weston A. Price Foundation.” And what would that warning be? Again, according to WAPF: “The fact that soy can feminize males and masculinize females is evidence of soy targeting the brain.” WAPF’s president, Sally Fallon, first gained notoriety for attacking soy in 2000, a year before Debi Pearl’s 2001 “Soy Alert.” In 2000, Fallon called soy “the next Asbestos” and claimed it caused sexual problems for kids. It seems reasonable to assume this was source for Pearl in 2001, considering the Pearl family uses WAPF material.

Depth of Love, Diversity of People: Simeon Tomaszewski’s Story

HA Editorial Team3 Comments

Homeschoolers U

Simeon Tomaszewski is in the Patrick Henry College Class of 2015.

No human institution is perfect; I can attest that Patrick Henry College is no exception to that rule. That said, coming from the conservative, homeschooled, Christian background that I did, the depth of love and diversity of people that I discovered at Patrick Henry College surprised me. My first reaction to some people very different from me was sometimes, “The Admissions let [person X] into the college?!?” But over time, I grew to appreciate them.

Some students, not just on campus as a whole, but in my wing and close circle of friends, listen to classical music, others to rap. Some students spend the bulk of their free time video gaming, others biking, some socializing. And as often as I have tried to shove people into boxes, they manage to surprise me. The guy who spends hours playing video games is a deep philosophical thinker. The girl who seems to have no end of time to spend encouraging others actually does very well academically, too. The jock is studying Music and learning to conduct an orchestra. College faculty and staff are the same way.

I have been very blessed by my time at PHC and grown in many ways. Not least among these is a broadening of the mind, a newfound hesitance to dismiss out of hand ideas with which I disagree or even people who don’t “fit” in my social sphere.

I cannot speak for other students, but my PHC experience has been nearly unqualifiedly a good one.

The Reluctant Rebel: Gemma’s Story, Part Two

HA Editorial Team7 Comments

Homeschoolers U

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

< Part One

Part Two: Freshman Year

My problems started the first semester of my freshman year.

I remember my first few weeks at PHC being happy ones. It was nice to start over with a clean slate and a new group of friends. I felt like I could “be myself” in a way I hadn’t ever been before, now that I was so far away from parents and home. It was still warm in northern Virginia, and the weight of the semester’s work hadn’t set in yet. A favorite evening pastime was swing dancing—we would clear out the furniture in the dining hall or the large lecture hall where chapel was held, and someone would put on a CD of swing music. (This was 2002 and swing dancing was really popular then.) On cooler evenings, we would dance out on the back porch of the main administration building.

The rulebook said nothing about dancing.

But a few weeks into the semester, the administration sent out an email saying that dancing was no longer allowed on campus.

They were not officially saying that dancing was wrong, but some people—donors, board members, it wasn’t clear—might believe it was, and out of deference to these people’s opinions, the college had decided to disallow it on campus. We could dance off campus if we wanted to.

That was easier said than done. Some people would go into the city on weekends and dance at community dance halls like Glen Echo, but that was a long drive. The fun, informal evenings were effectively squashed. Lots of rule changes happened this way—arbitrarily, without warning, and with no chance to appeal. A frequent rationale for changes was that the campus culture needed to respect the sensitivities of the more conservative students, parents, and donors.

The dorm wing I lived in was packed with freshmen girls. Our bubbly, outgoing RA wanted to help us make friends, so she coordinated with the RA of one of the male wings to organize some group outings. One month, our “brother wing” took us all out to dinner at an Italian restaurant. The next month, we invited them to go roller skating at a divey local rink. It was fun.

But then the Dean of Student Life, Paul Wilson, found out about these outings. Dean Wilson was a swarthy, charismatic former wrestling coach, hand-picked by Mike Farris for the job of shepherding his students. Most students seemed to like him. He certainly seemed jocular, smiling, energetic, easygoing, and approachable. Just like a coach should be.

But he believed that men and women were simply incapable of true platonic friendship. This was a belief he had stated repeatedly in chapel and to individuals in private. Relationships between men and women were always potentially volatile; it was best to stick to your own kind.

At the time, in order to promote a “courtship” culture on campus, the college had taken upon itself the burden of monitoring student relationships.

When it seemed like a man and a woman were getting pretty close, Dean Wilson would inquire about the nature of their relationship. He would then ask the man to call the woman’s parents to inform them of his intentions and receive their permission to pursue a relationship with their daughter. In these early days, there were less than 200 students on campus, so it was somewhat feasible for the college to play this role. (They have since modified the extent of their involvement in romantic relationships.)

Even though there was nothing romantic going on in our brother/sister wing outings, Dean Wilson used this rule to put an end to them. He discovered that our two RA’s had gone out for coffee a couple of times to plan the wing outings (and for no other purpose). He called them both to his office and told them they were forbidden from spending any more time alone together, unless the male RA was willing to call the female RA’s parents and get their permission to go to coffee with their daughter. Since there was nothing romantic in the least about their planning sessions over coffee, they were unwilling to take this step. It was clear, anyway, that Dean Wilson had more of a problem with our group outings than he did with the two of them talking over coffee. So they gave in, and we had no more brother/sister wing outings.

And again, what had seemed like a bright new beginning, full of friends and new opportunities, became a little duller, and a little smaller, a little more stifling. I started to wonder if maybe I had been lied to about this campus culture.

Later that first semester, I went to the city one weekend evening with a bunch of friends to see the monuments. Curfew was an hour later on weekends, and we made the most of our time, enjoying the monuments by night. But we took a wrong turn coming out of the metro station lot on the way home and got lost. As a result, we broke curfew by a few minutes. This was a rule violation for sure, but a fairly common one, and we had a reasonable excuse.

Weeks went by and no one said anything about it. I was starting to think our violation had simply been overlooked.

I had a friend, a troubled young man a year or two older than me, who had decided to withdraw that semester. He sold his books and told everyone he’d bought a plane ticket for a particular day. He was just living on campus until that day arrived, when he would go home. On the appointed day, however, he woke up early, stole his roommate’s bicycle, and left. Just disappeared.

As the rumors spread across campus, people became very concerned. What had happened to him? Did he kill himself? It was well known that he had a dislike for particular people on campus. He’d gotten into arguments with other students, and made a note of which people seemed sad to see him go and which people asked him things like “why are you still here?” Maybe he was planning something. Maybe he would come back and kill us! The rumors grew in intensity—he had penned some kind of manifesto to be sent as an all-student email, but the administration had caught it and deleted it before it went out. His parents flew in—apparently, they had no idea he’d even withdrawn from school. Students were huddled in dorm lounges, crying and praying.

We were afraid, and no one would tell us anything.

On this particular afternoon, in the midst of this crisis, I was summoned to Dean Wilson’s office. I went quickly—I assumed he wanted to talk to me about my missing friend.

He didn’t. He wanted to talk to me about being late for curfew a couple weeks before. I was blindsided. I didn’t even know how to respond—everyone was preoccupied by this massive crisis, and he wants to talk about this?

He wanted to know if I was “sorry” for breaking curfew. I was confused: we got lost, it took time to get un-lost, by the time we got home we were late—what part of that was supposed to make me “sorry”? I didn’t deny it, but I didn’t see what there was to be sorry about. It was a mistake, it just happened. I would accept punishment for having broken a rule, but it wasn’t some kind of moral offense that I needed to be “sorry” about.

This made Dean Wilson angry. My refusal to be “sorry” demonstrated a defiant attitude on my part. This disappointed him more than the rule violation itself. Furthermore, he was very concerned about the people I had been out with when the rule was broken. What did I think it said about me, that I was willing to be seen out in a car with these people, after curfew?

I was confused. “These people” were my friends. I liked them. I didn’t see anything wrong with them, and I didn’t see why I should care what anyone else thought either.

He continued to press me—was I sure there was nothing wrong with my friends? What could I tell him about their character? Did I think they had good character? Really? What did hanging out with them communicate to others about my character?

I was confused. I had no idea how to answer these questions. He badgered me into admitting a few character flaws on their part. I still didn’t see what difference that made. Everyone has flaws. If I couldn’t be friends with flawed people, I wouldn’t have any friends.

Dean Wilson was very disappointed in me. He had this remarkably effective way of acting “hurt” to make you feel guilty for things you didn’t need to feel guilty about. I had hurt him, disappointed him, and I should really feel bad for that. He concluded our meeting saying he would have to take some time to think about just how to punish me for this rule violation.

I left feeling scared, bewildered, guilty—on top of the other stress of the day. I spoke to another girl who had been in the car with me, a dorm-mate and good friend. She’d had a similar meeting with him. We were both left not knowing how we were to be punished, but with the threat of eventual punishment hanging over our heads.

Each student, at the beginning of the semester, was given 10 one-hour curfew “extensions,” which could be used at will throughout the semester, but only one-at-a-time (i.e., you couldn’t stack 6 together and stay out all night, you could only use one per night). A common punishment for curfew violation was the confiscation of some curfew extensions.

We assumed this would be our punishment, but we didn’t know how many he would take.

I clearly remember, a few weeks later, the first snow of the winter began late one evening. It was snowing heavily, with enough accumulation that many students went outside and started playing in it, throwing snowballs and building snowmen. Since it was after curfew, these students were all technically using their extensions to leave their dorms. My friend and I watched wistfully from a dorm window while all of our friends frolicked in the snow. We asked our RA if we couldn’t be excused to go out and join them? After all, we wouldn’t be leaving campus, just our dorm. She sympathized, but told us no—until Dean Wilson decided how he was going to punish us, we had to assume we had no extensions left and stay inside the dorm after curfew.

We stood, by ourselves, in the lobby of our dorm, watching all of our friends play in the snow. It was such a silly thing, but it left us feeling demeaned, like naughty children.

He did eventually make up his mind about our arbitrary punishment, but at a point so late in the semester that it didn’t matter anymore.

Several of my new friends dropped out after that semester.

The next semester, a new dorm that had been under construction the previous year was finally finished. The opening of this dorm relieved the massive overcrowding of the previous semester. There had been 7 freshman girls in my one-bathroom suite that first semester, and not surprisingly, we all hadn’t gotten along so well in such tight quarters. Now, there were entire wings of dorms that went unused. Everyone spread out.

Dean Wilson was in charge of assigning people to their rooms. He gave me a room by myself, in a wing full of mostly older, fairly conservative girls I did not know well. He sold this to me as being in my best interests and something I should be grateful for: “You seem like the kind of person who would enjoy living alone.” In retrospect, I can see that he was clearly trying to isolate me from my friends and put me in a place where I would be monitored.

I almost immediately got in trouble for re-arranging the furniture in my room. The room had 3 beds. I didn’t need 3 beds, so I took one apart and stored it in one of the two closets to make more space for myself. Again, according to Dean Wilson, it wasn’t so much the offense that was the problem as my attitude toward it—I didn’t think I had done anything wrong. I wasn’t “sorry” enough. I was “entitled” and “defiant of authority.” I also discovered during this encounter that my new RA would repeat to Dean Wilson, verbatim, anything I said to her.

I shut up after that.

The girls on my new wing made a habit of walking into my room whenever they felt like it, to try to “counsel” me. They made it clear that gossip was not only not condemned, but actually encouraged—it was a tool they would use to make people behave the way they wanted them to.

I still saw my friends at class and went to visit them in their dorm rooms (the female ones, anyway), but I felt increasingly isolated, watched, and fearful. I began to have nightmares, including a recurring one in which I was being strangled to death by demons. I had trouble sleeping and developed odd habits like sleeping with the lights on.   Like a child, I literally became afraid of the dark.

It is hard to explain, in retrospect, the level of pressure, fear, and isolation I felt. I was so confused about what I had done to deserve this. I couldn’t even talk to my parents about it; I couldn’t seem to make them understand what I was going through. It was like they had turned into different people—cold, angry, and judgmental. I found out, years later, that Dean Wilson had been calling them and talking to them about me, behind my back, since the previous semester. I don’t know what he was telling them, but he made it sound like I was in so much trouble they nearly withdrew me from the school involuntarily. But he reassured them that he was watching over me and doing his best to fix my problems, so of course they tried to help him in his project.

He took advantage of normal parental concerns to manipulate my well-intentioned parents and turn them against me, and used them to manipulate me, break my will, and bring me over to his side.

Part Three >

The Reluctant Rebel: Gemma’s Story, Part One

HA Editorial Team1 Comment

Homeschoolers U

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

Part 1: Why I Went

People often ask me why I chose to attend Patrick Henry.

I think a lot of people are incredulous that anyone would ever go to such a place. The truth is that students enrolled at PHC for a lot of reasons. Most were there because they believed in the stated mission of the school: to train students to lead the nation and shape the culture by way of a highly rigorous, Christian, classical liberal arts education. Others were there because PHC was the only college that their parents believed was safe enough to send their kids to. Some of these students wanted to be there too, but many did not.

I went to PHC because I believed in the mission, as it was presented to me.

I wanted to be there. I had looked around at other Christian colleges, and found them academically lightweight. I had looked at secular state universities, but they seemed vapid, and I never felt like I belonged. I was ambitious and idealistic—a typical overachieving firstborn—and the idea of being part of a grand new experiment like PHC was exciting to me. I had never read The Joshua Generation and was mostly unaware of Farris’ long-term agenda described therein. As far as I knew, the mission of Patrick Henry College was to be the most academically-excellent Christian college in the country. This is why I went; this is why my parents sent me.

I did have some reservations. I was homeschooled, but never as part of a homeschool cult like ATI or Vision Forum. (In fact, I’d never even heard of ATI until I got to college, and didn’t know anything about Vision Forum beyond the fact that they sold books and curricula.) My family was relatively normal as evangelical homeschoolers go. My siblings and I wore clothes from Express and American Eagle, listened to pop rock on the radio, and went to youth group. We and our homeschooled friends openly mocked the stereotypical “denim-jumper” homeschoolers and felt embarrassed by them. My friends laughed at me for applying to PHC, the “homeschool college.” They were all going off to big state universities or more established Christian colleges. I was convinced my choice was the right one, but I was worried that a “homeschool college” would be dominated by the weird denim-jumper types.

I went to a college recruiting event during my senior year of high school and pointedly asked the recruiter from PHC about the culture of the school. She reassured me that I had nothing to worry about. Sure, there were a few sheltered, denim-clad students on campus, but they were not the norm. “Dr. Farris wouldn’t even allow any photographs of women in skirts to be used in the brochures,” she said, handing me an example. Sure enough, the women pictured all wore pants and looked normal. “He didn’t want to give the impression that this is a school for very conservative homeschoolers.”

She went on to tell me how the school self-consciously wanted to set itself apart from places like Bob Jones, Pensacola Christian, and even Liberty University. PHC had its sights set higher than that—its goal was to be a Christian Harvard. It was pursuing accreditation. It was the real deal.

And yes, there were some rules, but just common-sense stuff. Nothing too hard core. She assured me I would fit in just fine.

I let this reassure me. In retrospect, this was my first encounter with what was to become a recurring theme of my time at PHC: the administration was obsessed with reputation, appearances, impressions given to outsiders.

But the reality within was very different.

Part Two >