I can remember people commenting on a quotation I used in one of my policy debate cases. The quotation dealt with some random technical aspect of immigration policy — the content of which wasn’t an issue. The issue was that the card was from someone who worked at the Ayn Rand Institute, and Ayn Rand was an atheist. Therefore (these people said), I needed to be careful about using this card. I remember being concerned by these comments at the time, but now I see no foundation for them. Instead, I see a byproduct of the somewhat insular community which Christian speech and debate creates.
Because the community is distinctly conservative and distinctly Christian, and because the community is centered around the ability to communicate a message, some of the most popular messages are those that create a group mentality (Jonathan Haidt has some important research about the importance group loyalty plays in conservative groups; give his works a read if you’re interested). In other words, the messages that get to the top are those that create an us vs. them mentality: Christians in a culture war, liberals trying to destroy the Constitution, America becoming increasingly immoral, etc. Regardless of whether or not you believe these messages are true, it should be clear that the combination of these narratives with the homogenous nature of the speech and debate community creates a very real possibility for students to develop a fear of outside ideas.
I can remember the first time I met an openly gay person. I can remember watching his hands to make sure he didn’t have a knife.
I listened carefully as we were talking, lest some underhanded message corrupt me. I did my best to stay polite, yet slightly gruff and on my guard (I was 14 with a somewhat squeaky voice – a funny picture, no doubt). I was confused for a while after he left. I didn’t see any attempts to undermine my faith (we talked mostly about the weather), and he was phenomenally well-spoken. This reaction wasn’t just because I thought “gay” was bad – it was because I had created an “us vs. them” narrative in my head and begun to fear people along with the idea. I had prevented myself from engaging with a human person because of a narrative I had created as a result of my fear of an idea.
But there’s a deeper reason why a fear of ideas is bad. To illustrate it, I need to introduce the concept of Hegel’s dialectic.
Hegel, a German philosopher who lived between 1770 and 1831, taught that knowledge was achieved through a threefold process: the thesis, the antithesis, and the synthesis. Essentially, you begin with one idea, contradict it with another idea, and then get a result (the synthesis) which is closer to the actual truth than either of the originals. In other words: every set of ideas has something to teach us.
Action items:
1. Students: you’re in high school. You have barely completed a fifth of your average life. You haven’t figured things out; you don’t have a perfect conception of God. That’s not a bad thing as long as your conception of God changes. If your faith and beliefs are not changing and developing, look carefully at speech and debate to ensure the insular community is not inhibiting the process described above.
2. For judges and parents: recognize that your kids are growing up. They’re going to be evaluating ideologies that you’re not comfortable with regardless of how much your try to shelter them. Competitors may advocate for ideas in debates that are contradictory to your own. That’s perfectly fine. Debate (particularly in the NCFCA and Stoa) is a safe environment. Your decision in a debate is feedback about the comparison between the two teams — not implementing a real philosophy or policy: occasionally you may vote for teams that you disagree with personally. Again, that’s fine.
In fact, one of the worst things you can do is to take a competitor aside in one of the infamous hallway conversations and tell them that the ideas are “dangerous” or discourage further interest in them. If you really believe that what you believe is true, then you should be comfortable with people exploring the arguments in a safe environment. Be their partner in discovery, not someone that holds them back from developing a broader understanding. Otherwise you may be surprised at what was suppressed when you are no longer there to restrain their intellects.
My time in the NCFCA was incredibly positive. I learned to speak professionally. I learned to analyze topics and arguments with an acuity that I couldn’t have achieved through any other method. I’m still involved in the homeschool debate scene because I want other people to experience this tremendous growth and development and get the maximal amount of benefit from it.
As I prepared my debate briefs, scouring the internet for evidence, there were two places I always looked first—the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. A good quote or two that could be applied in argument against a given plan was generally sufficient for my purposes. I filed my briefs carefully in my box and prepared for competition.
I honestly think my participation in NCFCA, known colloquially as “homeschool debate,” was the best thing about my high school years. I participated for four full years, attending debate competitions across my region. I loved it—the buzz of people, the feeling of purpose, and the heady rush I got when stepping up to speak.
Homeschool debate was one of the social highlights of my high school career. At the time, my main socialization events were church, AWANA (bible club), and a weekly arts and music co-op. Homeschool debate gave me one more weekly opportunity to see friends (or at least, the ones who were also in our local debate club) and, wonder of wonders, an opportunity to meet people outside of our local social circle. Debate tournaments were amazing—they served as the gathering points of dozens or even hundreds of homeschooled teens just like me, comprising the largest gathering of young people I found myself in outside of our annual homeschool convention.
And here is where we come back to the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Homeschool debate was an approved activity for me and many other teens like me because our parents considered it safe. Homeschool debate was founded by Christy Shipe, the daughter of Michael Farris, founder of HSLDA. The goal of homeschool debate was to train up a generation of young people for public speaking and political involvement in an effort to restore America to its Christian foundation. We were those young people.
NCFCA was unabashedly Christian. To participate in homeschool debate, we had to sign a statement of faith. This meant that the teens filling the halls of a given debate tournament were, like me, growing up in Christian homeschooling families. They were there because they shared the mission and vision of NCFCA. They too were being trained to be culture changers—they too were being brought up to embrace their parents’ vision for the restoration of a Christian nation.
As I’m sitting here, all my memories from homeschool debate are pouring over me. There were the long car trips in which we carpooled with others in our club and spent hours singing, talking, and playing games. There were the hotel stays where we congregated with the other debaters late into the night, sipping hot chocolate in the hotel lobby and swapping stories about tournaments and life. There were the times when we stayed with host families and made new friends in the process. There were the tournaments where disaster struck—a car problem, an illness—and memories were made. There were the times I stood up without a shred of actual evidence and used simple logic to overturn the other team’s carefully laid plan, basking in the heady rush I felt as I did so. The conferences, the tournaments, it all comes rushing back, along with the time spent on the homeschool debate forum cracking homeschool jokes with other debaters (When can the principle kiss the teacher without facing a harassment lawsuit? When you’re homeschooled, because your father is the principle and your mother is the teacher!).
And once again I’ve lost track of where I started this essay—with the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. My parents and the parents of the other students in homeschool debate thought they were preparing us to go out and take on the world, but they had a curious way of doing so. Namely, homeschool debate was like having pro-lifers debate each other about whether abortion should be legal. One year the topic was protectorates, and my partner and I created a plan to get rid of the D.C. gun ban. Watching the other team when we got up and presented our plan was always amusing. After all, how could they argue against the second amendment? They couldn’t! Not only would it be hard for them to argue against their principles, but also the judges were generally chosen from among homeschool parents and their church friends, meaning that the audience was one-sided as well. Generally, the other team would get up and argue that because of a case currently working its way through the courts, our plan was not inherent—in other words, the problem was real but was already being solved.
And beyond just this, we all knew that the best sources to use came from the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. If you quoted one of them to back up a point you were making, you were golden. In college, I learned something I hadn’t known before—that those centers leaned right and were generally taken with a large grain of salt. In homeschool debate, no one was going to argue that. In homeschool debate, no one knew that. We accepted the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute as fair and balanced and objective—and our coaches weren’t about to challenge that. The same was true of just about everything about homeschool debate.
Homeschool debate took place in a bubble. Within that bubble, it was great—I learned a lot about rhetoric, logic, and argumentation—but it was still in a bubble. You can’t raise a group completely outside of a culture and then send them out into it expecting them to change that culture without even accurate knowledge about that culture. Individuals raised in a bubble like we were are simply not equipped to do that—and indeed, our understanding and perspective was limited because we were never encouraged to really question and think outside of the box.
It’s funny, I actually think homeschool debate is what started me thinking my way out of the entire belief system. The introduction to argumentation and logic that I received during my participation served me well once I got outside of the bubble and subjected it to questioning. It was that very foundation in argumentation and logic that kept me going, somehow naively unafraid of what I might find or where my questions might take me. I suppose I might say that homeschool debate gave me the tools I needed to think myself out of the bubble, but that I had to recognize the existence of the bubble before I could do that. But of course, none of this is what my parents intended when they involved me in homeschool debate, eager to train me as conservative culture warrior.
I Was The Original CFC Fuck-Up: R.L. Stollar’s Story
R.L. Stollar, HA Community Coordinator, served as a Communicators for Christ conference instructor for three years, from 1998-2000. He wrote a book on intermediate debate theory, Beyond Baby Steps, that was published and sold by CFC. He created CFC’s very first website, too, and freely admits that, in retrospect, he sucked at HTML.
*****
“Bottle it up, and the bottle goes crack.”
~Craig Minowa, “The Exploding People”
*****
I have a confession to make.
R.L. Stollar’s staff picture from his 2000 conference tour with Communicators for Christ.
I did not want to write a single post for this week.
I have spent over a decade carefully bottling up all my distress and rage, putting those bottles into reinforced cardboard boxes marked “Fragile,” and hiding those boxes in the deepest, darkest basements in my mind so I would never have to think about or feel them again.
This week hurts. It hurts a lot.
Honestly, I forgot just how much it would hurt. As I forced myself to slowly pull those boxes from my mental basement, unwrap the newspapers guarding the bottles, and uncork them and watch certain moments from my life flash before my eyes — I realized why I never wanted to remember those moments ever again. I had to re-live things I had literally blocked from my mind. My insomnia flared up. My appetite vanished. My heart rate accelerated. The blood of nervousness and self-doubt rushed to my head. I felt like that frazzled, insecure, and confused kid that I was, putting on an aura of self-confidence because the only confidence I had was the bit that forensics taught me to fake.
In a sense, I still am that kid. I don’t think I ever quite grew up. I think some important piece of my soul got lost on the side of a road during a CFC tour and maybe, someday, I will find it.
For this week, I had to feel those things that keep me wishing I could just re-live my life all over again. Wishing I could just have been a normal boy with a normal life.
Then there’s the persistent fact that, honestly, I wouldn’t change a thing. All my experiences, even the painful ones, make me who I am. They instill in me a fire and a fierce determination to stand up for my friends and the people that I love. It is my pain and sorrow and tears that drive me. It is the pain and sorrow and tears of my friends that inspire me to keep pushing, to keep doing my best to make the world — and our homeschool world — a better place.
Because this world is a very sad place. And for me, the homeschool debate world was likewise. It was a place filled with people who became my best friends, a place filled with some of my most favorite memories — but it is also a place filled with loneliness and confusion and psychological beatdowns and overwhelming hypocrisy.
Preparing for this week, therefore, was difficult. It only became more so as I heard the stories of others — in particular, the stories of former CFC interns, some of which we are publishing. These stories made me sad, because I could relate to what they said on such a deep level. But they also gave me peace, because for one of the first times, HA has helped me feel not crazy. Because their stories made me realize that I was not the only fuck-up.
See, I was the original CFC fuck-up.
I am the reason why CFC changed the structure of its internship program. Because CFC was determined that another me would not happen again.
I had a unique experience because, other than the Moons’ own children, I was the only student instructor who toured for so many consecutive years. When I think back to my high school years, I don’t have many memories of my own family. Between being uprooted from California as my family moved to Oregon, flying around the country to tournaments, and spending months at a time with the Moons, my high school years feel homeless. Most of my high school angst is directed not towards my parents but the Moons. They became surrogate parents of sorts, my adopted family with whom I traveled — circus-like — across the many and divided states of America, like Christian minstrels carrying our music of golden oratory to the untrained masses.
But as time progressed, as month after month of touring and teaching went by, as the months became years and I finally couldn’t take it any longer, my spirit began to twitch. I began to lose my ability to just shrug everything off like it was nothing. It was not nothing. It was something and there was a reason why I hurt. And when I began to lose control over my external placidity, when my soul split from years of parents looking down on me in my youth while I taught their youth to not be looked down upon, I snapped.
It happened at the very last conference, in Hawaii, during my third and final year of touring. It happened over something completely inane, something about going to a movie with friends after the conference. But it happened. And it was one of the only two times in my entire life when I yelled. I yelled at Teresa and she yelled back. And we kept yelling. And at some point we stopped talking to each other at all. She sent Wendell after me, to be our messenger because we were done talking with one another. And I refused to talk to Wendell then, too. I refused to talk to him and he was my best friend for the last three years.
I am not proud of that. I am not proud of my anger. I am not proud of the hurt I caused either my teacher or my friend. But I couldn’t control my psyche any longer. I had a full-blown nervous breakdown. Following that night, I would descend into a major depression marked by self-injury and consistent suicidal thoughts that I continue to fight to this day.
I don’t think I can summon a cogent narrative of how I got to that point. But I can relay some interesting stories to lighten the mood. Like how the very first time I got wasted was on a CFC tour.
The beginning of that story is that I didn’t get wasted with fellow CFC interns (not that time, that is; CFC interns did not start getting wasted together until the third year). I got wasted with the children of homeschooling leaders from around the country.
The second year I taught with CFC (I was 15 at the time), which was the first year we officially “toured” around the country in the Moons’ motor home, we stopped at Regent University. HSLDA was holding their National Leadership Convention. This convention was an invite-only event for recognized leaders in the conservative Christian homeschooling world: the directors of all the state homeschool organizations, for example. CFC was tasked with teaching the leaders’ kids about speech and debate.
So, pretty much our job was to babysit the kids while the parents got inspired. During the day, we taught our peers. During the evening, while the parents mingled together like God’s chosen socialites, the kids roamed the university, unsupervised. One of those nights I was offered hard alcohol by the son of a national homeschool leader. I accepted. I was too scared to follow up the shots with a prescription-level painkiller, but I watched as he and his friends — the children of some of the other leaders — all took shots and popped various types of pills. They commiserated with each other, and found solace in their mutual disdain for each other’s parents: “____ cares more about the idea of homeschooling than homeschooling his own fucking kids.”
I could name names that would shock you, but that is not the point of this particular story. The point of this story is that, the higher you climb the power structures of the homeschooling world, the more they resemble the power structures in any other world.
I can tell you other stories, like what it was like living in a motor home for months on end. How traveling in a motor home with David Moon was like traveling with Jekyll and Hyde. One moment he was the lighthearted, lovable counterpart to Teresa’s professionalism. Then he’d snap and turn into a completely different person — red-faced, terrifying, and raging — and Teresa would silently turn the other way until his “episode” subsided.
I can you about the occasionally strange and otherworldly host homes we would stay at. Like the home where my CD player got confiscated by adults I had only meet two hours prior, because I was listening to Newsboys and “Newsboys have a rock beat and rock beats are Satan’s mating call.” Or the home where I couldn’t fall asleep until past midnight because the dad was rotating between yelling at and spanking his own kids for hours in the room right next to where I had to sleep. Or the one that still feels unreal, the house up on that hill in the middle of nowhere that had no kids and thus no one attending the local CFC conference — that house where the woman kept “accidentally” coming into the bathroom whenever I was showering, the same house where Playboy and Maxim magazines were “accidentally” left out in prominent display right where I was supposed to be sleeping.
I can tell you how I’d modify our teaching material to ensure that we did not offend our increasingly conservative audiences, as we traveled further and further into the Deep South. And after my small group spent hours creating some skit based on Veggie Tales, Teresa would make me break it to them that our time was wasted, because some parent thought Veggie Tales were Satanic. That after so many moments like this repeated over and over, week after week, I would begin to show obvious signs of strain. That I would withdraw completely from social interaction and disappear for hours. That no one ever bothered to make sure I was ok. No one, except Wendell, who one night sought me out and sat next to me silently as my body shook itself to sleep.
That was one month before the breakdown.
I can tell you how, in spite of everything I just said, I will be forever grateful to Teresa Moon for the gifts of speech and debate she gave me, and I love her very much.
I could tell you other things, too. I could write a book, really.
But right now I do not have the energy.
Right now, I am just trying to write this little bit without all my soul’s pieces falling apart again. Right now I just want to say that I am not alone.
I am not alone.
I am not the only fuck-up.
I have waited over a decade to say that, though I wish I didn’t have to. But at least when I say it now, I can say it loudly, because there are others saying it with me. So even as I fall apart while I put these words together, I have a newfound sense of peace.
We are not fuck-ups. We are survivors of a mad, mad world.
There is hope in that realization. There is healing through our shared pain.
At a post conference party in Texas, I met a man who used to be part of the NCFCA/CFC scene. He was well into his twenties and I was seventeen. We talked for a bit and ended up exchanging numbers. Our relationship happened mostly via text and IM, and it was a case of trouble attracting trouble. We never dated, but our relationship was really creepy and weird. One night after I had taken loads of my Xanax and other meds, he drunk texted me and over the course of several hours, ended up talking me into sending him naked pictures of myself. Despite this creepiness, I ended up disclosing a lot of my life’s story to him and I told him about my father abusing me. He really encouraged me to tell Mrs. Moon about the abuse. A few weeks later we ended up sexting again – eventually my mom found out about him and threatened to have him put behind bars if he ever talked to me again.
Towards the end of tour, I really started to fall apart (as if I wasn’t falling apart before.) I started to stress about having to return home. Things got so bad that I did end up telling Mrs. Moon and several of the other interns about my father molesting me. I don’t know what an appropriate reaction is when a teenager tells you that her father molested her, but what happened was far from a right response. We were at a conference in TN when I told Mrs. Moon about the abuse, and she had me tell my two younger brothers about the abuse, and then she had me tell my mother. My memory of this conference is pretty fragmented, but I remember crying a lot and feeling absolute horror about what was going on around me.
At the time, I really didn’t have words to describe the abuse. People kept badgering me and asking me questions about exactly what happened, but I was in no emotional state to talk about it. I felt like I was on the verge of having a mental breakdown. My behavior got more and more erratic and shortly after I told my family about the abuse, Mrs. Moon kicked me off tour.
We were in Pigeon Forge, TN and Mrs. Moon told me that she had asked my mother to drive down to TN to pick me up. I would not be able to finish the last two weeks of tour. Apparently, she had finally realized that I was in no condition to be on tour. The Moons had a goodbye breakfast for me at a little diner in Pigeon Forge. At this breakfast, I said goodbye to all the people who had been like family to me. The Moons promised that they would stay in touch with me and help me and that if I ever needed to talk about anything that I could call.
I was completely numb at that breakfast. I cried a lot and I remember several of the other interns crying. Very few of them really understood what was happening or why I had to leave. I hardly understood why I had to leave – in a way, I felt like I was being punished for speaking up about the abuse. I was on vacation last week, and I ended up driving through Pigeon Forge – to this day I hate that place.
After being kicked off the internship, I didn’t return home. I went to live with some family friends until my mom decided to divorce my father. Life got really rough after that. I attempted suicide again just a couple months after leaving tour. I also started drinking all the time and I started using more prescription drugs. I felt like my whole world had crumbled. The following is an excerpt from an email I wrote to Mrs. Moon the day I left tour:
“Saying goodbye to the team was the worst thing I think I’ve ever had to do. Arriving in North Carolina was even worse. It occurred to me that I might be stuck here for a long time. I really, really, really hate it here. I don’t know anyone. I’m lonely, depressed, teary, and scared out of my head. Life is so confusing right now. I hate this….All I want to do is go home. I have no clue what home is right now, but I know I want to be there. I just wish I could be somewhere where I knew people and where I felt safe and cared about. I’ve yet to see what that would look like in practice…”
I tried to keep in touch with the Moons and with the people I toured with, but shortly after leaving tour, one of the other interns told me that none of the people I interned with would be allowed to talk to me. As it was explained to me, Mrs. Moon felt like it was best that they not be in contact with me. I later contacted Mrs. Moon and received a similar answer from her. I can’t even begin to explain how much this devastated me. These people were my friends and support system and all of a sudden it was all yanked away from me. The Moons stopped talking to me shortly afterwards. On tour I was treated as a problem to be ignored – when that problem got too big to ignore, I was dismissed from tour. Once again, I could be ignored, as I was now someone else’s problem.
Needless to say, I was not invited to the annual Masters conference. A week before Masters I was diagnosed with meningitis and was hospitalized. I was told later that when Mrs. Moon heard I had meningitis, she was relieved because she would be able to use that as an explanation for why I wasn’t at the conference. When she heard I was in the hospital, I was told that her exact words were, “Oh thank God.”
Several months later, my mom emailed Mrs. Moon and asked if I could use her as a reference for another internship I was applying for. I should have known better. This was part of the reply she sent to my mom:
“I have not really had a chance to experience the Krysi that is dependable, trustworthy, honest, respecting of authority, a team player – many of the qualities I would expect an internship director to look for. I am optimistic that these character qualities can become a part of how Krysi is known. I currently have no real frame of reference for making that type of recommendation. I recall receiving only a few pieces of communication from Krysi shortly after she left the team complaining about her life and her options…”
The email to which the last sentence refers is the one I quoted previously. As to the rest of it… what did she expect? I was an emotionally traumatized teenager put in an impossible situation. Tour was one of the most stressful environments I’ve ever been in. Mrs. Moon knew I was unstable and she still allowed me to intern – when that didn’t work out, she took away the only support system I knew. I’m really not sure what other outcome she would have expected.
Six months after I left the internship, I sent an email to a friend and tried to explain to her how tour was for me. This was part of what I said:
“People put way too much pressure on 17 and 18 year olds. This was what damaged me the most, I think. Everyone expected all 13 of us to be absolutely perfect. On the platform and at conferences, we did a great job of meeting those expectations. After a while though, it become sort of soul killing. I’d go to a conference and feel absolutely dead – no one really knew me. They thought they did, but they had no idea about my life.”
That’s the thing, the one person who had an idea about my life (Mrs. Moon) accepted me to intern – being fully aware of my mental health problems – and then put me on a platform and expected me to act, look, and behave perfectly. When I didn’t measure up to those standards, I was rejected. I really don’t understand the reasoning behind any of it.
The last contact I had with the speech and debate world was during the spring of 2010 when I went to an NCFCA tournament to judge. I showed up with an orange juice bottle full of vodka. I was completely drunk and I gave alcohol to several of the competitors. After that I never went back.
I’m definitely not proud of all my actions over the years. I know I’ve made some mistakes, but then again, so have the responsible adults in my life. What happened on my CFC internship definitely messed with my head – I learned that nothing in life is permanent, that people will eventually abandon you, and that talking about trauma is unacceptable (and even punishable.)
Post tour, I got into a decent amount of trouble and did some crazy stuff (I was a wild one). I rejected Christian fundamentalism, in large part because of the hurt I experienced in the “Christian community.” About a year ago, I started to work on my trauma and substance abuse issues. It’s been a journey, but I’m finally in a good place. I’m happier than I’ve ever been, I have a great job, and I have people in my life who don’t abandon or reject me when I act a little crazy. It’s the first time I’ve ever known what stability looks like. I’ve re-embraced spirituality; I don’t consider myself a Christian – I’m just trying to figure out what it looks like to follow Jesus. I still screw up a lot and make mistakes, but I have people who love me through those mistakes rather than rejecting me.
I’m sure that there are people who will be angry for the things I’ve said about CFC/ICC, and I’m okay with that. I’m past the point in my life where I feel like I have to pretend everything is okay.
Sailboats And The Spirit: Finn’s Thoughts, Part One
HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Finn” is a pseudonym.
A few weeks ago, I ventured back into the depths of my Documents folder and found my apologetics cards. It wasn’t long before I started cringing.
My conception of God, though still distinctly Christian, has grown significantly since graduation from high school two years ago. A large part of this has been reading some of the greatest works in religion and philosophy in college; only a few years ago, I had read virtually no significant philosophical works and had virtually no knowledge of any religion besides Christianity.
I want to tell a few stories, and then I’ll close with a few action items for both judges/parents and students who may be reading this article.
When I first started speech and debate, I never did very well in impromptu because I simply wasn’t very good at talking about something random. Then, I noticed that I would get noticeably higher rankings when I would pick a topic which involved talking about God. So, naturally, I began connecting even the most straightforward topics to some spiritual-sounding stuff like grace, Jesus’s sacrifice, or our sin nature. I remember thinking during one round “alright, and for the third point I’ll just drop my voice really soft and sound all distressed about our depraved nature and then close with Jesus.” The topic itself had nothing to do with the Christian message, but by golly I was going to put some spiritual-sounding junk in there somewhere. And that’s exactly what it was: junk.
But it got me the rankings.
I wasn’t glorifying God by using my soft, passionate voice to talk about the virtuous stuff I threw in there to get the judges to like me. I was literally only talking about God because I noticed the correlation between my rankings and the total amount of Christian spiritual content.
I tell this story because I want to warn students against doing what I did.
You might think that this phenomenon is rare. On the contrary, I’ve seen nothing but increasing numbers of competitors catching onto this. At nationals, I judged a round of illustrated oratory. Seven out of the eight speakers spent a sizable portion of their time talking about God despite the fact that only two or three of the topics were actually about spiritual matters. Some of the analogies and methods they used to tie in “God” were so laughable that I’m sure I just had a blank stare across my face for a good portion of the round. (As much as I’m tempted to share an example, I don’t want to call a particular speech out for doing exactly what I was guilty of.) A persuasive room was similar: this time, seven out of eight speakers spoke about some topic of spiritual importance or somehow tied in references to God without actually doing any real in-depth analysis of those spiritual matters. These people are discovering exactly what I did years ago: that judges evaluate speeches with spiritual content with a lower standard.
Now, the NCFCA and Stoa are Christian leagues. I’m not concerned that students are talking about God. I’m actually very glad that speakers are able to speak to religious matters in a Christian environment. Instead, I’m arguing that students should ensure that any reference to God advances the overall message of the speech. If your message is that “sailboats are really cool and interesting,” then make that point. Don’t leave me with a bunch of random spiritual concepts you threw out because they sounded good: leave me with knowledge about sailboats.
I’m also arguing that judges shouldn’t accept spiritual-sounding junk because it’s related to religion — more on this in a bit.
There’s a big gap between the NCFCA’s motto “addressing life issues from a Biblical worldview in a manner that glorifies God,” and “mentioning God every thirty seconds to get points.” To quote Lecrae: “I used to do it too,” but I count it as one of the greatest mistakes of my speech and debate career.
So, action items:
1. For students: speak carefully about God. What you say really does have power to change your audience. Don’t use it lightly. Don’t just parrot “spiritual-ese” in spiritual-ish tones. Say something profound. Make sure your judge learns something: write your religious-themed speeches and apologetics cards such that you can teach everyone something. This means research — not just rhetorical devices.
2. For judges and parents: start listening consciously for speakers that are only throwing out Christian-sounding stuff without any real thought or consideration. Don’t excuse weak analysis or lame metaphors just because the topic is somehow Godly. I know there are judges who do this (I’ve seen it happen on my ballots) because there’s a tendency to think that talking about God is far more important than talking about non-religious things. However, this perpetuates the divide between the sacred and the secular. Listen to speeches about missionaries and spiritual matters with the same intensity that you would apply to listening to a speech about sailboats. I don’t want to disclaim any responsibility for having done what I did, but it only happened because judges actually rewarded me for it.
So that’s half of what I want to say. The other half involves an openness to new ideas.
I’ve spent a long time trying to figure out what I would say about my CFC tour experience if ever given the chance. It’s a lot to try and put into words. CFC was one of the first places where I felt a sense of family and acceptance. It was also one of the first places where I experienced the rejection and hypocrisy that seem to go hand in hand with conservative homeschooling groups.
Krysi Kovaka’s staff picture from her 2008 conference tour with Communicators for Christ.
To give proper background to this story, I first have to explain a bit about my childhood. I grew up in a conservative Christian middleclass family. On the outside, everything about my childhood was perfect (albeit a bit unconventional.) My parents chose to homeschool me and my four siblings. I was given a great academic education, but school is really only a very small part of any discussion relating to homeschooling. My father molested me while I was growing up, and given the insular community of which I was a part, there were very few people who would have been able to spot any signs of abuse. Nobody found out about the abuse until much, much later.
When my public schooled peer group was playing sports, doing ballet, or marching band (or just being normal teenagers) I was busy doing competitive speech and debate. I started doing speech and debate when I was eleven and I went to my first CFC conference. After that, I spent the majority of my time going to NCFCA tournaments, researching debate resolutions, and attending CFC conferences.
The thing is, I never quite fit the mold of what a conservative homeschooled debater should look like. I was a bit different; I liked to dress differently, dye my hair weird colors, and do anything else I could think of to stand out from my homogenous peer group. I think part of this was personality (I’ve always been a bit quirky) and part of it was my attempt at a cry for help. I was a very troubled teenager; despite (or maybe because of) my Christian homeschooled upbringing, I had problems with cutting, eating disorders, depression, and substance abuse. Of course, when I was competing in NCFCA tournaments and attending CFC conferences, very few people had any idea about my problems.
To adequately explain what happened on my CFC internship, I have to rewind a bit and talk about the winter before I went on tour. Christmas break of 2007 I was put in a behavioral hospital for attempting to commit suicide. I was radically unhappy at home, so I tried to overdose on over the counter pain medicine. I was in the hospital for nearly two weeks before I was discharged, just a few days before Christmas.
Several weeks later (January 2008) my mom was hosting a CFC Masters conference in my hometown of Louisville, KY. Prior to my suicide attempt, I had been accepted to be an RSA (staff assistant/all-purpose slave) at this conference. For reasons that still baffle me, the adults in my life decided that I needed to attend the conference and pretend that everything was okay. While I should have been in therapy, I was busy cleaning bathrooms, setting up for banquets, and doing any other menial task that came my way. Child labor laws where never even talked about.
During this conference I spent a lot of time holed up in bathrooms either cutting myself or making myself throw up. It’s interesting now for me to look back at pictures of myself at that Masters conference – it was evident from looking at me that there was something deeply wrong. Still, no one talked about it or asked about it. Depression, suicide, and mental illness are not socially acceptable topics among conservative homeschoolers.
To illustrate the polarity that was my life, I was awarded the Raudy Bearden scholarship at this Masters; in one minute I would be in a bathroom trying to hold myself together and in the next, I would be up on a stage accepting an award or giving a speech. Prior to the awards ceremony where I was awarded the scholarship, I was in the bathroom making myself throw up.
It was also during this conference that I decided I wanted to apply for a CFC internship. It wasn’t so much that I loved CFC or that I loved public speaking – I just wanted to leave home and this seemed like a perfect opportunity. The week after Masters I filled out an application to intern – I was pretty sure that getting accepted would be easy since my sister had interned twice. Turns out that I was right. I had a phone interview with Mrs. Moon, and despite the fact that she knew all about my mental health background (including my recent suicide attempt) she accepted me to intern just a few weeks after the phone interview. I told her that I was on psych medication but that I would be fully competent to tour the country in a motorhome with a dozen other people. To this day, I’m not sure why she took my word for it.
That spring and summer was a blur – I remember a lot of emails and writing a lot of classes. I remember having to go shopping for tour clothes (all of us interns had to wear color coordinated outfits.) I remember feeling a lot of pressure to perform well at that year’s NCFCA national tournament.
August rolled around and it was time to go to prep week and start tour. Over that summer I had spent a lot of time at counseling and therapy, but I was still in no mental or emotional condition to be in such a stressful environment. On tour you are expected to look perfect at all times, teach multiple classes in a day, give speeches, and function on very little sleep. At this time I was still dealing with an eating disorder (which I tried to hide by saying I was a vegetarian), I cut myself regularly, I was very depressed, and I was starting to abuse alcohol. I tried to hide all of these problems and put on a brave face as I got up on countless stages and spoke about the benefits of communication training and homeschooling. I felt like a performing monkey.
My internship wasn’t all bad – I made some great friends and I felt a real sense of community with a few of my fellow interns. I got to see the country and I got to get away from home. I loved not being at home.
Tour was a very stressful environment though, and I started to crumple under the constant pressure to be perfect. I would get up on a stage to speak and the second I got off stage I would run to a bathroom (bathrooms were the only place I found privacy) and hurt myself. I started having really bad anxiety attacks during this time, so a doctor (who was a friend of the Moons) prescribed me Xanax over the phone. I promptly started abusing this medication and nobody attempted to monitor my use of the pills.
What really amazes me about all of this is how few people took notice of my troubling behavior. Of course, there were a couple of my fellow interns who knew that something was wrong, but they were only teenagers themselves. None of the adults in my life took any notice. I can only attribute this to the fact that I was in a homeschooled bubble – I assume that the people I was around were sheltered to the point where they didn’t know what to look for. The other explanation is that the people I was around purposefully didn’t take notice of my behavior.
During the second half of my internship I began self-medicating with alcohol more frequently. One night, me and one of the other interns separated from our group. We were in Boston and we decided to strike out on our own to explore the city. We found a couple of homeless men and we had a fascinating conversation with them about life and God. During this conversation, I shared their vodka. Yes, I did that. I really didn’t see a problem with sharing vodka with homeless people. When we got back to the group no one noticed that I was slightly inebriated (or they pretended not to notice.)
On another occasion, I and two other interns raided the liquor cabinet at our host family’s house. We got black out drunk that night and ended up playing a risqué game of truth or dare. That night was the first (but not the last) time that I got sloppy drunk with a boy and made decisions I regretted later. The next morning we three were nursing hangovers, but we drug ourselves to the motorhome and tried to pretend that we were fine. I’m sure that one or two of our fellow interns noticed, but no one said anything. That was the culture we lived in – pretend that everything is fine, don’t make waves, and ignore problems.
Of Love and Office Supplies: Philosophical Perspective’s Thoughts
HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Philosophical Perspectives” is the author’s chosen pseudonym.
There are many things about the NCFCA that were… not awesome.
But as I’ve been remembering my years in the league, I’ve also been remembering the beautiful things – the friendships I gained with people around the country.
We were a strange bunch – “like-minded”, high-achieving homeschooled teenagers who liked to spend their spare time researching trade policy, arguing about Calvinism, and discussing the validity of resolutional critiques. We shopped for suits (at goodwill) and cooed over office supplies. We compared flow charts and rehashed debate rounds to figure out how we needed to boost our evidence boxes.
My church growing up hosted a New Year’s Eve party at a rec center every year which, as a tangent, I always thought was a dumb location – what were you supposed to do, if we didn’t want to play basketball? Work out? Communally? Anyway, after several years of sitting there, bored, I hit upon the perfect solution – I brought my debate box and re-wrote my case.
I saw my friends in person maybe once a month, usually at tournaments. Tournaments are weird places to hang out. We would be in rounds from 8am-10pm, if everything was running on time. I remember once not finishing until midnight. We grabbed moments when we could – during bye rounds or speech rounds if we weren’t competing. But we were exhausted, high on adrenaline and Red Bull, and most of the time competing against each other. We were also under the watchful eye of parents in every hallway.
Relationships may have been sparked at tournaments, but friendships grew and deepened online – mostly through Xanga, AIM, and HSD.
For the uninitiated, Xanga was an early web-blogging service, predating even MySpace. For us, it was facebook before there was facebook. You could write articles or update your status, and friends would comment or give “eProps,” the predecessor of facebook’s “like”.
AIM stands for AOL Instant Messenger. It was the one way we could have unmonitored conversations, since most of us understood the internet better than our parents.
HSD stands for Homeschooldebate.com, a forum established to discuss debate, judging, and coaching – but also quickly became home to myriad conversations about anything and everything, from serious to silly.
All three of these became spaces of deep community for me. As I re-read one of my (now private) Xangas recently, I was struck by how normal so much of it seems. I talked about how awesome my friends were, re-hashed tournaments (mostly the social happenings and tournament outcomes), posted inside jokes, and, more often that I care to admit, “meaningful” song lyrics.
It was on my other (secret) Xanga that I remembered the other stuff. There I wrote journal entries – some public, some private, and some protected (only visible to specific readers). I wrote about my faith, reflected critically on the competitiveness of the NCFCA, and processed problems in my family. I wrote about boys, love, belonging, and identity. I wrote about beauty, about pain, about Jesus.
I shared my soul with my friends on that site. They responded with love, support, and friendship. They called me out when I was spiraling. They talked me through my depression, and nursed me through my neglect. They reminded me that I was loved.
I did the same for them. I remember friends thousands of miles away IMing me when they were depressed, on the verge of self-harm. I would send them a song, and we’d talk until they could fall asleep. We dealt with eating disorders, self-harm, depression, anxiety, addiction, and death. We were a rag-tag bunch who were just helping each other survive.
And survive we did. We even managed to have fun. One of my favorite memories of my time in the NCFCA was a tournament held at a university, where I did very well. While usually out-of-towners stayed with other homeschool families, this time, we were allowed to stay in the dorms, without parental supervision. So we stayed up all night, drank artesian root beer, and watched a U2 concert. I held hands with a boy I liked under the couch cushions. We giggled, we ate candy, we made fun of M. Night Shyamalan. I think it’s one of the few times I felt like a teenager.
There are many skills the NCFCA gave me – critical thinking, public speaking, how to argue well, and how to understand all sides of an argument. This online community was its hidden gift. I learned how to share my heart in writing. I learned that big ideas are ok, that asking questions is good. I learned that I was beloved, messy and depressed as I was. I learned about music, and movies, and art. I learned that I didn’t have to win to be loved. I learned that I didn’t always have to be mature beyond my years, that it was ok to be silly. I learned how to listen, and that not every conversation is a debate. I learned how to walk through suffering, and how to ask for help. I learned how to sit with someone in their pain. I learned how to love and be loved, unconditionally.
I work now as a campus pastor – and I remember all of these things, as I sit with people in crisis. My friends in the NCFCA taught me more about love and honesty than anyone else since.
So, I’m taking a minute to celebrate those friends – from Xanga, AIM, and HSD days. It was a beautiful (and I think, sacred) community that we formed. For all we weathered, I’m grateful. It was, strange as it seems, a place of calm, and sanity, in the middle of the storm.
“There is warfare. We are soldiers. We have weapons.”
~Shelley Miller, NCFCA Oregon State Representative, 2013
*****
As we embark on our Resolved: series, you will see a lot of acronyms being thrown around. I figured it would be helpful for those unfamiliar with the homeschool speech and debate world to see a brief summary of what those acronyms mean. The following history of the key organizations and individuals is important to keep in mind as a general context for reading the posts this week.
HSLDA Debate
Homeschool Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) began a homeschool debate league in 1996. Christy Shipe (then Farris), the daughter of HSLDA’s chairman and co-founder Michael Farris, started the league when she was a senior at Cedarville University. The goal of the league, according to Michael, was “to improve your child’s reasoning powers, clarity of thinking, and ability to stand for the truth of God’s word.” Whereas competitive forensics sees the skills of forensics as ends in themselves, homeschool debate sees them as means to a larger end: “to help homeschoolers address life’s issues biblically, with God’s glory, not their own, as the focus.”
The very first national tournament was held in October 1997 at Loudoun Valley High School in Purcellville, Virginia. Christy Shipe was the tournament organizer. The debate team from Cedarville, of which Shipe was a part, played a crucial role in the beginning. Deborah Haffey, Cedarville’s debate coach at the time, was influential in Shipe’s love for debate. HSLDA’s original debate teaching materials featured Haffey. And the very first homeschool debate summer camps — as far as I can remember — began at Cedarville, via the university’s Miriam Maddox Forum, led by Haffey, Jonathan Hammond, and later Jeff Motter.The final round of HSLDA’s first national tournament, by the way, took place a separate venue than the rest of the tournament. It occurred at the 1997 National Christian Home Educators Leadership Conference in front of 400 home school leaders from 44 states. It was judged by Michael Farris, Deborah Haffey, and Bob Jones University’s debate coach, Dewitt Jones.
NCFCA
After five years past, the homeschool debate league had grown significantly. HSLDA decided that the league should become a distinct entity from itself. So the National Christian Forensics and Communications Association was created in 2000, co-founded by Christy Shipe and Teresa Moon. The association’s original seven-member board of directors included: Shipe, Moon, Todd Cooper, Michael Farris, Skip Rutledge, Deborah Haffey, and Terry Stollar. NCFCA’s stated goal is “is to train students to be able to engage the culture for Christ.” From the very beginning, NCFCA had a significant amount of in-fighting, resulting in a rapid burning-through of its leaders. Todd Cooper, NCFCA’s original president from San Diego, was booted almost instantaneously. My father, Terry Stollar, became the second president, and resigned after significant disagreements with the board. The first two presidents — as well as Moon, who served as Director of Forensics — all hailed at some point from California, which is interesting considering what I will later mention about “Region 2” and its split from NCFCA. Mike Larimer took over the presidency after my father. Teresa Hudson is NCFCA’s current president.
While debate was primarily the focus when the league was under HSLDA, NCFCA branched out significantly in their more diverse inclusion of speech events. As of today, NCFCA includes two types of debate — Policy and Lincoln-Douglas — as well as a variety of speech categories — biographical narrative, oratory, persuasive, duo interpretations, humorous interpretations, apologetics, extemporaneous, impromptu, and so forth.
CFC/ICC
Crucial to the growth of both HSLDA debate and later NCFCA was Communicators for Christ (CFC). David and Teresa Moon began CFC in 1997. Teresa was also the personal debate coach of many of NCFCA’s original “legends.” In the early days, the Moons traveled around the country, from state to state in their motor home, with a team of student instructors — later termed “interns.” As CFC taught speech and debate to other homeschool parents and students, it served as a “feeder” of sorts into NCFCA.
As CFC’s popularity grew, Teresa expanded CFC’s focus from homeschoolers to Christian schools in general. She refashioned the for-profit CFC into the non-profit Institute for Cultural Communicators (ICC). Today, ICC continues its CFC tours, but also offers “a variety of programs, events and teaching materials designed to help all Christian students, from all educational backgrounds — public, private and home — [to] become ‘cultural communicators’ — people who can impact their culture through excellent communication of the truth.” ICC’s stated goal is “to provide support and guidance to Christian schools, churches, and community education programs as together we train well-rounded communicators.”
A crucial concept about ICC’s goal is embodied in their “Flood the Five” conferences. The premise of these conferences is that only 5% of Americans are “ready” and “willing” to command any sort of public platform. So ICC “is committed to coaching Christian speakers to flood that 5%.”
HSD
HomeschoolDebate.com (HSD) was created by Andrew Bailey, an NCFCA alumni. HSD is an online forum for competitors, alumni, parents, and coaches from all over the country to connect. HA’s Nicholas Ducote was a board administrator on HSD for four years, and also owned the site (after Bailey and McPeak moved on) for two years, from 2007-2009. I myself used HSD significantly to market Plethora, my research book series, from 2001-2005.
HSD features threads on the current year’s debate topics, on homeschool league politics, on ideas for improving debate skills, and — well, and everything else. Some of the most popular threads on HSD in the past had nothing to do with speech or debate. The most popular threads were the “Just For Fun” and “Controversy Corner” threads, where us homeschool kids would argue about everything from free will versus predestination to that year’s presidential candidates. We would also create role-playing games and fictional stories about each other, projecting fellow competitors into soap opera storylines or superhero graphic novel contexts. HSD was, and continues to be, extraordinarily popular. When competitors would actually gather in person at national qualifying tournaments or the national tournament itself, it was always a highlight to meet in person these people you would socialize with digitally for the year prior.
HSD became a microcosm of some of the speech and debate world’s important developments: the promotion of evidence and research books, the promotion of summer camps, the connecting of alumni with current competitors to pass on both competition strategies and life lessons, and a channel for graduates to help younger kids work through questions about faith and humanity. HSD was also the starting place for the Great BJU Protest of 2009.
The Great BJU Protest of 2009
In 2009, NCFCA announced that the National Tournament that year would take place at Bob Jones University. This caused an outcry from many competitors on account of BJU’s extreme legalism and history of institutionalized racism. Some competitors believed the board made a poor decision that could hurt the image of both Christianity as well as homeschooling. This issue was also exacerbated by two other issues: how NCFCA allegedly ignored California’s previous suggestion of Irvine as a location, and how the previous year NCFCA also held a national tournament event at a Shriner’s Temple. Going from a Shriner’s Temple to a place popularly conceived as racist and small-minded infuriated quite a few people. As early as March of 2009, months before the tournament happened, members of HSD were considering how best to address this — some suggesting a boycott of the tournament, others suggesting petitioning the board to change the location, and others suggesting wearing stickers or walking silently out of the opening ceremony when BJU would give their “come to BJU!” talk.
In the end, a petition was sent to NCFCA leadership to change the location. Mike Larimer, then-president of NCFCA, gave what one of the protest’s organizers called “an expected non-response.” But the petition picked up when alumni from all around the country started showing overwhelming support for the protest. (I myself proudly signed the petition, though I was long graduated from the league. Standing up for what you feel is just and right is what this whole training was about!) As support for the petition ballooned, and word got out that protestors were planning a “walk out” of the opening ceremony, the NCFCA regional coordinator of Region 8, Lisa Kays, did something highly controversial. Kays sent an email to all the other regional coordinators. In her email, she demanded (1) that any competitors from her own region that signed the petition must immediately remove their names, and (2) ban anyone that is unwilling to remove their name from competing at the National Tournament.
Yes, you read that right. Lisa Kays, one of the heads of NCFCA leadership and who is now on the board of ICC, wanted to ban people from the National Tournament for speaking up against legalism and racism. As one of the protest’s organizers said at the time, “I am incredibly saddened to see this. This is nothing less than strong arm tactics against a very legitimate and very respectful protest.”
As it turns out, this protest organizer was not the only one who was saddened by this tactic.
STOA
In 2009, after years of strained relationships between the leaders of Region 2 (primarily California) and the national leaders of NCFCA, secession happened. Due to differences in governance philosophy, the structure of tournaments qualifying students for Nationals, and allegedly how certain NCFCA leaders (mis)handled the BJU Protest, California broke from the homeschool forensics union. A new speech and debate league was formed, STOA — which is not an acronym but a reference to ancient Greek architecture. While there are severalaccounts discussing STOA’s split from NCFCA in 2009, and while the official date is listed everywhere as such, it seems that the original genesis of STOA as an organization began in 2008, as evidenced by STOA’s original blog post dating back to August of that year. This split was announced on HSD in July of 2009 with the title, “California secedes from NCFCA. NO JOKE!”
The original leadership for STOA were Lars Jorgensen, Scott York, Marie Stout, Jeff Schubert, and Dorr Clark. Lars Jorgensen, who was the NCFCA regional coordinator for Region 2 since 2004, was the one who officially announced the split on August 10, 2009. STOA’s goal does not differ significantly from NCFCA’s: “to train Christian homeschooled students in Speech and Debate in order to better communicate a biblical worldview.”
*****
As of today, there are two homeschool speech and debate leagues: NCFCA and STOA. HSLDA continues to sell speech and debate material geared towards these leagues. Many of the original movers and shakers are still involved. Christy Shipe is still on the board of NCFCA. Teresa Moon continues to run CFC and ICC. Lisa Kays, one of the key players attempting to shut down the BJU protest, is on ICC’s board. Scott York continues as president of STOA.
And most curiously, a lot of us competitors who frequented the HSD forums a decade ago still frequent that forum to this day. There’s something about HSD that feels like home.
As this project has continued, I have challenged myself to analyze many of the institutions and cultures of my youth. (I wrote about an overview of my experiences and contemporary observations here.) I look very fondly on my time in NCFCA and CFC, but my female peers from high school (overwhelmingly) had a lot of criticism due to their experiences.
All of us believe in the mission of teaching kids to express themselves, think critically, and hone their verbal skills. But many of us have now realized that some of the toxic teachings of religious fundamentalism have negatively impacted many of the children in the league and Christian homeschool debate culture. This is not to say that NCFCA must abandon its Christian motivation and purpose. There are, however, simple steps that could be taken to lessen the negative impact of purity teachings and modesty doctrines.
I speak these words of criticism with a heavy heart because I know the tales of the suffering of many of my peers will be dismissed as atypical experiences or dramatic whining. Each and every one of us approaches this task of speaking about and criticizing Christian homeschooling debate with love, deep respect, and admiration for many of our dear friends from the league. Our criticisms are not a condemnation of NCFCA, CFC, STOA, et al (see here for an overview of the differences in these acronyms). Rather, consider our criticisms a call to “be holy for I [Christ] am holy.” I know perfection is impossible, but Christian homeschool debate taught me to fight for the impossible if I believed it was right.
We will publishing some pieces this week that are very critical of Communicators for Christ and the Moon family. I have fact-checked them and considered each one with an open mind. It is hard for me to comprehend how it could be so bad for some, when my experience was so positive. I don’t say this to diminish others’ negative experiences because, as I read these stories, it all made sense. Yes, things like the pressure of competition or the Body Shaming/Modesty Police didn’t impact me negatively, but I support and defend all the stories that we publish here.
I wanted to include a letter I wrote to Mrs. Moon a while ago, before Ryan and I began this project. I had a feeling that we would eventually get around to NCFCA and CFC, if only because so many of us share that experience on common.
*****
Mrs. Moon,
I was chatting with Devin recently about how beneficial my time on tour was for me. He mentioned that a lot of former interns have written to you about their scarring, possibly traumatizing experiences, they had one tour (no details, just very generally). I was honestly very shocked! Devin said I should pass on the kind words to you. I certainly can’t speak for anyone else, but my experience was fantastic. Yes, I had to memorize a sign-language dance to Mary Did You Know, but it’s a great memory.
My adolescence was very troubled. My family got deep into ATI, which I now consider to be a cult. At the first CFC conference I attended in 2003, Caleb Smith’s charisma opened me up to really express myself. From there, I developed critical thinking skills in the networks fostered at your conferences. I remember one conversation I had with you, I think it may have been in Austin in the downstairs coffee shop (I don’t expect you to remember), and I asked you about why CFC operated for-profit instead of a non-profit. You said you had a vision and you didn’t want it to be lost. This really bothered me for a long time and I thought it was a sort of “pat” answer. In the last few years, I’ve come to appreciate the work you did on an entirely new level. You opened up thousands of sheltered homeschool kids to so many ideas and the ability [to] process new ideas.I can honestly say I probably learned more from CFC [about how to think logically and empirically] than I ever did about all the sciences combined in high school. Without CFC, I never would have found debate, which was my only way to process out all the cultist nonsense. I credit debate 100% with where I am now.
Not only did the conferences change me, but the tour experience itself was life-changing. For the first time, I was out of my parents house and given real responsibilities. Emotionally, I experienced the first few months without a sense of impending doom, constant anxiety, and other home problems. I will also never forget that you made some pretty big exceptions to your rules for alumni participation levels to even let me tour with the team. I remember a conversation we had sometime before I toured after a regional tournament. I waited away from all the people partying to try and talk to you, you made it clear that you thought I had a lot of potential, but I needed to focus and buckle down. You were one of the first people to give me any sort of self confidence and sense of purpose.
I thrived in that environment and I kindled my love for teaching. Never again have I had so much “class room” time simply teaching subjects I’m passionate about. The skills I learned coordinating tournaments, administering things, herding participants prepared me for being dropped into Afghanistan with three weeks to design a curriculum, teach it, practice debates, organize, run, and administer a tournament. I know without CFC there’s no way I would have been prepared for that. And now there’s a thriving debate league in Afghanistan – thanks to the determination of Josh McCormick.
******
Many of us are where we are in large part because of Christian homeschool debate. Ryan and I have the tools to do this because we were trained to be counter-cultural warriors who fight the power in order to defend truth. It is unfortunate that criticism must be leveled at what many of us hold so dearly. Yet we would betray those life-changing lessons if we did not.
We want younger people in these groups to have a better experience, to have the “life-changingness” without the emotional trauma. I don’t know what that means exactly — but almost ten years ago, Ryan Stollar tried to start that conversation and he was punished for it. So we are going to have this damn conversation, whether it is comfortable or not.
HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Luke” is a pseudonym.
One of the very first things you learn in debate is the necessity of defining your terms.
So I’d like to begin with defining “socialization.”
In the spirit of late 1990’s homeschool debaters, I am going to use an online dictionary. Here’s how Dictionary.com defines “socialization”:
“a continuing process whereby an individual acquires a personal identity and learns the norms, values, behavior, and social skills appropriate to his or her social position.”
This definition of socialization fascinates me, because it has absolutely nothing to do with how we homeschoolers think of socialization. When we made fun of outsiders asking that age-old question about it, we’d kinda laugh it off and say, “Um, we have lots of friends! We don’t have a socialization problem!”
But what’s really funny is not the question itself. What’s really funny is that having friends, or park days, or co-ops, has nothing to do with socialization. Because socialization isn’t just interacting with like-minded or ideologically similar people of the same (or even different) peer group. It’s about a process that allows you to become you. And my early homeschooling years had nothing to do with me being me. They had to do with me being a mini-version of my parents and my subculture. I wasn’t learning how to think for myself. I was learning to think like my parents. Actually, that’s not fair. I was learning to think how the writers of our homeschooling curriculum wanted me to think. My parents, like me, were pawns on a cultural chessboard that transcended our little home.
But then debate came around. Debate was like my own Enlightenment, my own personal Great Awakening. Debate forced me and inspired me to look at different sides of an issue, to examine opposing viewpoints with earnestness and dedication. Debate taught me to question assumptions and challenge norms. Debate put me in a position to realize how complex life actually is. And it is far more complex than my homeschooling curriculum tried to trick me into thinking.
As the black and white facade faded, for the first time I got to figure out what I thought. What values and policies and ideas I thought made sense. I was beginning the process of acquiring a personal identity.
And as I acquired my own identity, I also learned the norms and skills necessary to being a good citizen in the public square of ideas. In short, I was becoming truly socialized. I learned how think for myself, how to articulate my own thoughts, and how to interact with people that thought differently.
The socializing aspect of debate was truly a blessing. It made me me. And that’s something I would never give up for anything. Learning to be one’s self — and to publicly express that individuality — is one of the greatest lessons someone can ever learn.
Homeschoolers Anonymous 