“The Bonfire Chorus,” about O’Connor’s experiences with book burning as a child in ATI, was originally published on his poetry blog here. It is reprinted with his permission.
About Adam
Adam O’Connor’s homeschooling was, at first, sprinkled with other forms of education. Homeschooled for preschool, he then went on to attend public school for the first and second grades, private school for third, charter school for the fourth and fifth before finally returning to his homeschooling roots for the remaining years of primary education. His family joined CHEF, where he taught photography and tutored in English for his local chapter. In his sophomore year his family joined NCFCA and IBLP / ATI. He found himself a modest success at speech and debate and competed in the national tournament in his junior year. The year following his graduation he left with a small group as an ATI sponsored initiative to teach English in Yuli, a rural town in Hualien, Taiwan. It was during this year that the accumulated years of indoctrination and his otherwise ultra-conservative, hyper-religious mindset began to unravel and he soon found himself in a crisis of faith. Although it took much longer to fully realize the effects of this year, he lost his faith in Taiwan and came home unrecognized and at odds with the social circles he had spent his entire life thus far building. He spend the next year commuting to Nicholls until transferring to Louisiana Tech for nearly three more years, dropping out one quarter shy of graduation. He is now pursuing his writing, particularly poetry, and hosts the Secret Meetings of the Dinky Tao Poetry Hour, the second oldest reading in New Orleans, currently located at the Neutral Ground Coffee House. He has been seen reading at the 17 Poets at the Goldmine, the open mic at Buffa’s, and was featured at the Apple Barrel on Frenchman for the Book Fair in 2011. He is currently working on his first book of poetry, entitled “…till the moon howls back”.
HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Eve” is a pseudonym
My homeschooling experience in and of itself was not particularly awful. It started out harmlessly enough. My older brother was very ahead of his public school class in first grade and was bored so he asked my mom to homeschool him. (Or so the story goes, I’ve never actually bothered to ask if that was actually the case). I do know that there was a very strong homeschooling movement in our church and we immediately joined that group. For the most part I enjoyed school growing up. My older brother and I were very inquisitive and my mom did her best of fulfill our desire for knowledge. Unfortunately for me, much of my interest centered on biology. I was provided with plenty of Creationist curriculum, but very little that explained any actual science.
Church was a different matter for me. I was rarely happy at church. I did not understand many things and I had a lot of questions throughout high school. My questions were always met with the same types of answers, “We know best. Just trust us we’ll get to your answers eventually but for now just focus on the stuff we’re teaching you. You’re still young and the Bible says that when we are babies we need milk.” It was an empty reply and it always left me even more unhappy. When I tried to start a study group with some of the other girls my age so that we could find some answers for ourselves, we were immediately shut down. Even though we were meeting off church property we were told that in order to have a bible study we had to have one of the women from the church oversee us. Again I was left in the dark. All I ever wanted was for someone to sit with me and be honest. I needed someone to either tell me that they didn’t have the answers I wanted or to help me find them. No one would because asking questions was against the rules in my church.
I tried very very hard to have faith. Everyone around me believed so fervently in God and Creation. I went to Bible Camps, Summit, raised money and went on mission trips, joined Bible studies and read so many study books I’ve lost count, but I never had faith. I don’t know that I’ve ever truly experienced faith. This was a terrifying realization to come to. The thought that everything I was taught growing up, everything that my parents so fervently believed was not what I believed shook me to my core. I am terrified of disappointing my parents. I always have been and I think I might always be. All of my life up until college revolved around making my parents happy. I was the good kid.
Then, of course, my family became heavily involved with the NCFCA. I hated it. I have never liked speaking in front of people. I willingly participated for one tournament and that was it. After that I supported my older brother. I had much more fun when all I had to do was help him research and then during tournaments I could run around doing whatever and helping my mom do Judge’s Hospitality. I never really made friends in the NCFCA. Most everyone loved my older brother so most everyone knew me (if only as his little sister), but I never found my own group of people. To be honest I was fine with that. I didn’t really like most of the NCFCA so I was fine just doing my own thing and living in my brother’s shadow.
Debate did, however, open me up to the world of the internet. I was suddenly immersed in research for debate, but also in everything else. All of the ideas on the internet fascinated me. I made friends with a very outspoken atheist who constantly questioned my beliefs. He never did it in a rude or antagonistic way. He could tell I wasn’t entirely convinced about my faith, but it was so deeply ingrained in me that I would never have admitted that to him. So instead he just persistently asked me why I believed what I believed. I never did have an answer for him.
In college I moved rapidly away from my parents’ beliefs. I majored in biology and was fascinated with everything I learned. When I took a class on evolution I had so many questions that I spent a large amount of time in my professor’s office. He was very understanding and very, very helpful. I stopped going to church when I moved to college and focused instead on answering all of those questions I’d had growing up. Unlike the elders in my church, my professors wanted to do nothing more than give me answers. I thrived in college. I made friends for the first time and was social. All the while, my relationship with my parents started showing signs of wear. Practically every time I went home we had a conversation that ended with my crying and feeling like I was nothing but a disappointment. All I wanted to do was figure out for myself what I believed, but because it was looking like I wasn’t going to believe what they did, they were very unhappy.
After graduating I got the hell out of my state and moved to the East Coast. I had some friends in the area but it was still a terrifying transition. I went from living near/with my family to living 18 hours away in the middle of a big city. Thankfully with the support of my friends I adjusted quickly. My parents were sure I’d be back to my home state after 3 months. I’ve now lived up here for almost 3 years and I’ve never been happier. Soon after I moved I met a guy and we started dating. He was the first guy I ever actually dated. Even when our relationship became serious, my parents never really made any effort to get to know him. He is not a conservative Christian so they don’t care to. I brought him home with me once for Thanksgiving and within 30 minutes of him being in my house my dad was trying to convert him. They have still never actually invited him to come to their house for the holidays with me.
These days my relationship with my parents is superficial at best. I no longer feel comfortable sharing things about my life with them and they never ask anyway. Occasionally we talk on the phone to catch up a little but it’s always small talk. I do hope that one day they will begin to come around and accept that I just don’t believe what they do. I hope that they’ll realize that I still very much want to have a good relationship with them but that I can’t keep living my life just to make them happy. I will always be afraid of disappointing them and it will always profoundly hurt when they tell me that I have done so, but I have to live my life with the goal of achieving my dreams and desires, not theirs.
Currently, I no longer consider myself religious at all. I do not have any sort of faith. I would not go so far as to call myself an atheist. Agnostic would probably be the best if you have to term it.
HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Ralph” is a pseudonym.
I was raised in a family where homeschooling wasn’t just the preferred method of education, but the only right one. Homeschooling was a way of life or a lifestyle if you will and everything revolved around my parents’ opinion of what God’s will was. Other than AYSO soccer, I had no social contact outside of church, family, and the homeschool umbrella group until I went to community college. This was when I discovered that I was socially retarded (yes that’s a technical term).
The religious sheltering of my childhood was only made more extreme and miserable by the international homeschool conglomerate cult ATI (Advanced Training Institute) aka IBLP (Institute of Basic Life Principles) run by ‘his eminence’ Bill Gothard. I won’t go into too many details of how involved my family was with this group or how many times we went to the IBLP seminars or the national conference in Knoxville Tennessee. But even at a young age I can remember wondering what the point was of all the putting on of shows, the mass gatherings, and the ridiculous dress code which looks nearly identical to that of the Mormons.
Besides the endless hypocrisy of Mr. Gothard’s teachings, the suppression of children’s natural instinct to ask questions of things that don’t make sense, and the plain and simply false teachings that go against recorded history and scientific fact — the most damaging moment of my experience with this group and quite possibly of my childhood (ironic that at the age of 20 both my parents and I still considered me a child) was when I attended the ALERT Academy. ALERT stands for Air Land Emergency Resource Team, but is really nothing more than a glorified boy scout troop; often referred to by some as ‘Gothard’s boy scouts’.
The main point they tried to drive home to their ‘trainees’ (typically 16-18 years old) was that no matter what adversity or difficulty you are facing, either physical, mental, or spiritual, all you need to do is cry out to God and he will get you through it. The way they taught us to do this with the physical aspect was by hiking with 60-80 pound back packs at nothing short of a speed-walk pace which often turned into a jog for miles on end without ever disclosing how far or long we were going.
Again, I won’t go into too many details but the ‘physical training’ done at ALERT made Basic Combat Training feel like a summer camp when I joined the Army years later. During this abusive level of physical training I ended up spraining my back which caused horrible pain during these hikes, but as I was told, “just ask God to make the pain go away and you will make it through.” Needless to say this was not a satisfactory answer to me and I ‘developed an attitude’ according to the leadership there.
I eventually was kicked out with them citing a ‘prideful spirit’ as the root cause of my problems.
This explanation is truly only scratching the surface of my experience at ALERT, but I don’t really want to turn this into an book. A few years later I found myself thinking that being a youth pastor might be a good path for me to take. So I attended a Christian college to begin studying for this purpose. However it didn’t take long from being out of my parents immediate control and having even a tiny taste of independence and freedom to begin rethinking everything I had ever been taught. Of course this did not happen without some outside influence.
After years of hearing my mother rail against psychology as nothing but excuses and philosophy as a way of opening your mind to Satan, I decided to take some classes and ended up majoring in both. She was partially right about something, philosophy does open your mind, but not to an imaginary evil gremlin whose ultimate goal is to enslave humanity. It simply opens the mind to new ideas and not being close minded.
To this day my parents curse my philosophy professor for ‘leading me astray’.
Some may say I’m just another typical example of how the devil can take possesion of people through exposure to worldly things. The truth is if you shelter your kids from ‘the real world’ they are going to wonder what you are keeping from them and many will run at the first chance they get. If philosophy, being the love of knowledge by definition, is so evil, then what are you saying by telling people to stay away from it?
I’m pretty sure there is a word to describe the rejection of knowledge; it is called ignorance.
After years of rebuilding my beliefs and life I have come to clarity. I realize my parents were raising children, and while this is typically what people say, I believe the mentality of child rearing needs to change.
Stop ‘raising children’, start raising responsible and educated adults who will not only be beneficial to society, but understand how to be a part of it.
“Home was a place to try and live up to impossible standards. I learned at home that nothing I did was good enough. Who I was, was wrong.”
I think I’m ready to tell my story. The thing is, I’m a very thorough, detail-oriented person, so it might work better to make it into a series, like a blog. I would like it to be anonymous, but I’m excited about this and I hope my story can bring healing and people can identify with me.
***
December 2
This is what I remember from my childhood. My mother decided to homeschool us for a variety of reasons. She had gone to a public school herself, but she had children starting at age 30, so in reflecting back on her education, and because of the kind of violent crimes that were happening in the 1980s in schools, she wanted to keep her children safe as well as give them an excellent education.
I remember as a young child, maybe 8, my dad’s dad, my grandfather, promising me a dime for each state and capital that I could correctly recite, only to find out in my twenties that he had been extremely skeptical of home-schooling, and my mother always felt she had to prove to him that we were actually being educated. My mother didn’t have a teaching degree, but she did have Bachelor and Master’s degrees. This was a smart woman.
She did, however, make one decision I will never understand.
She married my father.
***
December 5
As far back as I can remember, my father had three states of being.
1. Raging.
2. Trying to make up for it.
3. Asleep.
When I got older I noticed a 4th, which was either glued to a tv or computer screen. And I suppose a 5th: Working.
The reason I do not understand why my mother married this man is that he was verbally and physically abusive to her on a regular basis. My mother was afraid of him. I could see it. I was afraid, too, but as I got older it turned into anger, resentment, and even hate.
One day as a teenager, I tried to drive away, and he opened the car door and told me to get out, and that I was not leaving. I sat there in the driver’s seat, contemplating whether kicking him as hard as I could right in his nuts would give me the opportunity to shut the car door and escape. I ended up giving in to his wishes to come back in the house.
I hated myself for it.
I remember my mom used to leave the house regularly for a “break,” which usually lasted a few hours. But one night she didn’t come home. She called my dad to let him know that she was safe but wouldn’t be home that night. I think she was gone for two days, at my aunt’s house.
When my mom refused to tell my dad where she was, he hung up the phone. Ok, correction, he slammed the tough plastic coated metal rotary phone on its hook repeatedly until it broke into pieces. It sat in his workshop in the garage for months, waiting to be fixed.
It never was fixed.
I hated looking at it, because it would send me into flashbacks. I got to know the feel of adrenaline pumping through my veins at a very young age. Some of the abuse and neglect I’ve completely blocked out, and some of it I remember so vividly I would swear it only happened minutes ago.
My mother is now in her sixties, has been married to my father for more than thirty years, and has in the last year decided to separate from him. As a teenager I cannot count the times I wished they would get a divorce. A good friend of my mom left her husband because of abuse and I was jealous. At fifteen, I was elated to come home from a college class to a phone call from my mom, telling me to meet her at a nearby parking lot, and we were going to stay at someone else’s house for the night.
She had filed a restraining order against my dad.
But two weeks later, he was back. My mother was a pushover and I was pissed off. I was not ready to see him. I realize now that pressing charges and sending his ass to jail might have prevented the hell my siblings and I endured for the next few years.
By the time I was 17, I figured out I could escape all the fighting by staying away from home as much as possible, and at 18, I moved out.
***
December 16
My mom taught me from a very young age to be “modest,” which meant loose-fitting clothes, practically wearing turtlenecks because God forbid you show cleavage. And no tank tops. Shorts had to be almost to the knee if not below.
Looking back, I have almost no pictures of me looking feminine, other than floor-length dresses or skirts, mostly for church. My mom finally let me start wearing makeup around 15 or 16, but not too much. Mostly just a little eyeshadow and mascara.
When I was 12, some friends took me to an airshow, and I wore my shortest shorts, which were still almost to the knee, and then rolled them up after leaving home.
This is a perfect picture of what life was like most of the time. Hide who you are at home, you are only safe to come out of your shell with other peers, kids your own age. Shouldn’t home be the place to relax and be yourself?
It wasn’t for me.
Home was a place to try and live up to impossible standards. I learned at home that nothing I did was good enough. Who I was, was wrong. Conform. Yet my parents continually taught not to conform to the world’s standard. Hypocrisy.
As an adult, I struggle to replace these fallacies with logic, and it is difficult because of how deeply they’ve been ingrained.
In a word, awful. It can manifest itself in many ways. Anxiety, depression, nausea, anger, maniacal activity, constant illness, PTSD, you name it. Sometimes it can be just one of these things. Sometimes it can be many.
But ultimately, the feeling is that you are without control. You might feel led to do things you wouldn’t normally do. You may have abstained from alcohol and suddenly find yourself worrying about being an alcoholic. You may have been adamantly against smoking and find yourself smoking at least a pack a day. You may have been rail thin and now you’re struggling with weight problems. No matter how you cope, you find you just can’t manage to get things back under control. None of these activities are inherently bad, but you are driven to excess in an attempt to fill a new void.
Whether it’s depression, anxiety, anger, or something you’re experiencing, these are unfortunately completely natural feelings. I’ve experienced a number of them myself as have many other people who have suffered through religious abuse. Even if these feelings are normal, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do anything about them. With therapy (and medication in some instances), these feelings will begin to go away.
You will once again find yourself in control of your life and find something to fill that void.
You may be thinking right now about why there’s even a void in the first place. After all, you made the decision to depart that religiously oppressive upbringing for your own happiness. You shouldn’t be unhappy, right? Think about what you just did in doing that. In your mind, you’re a bird flying out of its cage. It’s truly a beautiful sight. However, in reality, you’re leaving behind a way of thinking and coping for something completely unknown. I’m not going to lie: breaking away at first is going to feel awful. You’re going to want to replace your way of coping with so many things to numb your feelings. It’s not an easy road, but it gets easier as you travel upon it. There is healing and happiness somewhere in the middle. As far as the eye can see after that, the road is rocky, but never quite the same as it is now.
You may have been taught otherwise but it’s a well-known fact that the activities of the mind and body are somehow connected. Constant stress compromises the mind’s ability to cope. Religious abuse is just one type of stress. Because of that fact, it’s rare for any of us to break free without experiencing some type of mental and emotional problems. After all, you’re not leaving because you’re happy with the way things are.
The good news is that we’re also learning more about the mind as time goes on. Activities such as therapy help repair some of that damage by helping us think about it differently. The brain is incredibly plastic and its ability to form new neuronal connections in unsurpassed by just about anything. Negative feelings can be turned into positive ones. Therapy is often necessary to do this. In some instances, medication will help quell some of the negative feelings so that therapy can be conducted more easily. In rarer instances, it’s actually necessary to keep things from getting worse. I fall into this last category.
I do not want you to think for a moment that you’re somehow defective or going against God’s will because you might need to take medication to help cope with some of the emotional problems you’re experiencing. Psychiatric medication is mostly just a “means” to an “end.” It doesn’t change who you are. It does help you figure out some things by constructing a sort of barrier against the negative emotions and helps them come in one at a time instead of flooding in all at once. A psychiatrist and therapist will work with you to see if you could benefit from this route and help you manage it.
You might feel a bit overwhelmed right now with all this information. You might feel that you want to be completely free all at once. It doesn’t work that way. It’s a gradual process, but it works. To me, this whole process is somewhat like learning to play the piano. You can choose to ignore the teacher and play all day, learning nothing. That’s the easy route, just banging around on the piano without direction. Or you can learn to play Chopsticks. You can learn to read the music and it opens new doors to you. You will probably never be a concert pianist, but I do think you’ll learn to play some beautiful Chopin, all on your own.
Just don’t forget this important fact: if you don’t use it, you lose it. Keep practicing.
HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Libby Anne’s blog Love Joy Feminism. It was originally published on Patheos on March 7, 2013.
After I wrote my posts on academics and socialization, I realized that there is another way homeschooling affected my life—and it’s no less significant. In fact, it’s a whole lot more significant. Quite simply, homeschooling affected my life because it changed my parents. When I was born, my parents were fairly ordinary evangelical Christians. That didn’t last. Their involvement in the homeschool movement introduced them to new ideas they had not before been exposed to—ideas put forward by people and organizations like Michael Farris and HSLDA, Michael and Debi Pearl and No Greater Joy, and Doug Phillips and Vision Forum. I simply cannot overestimate the affect this had on my life.
Libby Anne: “This is the real legacy of homeschooling on my life: the things that have left my family damaged and torn even today, temporarily patched back together but a shadow of what it could be.”
Somewhere in all this were these toxic ideas about control, and this insidious idea fed to my parents that they could, by homeschooling, completely determine the way we children would turn out. The homeschool literature my parents read urged them to see themselves as gardeners carefully pruning and shaping us, tying us here and clipping us there, gradually turning us into their ideal Christian men and women. My parents were promised a result, promised perfect children if they followed the perfect homeschool formula. In some sense this entire ideology robbed my siblings and I of agency, turning us into mere projections of my parents, frozen snapshots pinned on the wall.
First, of course, was the dominionism. A big word for a simple concept, but apt nonetheless. Michael Farris is easily the best known figure in the homeschool movement, and the promises that fell from his lips were sweet to my parents’ ears, their path greased by the still-raging rhetoric of the culture wars. I heard Farris speak several times, in addition to reading his literature, and one motif he was fond of was that of the Joshua generation. Farris told parents that the public schools were like Egypt, and that they were the Moses generation, taking their children out of Egypt and educating them in the wilderness. Their children, he said, would be the Joshua generation, who like the Israelites’ conquest of Canaan would retake America for Christ, creating a nation built on Christianity and God’s law. My parents bought it hook line and sinker, and looked at my siblings and I as though we were their golden ticket.
Based on this newfound ideology, my parents told us children that the reason dad was working an ordinary job rather than being a pastor, or a missionary, or a politician was so that he and mom could raise up a large number of godly offspring to go out and do all of these things a hundred fold. We were the arrows in my dad’s quiver, and they were raising us to shoot out into the world to make a difference for Christ. This is called Quiverfull, an ideology born and nurtured in the homeschool movement, passed from homeschool mother to homeschool mother and homeschool co-op to homeschool co-op like a disease. My parents were honing us and training us, they told us, preparing us for this mission. Did I mention that this could feel dehumanizing, and stifling? Oh, sometimes it could feel gloriously empowering. But the only dreams we were allowed to have were the ones our parents fed us. Step outside of that, and our parents’ smiles would instantaneously turn to frowns. And believe me, we all knew it would happen. We watched it happen, sometimes to us personally and other times to our siblings.
This leads into my next point—the utter amount of control my parents exercised over all of us offspring. Somewhere around the time I was eight or so, another homeschooling mother passed my mom Michael Pearl’s To Train Up a Child. This child rearing manual urges parents to see any disobedience as outright defiance and to see the parent-child relationship as oppositional. In fact, it goes so far as to instruct parents in how to break their children’s wills—and to threaten that those children whose wills are not broken will grow up to be miserable failures in life. This was all new to my parents, but once again, they took it in as gospel truth. Their homeschool friends all swore by the book, so it must be right—right?
The biggest thing I remember in all this was the utter rage of not being listened to. Back talk was not tolerated. In fact, any questioning of a parent’s word was out of the question. Obedience was to be immediate, complete, and without question. If it wasn’t, it was disobedience. Oh, and obedience wascheerful. Sour faces got us sent to our beds. Normal human emotions were curtailed. Dragging your feet? Complaining? Moping? A spanking, or a timeout, or a hundred sentences to write. You’re trying to explain your case? More swats, more time, more sentences. Shut your mouth, don’t talk back. Don’t question your parents. Obey.
During my teenage years my parents adopted another line fed them by the homeschool movement—that the concept of “teenager” was a modern invention, and contrary to God’s plan for the family. Rebellion was unnatural, and not to be allowed. Questioning was frowned on, and quickly answered with emotional manipulation—the dense fog of disapproval was enough to make the strongest of us buckle and give in. Further, during our teenage years we were expected to bear the responsibility and workload of an adult, but without being given the freedoms of an adult. It was like being two years old, and thirty, in a fifteen year old body. Where we went, who we were friends with, what music we listened to, and what books we read—all was still carefully monitored and controlled. And being homeschooled meant we could never get away. We were smothered under all of it.
But there was more. At a homeschool convention my parents came in contact with the marketing and literature of Vision Forum, a group whose influence has become pervasive in many homeschooling circles. Their literature is passed from homeschool mom to homeschool mom and their speakers get top billing at the main homeschool conventions. Their message is a patriarchal family order that encompasses not just husband and wife but children as well—especially daughters. Words like courtship became commonplace, and the idea that fathers should help their daughters pick their future spouses suddenly became natural. Dating was quickly off the table completely, and we awkward homeschooled teenagers eyed each other warily from across the debate table or co-op room. The idea that you could control and direct your own love life? Unthinkable. Absurd.
And suddenly the male arrows were being fashioned very differently from the female arrows. My brothers were to go out and do great things for Christ, but my sisters and I? We were to be stay at home homeschool moms raising large broods. We learned to cook, and clean, and care for children, seeing our daily lives as junior mothers as practice for our future lives. It was an odd sort of tension we girls inhabited. We were to change the world—but we were to do so by being homemakers and raising a dozen or more children. The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world. Choice? That’s a dirty word. All that mattered was your god-given role. Any earlier dreams I’d had were cut short and I was soon unable to dream beyond the future my parents so carefully laid out for me. And then there was the whole college thing. I got lucky. Through all of this my parents held onto the value they placed on education, and they sent me, a girl, to college in spite of the warnings against it they received from some quarters. I got an education. Other girls didn’t.
And then there was the huge problem when I began to question and leave my parents’ beliefs and ideology. Having been taught by the literature of the homeschool movement to see me as clay they could mold as they saw fit, they were shocked when I shook myself and chose my own direction. They had been promised the world, and were suddenly coming up empty on their investment. It was like the Greek myth in which Pygmalion sculpted a statue of his ideal perfect woman, and then it came alive. Or at least, it would be like that myth if Pygmalion had reacted with anger and rage when the statue came to life and dared move from the pose in which he carved it. When I began thinking for myself my parents reacted as though they suddenly saw me as broken, ruined. And in some sense I was. They had put everything into making me into this certain specific image, and then I dashed it all by asking questions and making up my own mind. I was like a mirror suddenly shattered into a shower of pieces. All of the plans they had built for me were ruined.
The homeschool movement took my parents, and it twisted them. The literature, the people, the groups, the rhetoric—my parents were drastically changed as a result of their decision to homeschool. The ideas that filtered into our home from the greater homeschool movement had an impact on my life the depth of which it is difficult to express. These ideas shaped how I saw myself, dictated my dreams, and created a fairy future that was dashed the moment I dared stop and really think about all of it. The triumphalist dominionism, the stifling authoritarianism, the all-encompassing patriarchalism—this was the stuff of my childhood. And the wake of destruction that followed was the rot produced by ideologies that so suffuse the homeschool movement that it’s a challenge for even the most independent-minded homeschooler to completely escape their sway.
This is the real legacy of homeschooling on my life. It’s not my academic achievement or the socialization issues I faced as a result of growing up in a bubble. It’s all of this, the things that have left my family damaged and torn even today, temporarily patched back together but a shadow of what it could be. The control, the conformity, the attempt to treat children not as individuals with their own agency but as beings to be molded into ideologically-perfect culture warriors. The emotional manipulation, the feelings of failure, the stunted and half-formed dreams. The pain, the tears, the way my blood pressure raises when the phone rings. The broken relationships, the fear, the anguish at what could have been. The ashes of a life so carefully built that burned down when I came of age, ashes blowing in the wind. I’m building something new today, yes, but the foundation I started on had to be razed and everything begun afresh, with echoes of the past still sounding in my ears, filling my dreams, and clouding my vision.
In some sense, none of this is the fault of homeschooling—but in another sense, all of it is. If my parents hadn’t homeschooled me, everything would have been different. This sounds like a huge claim, but it’s really not. My parents started homeschooling for educational reasons, not religious reasons. All of the stuff discussed above? It hit them after they entered the world of homeschooling, not before. And because my parents never stopped attending the evangelical megachurch that fit them well when I was small, and not so well as I grew, I can make a bit of a comparative study. By the time I was high school aged, there was a huge gap between me and most of the other kids who attended that church. They dressed like normal teens, listened to Christian rock music, and attended youth group. I didn’t associate with them or befriend them—for one thing, my parents felt the church youth group was too worldly, and for another thing, their social networks revolved around their schools and thus de facto shut me out. Instead, I stayed close to the homeschooled children of a few of my parents’ friends who had also attended the church from way back. We were different—they were like me. If we hadn’t been homeschooled, we would have been like those youth group kids. Evangelical, yes, but normal evangelical.
The most prominent leaders and organizations of the homeschool movement—the curriculum publishers, the speakers, the conferences—are currently awash in all of this toxic ideology. Courtship, and blanket training, and stay at home daughters, and the Joshua generation—it’s pervasive in many—if not most!—homeschool circles. Of course, there has always been dissent from this cocktail of ideas: you’ll find that while rural areas often only have Christian homeschool groups and co-ops, more liberal areas have two (or more) parallel networks—a larger Christian homeschooling community and a smaller secular one. The growing number of people homeschooling for purely practical and pragmatic reasons, combined with the advent of the internet, which has challenged the gatekeeper status of groups like HSLDA, may help turn the tide. But at the moment the messaging and the networking, all of that is still controlled by Farris et al., and that means that all of this—the dominionism, the authoritarianism, and the patriarchalism—is insidiously widespread among homeschoolers. And that means that when ordinary evangelical parents like mine enter the homeschool movement, they open themselves up to being pulled into a toxic cocktail of beliefs that may forever change their lives—and with them the lives of their children.
This is the true legacy homechooling has had on my life.
Homeschoolers Anonymous 