Among Dana Goldstein’s reasons for arguing that no true progressive should homeschool: to do so would keep high-achieving kids from being around low-achieving kids and helping them, and to do so would prevent homeschooled kids from experiencing diversity.

But in an earlier post, Goldstein praised the French emphasis on high-quality vocational education. Excerpt:

In the last three years of high school, or lycee, French teenagers choose to focus on the hard sciences, social sciences, or literature, or from among eight career-oriented “technical” courses of study, including the food sciences, health sciences, and hospitality.

Americans are–and probably should be–skeptical of efforts to “track” 15-year olds into specific careers, especially given the vast inequities in children’s educational and social opportunities before they ever enter high school. But some of the most thoughtful education reformers I’ve talked to in my reporting are Americans who are trying to seed workforce-relevancy into our own school system, by introducing young adults to possible professions in an intellectually rigorous way. This is important work, because we know one of the primary causes of dropping-out is that low-income students don’t see how their education will help them land a job or build a satisfying, remunerative career in the future.

I don’t know how many of you saw this comment from our reader Roberto in the ‘Catholic Moment’ thread, but it bears repeating here:

There never was a “Catholic moment,” at least not like Father Neuhaus and his fellow Catholic neocons imagined it. They papered over the tensions and incompatibility between Catholicism and Liberalism, by which I mean John Locke and not Nancy Pelosi, in a way that John Courtney Murray never did.

They did this because the “Catholic moment” was a political, not religious, concept. It was a search for an articulation of Christianity that could do battle in the public square on terms that were somehow accessible to non-Christians.

The problem, as Father Neuhaus sometimes acknowledged, is that Liberalism can’t accommodate that kind of public Christianity. Folks like Alasdair MacIntyre, who famously said “The contemporary debates within modern political systems are almost exclusively between conservative liberals, liberal liberals, and radical liberals,” and, especially, William Cavanaugh have documented the point so well that it requires a kind of invincible ignorance to insist otherwise.

The Catholic moment would have been chimerical even if the Bishops were saints and Catholics fully embraced NFP. Asking Catholicism to save America from itself misses the point: to be “saved,” at least in the sense that many social conservatives understand that, requires America becoming something other than it is: the exemplar of western liberal individualism.

I encourage you to set aside some time to read this transcript of an absorbing Australian public radio discussion of “political theology.” William Cavanaugh is one of the guests. On the program, Prof. Cavanaugh says:

In a sense I want to argue that all theology is political theology, that it all has implications, but the term itself goes back to Carl Schmitt in the 1920s, it may go back beyond that but if it does I am not aware, but it goes back to Carl Schmitt in the 1920’s who argued that all forms of modern theories of the state are secularised theological concepts. For him political theology just meant that, that what you have in the study of modern political concepts are really kind of theological concepts in disguise.

… All politics are theological I think in the sense that they marshal large transcendent visions of human origins and human destiny.

I just don’t think there are ways ultimately of getting around ultimate questions when you are talking politics. I don’t think you can get around questions of what are human beings really like, where did we come from? Where are we ultimately going?

If I’m reading Roberto (and Cavanaugh) correctly, then Catholicism could not ever fundamentally instruct American life because it is radically (= at its roots) different from the nature of our country, which was founded as the liberal state par excellence. Catholicism could not really change America, but only be changed by America, not because America is hostile to Catholicism (though some Americans were), but because the liberal, capitalist individualism at the heart of what it means to be American cannot be reconciled with the Catholic vision of human origins and destiny. Right? Help me out here.

Conor Friedersdorf believes that ending the drug war would do a lot to stop family breakdown. Excerpt:

It is therefore striking that libertarians, who are in fact uninclined to talk about family breakdown, seek to overturn a policy that does more damage to American families than any other.

Santorum laments the staggering number of incarcerated Americans without noting that government is a major cause of their being locked up. Neither absent fathers nor declining traditional values caused legislators to impose mandatory minimum laws on nonviolent drug crimes. But increasingly harsh penalties passed in a failed effort to win the War on Drugs has led to hundreds of thousands of men being imprisoned, left countless kids with absent fathers, and depleted the supply of marriageable men in neighborhoods where family breakdown is most dire.

I don’t get this reasoning. Let me grant that as someone who has never smoked pot, I would in principle favor lessening the penalties for marijuana possession. I suppose I’m even open to the argument for legalization, though I have my doubts. That said, it strikes me as a libertarian fantasy, this idea that ending the drug war will strengthen families. Is it really the case that all these fathers who sit in prisons on drug charges were otherwise exemplary patriarchs who could be counted on to support their children and the children’s mother, financially and emotionally, and to be what a father is supposed to be? Really? Do we have any evidence that we’ve incarcerated a large population of Ward Cleavers and Cliff Huxtables on drug offenses?

There may be good reasons for ending, or drawing down, the drug war, but the idea that it will strengthen America’s families strikes me as an extraordinarily poor one. My guess, and it’s only that, is that the drug crime that earned Daddy a trip to the slammer in the first place is, in most cases, part of a tangle of pathology that one does not associate with the characteristics of a good husband and father. One may believe the drug laws are draconian and unjust, but if one cares about fulfilling one’s responsibilities to one’s wife and one’s children, one is disinclined to put them at risk to indulge one’s desire to get high. Rich, poor, or middle-class, a man who is so interested in getting high that he risks prison is not likely to be a candidate for Father of the Year.

William Deresiewicz says that there’s something about our natures that requires fiction. Excerpt:

The very idea of fiction is relatively recent. Traditional societies didn’t have it, and when it arose, couldn’t wrap their heads around it. Homer’s audience thought he was writing history. 2,500 years later, Robinson Crusoe was presented as a true story; no one would have cared about it otherwise. Only slowly through the 17th and 18th centuries did the notion emerge that a story could be meaningful without being factual, that between or beside truth and falsehood lies a third category, where something can be realistic without being real, referential without referring to actual events, believable without attempting to evoke belief. Paradoxically (or not), the concept of fiction solidified simultaneously with the emergence of science—that is to say, with the very idea of fact as we now understand it.

Maybe. I dunno. I continue to puzzle over why some people (like my wife) adore fiction but don’t read much non-fiction, and others (me) are exactly the opposite. I gave up on “Anna Karenina,” not because I didn’t like it, but because I found myself not picking it up, instead choosing to read one of the non-fiction books I have on my bedside table. This happens all the time. I really don’t understand it, and actually don’t like it — I mean, I wish I found it easier to lose myself in fiction, the way I can lose myself in a work of history, or biography, or politics, or popular science, and so forth.

It’s not that I think non-fiction is superior to fiction. It’s just harder for fiction to work its spell on me, for some reason. The last work of fiction that I couldn’t put down was Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom,” which left a sour taste in my mouth. But I think the reason I enjoyed it so much, until it petered out with a greatly dissatisfying ending, was because it was a novel of ideas that tracks closely with things I think about all the time (e.g., rootlessness, rival versions of liberty, the autonomous self). I couldn’t turn off the part of my brain that kept analyzing what I was reading in those terms (“This is just like…”). Tom Wolfe’s novels are like that for me. In both cases (Franzen’s and Wolfe’s) the characters are quite realistic — I didn’t get the sense that they are abstractions who exist to illustrate a point — but what I find their novels work out ideas in the lives of their characters. I suppose all fiction is like this, but the social realism of Franzen and Wolfe appeals to me, probably because they care about the questions I care about.

Anyway, I wish I could explain this to myself, because I find myself constantly wishing I read more novels. The main reason I read at all is because I have a deep curiosity about the world, and want to learn more. I concede that fiction at its best is not an escape from the world, but rather an indirect mode of engaging it, and in that sense a different way of learning about it than directly, through non-fiction. I concede that in theory, a novel may tell us more about how this part of our world is than a work of sociological analysis (say). I admit that fiction and non-fiction can be complementary methods of investigation. All of that is true … and yet, nine times out of 10, I will pull the non-fiction book off the shelf, while my wife will do exactly the opposite. I wish I knew why.

I don’t suppose it’s an important question, but it seems important to me, in part because I am often frustrated by the sense many people today have that the world is entirely rational, and that mystery is nothing more than a puzzle we don’t yet understand. This is profoundly wrong, even dangerously wrong. Aside from being enjoyable purely for aesthetic reasons, fiction as a way of knowing strikes me as a powerful counter to this tendency. What frustrates me is that I don’t love fiction as I wish I did, and I don’t know why. In non-fiction, I read widely and hungrily. Fiction? No.

The terrible twins are at it again:

With the Syrian government continuing its deadly crackdown on its citizens, two senior American senators who were on their way to the Middle East spoke out strongly on Sunday in favor of arming the Syrian opposition forces.

YEAH YOU RITE!

UPDATE: I can’t get the photo to paste right, but check out the second photo, taken by my wife at a local gas station tonight. If you’re from the South, or from Texas, you’re not going to need the word from that bumper sticker translated.

In the Fatherless thread below, someone suggested that if contraception were more widely available, there would be less childbearing outside of wedlock. You would think so, but that’s not the way it’s played out, Ross Douthat writes. Excerpt:

When the Alan Guttmacher Institute surveyed more than 10,000 women who had procured abortions in 2000 and 2001, it found that only 12 percent cited problems obtaining birth control as a reason for their pregnancies. A recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study of teenage mothers found similar results: Only 13 percent of the teens reported having had trouble getting contraception.

In fact, says Ross, the data show that the reason blue states have lower teen childbearing rates than red states is because they also have higher abortion rates. Says Ross:

What’s intuitive isn’t always true, and if social conservatives haven’t figured out how to make all good things go together in post-sexual-revolution America, neither have social liberals.

At the very least, American conservatives are hardly crazy to reject a model for sex, marriage and family that seems to depend heavily on higher-than-average abortion rates. They’ve seen that future in places like liberal, cosmopolitan New York, where two in five pregnancies end in abortion. And it isn’t a pretty sight.

Read the whole thing. 

In the comments thread attached to Part 1, some of you pointed out that Dana Goldstein aimed her criticism of homeschooling at liberal parents who choose it, arguing that it is against progressive values. Why? Three reasons:

1. She claims that a “growing body of research” shows that low-achieving students do better on tests when in class with high-achieving kids, while high-achieving kids don’t suffer a fall-off in test scores when they share the classroom with low achievers. Thus, in Goldstein’s reasoning, for parents to take their smart kids out of the classroom is to punish, however inadvertently, low-achieving kids.

2. “Diversity” is a plus, and you don’t get that with homeschooling.

3. “It is rooted in distrust of the public sphere, in class privilege, and in the dated presumption that children hail from two-parent families, in which at least one parent can afford (and wants) to take significant time away from paid work in order to manage a process—education—that most parents entrust to the community at-large.” In other words, if you choose to educate your child on your own, you are showing yourself to be a rich person exercising privilege (including the privilege of acting like you’re so special, you and your two-parent family), and breaking faith with your community.

Well, I’m not a progressive, but I was thinking about these points this afternoon when my wife and I attended an information session for a classical tutorial being organized this fall for homeschooled Christian kids. If we can pull this together — and it’s looking like enough families will be involved to make it financially viable — we will have a classically trained teacher offering six hours of instruction per week in arts and humanities to our kids. The teacher will be graduating with a master’s from the University of Dallas this semester, and spoke tonight about the coursework he intends to offer, and about his philosophy of education. It was breathtaking stuff. The reading list was amazing too. Listening to him lay out his vision for what it means to be educated, I thought that Dana Goldstein and I live in different worlds. More to the point, while this tutorial will be taught within a general Christian ethos, almost all of these humanities texts — including works of Aristotle, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, et alia — could be taught by a wholly secular tutor. If I were a militant atheist, I would still want my children learning all of this. They’re not going to get it, or nearly as much of it, in normal classrooms, public or private.

So, if you are fortunate enough to have the resources to give this kind of education to your child, do you deny it to your child because it is not available to everybody, equally? Do you deny your seventh grader the chance to learn about the Greco-Roman tradition, and the Renaissance, from a humanities scholar because it’s more important for them to go to school with a diverse group of people?

It all comes back to these questions: What is education for? What is school for? What is an educated person?

I am a conservative, and a religious believer, but I can easily imagine that a humanistically-oriented secular liberal and I could come up with surprisingly compatible answers to that question — answers that do not put us on the same side of the homeschooling issue as Dana Goldstein. I’m just not seeing the reason why progressive political commitments require one to deny their children this kind of education.

[Incidentally, if you live in the Baton Rouge area and are interested in this program for your kids, e-mail me at rod.dreher — at — gmail.com, and I’ll put you in touch with the organizers; we need to know by the end of the month if we’re going to have enough families to launch this thing starting with the fall semester. One of the organizers, it turns out, is a guy who lived in my dorm in college. It was great to meet up again after all these years. He’s now an engineer, and a veteran homeschooler. He told me that he knew from this blog that I’m a big fan of Ken Myers’s Mars Hill Audio Journal. He is too — and it turns out that the scholar who will be our children’s classical tutor if this program works out is also a subscriber to and admirer of the Journal. Said my friend, “I can’t think of a single thing that has done more for my spiritual growth over the past years than the Mars Hill Audio Journal.” I told him that I could just about say the same thing. We agreed that the best thing about the Journal is how it compels listeners to think on important questions that are enormously important to Christians trying to make sense of modernity, but that often do not occur to us, or exist liminally and inchoately in our minds. Ken Myers has a great gift of drawing them for his listeners, through his interviews. After listening to the tutor speak tonight, I was confident that he would be a terrific teacher for our older son. Hearing that he is also a Mars Hill Audio Journal enthusiast sealed the deal.]

Dana Goldstein says that liberals have no business homeschooling. Why not? Because it is anti-egalitarian. Excerpt:

Of course, no one wants to sacrifice his own child’s education in order to better serve someone else’s kid. But here’s the great thing about attending racially and socioeconomically integrated schools: It helps children become better grown-ups. Research by Columbia University sociologist Amy Stuart Wells found that adult graduates of integrated high schools shared a commitment to diversity, to understanding and bridging cultural differences, and to appreciating “the humanness of individuals across racial lines.”

One hardly knows where to begin with this nonsense. This is a liberal shibboleth: the idea that “diversity” is a measure of quality. I have worked in offices in which lower-quality work performed by a minority was endorsed on the grounds that “diversity” and “inclusiveness” is a positive good. The idea that people should put their children into a school that they have reason to believe will poorly educate them because they will learn a commitment to “diversity” is therapeutic crackpottery.

I once lost a liberal friend over this issue, not long after we had our first child. When she found out that we planned to homeschool, she launched into a tirade about how unchristian we were for doing so. She didn’t listen to anything we had to say about our hopes for our child’s education, why we thought we could do better by him, or anything. To be sure, our reasons may have been mistaken, but she didn’t address them. She just went into hysterics — literally, she started crying — about what bad people we were to turn our back on Diversity. It was an entirely emotional reaction. By considering homeschooling, we had turned our back on the Community of the Righteous. I expected people to make rational cases against homeschooling, but I wasn’t prepared for that reaction.