The home-schooled kids I’ve seen from personal relationships and from coaching soccer are too often little hot-housed flowers. They aren’t used to taking orders from strangers and they are unskilled in the give and take of peer relationships. This is a particular difficulty for boys who must get used to the tough pecking-order relationships that boys naturally develop and are mirrored in the working world. The parents (mostly mothers) of home schoolers will complain about the discipline and want special treatment for their children. They are more likely than public or private school kids to drop out regardless of their natural athletic ability.

As far as the extra closeness blah, blah, blah. I defy you to find a closer parent-child relationship than I have with my son because I have never see it. Where I can’t provide the best for my kids, I have no problem paying people who are more capable and I work like hell to provide that ability. My son goes around without prompting saying: “my life is awesome” and “my life is all about opportunities.” He is well aware of where I came from and how hard I worked to move up. I have a saying that we have adopted as our motto: “you stand on my shoulders.” I work a more than full-time job and my wife teaches high school. We live and work to provide the best opportunities for our kids and I defy you to find more successful parents than we are. ~ “Steve” quoted at Crunchy Cons

For what it’s worth, Rod never denied that children who go to conventional public and private schools can have strong family relationships, and he does not mandate homeschooling for everyone. He does, however, hold it up as an alternative to submitting to the chaotic public schools or, I might add, to the leftist politicisation of students that takes place in most private schools.

I take it as a given that homeschooling is generally far more normal and natural than the meat processing plant approach that passes for education in most schools today. As it happens, I am currently running an online church history course for some homeschooled Orthodox high school students, so I am in one sense personally committed to the support of homeschooling. Many, if not most, of the families in my church homeschool, and their children all seem to be mature and confident, for lack of a better word.

But I would not be honest if I didn’t say that homeschooling sometimes inspires a certain anxiety in me. Because education should be first and foremost an instruction in what is needful to live a good life, rather than simply technical schooling, I grant that it involves the cultivation of the whole child that most schools cannot (or at least today usually will not) provide. This involves moral and religious instruction that private schools positively do not provide, public schools are currently forbidden from providing (and which they positively undermine in a number of obvious ways) and which even religious schools in this country can provide only to a certain degree.

At the same time, however, I am frequently underwhelmed by the level of schooling and preparation most homeschooled high school students I have encountered possess. They are usually quite bright, but the level at which they have engaged their materials is so often very rudimentary. In my experience so far, grammar is usually fine and sometimes largely flawless, but many of the teenaged homeschooled children I have dealt with seem to have had little experience with formal writing of any kind.

It may be that my own background in private schools seriously distorts my expectations of the kind of writing high school students should be able to produce, and my own penchant for writing may further distort my sense of what is reasonable to expect by, say, age 16, but I remember the standards that we had in middle school being such that we had to learn to write essays fairly well in order to advance. Homeschooled students, perhaps because they have the advantage of the small, discussion-oriented learning experience, seem to have fewer occasions to practise formal writing, which in turn provides them with fewer occasions to practise critical thinking and organising and structuring complex ideas. This will not only hinder any future academic pursuits they might want to undertake (writing college entrance essays, for instance, becomes rather difficult if you are not fairly well studied in essay writing), but can actually do them a disservice in the rest of their life.

Granted, I would undoubtedly be underwhelmed by the schooling many of their peers possess as well, which makes me reluctant to leap to conclusions that homeschooling is often not getting the job done (or at least not getting the job done as well as I think it should be getting done). I may be expecting an average level of ability that is more than is reasonable, but I am not so sure. Many are the stories of the excellent homeschooled student beating out all other contenders in programming and science contests. I am left a little uneasy all the same.

This man, who wrote in to the CC blog, locates one of the chief virtues of the old Catholic school in the rigorous discipline in the classroom and at home, and he is absolutely right on this. In fairness to homeschooling parents, it is to recapture some sliver of that discipline, vanishing or gone from many public schools, that they have brought their children back home. But it is my impression, admittedly gained only through occasional experience with homeschooled kids, that there is a real danger not only of the sort of smothering that creates the “hothouse flowers” described in the email but of a potential for lack of academic rigour that proper professional teachers are supposed to impose.

I acknowledge that there are very few such proper professional teachers, and this often leaves parents with a very difficult dilemma that makes homeschooling the most sensible alternative. But I do get a certain sinking feeling when I contemplate the prospect of more and more of the most conservative and Christian people in the country withdrawing to their domestic “monasteries” while their peers, far less inculctated with any of the same values, come to control completely all institutions and professions. Taking the long view, which is the view I think “crunchy” cons generally do take, I can foresee a time when these homeschooled people are reduced to a kind of second-class status in society and they and their descendants are pushed even further to the margins and within a generation or two knocked to the bottom of the middle class or out of it all together. Perhaps the “crunchy” cons view that probable decline in social standing with equanimity, regarding it as fundamentally less important, in which case they have no problem. I am less inclined to view it with equanimity, and so I do have a certain reservation about the possible consequences of crunchiness in this respect.

The retreat to these “monasteries” at the advent of the new “Dark Ages” (a term used in Crunchy Cons, and not one I would prefer to use, as the period conventionally referred as the Dark Ages was the rise of Christendom and so was a very Light Age in the most important respect) has a certain appeal and makes a certain amount of sense. I would simply observe that the reason why the actual monasteries of the fourth and fifth centuries were not subsequently surrounded and obliterated by the barbarians was because the entire society around them, the barbarians included, was becoming more and more Christian. We seem to be looking forward to an age of post-Christian barbarian “kingdoms,” which will ultimately has as much patience with our “monasteries” as the federal government had with the Davidians in Waco. Recognising that is ultimately not a criticism of homeschooling or the idea of new “monasteries,” but rather a confirmation of the miserable state of the culture that has propelled so many to seek refuge in homeschooling and a warning that the new “monasteries” may suffer the fate of a Solovkii in the twentieth century rather than flourish like a Lerins and Monte Cassino.