And it doesn’t always stick
“WTF?!” a niece’s glance shot my way from down the pew. Graduation ceremonies at her cousin’s Christian high school followed the Pledge of Allegiance with a second pledge, this time to the Christian flag.
Wait. What? There’s a Christian flag?
It was a suburban church school, not the home-schools of the Washington Post profile, “The revolt of the Christian home-schoolers.” But it was a subculture related to the one Christina and Aaron Beall grew up in:
Aaron and Christina had never attended school when they were children. Until a few days earlier, when Round Hill Elementary held a back-to-school open house, they had rarely set foot inside a school building. Both had been raised to believe that public schools were tools of a demonic social order, government “indoctrination camps” devoted to the propagation of lies and the subversion of Christian families.
At a time when home education was still a fringe phenomenon, the Bealls had grown up in the most powerful and ideologically committed faction of the modern home-schooling movement. That movement, led by deeply conservative Christians, saw home schooling as a way of life — a conscious rejection of contemporary ideas about biology, history, gender equality and the role of religion in American government.
Christina and Aaron were supposed to advance the banner of that movement, instilling its codes in their children through the same forms of corporal punishment once inflicted upon them. Yet instead, along with many others of their age and upbringing, they had walked away.
“People who think the public schools are indoctrinating don’t know what indoctrination is. We were indoctrinated,” Aaron Beall says now. “It’s not even comparable.”
Taking their daughter to her first day in public school was a refutation of everything their home-schooling indoctinated them to, and the abuse that came with it.
There were still moments when they were condemned by an inner voice telling them that they were doing the wrong thing, that both they and their children would go to hell for abandoning the rod and embracing public schools. But the voice was usually silenced by their wonder and gratitude at the breadth of their children’s education.
Sarah Jones writes at New York magazine that she too was a member/participant/victim of Christian home-schooling:
The Bealls and I are roughly the same age, and I too belonged to the Joshua generation, though my parents appear to be less extreme than their own. Even so, my education was a haphazard affair. My parents homeschooled me for seven years. I also spent two years in a fundamentalist Christian school and three in public school before heading off to a conservative Evangelical college. Like the Bealls, I have rejected the Christian homeschool movement and its political goals. If we were once the Joshua generation, we have since become something much harder to define.
That ambiguity is not what our parents hoped for us. Yet no parent, however controlling, can fend off independence forever. Self-determination is the inheritance of age. A child comes to understand their parents not as the titanic figures of their youth but as people with foibles and pains of their own. That process is uncomfortable for all involved, but it is inevitable, and it can have political implications, too. Indoctrination is heady, but it doesn’t always stick.
I don’t know how common it is for people to leave this subculture as adults. My social circle is not a reliable source of data: It is full of friends who have left either the Christian homeschool movement or the broader conservative world. Some of us grew up in homes characterized by abuse and neglect, but not all. Most are liberal or leftist, but not all. Michael Farris, who coined the term Joshua generation and founded the Homeschool Legal Defense Association before working for the Alliance Defending Freedom, has his own theories. He blames a fraction of homeschooling parents for their extremism. “I view this as the fringe of the fringe,” he told the Post. “And every kid that I know that has lashed out at home schooling came out of this.”
The Post feature is a deeper look into the movement than we usually see, and more immersion than I had at that brief church-school graduation. The graduate that day eventually wound up working for a New York fashion magazine. As Jones wrote, “Indoctrination is heady, but it doesn’t always stick.”