This past week or so has been a bad media moment for homeschooling. First there was a Washington Post expose on “the revolt of the Christian homeschoolers” that ran May 30.
Mind you, this is a time when homeschooling in America is at all-time highs. Then, starting last Friday, Amazon Prime premiered “Shiny Happy People,” its four-part series on the woes of the Duggar family, the stars of the long-running reality TV special “19 Kids and Counting.”
The latter is one of the more bizarre examples of circumstantial evidence, imputed (but not proven) guilt and overkill that I’ve seen in a long time. I’ll get to the Post piece in a moment, but the pile-on @AmazonPrime simply must be addressed.
For starters, not only does the series go after the Duggar parents Jim Bob and Michelle, but it also trashes the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP) or what a lot of us who attended it in the 1970s used to call Basic Youth Conflicts. Bill Gothard, its founder, resigned in 2014 after being accused by multiple women of sexual abuse.
The series starts with a number of unidentified people (we learn their names later in the series but still) accusing IBLP of “spiritual, emotional, physical, psychological abuse” and essentially being the spiritual engine that fed the Duggar family empire. That and the fact that the Discovery TLC Network became a multi-billion-dollar company partly due to them.
“Homeschooling is the linchpin of this whole project,” said one woman.
Does that include all the homeschoolers who made it into Harvard and other forms of elite education? There are many facets to this nondenominational, multiracial movement.
“World domination is their goal,” intoned another man.
The series (I’ve watched two of the episodes so far) careens back and forth from homeschooling to the Duggars to conservative politics to the IBLP, trying to throw as much dirt as possible on them all. Is everyone who was ever involved with the IBLP and homeschooling a wacko?
My friends (and I) attended these seminars in the mid-1970s when Gothard was filling coliseums. Our biggest criticism was that here was a single guy without kids purporting to tell families how to raise their children. It was weird from the get-go. Gothard is an easy target.
Most disturbing to me was his teaching on reconciliation; even if you were 100% the victim, there must have been something you did that was at fault. And you had to apologize for your part in the conflict, even if you did nothing wrong. During the years I was influenced by Gothard, I racked up a lot of apologies to abusive people that I didn’t need to give. Eventually, I chucked all his teachings.
Which all goes to say there are lots of us who sampled Gothard et al and rejected it early on. The ones who hung on were a sliver of the whole, but that sliver is one part of the traditional religious world that has a way of birthing lots of kids.
There are multiple faults to be found. Even with a target-rich group like IBLP, I don’t like it when any media – left or right — finds a convenient voice and anoints that person as an automatic expert. The pros behind this show interviewed one Jennifer Sutphin, who runs a YouTube channel called Fundie Fridays. She didn’t grow up in the IBLP; she’s simply a convenient purveyor of snark and popular on Reddit.
Then there was another woman called Brooke Arnold who attended IBLP and happened not to like it. She called Wheaton the “Harvard for fundamentalists” whereas no, Wheaton is the Harvard for evangelicals. Bob Jones University exists for fundamentalists. With factual misses like that, it’s clear that Amazon didn’t care about the finer points of Christian culture. They saw the Duggars and Gothard as ripe for the picking.
And there’s more. “The institute raises little predators,” says one unnamed woman. Really? Can she prove that? Other than Josh Duggar, what other predators does she know of? Am wondering if the IBCP has a good libel lawyer because there’s an ample harvest here for the taking.
Anyway, it’s the poorest sort of journalism to marshal all sorts of naysayers on one side and to not represent the other side — other than to say they didn’t respond to questions. There’s always a way to get the other side of the story; you just have to want to.
There’s a lot of chatter going on about the Amazon series, so I’ll connect it to that Post story.
Homeschoolers used to be an alternative universe for the Post, which is why I pitched them this article back in 2012; a multi-source piece about disagreements within the homeschooling camp. I don’t recall anyone mentioning IBLP when I researched the piece, but homeschooling was trending right even back then and freer spirits such as the woman I profiled, Susan Wise Bauer, were troubled by it.
In a piece about “the revolt of the Christian homeschoolers,” far less space should have been spent on the one family profiled. I would have liked to have seen in-person visits with more families to convince us that this disenchantment is a common experience.
Instead, we hear mostly about Christina and Aaron Beall, a Christian couple brought up as homeschoolers who break away from the tyranny of their child-beating parents to enroll their three kids in the local , supposedly godless public school.
The chances of said school — in the GOP stronghold of Loudoun County, Va. — having the kind of sex-ed for little kids that’s allowed up here in the Pacific Northwest, is pretty small. No drag queens are likely to read storybooks to this crowd. So to portray this couple as having “a weight incomprehensible” to other parents is loading on the drama pretty thick. We hear that:
Their 6-year-old daughter, wearing a sequined blue dress and a pink backpack that almost obscured her small body, hesitated as she reached the doors. Although Aaron had told her again and again how brave she was, he knew it would be years before she understood how much he meant it — understood that for her mother and father, the decision to send her to school was nothing less than a revolt…
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.
I understand the writer is trying to note that these specific conservative Christians are a “faction” of the diverse homeschooling movement, but that point gets completely lost. We do hear that Christian homeschooling pioneers want their kids to be a “Joshua generation” who’d enter politics and transform the country into a more biblical landscape.
Again, this is news? Every movement out there wants their interns and 20-something employees to focus on changing the culture. I appreciated that the writer quoted Michael Farris, founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association, as admitting that the ultra-right homeschooling parents are going to see their children reject the movement in spades, which we’re already seeing with some of the Duggar kids.
People forget there was a time when home schoolers went through a hell of state regulations and roadblocks, which is why the HSLDA was founded. If the pendulum has swung too far, maybe it’s the fault of some of those state officials who were overzealous in the first place?
As for public school discourse on race and gender, there’s certainly been some reasons why. I always love to refer folks to the Portland, Ore., public schools’ discourse for the K-5 set on “white colonizers” and transgender ideology. You can access some of the spicy material taught in Washington state schools here.
Over decades, they have eroded state regulations, ensuring that parents who home-school face little oversight in much of the country. More recently, they have inflamed the nation’s culture wars, fueling attacks on public-school lessons about race and gender with the politically potent language of “parental rights.”
But what should be a moment of triumph for conservative Christian home-schoolers has been undermined by an unmistakable backlash: the desertion and denunciations of the very children they said they were saving.
The bottom line: Only two people are quoted as having been former homeschoolers who are coming out against the movement.
Counting the couple profiled in the story, it sounds like it’s more of a revolt of a handful of people. Are we sure that the Christian homeschooling movement is the new Gilead with its adherents fleeing into the “Canada” of public schools? (You need to have watched “The Handmaid’s Tale” on Hulu to know what I’m talking about.)
The rest of the article details the couple’s departure from the movement’s stress on spanking or whipping one’s child and follows them through their experiment with placing first one child, then three in public school. By this time, the Bealls have dumped the conservative form of Christianity in which they were raised, but it’s unclear whether they have slipped out of church as well or switched congregations. That was a large hole in the piece. Are basic Christian doctrines part of this drama?
Another journalism question: I am curious why readers were not allowed to comment on the article but to fill the reporter’s inbox instead.
One thing they might have stressed is that the ultra-conservative folks are not indicative of the wider homeschooling movement. Why not run a sidebar showing the mirror image: Tales of a progressive couple who escaped into the arms of Christian homeschooling sometime during the pandemic? The statistics are out there.
We know that’s not going to happen.
The overwhelming narrative in all this is that conservatives who go liberal are finally seeing the light. See the stories on Megan Phelps-Roper, once part of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church or Jinger Duggar Vuolo, the newest Duggar child to escape the family nest, for examples.
The much rarer stories on liberals going conservative, such as career women who become nuns or who convert to Orthodox Judaism, contain an element of surprise; why would a sane person do this?
Sadly, reporters tend to have few contacts in conservative communities and most will never understand why the latter believe and act as they do. Back in the 1990s, I used to see more homeschoolers —and those like them — work to get positions in the secular media to get their worldview a hearing. I’m not seeing that now; instead they are involved with politics or law but not the mainstream press — an institution they see as irredeemable and hopelessly slanted against them.
FIRST IMAGE: Feature art with essay on homeschooling costs — at the website of the Texas Home School Coalition.