How it should be done
Forming a child's mind and soul is a mission - and it's not something teachers can do alone
09:50 AM CDT on Sunday, August 26, 2007
There are two kinds of parents: those who have seen the 1999 PBS documentary The Lost Children of Rockdale County, and those who have yet to be freaked out by it.
Our firstborn was barely home from the hospital when my wife and I first saw the show, which investigated a syphilis outbreak in a prosperous suburban high school. It was a damning portrait of a peer culture run wild and well-meaning parents whose indulgent child-raising created a moral quagmire for their kids. When the final credits rolled, we had no doubt that we were going to homeschool.
Given our values, we were headed to homeschooling anyway. My wife and I believe in academic rigor and the old-fashioned idea that true learning requires education in virtue, as well. Given how unfashionable that view is, how disdainful Julie and I are of the permissive mores in mainstream culture and the stories public school teachers share about how maddeningly disengaged so many parents are from the moral imagination of their children, homeschooling seemed inevitable.
Parenthood, alas, is the negation of ideology. Despite our best efforts, homeschooling didn't work out for our son. Though it meant giving up on a dream, we weren't going to make him suffer for our principles. But what to do?
We considered religious schooling, but warily. Too often, faith is often not at the core of a school's mission, but rather a deceptive veneer over an institution that actually embodies and transmits values traditionalists like us reject.
To wit: I recently heard from a disillusioned teacher at a prestigious Christian high school, who wrote that the school pays only lip service to its stated values:
It's bad enough that the young guys come already inundated with the ethos of the culture, having been raised by sentimental, violent and pornographic television and music. They're sent to [the school] for one thing only: so they can get into a good college and make MONEY. That is all their parents think of, and their parents make this clear in the way they dress, the cars they drive, the symbolism that decorates their homes.
What is it all about? Money. Success. Power. You would think that [the school] would counter that, being a [Christian] school and all. Hardly. The counseling department ran the school, with the summum bonum being SAT scores above all.
Academic standards be damned, Julie and I were unwilling to put our son in a school where he'd learn just enough of his faith to inoculate him against taking its moral teachings seriously.
We tried out a wonderful homeschooling-hybrid Christian academy, but it wasn't a good academic fit for our son. Then a stranger happened to tell me about Providence Christian School of Texas, which teaches a classical curriculum in a strongly Christian atmosphere. Our son got in and spent his first-grade year there.
What a treasure that school has turned out to be. The academics are challenging and first-rate, but in truth, you can get that at other Dallas schools. It's the countercultural spirit of Providence that amazes and delights.
A small but telling example: Providence doesn't allow students to discuss TV, movies or popular culture on campus. When I tell parents this, half respond as if I'd disclosed that my child studied at Heinrich Himmler Elementary, and the other half can't believe our good fortune. Providence doesn't require abstinence from these things, but if you're training your child to love the good, the true and the beautiful instead of trash culture, this school is a powerful ally.
Providence understands that forming a child's mind and soul is a mission – and it's not something teachers can do alone. The school requires parental involvement to a surprising degree. Last week, on the night before classes started, Headmaster Tony Jeffrey delivered a moving address to parents. He reminded us that educating children begins with strong family life and requires the community of like-minded families gathered at the school, dedicated in thought, word and deed to the same mission. It really does take a village to raise a child – just not the village Hillary Clinton was thinking of.
Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, observing the loss of common moral values and common moral language in our culture, has said that recovering and sustaining a life of traditional virtue requires small communities willing to live out the virtues together. It's hard, especially without support from the wider culture. But the stakes are enormous, and, besides, what else is there?
We desperately need more places like this – and like West Dallas Community School, the sister academy to Providence that provides a similar education to underprivileged children. Social conservatives have placed far too much hope (and too many financial resources) in politics as an agent of cultural renewal, and far too little in the slow, steady work of building up institutions like Providence. As the agrarian essayist Wendell Berry has written, "our country is not being destroyed by bad politics; it is being destroyed by a bad way of life."
Culture is more important than politics at shaping how men and women think and act. In that regard, teachers, like poets, are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Presidents and Congresses, Republican and Democratic – they will come and they will go. But the patient soulcraft undertaken at places like Providence will endure for the lifetimes of children who may or may not grow up to be rich, famous or powerful, but – whatever their calling – will have what it takes to move mountains.
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist. His e-mail address is rdreher@dallasnews.com.
