It has been a great treat for Betsy and me, and our youngest daughter Miriam, to be with you these two days.  Such gatherings are a wonderful way to confirm the community of home schooling, that extends across this state, and this nation.  Thank you for your hospitality.

My subject this afternoon is "The Perils (and Rewards) of Being a 'Pioneer" Family," a theme that seems appropriate in this, the "Last Frontier" state, where "pioneering" is something more than a memory. 

But I ask you now to cast your minds in another way.  Picture a country where leading educators look upon parents as bad influences; a country where those same educators wish to take children away from home as early as possible.

Picture a country where schools no longer serve the home or the local community; instead, they serve the government and the abstract international economy.

Picture a country where some parents view their children as an encumbrance at home, where there is no useful work for them to do, and where these parents are glad enough to turn them over to the state.

Indeed, I suggest that you picture the United States of America in the 1990's.

Such is the current dominant relationship of schooling to the family and the society, as described by the Kentucky farmer and poet Wendell Berry.  As he writes in his book, What Are People For?: 

According to the new norm, the child's destiny is not to succeed the parents, but to outmode them....The schools are no longer oriented to a cultural inheritance that it is their duty to pass on unimpaired, but to the career, which is to say the future of the child....[H]e or she is educated to leave home....School systems innovate as compulsively and as eagerly as factories.  It is no wonder that, under these circumstances, 'educators' tend to look upon parents as bad influences and wish to take the children away from home as early as possible.  And many parents, in truth, are now finding their children an encumbrance at home, where there is no useful work for them to do, and are glad enough to turn them over to the state for the use of the future.  He concludes:  The local schools no longer serve the local community; they serve the government's economy and the economy's government.

Berry's observations are generally true, yet at the same time incomplete.  There are those, here in this room and elsewhere around the country, who seek to reassert the traditional role of families in education.  Simply put, we are in the midst of a kind of revolution in which hundreds of thousands of American parents are choosing not to educate their children to leave home, but to educate them at home.  And for reasons that I will explain, such parents face special dangers.

The home-schooling movement has grown spectacularly in a short period of time.  In 1970, home education was found among a scattered few, some tied to the so-called "counter culture," or among special cases such as American families living overseas, probably not more than 20,000 overall.  Yet by 1998, somewhere near two million children in the 50 states studied primarily at home.

Academically, these children tend to outperform their public-school peers.  But home schooling is about more than academic achievement.  It is about restoring much of what America once was--a nation that nurtured both freedom and virtue.

So what brought on this home-education revolution?  Where will it take us?  And why do home educators face so many dangers?  To best answer these questions, we must first understand where we've been.

Before 1840, the vast majority of Americans (more than 90 percent) lived on farms or in small villages; theirs was the life of the cottage.  While many adults had a specialized trade, most households aimed at--and commonly achieved--self-sufficiency in food, clothing and other essentials.

For example, families commonly preserved their own meat and vegetables and prepared their own meals.  They spun and wove their own cloth; they sewed their own clothing.  They made the chairs they sat in, the candles that gave them light, and they either walked or rode their own horses and drove their own wagons.

As one historian has phrased it, these Americans raised and educated their children to succeed them, not just to succeed.  By age 5, children were active participants in the work of the household, as were elderly or unmarried kin.

Husbands and wives, too, were bound together in a partnership of home-centered work; they specialized in tasks, to be sure, but each needed the other to create the self-sufficient home, which they believed to be essential to their dignity and their liberty.

Divorce was out of the question.  Children were everywhere, with the average family counting seven.  Family loyalties rested not only on love and emotional companionship but also on need:  Wife and husband, child and parent were functionally intertwined.  These household economies operated on the principle of altruism, or sharing.

This American world began to change about 1840, as the emerging industrialists lured vast multitudes into newly-built factories.  But newfound industrial efficiency and lower-cost, standardized products came at the expense of small, family-held enterprises--and ultimately of home life itself.

Although families could now buy an array of cheaper consumer goods, a less visible price that they paid was the surrender of productive family functions (candle-making, food processing, weaving) to the industrial sphere.  Moreover, they also had to surrender something more precious--their time together.

In this new order, people now worked in one place and slept in another

--a revolutionary shift in human living patterns.  With mothers and fathers pulled out of the cottage, the care and training of children became a matter for the larger society--again, something new in human affairs.

Over the next 100 years, the modern social-welfare state took shape, claiming nurturing functions that throughout history belonged to the family.  The first and most important of these was education. 

Also beginning in the 1840's, the common-school movement--backed by compulsory education laws--took children out of the home for moral and practical training.  From this seed the modern public-education system would grow.

Established in Massachusetts, the movement in its early years aimed at indoctrinating immigrant Catholic children into the liberal Unitarianism of the Boston elite.  After the Civil War, the New England system was imposed on the defeated South as a tool of political reconstruction.  By 1900, the movement adopted the sentimental, atheistic socialism of John Dewey and his colleagues.

Whatever changed, the consistent goal was state control of children.  As one turn-of-the-century school inspector explained, "The schools exist for the benefit of the state rather than for the benefit of the individual.  The state seeks to make every citizen intelligent and serviceable."

In his influential SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FAMILY (1917), Arthur Calhoun celebrated the "disappearance" of family-centered childrearing and "the substitution of the parentalism of society."  Children, Calhoun reported with satisfaction, had passed "into the care of community experts who are qualified to perform the complexer (sic) functions of parenthood...which the [natural] parents have neither the time nor knowledge to perform."

This aggressive social-welfare state went on to capture other family functions.  For example, the years near 1840 marked the advent of the legal concept of parens patriae--"the parenthood of the state."  Children could be seized and incarcerated over the protests of families when natural parents were deemed (as a Pennsylvania court put it) "unequal to the task of education or unworthy of it."

In short, the message given to parents was:  leave education and child guidance to the professionals. 

Government expansion weakened family ties in other ways as well. 

Until modern times, grown children and other relatives provided security and support to the elder members of their families.  Adults had an obligation

--moral, social and legal--to care for their own.  Moreover, they also knew their own security might depend someday on the children they had reared and on the example they set in caring for their own parents.

State-level pension programs, the national Social Security system and health insurance shattered those security bonds.  The incentives toward childbearing actually reversed.  The new, ruthlessly correct logic became  "children are time consuming, expensive, and noisy.  Let others raise the children who will support me in my old age."

During the years 1840-1940, divorces--virtually unknown at the beginning of this period--increased dramatically.  The average age of first marriage for both men and women rose, and the birth rate steadily declined, from an average of seven children per family to about two by the early 1930's.          

"The large family is an economically handicapped family," mourned the family advocate Ralph Borsodi in his 1929 book, THIS UGLY CIVILIZATION.  "The family today tends to restrict the number of its children; to shift the responsibility for caring for its aged relatives to public institutions; to drive even the wife and mother out of the home into money-making and to place its infirm and crippled members in hospitals of various kinds."

This probably sounds familiar to most of you.  But there was a time, just a few decades ago, when the family made a comeback of sorts.

That time occurred roughly from 1940 to 1965.  The average age of first marriage fell to historic lows (20 for women, 22 for men), the proportion of adults who were married soared to the highest level ever recorded, the divorce rate dropped 50 percent after World War II and the birth rate grew 60 percent, with average family size shooting from about two children in 1940 to nearly four children in 1957.

There were several reasons for this reversal of trends.  Among them:

• An informal but prevailing "family wage" large enough for men to support a household and for many married women to raise children at home rather than toil in a factory.

• Pro-family tax policies including a large per-person tax exemption, special tax breaks for home ownership, and "income splitting," which provided incentives for marriage and increased the financial burdens for divorce.

• The revival of family-centered religion combined with an increase in fertility, especially among Roman Catholics.  In 1958--well after the "catching up" on babies deferred during World War II had ended--22 percent of Catholic adults under age 40 had four or more children.  This was more than double the rate in 1953.  (Among Protestants, the rate held steady at 9 percent).

All in all it seemed to be a momentous turnaround.  But it was not to last.

Statistics from 1965-1980 tell a far different tale.  The marriage rate for women ages 20-24 fell 55 percent; the divorce rate soared by 125 percent; the birth rate tumbled 46 percent.

What happened?  Again, several things.  The most obvious was the collapse of the social forces that had nourished family renewal just a quarter century earlier.  World War II-era America, and the patriotic and conformist attitudes which sustained it, became a casualty on the rice paddies of Vietnam.

More importantly, however, the church failed in its family-sustaining tasks.  Sermons on chastity and fidelity disappeared from many Protestant pulpits.

So-called "mainline" churches even went on the attack.  A National Council of Churches panel in 1961 labeled marriage an "idolatry" and endorsed the sexual modernist agenda:  opposition to population growth, access to abortion and promotion of contraception.

Catholics, too, grew disoriented in the wake of the Vatican II conference of the mid-1960's.  Divisions on family and sexual issues were widely publicized, and absent a unified voice from church leaders, much of the laity threw in with the modernists whose voices increasingly dominated the wider culture.

Government action accelerated the trend in numerous ways.  Between 1963 and 1981, the Congress abandoned all pro-family tax measures, including income splitting and a large per-capita tax exemption.  The Federal government also created a welfare system that subsidized out-of-wedlock childbearing, put legal pressures on American industry to employ more women and break down the informal family wage system, and--certainly not least--issued a string of destructive court decisions.

In the courts, as well as among intellectuals and the media, the "rights" of individuals triumphed almost completely over duties toward family and community.  The old concept of liberty based on responsibility was replaced by "no-fault divorce," "children's rights" and "the right to privacy"--meaning, most often, abortion on demand.

Beyond all this lies evidence of deeper causes that predated the 1960's.

The so-called sexual revolution, for example, actually began decades earlier.  The World War II mobilization of 28 million men and women for war and factory work shook traditional restraints on courting and sexual behavior.

Alfred Kinsey's 1948 book, SEXUAL BEHAVIOR IN THE HUMAN MALE, raised pornography to the level of popular science.  PLAYBOY magazine debuted in 1953 and movies grew more explicit.  Although most families appeared healthy, rates of illegitimacy and sexually transmitted diseases climbed at an alarming pace.

An even greater problem was the failure of postwar family renewal to return functions or tasks to the household in any meaningful way.  Driving the new medium of television, advertising whetted ever more appetites for consumer goods, and by its very nature discouraged all forms of family self-sufficiency, such as gardening or sewing or home carpentry.  Most remaining small farms collapsed in these years, pouring a last great stream of country refugees into the cities and factories.

Thus unleashed sexuality and rampant consumerism, rather than the authentic family and the household economy, were the true winners of the 1950's.  When fresh challenges to the family arose in the next decade--from feminists, atheists, members of the New Left and others--the "traditional family" of the 1950's simply vanished, as smoke in a gust of wind.

Yet the story does not end here.  Despite the corruptions of greed and lust--the death that is the wages of sin--the desire to create and live in families cannot ever be extinguished.  The urge is planted in our genetic inheritance, in our hormones and in our souls.  Humans can try to deny this aspect of their nature, but the desire still returns in some way to each generation, opening again the possibility for renewal.

And so, in the 1970's, specific events--including federal efforts to regulate public and parochial education, Supreme Court decisions blessing the sexual revolution, and the breakdown of discipline and standards in local schools, inspired a critical mass of pioneers to bring their children home.

They soon discovered that, indeed, there's no place like home for the education of their children.  These pioneer families also found that the nature of their relationships changed, almost overnight, a theme I described in my talk last night.  Father, mother, and children had become members of a learning enterprise who needed each other and who profited--morally and practically--from each other.

A key productive function lost to the family over a century ago--education--had come home, and the results were at once remarkable and predictable.  Many of these families found ways to bring other functions home as well--gardening, food preservation or a family business--and they tasted an independence unknown to several American generations.

Home educators created a demand for appropriate books, curricula and software; new, family-held "cottage businesses" blossomed.  Families shared with friends and neighbors the fruits of their newfound independence.  Home schooling communities emerged locally, on a state-wide basis, and nationally.

Viewed through the lens of history, home schooling is the most promising effort at reconstructing the institution of the family in America in the past 150 years.  The family, uprooted and ravaged by factory and state, has found its path back to the symbolic cottage--its true home.

At the same time, home schooling faces some real dangers.  This should come as no surprise:  In seeking true liberty and autonomy, home-schooling families pose a basic threat to the powers that be.

When parents bring their children home, not only do school districts lose money; the gross national product also goes down, as schooling passes into the uncounted realm of home production.  This joint threat explains the legal obstacles and criticisms that home education faces in every state, and now from the federal government as well.

So, watch out for the ambush!  As the number of home-schooled children climbs, these hurdles and challenges and dangers, will only grow.  Some will be direct challenges, perhaps by welfare or "child protection" authorities, who can be expected to go after the most vulnerable home schooling families.  Or the threat might be indirect including incentives and lures to pull you back into the state system.  These realities illustrate the vital need for organizations such as the Home School Legal Defense Association, the National Center for Home Education, and The Alaska Private and Home Educators Association, which provide the legal, political and educational shelters under which home education might survive during this critical phase of its growth.

But if home schooling can weather this storm, it could spark a cultural revolution aimed at recovering not only learning standards, but also family integrity and sustainable community.

Residing again the family cottage, we can relearn certain philosophical truths.  Two hundred years ago, Adam Smith, the philosopher of liberty, wrote:  "Domestic [or home] education is the institution of nature--public education is the contrivance of man.  It is surely unnecessary to say which is likely to be the wisest."

 What Smith calls the institution of nature is, of course, the institution of God.

Or as the great American sociologist, Robert Nisbet, once wrote:

We can use the family as an almost infallible touchstone of the material and cultural prosperity of a people.  When it is strong, closely linked with private property, treated as the essential context of education in society, and its sanctity recognized by law and custom, the probability is extremely high that we shall find the rest of the social order characterized by that subtle but [powerful] fusion of stability and individual mobility which is the hallmark of great ages....It is inconceivable to me that either intellectual growth or social order or the roots of liberty can possibly be maintained among a people unless the kinship tie is strong and [the family] has both functional significance and symbolic authority.

 As pioneers in the rebuilding of the functional family, you are also rebuiliding a civilization where liberty and progress might advance, as well.  You are important to this nation...and indeed, to this civilization.  Go in God's peace, and serve the Lord.