Early in this century, the English Christian journalist G.K. Chesteron remarked:  "Educational conferences are always interesting, for the simple reason that under the title of education you can discuss whatever comes into your head!"  I usually ask an audience to remember that general rule, on the likelihood that my talk might stray off in unexpected directions.

In that spirit, I will begin with a mental game, of sorts.  I understand that this gathering tonight includes some folks considering home-centered education and others already so engaged.  In a few moments, as I directly ask current home-schoolers to think backwards about certain decisions they have made and changes they have felt, I will also be asking those considering family-centered education to translate these thoughts forward, into a possible future for themselves.  For example, when I say:  "think back to the time when you began home schooling…,” those of you considering this act should think forward to the time when you begin home schooling…again, as a possible future.  I hope that’s not too complicated.  In any case, let us begin.

Think back to the time when you began home schooling, or made a deep family commitment to a private religious school for your children.  After much thought, reading, research, and--I suspect--conversations with others already so engaged, and after small debates around the kitchen table, and perhaps even after debates within your own heart, you made the decision.  Some relatives, perhaps, were skeptical.  A few may have been downright hostile.  Even those of you who were very confident and well-supported may have faced moments, if not hours or days, of self doubt.  Can I do this?  Will it work?

But soon, you began, possibly on the day you wrote that first lesson plan or opened that package of books.  And, just as though jumping into a fast moving river, the current immediately began to pull you along.  You started to see signs of progress, of learning, in your children.  You began to understand the home educator’s secret--that all activities in life, with a little thought and attention, can become learning adventures.  Your confidence grew.

Then, in the second or third month, I suspect that you noticed still another development, this one more unexpected.  You began to realize that your family was changing.  Personal schedules and priorities for mother and father had altered in profound, and sometimes unexpected ways.  Home schooling had become a central priority for all, and other obligations--to the workplace, for example--shifted as well.  A new energy and a new unity had spread through your home.  Indeed, you had found that taking back the function of schooling, of education, had transformed virtually everything that your family did.  You realized that you looked at the world in new ways.  You began to think of other tasks that your family might take on, as a family.  Even with the cry of little ones already in the background.  You may have thought with more frequency and prayed about welcoming another baby into the family.

Can we say, in summary, that your family grew stronger because of your decision to home school?  The answer, I believe, is yes.  And I will devote the balance of my talk to explaining why.  I need begin by examining the historic connection between public schooling and the family.

Unfortunately, the word "family" has been badly abused in recent decades, and twisted to justify all kinds of mischief.  In deferrence to the teachers of grammar here, it is important as well to give at the outset a clear statement as to what I mean by the word.  I firmly reject the standard contemporary view that the family is "changing" or "evolving" into new forms better suited to modern life.  Rather, I hold that a family structure of a certain kind is rooted through God's creation in human nature:  in our genetic inheritance; in our instincts; in our hormones.  The human family is no more subject to rapid change than is the instinctual blink of the eye, or the shiver down the spine.  The so-called "changes" we observe in family living are either deterioration and decline from a natural order, or restoration toward that order.

So in all corners of the globe, and in every historical age, the human family can be defined as a man and a woman in a socially-approved covenant called marriage, for the purposes of mutual care and protection, sexual intimacy, the begetting and rearing of children, the construction of a small home economy of shared production and consumption, and the continuity of the generations.[i]  This is the definition adopted by over 700 delegates from six continents to the World Congress of Families, held last year in Prague, The Czech Republic, a gathering for which I served as General Secretary. 

Over the last 150 years, it is true that this common human family system has faced unusual, indeed extraordinary pressures from two new sources:  first, from the so-called "permanent revolution" of modern industrialization, the rise of an urban factory system, which separated the workplace from the home, displaced the making of things in the home by factory production, and disrupted existing patterns of family living, and second, from the rapid growth of the modern state, particularly in the realm of education. 

It is important to remember that from the very beginning, public school advocates aimed--as they had to--at undermining and displacing the family as the center of children's lives.  Benjamin Rush, a philosophical zealot and dreamer active in the late 1700’s, and the foremost advocate for state education in his day, adopted a politically-charged vision of learning, which began by demoting the family:

         Our country includes family, friends, and property, and [the state] should be preferred to them all.  Let our pupil be taught to love his family, but let him be taught at the same time that he must forsake and even forget [his family] when the welfare of his country requires it.[ii]

The so-called "father" of public schooling, Horace Mann of Massachusetts, held similar critical attitudes toward the family.  Citing the "neglect," ignorance, and inefficiencies of families in his state, he  emphasized the brutality of what he labelled "monster families," deemed totally unworthy of their children.  Indeed, Mann linked his new "common school" system to a vision of a powerful, authoritarian state, where government simply assumed the role of parent.  As he wrote in his school report for 1846:  "Massachusetts is parental in her government.  More and more, as year after year rolls by, she seeks to substitute prevention for remedy, and rewards for penalties."[iii]

The COMMON SCHOOL JOURNAL, founded by Mann and his colleagues in 1838, as the intellectual mouthpiece for the new public school movement, featured the strong criticism of family life as one of its regular themes.  Here are passages, chosen at random from this journal:

-- "the little interests or conveniences of the family" must be subordinate to "the paramount subject" of the school;[iv]  or

-- the public schools succeed because "parents, although the most sunken in depravity themselves, welcome the proposals and receive with gratitude the services of ...moral philanthropy in behalf of their families";[v]  or

-- "there are many worthless parents";[vi]  or

-- "[T]hese are...illustrations of the folly of a parent, who interferes with and perplexes a teacher while instructing or training his child";[vii]

-- And finally, "Parents must cease to regard wealth as the best inheritance they can leave to their children"; better that this family wealth be used to expand the common schools.[viii]

These sentiments spread with public education across the country, over the middle decades of the 19th Century.  John Swett, superintendent of the California state schools from 1863 to 1869, was blunt in his opinion that the state must replace the family.  As he wrote:  "children arrived at the age of maturity belong, not to the parents, but to the State, to society, to the country."[ix]  Swett maintained that this gave the state the right to reach back into the children's early years, as well, in order to shape them toward governmental ends.  In his 1864 Report to the California state legislature, Swett explained that "the child should be taught to consider his instructor... superior to the parent in point of authority....The vulgar impression that parents have a legal right to dictate to teachers is entirely erroneous....Parents have no remedy as against the teacher."[x]

F.W. Parker, the so-called "father of progressive education" and inspiration for the influential socialist educator John Dewey, told the 1895 convention of the National Education Association that "The child is not in school for knowledge.  He is there to live, and to put his life, nurtured in the school, into the community."[xi]  As Parker concluded elsewhere:  "Every [public] school in the land should become  a home and heaven for children."

It is tempting simply to dismiss such conclusions and words as the over-heated speeches of professors, and school bureaucrats.  But there is direct evidence of a strong linkage between the spread of mass state education and the decline or weakening of the family.  This evidence derives from the field of demography, the study of population.  It focuses on changes in the birth rate or fertility, for the readiness of married couples to bring children into the world is perhaps the most sensitive numerical measure that we have of family integrity.  Humans have always known ways of regulating their fertility, and the effects of economic, political, or cultural shifts on the family can be measured by trends in birth rates and average completed family size.  High fertility does not automatically mean better parenting and stronger families.  And we must not confuse such average statistical behavior with the behavior or sitation of a single family, where each situation has its own story to tell.  But in an age when rival institutions such as corporations or governments also lay claim to the time of parents, higher fertility is--on average--a measureable sign of a deeper personal time commitment by parents to their children and to home.[xii]  In terms of state education and fertility, the critical work comes from two well-known American demographers, John Caldwell and Norman Ryder. 

Caldwell's book, THEORY OF FERTILITY DECLINE, appeared in 1982,[xiii] and represents a provocative attempt to apply anthropological research, primarily in Africa and Australia, across the board.  Caldwell notes, as others have before, that fertility declines only when there is a change in economic relations within the family.  Let me explain that principle.  In traditional, farming-oriented societies, the flow of wealth is from children to parents.  Children are small workers, from age 3 or 4 on.  They are perceived as economic assets, and fertility is high.  However, as the modern "labor market method of production" breaks through in a society, the flow of wealth reverses, now going from parents to children.  Educated children, Caldwell explains, expect to be given more and to be demanded of less by their parents, and their economic importance for parents evaporates, or even reverses.

But in an important turn of his argument, Caldwell emphasizes that it is not the growth of cities and the rise of industry, by themselves, that cause this change in family relations.  Rather, he shows that it is the prior import, or spread of new ideas through mass state education that causes the critical shift in the parent-child relation.  State-controlled education, he argues,  serves as the driving force behind the shift in preference from a large to a small family and the transformation of the modern family into a weak institution.

Evidence from the United States gives strong support to Caldwell's emphasis on public schooling as the primary explanation of family decline.  The steady fall in the American birth rate between 1850 and 1900 has long puzzled demographers, for throughout that period the U.S. remained predominantly rural and absorbed masses of young immigrants, situations normally tied to many babies.  Caldwell's interpreters[xiv] speculated, though, that the leadership role of the United States in introducing a mass state education system might explain the change.  And indeed, U.S. data from 1871 to 1900 show a remarkably strong negative bond between the fertility of women and an index of public school growth developed by L.P. Ayres in 1920.  Fertility decline was particularly related to the average number of days that children attended school in a given year.  Even among rural farming families, where children still held direct economic value, the negative effect of public schooling on fertility was strong.  Each additional month that children spent in a school decreased family size in that district by .23 children.  Indeed, we see here how state education has quite literally "consumed" children, and weakened families.

With his usual bluntness, Norman Ryder, long time Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, has offered a variation of the Caldwell theory, one which continues to stress the role of state education as the destroyer of family integrity.[xv]

The state school, he writes, serves as modern society's agent in the release of the individual from obligations to the family.  [QUOTE] "Education of the junior generation is a subversive influence.  Boys who go to [public] school distinguish between what they learn there and what their father can teach them....The reinforcement of the [family] control structure is undermined when the young are trained outside the family for specialized roles in which the father has no competence."[xvi]

A related struggle goes on between the family and the state for the allegiance of the child.  As Ryder puts it:  "Political organizations, like economic organizations, demand loyalty and attempt to neutralize family particularism.  There is a struggle between the family and the State for the minds of the young."  In this struggle, he says, the state school serves as "the chief instrument for teaching citizenship, in a direct appeal to the children over the heads of their parents."  The school also serves as the medium for communicating a "state morality" designed to displace that of inherited religion and families.[xvii]

Ryder's work underlines here the vital importance of specific functions to family institutional strength.  When families educate their own children, serve as the focus of religious life, and/or raise the largest share of their own food, the persons in these families are more likely to give their first loyalties to the home.  When these functions pass over to rival institutions, families lose these claims and they diminish as institutions when compared to their rivals.   Indeed, during the last 35 years, family decay has been the story in America:  the divorce rate has tripled; the rate of first marriage has fallen by a third; and the marital birth rate has tumbled by fifty percent.

So, while certainly not the only explanation, we can indict--with justice--state education as a direct cause of family decline.  In its theory, in its actions, and in its results, public education seeks to diminish the role of the family. 

The next critical question becomes:  if we reverse the process, and replace state education with family-centered education, will families currently weak or in trouble grow stronger?

The evidence here is more scattered, for the project itself is in its early stages and mainline educational researchers have given the matter little attention, for obvious reasons.  Yet there are, so to speak, "laboratory experiments" that have occurred in our time which offer tantillizing hints regarding the effects of family-centered education on the wholeness and integrity of the family:

First, the Roman Catholic schools.  Of all American religious groups, Catholics have maintained most vigorously an educational system separate from the public schools.  The Catholic parochial system showed particular strength in the middle decades of the 20th century.  Not by coincidence, it turns out, the period 1945 to 1967 produced an extraordinary increase of Catholic marital fertility:  a sign of family renewal.  While births rose for all American religious groups in this period, it rose far more rapidly and continued longer among Catholics.  Indeed, the turn to larger completed families was found exclusively among Catholics:  in 1952, 11% of Catholic families had 4 or more children, identical to the figure for American Protestants.  By 1959, the Catholic figure had more than doubled, to 23%, while the Protestant figure was unchanged.  Most importantly, the prior attendance by mothers at Catholic schools--elementary, secondary, and college levels--was clearly positively associated with this higher fertility.[xviii]  Church—and family—centered education was the key source of family renewal.  And while the Catholic birth rate had generally fallen back toward national norms by the 1980's, researchers could still show at that time a significant positive tie between marriage, number of children, and a woman's prior attendance at Catholic schools.[xix]

A second example would be the Old Order Amish.  The Amish people of North America, part of the Anabaptist tradition, violate every modern rule.  They use real horsepower, not the metal kind.  They insist on living in the countryside, and raising most of their own food.  Relative to the state, the Amish are, at their request, exempt from Social Security and Medicare.  They refuse welfare.  They use child labor from age three on, and--most important for our purposes--they keep their children out of state schools, operating their own schools through the eighth grade. 

These schools are closely tied to family living.  As the social analyst, Professor Donald Kraybill, explains:

Continuity reigns supreme.  In some instances, all the children in a family have the same teacher for all eight grades.  Parents relate to one teacher, who over the years develops a keen understanding of the family.  A teacher may relate to as few as ten families in a school year, for there are four or five children from some households.[xx]

 Upon completion of the eighth grade, Amish children leave the classroom, for practical apprenticeships in farming, gardening, homemaking, crafts, shop work, and manual trades, all integrated into traditional family living.

Here again, we can link non-state education to high fertility:  the mark of a successful family system.  By age 45, the typical contemporary Amishwoman has 7 children.  This is exactly the figure found among all American women before the beginning of "public education" in the 1840's. 

If it seems overly-simplistic to attribute these Amish family characteristics to non-state education, one should recall the work of Caldwell and Ryder:  they agree that "traditionalist" or "family farming" societies are most vulnerable to subversion through state education.  During the various Amish school wars of the 1960's and early 1970's, when state governments forced Amish children into state schools, sometimes jailing their fathers, the Amish elders were quite correct in their defiance of the authorities:  state education would have destroyed their religion, their family system and their communities, the whole pattern of their life.

 As one Amish elder put it:  “With us, our religion is inseparable [from a day’s work, a night’s rest, a meal, or any other practice; therefore, our education can much less be separated from our other religious practices.”  As Professor Kraybill explains the Amish rejection of state education:  Amish parents would be severed from the curriculum, policies, and administrators that would indoctrinate their youth.  Abstract textbooks, written by distant specialists, would encourage intellectual gymnastics that would surely turn [the Amish ideal] of manual labor into drudgery.  Most importantly, [public] high school would separate Amish children from [the central virtue of] humility,” on which their religious society rested.  In the freedom they won from state educational coercion, through the Yoder v. Wisconsin Supreme Court decision, they have shown how a "traditional" religious people might survive, and even thrive, in the modern, competitive world, if they can avoid state schools.

Third, home educators.  From the feminist economist Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the 1890's, to Harvard University sociologist Talcott Parsons in the 1950's, to futurist writer Alvin Toffler in the 1990's, analysts of the family in America have emphasized the modern family's "loss of functions":  they have shown how the "home production" of goods such as clothing, furniture, and food has passed to industry, while the educational, protective, and welfare functions have passed to the state, changes that left the family without functions,  deinstitutionalized, and weak.  But as the perceptive American writer and poet, Wendell Berry, has explained:  "the old centers of home and community were made vulnerable to this invasion by corporation and state through their failure as economies.  If there is no household or community economy, then family members and neighbors are no longer useful to one another."[xxi]

Home education, viewed in this way, represents the return of a central function to the family.  And as I suggested earlier, it also forces a fundamental reorganization of the family:  in terms of the behavior of all its members, its relationship to the outside world, and its internal psychology.  In short, home schooling families discover what it feels like to be "reinstitutionalized," to become strong again, all by bringing a central family function home again.

I also would suggest that the act or intent of home schooling stimulates marital fertility, the standard measure of family renewal that I have used here.  Certainly, home-school families are on average larger than families placing children in public schools.  Data from the United States found that the average number of children in home education families was 3.43 in 1991, compared to less than two for the nation-at-large:  the figure for Canada was 3.46,[xxii] again, about 70 percent larger than “state school” families.  Moreover, I suspect that the economic logic of home education encourages still more births, for in some respects the economic gain to the family of maintaining one parent as a teacher in the home increases with each additional child.

So, are home-school families better as well?  In measurable terms of child well-being, certainly yes.  As a battery of studies have shown, home-schooled children perform significantly higher on standardized tests than their public-schooled counterparts.  Children at home are less likely to engage in high-risk behaviors, such as the use of mind-altering drugs or promiscuous, non-marital sex.  They are healthier, as well.

Home-schooling may be logical, but it is not easy, for it demands a stance athrwart the pressures of the modern state and the modern culture not dissimilar to that of the Amish.  Not every family who begins the process succeeds.  But those who do persevere will contain, I believe, both better parents and better children in the end.  Their families will be better for it.  They will be stronger, and more able to contribute to the great American experiment in freedom, prosperity, and virtue.

When the burdens grow large, when you grow tired, remember that home-centered education means much more than imparting book learning to children.  It means the building of a stronger family, as intended by God the Creator….