In this workshop today, I want to offer some opening comments myself, and then ask you to offer your comments as well.

I have been asked to address the question of the troubled teenager, and the role of the father in the home schooling family.  I dearly wish that I could come to you with clear and easily reproduced answers to this very real challenge.  Even more, I wish I could report to you that my own experience with rearing teenagers--male and female--has gone smoothly, with perfect results.

Alas, like I suspect most other parents, I struggle as well, to guide my children to do the right things, in the context of surging youthful hormones, a subversive popular culture, and modern laws that work primarily to cripple parental authority.  Modest successes, here and there, are punctuated by periods of apparent failure.  Pride in and love of my children can be overwhelmed, at times, by a sense that I have failed them.  And, I suspect, we all know of stories of good families--including home schooling families--who have "lost" children, perhaps to drugs, or to nonbelief, or even, in some cases, to the terrible act of suicide.  How do we make sense out of this?

It helps to begin with recognition that difficulties are the norm, the expected thing, during the years 13 through 18.  Just last week, for example, a new book came out, authored by the President of Bard College, Leon Botstein.

Entitled JEFFERSON'S CHILDREN: EDUCATION AND THE PROMISE OF AMERICAN CULTURE, the author frankly acknowledged that modern American high schools do a very poor job of meeting the needs of the young today.  This conclusion, of course, comes as no surprise to home schooling families.  But the author's arguments are instructive.  He notes, for example, that the model for the American high school emerged over 100 years ago, in the mid-19th century, and was designed to meet the needs of children becoming adults; physically, emotionally, intellectually, and sexually, that is, at about age 16.  Today, however, because of better health and different, more protein rich diets, American children become "physical adults" about 3 years earlier than they did in 1880:  that is, at age 13, or some cases even 12.  Bolstein argues that traditional educational sequencing simply no longer makes sense.  His solution?: abolish junior highs; make the jump directly from sixth grade to high school, and save everyone a whole lot of trouble.

Another interesting little fact emerged several weeks ago, when I participated as a speaker at a conference on "The Federal Government and Marriage," sponsored by Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas.  Another of the panelists, a marriage therapist by profession, noted that among second marriages, the divorce rate is nearly 100 percent, if either of the wedded pair have at the time a daughter, 13 or 14 years old, from a prior marriage.  It seems that the turbulence of these adolescent years turns a difficult situation between two adults into an almost impossible one.

These are signs, then, of the difficult task that we face.  But there is another difficulty that our topic requires me to address.  For we also gather here as fathers, and I want to spend some time talking about the troubled position of fatherhood, in these confused times.  Indeed, it would not be incorrect to talk about a "crisis" of fatherhood in our time.

As you may know by now, I am an historian, and it is to history that I turn to understand our condition.  In pre-Christian Europe, the Roman household regularly included several generations of one family, along with servants.  But it was always the father who exercised absolute authority as head of household.  Indeed, as a kind of small scale absolute monarch, he held in his hands the power of life and death.

The spread of Christianity into the Empire altered some aspects of this patriarchal system, yet strengthened others.  On the one hand, wherever the powerful voice of the Christian church could be heard, infants no longer lived or died at the decision and mercy of their fathers.  On the other hand, the New Testament affirmed the authority of loving Christian fathers over their wives and children.  As Paul wrote in Ephesians 5 and 6:  "Wives, submit yourselves under your own husbands, as unto the Lord.  For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the Church; ...Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it,...and ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath; but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord."

Fifteen hundred years later, Martin Luther's protest against prevailing church teachings included attention to the corruption of the doctrines of marriage and fatherhood.  In a lengthy letter addressed to the celibate Knights of the Teutonic Order, Luther stressed that marriage was not a secondary, inferior state, but rather the highest of estates, "the real religious order on earth," divinely established and "pleasing to God and precious in his sight."  Luther's own marriage to Katharine von Bora, and the leadership and attention given to his own household, served as the example for the generations of Christian fathers which followed.

As Christianity moved into North America, beginning with the Jamestown and Massachusetts Bay colonies of the seventeenth century, the focus on home-centered devotion grew.  For the next two hundred years, daily family prayer, Bible reading, and the religious training of children and servants were central activities for the early Americans, Protestant and Catholic, with the father in the role of informal domestic priest and family prophet. 

But by the mid-19th century, a series of assaults on the meaning of fatherhood had commenced.  And the authority of the father--both secular and religious--began a retreat, a retreat finally completed with the Supreme Court's abortion decisions in the mid-1970's.

The first major challenge to the position of the father was economic in nature:  the rise of the factory system, or industrialization.  In the beginning, the application of industrial measures--including the rational management of resources, production for market sale, and the use of the division of labor--remained in the home.

Yet as the central factory grew in importance, the family economy faltered, with serious consequences.  While wages paid by third parties grew more common, sons grew less dependent on their fathers, and fathers less dependent on sons.  Parents--both men and women--were lured away from the home to earn their livings, creating the childcare problems we still wrestle with today.  And the production of goods in the home quickly vanished, leaving families to function only as consumers.

Legal changes in the mid-nineteenth century further altered fathers' authority and responsibility.  A 1839 Pennsylvania court decision created a new doctrine in American law called parens patriae, literally "the parenthood of the state."  In declaring it legal for state reform schools to take children from their parents if the former were deemed "delinquent" or "neglected," the court for the first time judged the government's power over children to be superior to, and prior to, that of fathers and mothers.

Compulsory school attendance laws were another 19th century tool to strip the rights of parenthood, particularly the educational rights and duties of fathers.  The proponents of state schooling were rarely shy about their motives.  One school inspector in South Carolina mocked concern about "the sacred rights and personal privileges" of parents who kept their children at home:  "Those who deny the right of the State to compel the parent to send his child to school are too frequently the offending parents themselves, sentimental theorists or vacillating politicians." 

The religious aspect of fatherhood also suffered.  In the 19th century, as men moved into factories and offices, their role as religious leader suffered.  Increasingly rare were paternal leadership of Bible study and prayer, with mothers--by default--often becoming the religious leaders in the home.

In this century, the theological drift of many churches has compounded the problem.  Attacks by theologians on so-called "paternal tyranny" have been common, as have portrayal of the home and family as institutions in decline.  Religion today is less masculine; more feminine.

The treatment of fatherhood in the recent abortion debate falls in line with this long, continuous assault.  In its Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, the Supreme Court argued that a woman's freedom to have an abortion was a "fundamental right" protected by the Constitution against state interference.  Since no direct attention to the father's role was given, the state of Missouri crafted a law providing that no abortion could be performed prior to the end of the first twelve weeks of pregnancy except with the written consent of the woman's husband, if she were married.

The law was challenged, and the case Planned Parenthood of Central Missouri v. Danforth, Attorney General of Missouri, reached the Supreme Court in 1976.  In a split decision, the Court struck down the Missouri law.  In effect, the Court reasoned that the mother's right to destroy a child was superior to the father's right to protect it.  As Justice White argued in his stirring dissent:  "It is truly surprising that the majority finds in the United States Constitution, as it must in order to justify the result it reaches, a rule that the State must assign a greater value to a mother's decision to cut off a potential human life by abortion than to a father's decision to let it mature into a live child."

The logic of the Danforth decision was chilling: on the question of abortion, the father is irrelevant, with no more interest in the fate of the baby than a stranger from Mars.  With the Roe and Danforth decisions, American fathers were finally and fully stripped of the last shred of their real authority in matters of procreation.

Writing nearly sixty years ago, the social philosopher Wyndham Lewis argued that the social and political forces tearing at Western Christian Civilization always found a common enemy: the father.  He wrote: "The male, the Father, is in all these revolutions, the enemy.  It is he that has been cast to represent authority.  Therefore in modern revolutionary Europe [and America] it was he, the male head-of-the-family, who has been aimed at in every insurrection.  The break-up of the Family...must begin and end with the eclipse of the Father principle."

In our time, when fathers are needed, they have the least level of political and legal support.  So what should now be done?  Regarding fatherhood, I do have some suggestions:

First, we must be aware that the struggle to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision, and its Danforth clone, is more than a matter of reversing the Court's treatment of abortion, vitally important though that is.  It is also important to overturn the underlying logic of these decisions, and their views of marriage, of family, and of fatherhood.

Second, the Christian churches must give renewed attention to fatherhood, as both a theological and social concept.  In the New Testament, Jesus forcefully introduced the language of Father and Son so that we might understand the nature of God, and our own responsibilities.

Third, we fathers must make a conscious turn toward home, and recover our religious responsibilities there.  My sins here are as great, perhaps, as anyone else's.  Yet I see the critical need for fathers to rejoin their wives as religious teachers at home.  There are no secrets to this: family prayer and home Bible study remain the central acts.

It is useful here, I think, to refer to the closing of the last chapter of the Old Testament, Malachi 4: 5-6, where the prophet records:  "Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord:  And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse."

And finally, we need to consider home education, in light of the father's responsibility.  In the 1970's, specific events--federal efforts to regulate public and parochial education, Supreme Court decisions blessing the sexual revolution, the breakdown of discipline and standards in local schools, the appearance of books by John Holt and Raymond Moore encouraging a radical break with existing patterns of learning--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.  No longer mere consumers sharing the same roof and television set, they had become members of a learning enterprise who needed each other and who profited--morally and practically--from each other.

What once was lost has now been found.  Viewed from the historic angle, home schooling is the most promising effort at family institutional reconstruction undertaken in America during the last 150 years.  The family, born to and naturally residing in the symbolic "cottage," then uprooted and ravaged by factory and state, has found a path back to its true home.

But the problems of moving our children through the high school years to adulthood still remain, and it is directly to those problems that I want to turn.

I want your ideas here.  Let us begin by addressing this question: