I have been meaning to write this one for a while now, but it's not just my blogADD that has kept me away from this discussion. I just so get emotionally pissed off about this subject that it becomes unbearable to try to write everything that comes shooting by my brain. Yet Nance here point to a post by Amanda Marcotte that has pissed me off so royally that I have to respond to it.

In the comments Amanda insists that she allegedly has no problems with either stay at home mothers or homeschoolers; yet in her writing she betrays herself. When she opens up her post with and I quote, "This interview in Newsweek with Laura Derrick, the president of the National Home Educator’s Network, was even fluffier than I expected it would be when I opened the link", you know that her expectation was to see a piece excoriating the "different path" of homeschooling.

It goes downhill from there because she conflates her contempt for xian fundamentalists with homeschooling:

I didn’t expect the interviewer to hammer at Derrick about the issue of whether or not it’s wise for people to homeschool their kids if they are doing so with the intention of teaching them that Noah had a pet dinosaur or that Jesus founded America (and therefore feed them into upper echelon jobs in the Justice Department), but I figured it would at least come up. No luck, though.

In the next paragraph her cluelessness about homeschooling shows with flying color when she claims to know that homeschooling is gaining steam in the left. Ahh ... hmmm ... see ... no!

Homeschooling has never been an either/or proposition for people in the left or right. It has been always a proposition for radicals; especially radicals who have a strong libertarian political background. There's conservative libertarians, Christian libertarians and then people like me, who Chris Nolan has most famously described as Social/Progressive Libertarians.

The problem is that christian fundamentalist homeschoolers in this country have had a well funded public relations machine. That's it. That's all.

The HSDLA was the pet project of Michael Farris, one of the signers of the Manifesto for a Christian Church; which really should be read as a manifesto for a extremist American theocracy.

But you already suspected as much.

Michael Farris has had an uncanny ability to raise millions of dollars for legal, education and lobby projects. This is what I wrote about him back in 2005:

HSLDA was founded by Michael Farris who, to put it succintly, is the Ralph Reed of the Christian Reconstructionist/Dominionis education movement. Although Michael Farris claims he is but just a Baptist minister, he has signed the 1986 document that launched the dominionist movement, "A MANIFESTO : For The Christian Church". The document is a 'declaration and a convenant' in which the signators "believe America can be turned around and once again function as a Christian nation as it did in its earlier years" and outline why and how they're putting in place their call to action with wisdome such as article #13:

13. The Need for Confrontation: We affirm that in a life where there exists "the world, the flesh and the devil," there is need for living confrontation over matters of falsehood and unrighteousness in the Church and in the world. It is impossible for any group of people to live truly biblically obedient lives without applying to each other regular confrontation, exhortation, rebuke and church discipline. Church discipline must be an on-going part of any congregation that chooses truly to live according to the Bible.

This idea of confronting unrighteousness is fundamental to the dominionists' agenda for educating the next wave of christian leaders. Michael Farris left HSLDA to found Patrick Henry College to raise the Joshua generation and prepare them to take over the land.

Read the whole goddamn thing, because I outline how the HSDLA has spent millions across the country trying to write themselves into education and homeschooling legislation. They have the lawyers and lobyyists and the millions devoted to this single task.

Who do we have in the left?

{{ crickets }}}

{{ crickets }}}

Yeah.

I thought so.

What I find outrageouly frustrating with a lot of feminists who defend schooling is how they gloss over the fact that schools are the ultimate conditioning tools of the patriarchy. How can't some feminists see that?

Socialization, that most hated word by homeschoolers of all stripes, is a bio-power machine that is meant to condition children to subserviency. Christian Fundamentalists totally get it. In their belief system, schools are all about conditioning children into a life of liberal values that is meant to strip them of all subserviency to god. They get that schooling a bio-power machine of oppression.

Radicals on the left understand this too. Many people who decide to homeschool also decide to homebirth or at least have midwife assisted births. I know many homeschoolers who are atheists, who are ecological activists, anti-corporationists and feminists. Most are college educated but I know a growing number of uncollege parents. These people are highly educated individuals who have opted out of the economically oppressive college machine to educated themselves, start their own businesses or even take the apprenticeship route into the professions.

Sure you supposedly can't become a neurosurgeon this way; but I have known of more than one or another homeschooling child or parent's whose individual research has earned them a job at a lab that has then put them into a different path to medical school.

What about the myopic liberals of the left? Not so much.

Well, unfortunately, too many feminists have become so conditioned to believe Academia is the path to some sort of revolutionary change that they don't seem to get that the very structure of schooling (from childhood to adulthood) can also lead to a path to conformity with the patriarchal status quo.

And that the irony is that many women in these academic or intellectually powerful positions are in subservient positions to the patriarchy, even more so than a lot of their homeschooling feminist counterparts.

Let me explain.

Many marriages within homeschooling families function as enterprises where the husband is the main investor. If the family is patriarchy-centric, the man is presented as the boss or CEO of the family with the mother being the Administrative Executive Assistant. Yet, in many progressive families, the wealth brought in by the husband is seen as part of a partnership. An actual business partnership, not just an emotional one. Moreover, in a lot of these marriages the mother has a small business or a part-time job on the side. Especially in places like New York where the cost of living is so high it is almost impossible to live on one income.

This is an important distinction to make because there is a huge misconception about stay-at-home motherhood. The marriages that work understand that the woman, when she stays at home, produces a path to wealth and opportunity that is not immediately translated into cash. So these couples work out a salary for the wife, savings and a retirement plan as well. If the husband's income is not enough, then the income from the part-time job is used to cover these costs.

Make no bones about it, marriage within these terms is a business proposition. I know some people who worked it out as part of their pre-nuptial agreement. Others have come into it as everybody else, out of the realization that the "non cash" half of the partnership needs to have money allocated.

This partnership approach to marriage is anything but mainstream. On the contrary, the idea of many people is that domesticity is free of labor and hence there is no cost and/or value related to it. Yet, it's in the high profile divorce cases of CEOs like Jack Welch and Sumner Redstone, and especially Gary Wendt, where millions or even billions are at stake in the divorce settlement, that we can see the real capital and wealth generating value of a stay-at-home- mother and wife.

Lorna Wendt proved with her divorce settlement that most marriages are a 50/50 partnership even if the other 50% labor's is not directly bringing in cash. These high profile cases prove there is an indirect wealth that stay-at-home mothers and wives.

If more working stiffs on the lower end of the earning spectrum got into our little heads the enormity of this value, we'd be knocking down the doors of Capitol Hill and immediately demanding a Universal Health Care program, a Paid Leave Family Act and, especially, a complete toss-away of compulsory full-time schooling in favor of more mixed independent learning.

But no.

Americans have been so conditioned to think of our lives as completely devoid of any wealth that the concept of actually having the ability to create independent paths to wealth, to education, to political power, scares shitless a lot of people including many people in the so-called left.

I consider homeschooling a radical feminist act.

It's empowering to see your children as whole human beings who are on the path of self-awareness as opposed to unformed human blobs waiting to be given knowledge by people who see them as just a path to a paycheck.

In my perfect world, I would be able to send my kids only a few days to school. In my perfect world, I would be able to help them pick and choose what they wanted to do at school and ensure his teachers respect their choices on how they wanted to achieve their own educational goals.

But I don't live in a perfect world, nor in a perfect marriage. This year my kids are in school. To me this is a total abdication of what I believe a marriage should be but I am the feminist, the patriarchy at home is not and so I live with the political inconsistencies of my marital dysfunction.

Yet, I also have to live with the choices of my children. The little one likes it. The oldest not so. I kind of suspected this but I wasn't prepared for the outright hatred of my first born.

In homeschooling --or as I called it here, unschooling-- kids choose the path to their learning experiences outside of a curricula, school-centric framework. Everyday is a learning opportunity and every moment of your life is not a part of homework but a pebble on the path to one's life's work.

So this next year I may find myself being a schooling/unschooling mother; with one part of my heart inside the beast and the other half without.

We'll see.

I actually already have an idea of what I am going to give my kids to read. My 7 year-old and my 10 year old will be reading with me all summer on the Teenage Liberation Handbook.

I haven't thrown the towel yet.