Kill the Litmus Test

I read this article recently, about the challenges Susan Wise Bauer has encountered in the homeschooling movement.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/home-schooling-pioneer-susan-wise-bauer-is-well-versed-in-controversy/2012/10/29/521a3070-da80-11e1-9745-d9ae6098d493_story.html

Homeschoolers all know who SWB is.  She’s at the center of a return to classical education methods, and author of several almost universally popular history and language arts curricula.  To be almost universally popular in the increasingly diverse homeschooling community is no easy feat.  But, as the article states, “This past spring, she announced she would sit out the conferences next year because of rifts in this once seemingly monolithic movement.”  The article goes on to say:

“Whereas early home-schoolers were a freewheeling bunch forced to stick together against a hostile world because of their aversion to public schools, now it seems as if there are litmus tests for acceptance into the community….“I’ve been told if I say anything supportive of public schools, even charter ones, I’ll lose my speaker’s fee, and I don’t get my expenses reimbursed,” she says. “Of course, I tell them I won’t come.”  Bauer has been asked “to swear I won’t bring certain books for my book table; to mention certain words,” she wrote on her blog in April.  “None of which, I should say, have anything to do with what I normally talk about: grammar, history, writing, reading, learning. I have been told that I am not welcome, in some cases, because I talk too much about the psychology of learning, and not about the Bible. Or because I have a theological degree and am obviously pushing a Christian agenda. Because my ‘professional associations,’ however loose, are too liberal, or too secular, or too Christian.”

She’s under attack from both sides of the spectrum, and as a result, this pillar of the homeschooling community is pulling out.  I find this deeply worrying.  As homeschooling increases in popularity, it is only natural that factions should emerge and differences arise.  But when our inability to cooperate in spite of these differences leads to a divisiveness that threatens the whole homeschooling movement, we need to sit up and take notice!

Several huge problems are inherent in this trend.  When we use a litmus test to weed people out, in homeschooling, politics, or any other movement, it narrows our focus to narrow criteria and pulls our efforts away from quality work.  As a result, we lose sight of what we’re really trying to achieve.  More importantly, we risk losing the best and brightest leaders in our movement, those whose understanding of and passion for their subject matter provide our children learning opportunities kids in school will never have, and whose clarity of thought provides us as teachers an ease-of-use that school teachers, mired in education-ese, don’t have access to.  If we evaluate our curriculum providers in this way, we risk losing the very freedom that makes homeschooling so special!  When writers like SWB are forced to conform to a set of political stances, (or walk away, as those with integrity will no doubt do), we bring about the same limitations that make a public school education so odious to most of us.

I wonder too, what this tactic will teach our children.  Do we want them to learn to apply the litmus-test approach to their relationships with others?  The world is made up of billions of different personalities, all of whom have good and bad qualities, and many of whom our children will have to learn to live and work with, regardless of their beliefs.  Can our children afford to be so narrow in their acceptance of people?  Although I realize we need to adhere to the principles we believe in, I prefer to look beyond people’s opinions to their motivation.  Often we share the same goal, though we may walk a different path to achieve it, and in limiting our interactions to only those people with whom we are in agreement, we lose immeasurably.

This myopic approach carries the risk of alienating not only the leaders in our homeschooling community, but the audience they work for as well.  Homeschoolers won’t stop using SWB’s excellent materials if she ceases attending conventions, but they may stop attending the conventions themselves, which will marginalize the organizations that sponsor them, and further exacerbate the divisiveness already begun.  Even worse, our obvious inability to get along will drive some families away from homeschooling altogether, families who really need it as an option for their children.  Those new to homeschooling now enter a complex social minefield with no notion of how to avoid conflict over issues they may not even understand.  Consider this remark cited in the article, from SWB’s blog:

“My husband and I ultimately decided against homeschooling after a few years because it was so incredibly difficult to build/find a community and we found the experience horribly, destructively isolating as a result. We were either too Christian or not Christian enough, or not the right kind of Christian, too structured or too unstructured, too egalitarian in our marriage or too husband-led.”

Perhaps the greatest risk of all comes from outside our community.  Deep divisions within homeschooling carry a tremendous political threat.  Currently, homeschooling is legal in all 50 states, but as anyone who has been in the movement for a few years knows, our right to teach our own children is far from assured.  If we splinter into groups along political lines and fail to work together on issues of legality, we risk losing everything!  If we allow one issue, however significant, to become a litmus test for acceptance into the homeschool community, we risk limiting, or even losing, the very freedom we so cherish.  We cannot afford to marginalize large portions of the support we need, either from gifted writers like Susan Wise Bauer, or from the new families that will drive the homeschooling movement forward and keep it a viable option for future generations.