Education is Not for You

From time to time I have the privilege of meeting with families who may be interested in sending their students to my kids' school.  Last week I met with a potential family who are currently using a different method of education, and one of the parents teaches at a very different type of school than ours.  This led to a lot of thoughtful questions and discussion, especially about educational methods, and it made me realize something about the way we want to educate our kids.

There are tons of educational methods out there.  For quite a few years now, families have noticed that public schools just aren't hacking it and now alternatives abound.  Homeschooling, Unschooling, Montessori, Waldorf Schools, the Steiner method, and classical education are just a few of the philosophies that are out there.  For the most part, educational philosophers will try to argue that their method is the best for educating your child.

But I realized that what we're really trying to do is not to educate children for the sake of having educated children.  Instead, we're trying to educate kids who are prepared to communicate their education, and the gospel, to a world that desperately needs both.  You can have the smartest kid on the block, but if they don't know how to communicate their intellect, and consequently the gospel, with the rest of the world, what good does that education do?

Ultimately, then, we're not necessarily looking for the best education for our child, but we're looking for the best education that will prepare them to educate the world.

Girls

It's been ages since I've posted on here, so there's probably no one out there anymore, but today I had a thought.  This is a thought that's taken some developing, so here it is, ready to come, ready or not.

The idea of "smashing gender stereotypes" is so old that it appears to be new again.  I was reminded of this as my 2-year-old daughter listened to my Strawberry Shortcake record from 1983 or so, which made fun of the boys wanting to help the girls carry their heavy baskets.  Strawberry Shortcake was the strong, independent girl who didn't need any help from boys.  And then I just saw this video, advertising the new "engineering" girls' toy, Goldieblox.  Aside from the fact that none of those 8-year-old girls know what a record player is, let alone who the Beastie Boys are, I think I get the message.  Baby dolls and pink things are for dumb girls who are stuck in the past, while smart girls want to be engineers.

Growing up I was one of those girls in that advertisement.  I liked science, and did not do dolls.  Every one of my heroes, from Strawberry Shortcake to Orphan Annie to Rainbow Brite told me that this was the way to go.  Even Barbie taught me that, way before Goldieblox.  In college I went into a scientific field where the men outnumbered women at least 10:1, sometimes more.  However, somewhere in there, I realized that I missed out on something.

God made me a girl, and there wasn't much I could do to change that.  This left me, at base, with an insecurity that needed to be dealt with, and I wasn't at peace until it was.  It wasn't until I realized that I could be a geologist, rock hammer in hand, smashing things in the field and be a lady at the same time that I was really secure in who I was made to be.  I wish someone told me you can be both: you can train to be a godly wife and mother, loving your femininity, and at the same love science, building, being dirty and outside, etc.

That's the problem with marketing to little girls the way Goldieblox does.  We've all been here before, and what we're doing is teaching girls that in order to be smart and brave they must despise being feminine and maternal.  This is not an either/or decision.  My little girl loves pink and babies and Disney princesses.  However, she is also intelligent (at 2 years old she can assemble simple Lego sets) and loves books, and I don't see any reason for teaching her that those desires are in competition.

Classical Education

Being in the classical education world is very exciting.  To see your own kids learning at a young age things you never knew until high school or college (or maybe even never), is encouraging and fun.  I talk to many friends who like to say, "Isn't it amazing what our kids will do?  With an education like this they will take over the world!"

I'd like to think so, but then God doesn't always take over the world in the way we think He should.  Maybe I'm a cynic, but it seems like as public education deteriorates, and in California we're at the head of the pack on that one, the antagonism has only grown towards those who actually care about education.  Regulations on private schools have grown tighter and restrictions increase every year, usually while our legislature is in session.  For example, because of budget cuts, our local public schools have a month less of school then is required by law (they use minimum days to count as full days).  However, we have to make sure our school keeps accurate records of attendance and school days, in case a truancy officer decides to show up on our door.

All this has made me re-think what God is doing with a revival in classical Christian education.  He is definitely preparing our children to take over the world, but it may just be by their martyrdom.  He is preparing a generation who knows what they believe and has the backbone to fight to the end for it.  He used it in Rome to bring an entire empire to its knees, and why couldn't He do that again?

The End

And there it ends.  My rough outline of the history of farming in western civilization has made it's way to the 20th century.  At some point I hope to transform this into a book, but I'm not sure that publishers will be interested in a history of agriculture and politics coming from a geology major with teaching experience.

Still, I have a working title: Life, Liberty, and Property: The history of farming, private property, and democracy.  Look for it in about 20 years at a bookstore near you!

The Government's New Business

The crash of wheat prices in 1929 was followed in 1931 by one of the worst droughts that the Great Plains had seen in over a hundred years.  With no visible sources of water, farmers were forced to let their fields lie fallow.  The suitcase farmers abandoned their lands, leaving millions of acres of plowed-up dirt open to the elements.  When the high winds whipped across the prairie they began to pick up immense clouds of dust, which turned into dust storms that tore through towns and destroyed homes and crops.  As the dust storms continued farmers' lives were in danger, as the dust filled their homes and their lungs.  Over the next 8 years the drought continued, threatening to turn most of western Oklahoma into the Sahara Desert.  After starving and nearly losing their land many farmers began to do the unthinkable--ask the federal government for assistance.  Amazingly, the same man whose policies had created the Dust Bowl by arbitrarily fixing a high price for wheat, Herbert Hoover, was now President of the United States; but he would have nothing to do with helping the farmers.

Angered by Hoover's policies the nation elected Franklin Roosevelt, who was specifically elected on a platform the use the intervention of the federal government to aid the victims of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl.  He dispatched federal agents to the Great Plains, having them buy up and destroy surplus livestock and crops (what little there was left) to create a scarcity and drive up prices.  He also issued the first-ever farm subsidies, which paid farmers federal money for not growing crops.  He ordered banks to issue loans to farmers for new equipment.  For many victims of the Dust Bowl this was the first income they had seen in nearly a decade.  However, his policies led to an increasing number of farmers continuing to take farm subsidies.  Also, most farmers could not function without living in debt to banks and loan agencies.  Consequently, U.S. farmland has been transformed into being nearly entirely dependent on the federal government for survival.

Plowing up the Plains

The idealism that was a hallmark of 19th century Victorianism came to an abrupt end with the beginning of World War I.  In 1917 a businessman named Herbert Hoover was appointed head of the U.S. Food Administration, which was charged with stabilitizing U.S. food prices during the war.  As head of the administration Hoover created the first ever federally-controlled price limits on produce, effectively turning food into a commodity.  Up until this time Russia was the largest supplier of European wheat, but because of the war front, their farmers could not sell their produce.  Hoover wanted the U.S. to take over this market, and by artificially fixing a high price for wheat, U.S. farmers began planting lots of it.  Millions of acres in the central United States, espeically the plains of newly-settled Oklahoma, were plowed under for wheat.  This entire region, which had once been a dry grassland, was plowed up to make room for more wheat.  Wheat became so profitable that it led to the rise of "suitcase farmers," wealthy businessmen from the East Coast who would buy up land in Oklahoma and pay someone else to farm the land for them.  They bought up huge tracts of land, radically transforming the landscape of the Great Plains.  Hoover, meanwhile, won an humanitarian award for sending money to the starving Russian farmers that his economic policies put out of business.

Eventually, even in the U.S., the prosperity grown on wheat came to an end.  In 1929 the stock market crashed and the price of all commodities plummeted.  Farmers in the Great Plains continued to produce wheat, even when the price dropped below the cost of planting.  Since the price of wheat dropped, they just plowed up more land to plant more wheat, increasing the economic damage that was to come.  There was so much wheat that much of the stores rotted before they could be transported, and much of it was burned.  While unemployed workers and broke businessmen in the cities were starving, farmers in the Great Plains were burning their excess wheat crops because there were no trains to take them to market.

Without a source of income most farmers turned to subsistence farming, keeping their families alive with what they could produce in their own gardens at home.  That, however, changed when the Dust Bowl began.

Feminism and Consumerism

Another result of this movement away from the land was the rise of feminism.  In her book The Feminization of American Culture, Ann Douglas describes the rise of modern feminism through analyzing 19th century women novelists.  In a rapidly industrializing economy upper-class women felt the need to justify their increasingly ample leisure time.  These ladies had the old-world benefits of servants, along with the new-world benefits of automation, which left them with a lot of time on their hands.  Douglas traces this movement from production to consumerism while analyzing Harriet Beecher Stowe's novels:

"In the newly commercialized and urbanized America of the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the woman consumer, Stowe demonstrates, is more important, more indispensable, than the woman producer; luxury items can and must function as necessities.  With her usual acumen, Stowe had grasped the actual meaning of the sentimental heroine and her crucial role in the rise of consumer culture."

This older feminism eventually gave rise to the newer feminism.  The sentimental idealization of women's roles included the idealization of any office they could hold.  Anything a mother did for her children was excused for sentimental reasons, and Douglas cites at least one early feminist who joined combat in the Civil War as a Mother to her country.

For the first time in history people were not measured and counted by what they could produce, but by what they could consume. Many children in a home was, until recently, considered a blessing.  Those little ones would grow the farm and provide for the community and their parents as they grew, more little producers eventually made more wealth for everyone.  Now many people forgo the privilege of having children because they don't want to raise little consumers who will take from their parents.  As Wendell Berry noted, "the present natural ambition of the U.S. is unemployment.  People live for weekends, or vacations, or retirement; moreover, this ambition seems to be classless, as true in the executive suites as on the assembly lines."