An alienating culture
Garvey, John
7 OF SEVERAL MIMPS John Garvey AN ALIENATING CULTURE NO SENSE OF THE SACRED ¦ have friends who have decided to teach their children at home. We considered doing this briefly, when our children...
...Is that bad...
...Is there a point at which it is a good thing not to be socialized into a culture...
...When you haven't seen television for...
...To prepare them for this world, to make them feel at home in it, is a form of child abuse...
...It may be better if they feel alien from what surrounds them, not at all at home, since what surrounds them is really a corrupt and dreadful, a death-dealing, empty world...
...I'm not sure, now...
...The friends we had who decided in favor of home schooling ranged from left to right politically, but agreed that the consensus to be found in public schools was so damaging that they did not want their children exposed to it...
...I once thought that this was an exaggerated fear, though we had chosen to send our kids to parochial schools...
...We sent them to parochial schools, and they survived, as we have until now...
...Is this a culture within which you want your children to be at home...
...Your kids may seem odd to their friends if they are not allowed to watch everything they want on television and wander the malls with kids who've been body-pierced...
...We considered doing this briefly, when our children were young, but thought that they needed the socialization (a word often used against advocates of home schooling) that comes with spending a lot of time with other children, and believed that they needed adult influences other than ours...
Vol. 121 • November 1994 • No. 20
