When a Lawsuit's a Boy's Only Hope: Billy Wolfe, Bullying, and the Results of a Peer-Based Culture

It's not every day that you see a story about one boy being bullied without headlines accompanying headlines announcing a vicious death or a closeted homosexuality. Yesterday, though, the New York Times published just such a story. Dan Barry wrote the piece, entitled "A Boy the Bullies Love to Beat Up, Repeatedly", as a sober, quiet reflection on bullying. Though there is no grisly headline attached to the story (thankfully!), the piece is worth reading and thinking about.

Barry notes, succinctly, that fifteen-year-old Billy Wolfe of Fayetteville, Arkansas gets bullied on a regular basis. This is the kind of piece that Barry regularly writes for the NYT: pieces that go beyond headlines and burrow into the experiences of everyday people. A steady diet of such articles would grow tiresome, probably, but this piece raised a number of issues in my own mind about the link between schools and bullying. Billy is bullied on a regular basis by a number of boys who randomly approach him and punch him. There seems to be little rationale for this behavior, though one could guess that Billy is an outsider in his school--he might be bookish, or he might be slightly effeminate, or he might be a little socially awkward, or he just might not be strong, debonair, or athletic. As one who went to public school, I can reason that any of these factors could be directly contributing to Billy's situation. Kids--despite appearances to the contrary--can be relentlessly cruel. Public school can be quite difficult, then, because it often involves a large number of kids, some of whom are quite cruel, and little supervision by wise, discerning adults. For the child who is, for whatever reason, on the fringe, public (or private) school can represent a day-in, day-out exercise in sustained fear and unalleviated despair.

Perhaps many of us have forgotten this truth. We've long ago left behind school experiences that were difficult. Perhaps we are internally ashamed of the fact that we were once bullied. In fleeting moments of remembrance, we feel as though we caused such treatment. Maybe we remember how gawky we were, or how awkward, or how small, and we feel that we deserved to be bullied. Let's square with bullying, and with the pre-teen and teenage years: they can be quite hard. We're not giving into silly psychobabble or becoming weak if we look our past in the face and see the pain and hurt that lies there. I was always very short, and I remember being on picked on continually for it. I told my parents about some of it, and occasionally talked about it with friends, but there was alot of evil that I could do little about it and simply bore on my own. Some would say that this reality shaped my character and made me tougher, and that's probably true. But my experience in public school among a bunch of nasty kids also left me with some scars. I'm sure others experienced the same, though it's unlikely they'll talk much about it.

In reflecting on Billy Wolfe, I'm reminded of a few recent trips to local coffee shops. While reading in the afternoon, I've observed schoolchildren, fresh out of school for the day, play a number of pranks on one another. I've also seen packs of children hanging out with no adult supervision. In all of these instances, I've thought to myself that it is no good thing for packs of unsaved children to hang out together. There is little good that results from such grouping. Unsaved children, after all, do not tend to focus on goodness, truth, and beauty, especially in a Christian sense. No, they tend to focus on what is evil, outlawed, unkind, "cool", and funny, despite what others may think. The peer-based culture of American children that stems from the advent of public education in the twentieth century can hardly be viewed as a positive development for our society. I am not offering a direct application regarding the viability of public school for children of Christians here. Some kids thrive in such situations--they're well liked, they have a good witness, and all goes rather smoothly. With that said, though, it only makes sense that public or private school, unless closely monitored by wise, kind, just adults, threatens to present schoolchildren (particularly those who are not well-liked for whatever reason) with situations marked by cruelness and, well, evil. As Christians, we've got to think carefully before we plunge our kids into such worlds.

It is not easy to admit that one was bullied. It is also not easy to forget being bullied. I remember getting punched by bullies in school, and I remember one of my friends being shoved into a locker by a bully. He cut his hand so badly that he had to go to the emergency room. There was a great deal more that I can remember, too. I remember being taunted by older boys about a poor basketball game I played. Without any provocation, these boys repeatedly made fun of me for making a few turnovers. Twelve years later, I can easily recall my hot cheeks, my attempt not to cry in front of other boys, my inability to say anything meaningful to these boys.

These recollections show me that I, along with all Christian parents, need to think carefully about schooling. We cannot shield our children from the evil of this world; indeed, we must teach children to live in the midst of it, and beyond this, to be light in this place. With that said, though, we should remember children like Billy Wolfe. There were many children I can recall who were chewed up by public school and the cruel kids who populated it. We should remember, perhaps, our own histories, and run our minds over our own scars. As parents, we should be prepared to stand up with great force and courage for our children. I'm thankful that my own parents were always there for me. We've got to teach our children to defend themselves, even as we teach them to, when possible, suffer reproach for the gospel. Most of all, we need simply to think--to think about our children's souls and the way they will be shaped by the childhood years in which we shepherd them. Education is important, after all, but at what price does it come?

"Regulating" Home School: Briefly Dissecting a Fascinating Editorial on the California Decision

The LA Times published a piece today arguing that the recent California decision to limit homeschool to "credentialed" parents has been misunderstood.

The piece's authors, Walter P. Coombs and Ralph Shaffer, are professors emeriti at Cal Poly Pomona. They make some questionable points in "Regulating Home Schoolers", a piece so bad it fairly begs for satirization. For instance, read this statement: "The court's decision means that home schoolers must be given some substantive instruction in social studies and not simply spend their time watching Fox with its strange assortment of oddballs pontificating on current events." Well! Coombs and Shaffer, please, don't hold back. Tell us what you really think about homeschooling. While you're at it, tell us what you really think about Fox News. It's hard to read between the lines. Just stop for a moment and stand under this quotation, leaking with bias and unacademic discourse. Stick out your tongue and let your tongue catch it. Yes, kids, that's what condescension tastes like. You'll be drinking lots of it (if your politics align with "oddballs", that is) in college, where you can learn from such unbiased, objective academics as Coombs and Shaffer.

Let's proceed. Here's another gem: "It's evident that the vast majority who teach their offspring in front of the television do so because they don't want their children to be subjected to such dangerous doctrines as evolution, abortion, global warming, equal rights and other ideas abhorrent to the evangelical mantra." Well, yes. Abortion would appear to be a "dangerous doctrine", Coombs and Shaffer, at least for the fetuses who this very moment sit in garbage dumps all across America. For them, the "doctrine" of abortion meant death. Not sure how you two would define "dangerous", but that would qualify on my list.

Moving on, we come to this: "Finally, in its call for the Legislature to enact laws providing for home schooling, apparently without credentialed teachers, the editorial wants "reasonable regulations," citing as examples required lesson plans or a student portfolio of work. Those regulations might be acceptable to some of the learn-at-home parents, but the Internet will be full of angry letters from home schoolers saying all that bureaucratic regulation is what they wanted to escape by teaching their children at home." Once again: yes. Coombs and Shaffer, you've sketched this situation accurately, and your closing comment seems entirely logical and well-founded. These men, who I'm sure are quite intelligent, learned, and accomplished, have failed to justify a premise inherent in their argument, namely, that it is the right of the state to educate children, not the right of the parent to determine who and what educates their children. What on earth would make Coombs and Shaffer assume such a premise? There's certainly nothing in the Constitution or our country's founding documents that warrants such a conclusion. Furthermore, public education in America is barely a hundred years old. Yes, it took secularists that long to convince the American public that it was the state's right and duty to educate children. And think about world history. Do people who voice the argument of Coombs and Shaffer think that medieval children were trucking off to state-funded schools back in the tenth century?

Public education, considered in the scale of human history, is breathtakingly young. And yet men like Coombs and Shaffer expect us to think that a) it's the only reasonable practice of decent human beings and b) that it's ridiculous for anyone to question this assumption. In reality, though, it is the thought of Coombs and Shaffer that is "young", baseless, and quite harmful to society. If parents want to put their children in public school, fine. But they have absolutely no need or responsibility to do so. They can do whatever on earth they would like to do with their children--they're the parents! No one regulates them or stands over them. See how far you can go with an assumed premise?

We close with this: "There has always been something decidedly elitist and anti-democratic in home schooling. It smacks of a belief that privileged children should not have to associate with the other kids in the neighborhood and that by staying home, they would not be subjected to the leavening effect of democracy. Moreover, it is apparent from the cries of the far right that there has been a specific policy in home schooling -- to teach only the ideas acceptable to ideologues who fear the contaminating influence of what is commonly known as a liberal education." This is a strange statement, historically speaking. It is often non-elites, culturally speaking, who home-school their children. This same group of people is often, whether you agree with them ideologically or not, fervently patriotic and great supporters of the democratic process. This last point is most curious, then, and it also gives us a nice parting shot at the end. Coombs and Shaffer seem to be confused, because many home-schooling parents love liberal education, classically defined (as consisting of study of the sciences, the classics, humanities, and other disciplines, a definition many of varying worldviews would subscribe to). That's precisely what many parents want to give their children, in place of a politically liberal education, which is what most children receive in American public schools nowadays. I should know--I went to public school all of my life. My education paled in comparison to the classic liberal education, though it was frequently infused by anti-conservative, unacademic teaching that left me with little in the way of skill and intellectual ability and much in the way of heated rhetoric and half-justified conclusions (which reminds one of a certain article, by the way).

Coombs and Shaffer can disagree with home-schoolers. That's their right (that one actually is in America's founding documents). Of course, one could argue that they might have stereotyped home-schoolers; not every home-schooler is conservative, after all, so they look a little sloppy on that point. Beyond that, though, if you look at your average home-school product, and I know many, they are often well-spoken, intellectually sharp, logically capable, and well-rounded students. They are frequently academically motivated and mentally gifted. Look at a school like Patrick Henry College. Whether or not you agree with its politics and religious views, its students, many (most?) of which come from home-schooling families, boast impressive SATs, vocabularies, and abilities. There are a ton of National Merit scholars that end up at PHC. This is merely one example of many, though I'll also note that my wife and her sister were both home-schooled, and thus I am personally insulted by this piece, and can testify that both of these girls were extremely well-trained and have both turned out to be women of great intellectual ability (I don't think my wife's sister has ever gotten a B, whether at a difficult private school or in college). In the end, that's the main problem with this article by Coombs and Shaffer. There's simply too much to refute its sloppy logic and its biased "arguments", and it ends up overwhelming the reader, and leaving him desperate for a class in a "liberal school" in which to fall asleep and so clear his mind.