The Week-est Link, May 16, 2008: FreeRange Kids, Adorare Mente, & the White Board Sessions

1. Spotted a terrific article in the LA Times the other day about a parent who rebelled against overparenting and let her nine-year-old find his way home on the New York subway. The author, Rosa Brooks, makes the case for letting kids be kids, and play as such. Also, check out a great site called FreeRangeKids that advocates a more hands-off model of parenting.

2. The first edition of the Southern Seminary student journal Adorare Mente is now online. It looks like a really helpful issue. I edited the church history section and selected an excellent paper by SBTS MDiv student Trevin Wax on the Marburg Colloquy, which featured debate between Luther and his follower, Zwingli, on the Lord's Supper. Check out the whole journal.

3. Tremendously helpful and insightful piece by Presbyterian historian Sean Lucas on the pastorate and PhD studies. (HT: JT) If you are an MDiv student and are struggling to figure out what to do on this issue, join the club. Don't be discouraged--this is a tough area. I want to blog about this more in the future (and have in the past), and hope to offer my own little bit of advice on the matter. Fundamentally, know this: it is a great thing to get lots of training before entering the pastorate. We need a small, select group of academic theologians; we need a huge, gifted, well-trained, gospel-driven group of pastor-theologians. Young, gifted seminarian: think hard about this last sentence.

4. Have you heard about the White Board Sessions? Neither had I til I saw a fleeting notice of them at the 9Marks blog. Sounds like a really interesting time. Dever paired up with some emergingish guys will make for some fun, I predict...

5. New Death Cab for Cutie album is out. My buddy Doug Hankins is currently letting me listen to it, and it sounds amazing eight minutes in. If you don't know about Death Cab, give them a listen--thoughtful, evocative music.

Have a great, God-saturated weekend, all.

"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.

The Sad Tale Of Eliot Spitzer, and What it Tells Us (and What it Doesn't)

Eliot Spitzer, the governor of New York, has resigned after it became public that he had hired prostitutes through a "high-end clientele" business. The story is sordid, and very sad for the people whom Mr. Spitzer has let down. This would include, significantly, his wife, and, not insignificantly, the state of New York.

In looking at web coverage of this event, I came across this article in the LA Times by an evolutionary biologist. David Barash argues in "Want a Man, or a Worm?" that it is natural for males of many species to copulate with a wide variety of females from their species. Barash notes that among men who seek a number of female sex partners that "Even if, thanks to birth control technology, they do not actually reproduce as a result (and thus enhance their evolutionary "fitness"), they are responding to the biological pressures that whisper within men." This is a good point. If one looks through most any type of human history, biblical or otherwise, one sees that men often seek out a number of women for sex. Speaking rather broadly, many men have struggled greatly to confine their sexual drive to one woman, particularly men in positions of power like Mr. Spitzer.

Here's the fascinating thing about Barash's opinion piece, though. Right after acknowledging this historically proven situation, he says the following: "That doesn't justify adultery, by either sex, especially because human beings -- even those burdened by a Y chromosome and suffering from testosterone poisoning -- are presumed capable of exercising control over their impulses. Especially if, via wedding vows, they have promised to do so. After all, "doing what comes naturally" is what nonhuman animals do. People, most of us like to think, have the unique capacity to act contrary to their biologically given inclinations. Maybe, in fact, it is what makes us human." One wonders why the evolutionary biologist--who has just taken numerous paragraphs to explain polygamous mammalian sexual behavior as entirely natural--suddenly becomes a moralist, and attempts to convince the reader that the natural orientation of men (to avoid monogamy) "doesn't justify adultery". Barash has offered us no moral framework, no higher, transcendent cause or reason by which he could justify his judgement that adultery is wrong. If biology explains all, then all that we have an "is", an explanation for what goes on in the world, but we have no "ought", for biology in itself cannot bequeath us morality, let alone the spirituality that would birth a moral standard. No, if we explain life in materialistic terms, then we live it, ethically, in materialistic terms, and adultery cannot be judged wrong, and Eliot Spitzer cannot be looked upon in a negative light. Yet this is exactly what even the most learned among us do, and so show us, time and again, that the Christian worldview alone gives us a comprehensive, logical understanding of man and man's world.

Christian men are reminded by this sad event to seek self-control, or, perhaps, Spirit-control of self. It is no accident that men have sought polygamous relationships throughout history and that men seem far more often than women to destroy marriages and homes through extramarital affairs. This is not to say that women do not ever fall in such ways, or that all women possess less reproductive drive than men, but it is to say that a quick historical scan yields that men are much more likely to stray than women are. We can acknowledge, then, that there are significant "biological pressures that whisper within men", as Barash argues. We go beyond this, however, to say that adultery involves not merely biology but spirituality. Indeed, it is our sinful nature, our errant spirituality, that drives our biology. Adam would not have cheated on Eve prior to the fall. His biology operated at a cool "faithful" then then. His fall, though, shot that temperature up to "hungry", and won him a sinful nature, and a part of this sinful nature is the drive to commit the horrible, tragedy-inducing sin of adultery. Biology matters, yes, but so too does spirituality.

Men have been attempting to control themselves (to follow Barash's moral guidance) for millenia, and we can all see where that's gotten us. No, we must have the Holy Spirit living inside of us, willing us away from Internet ads and tv shows and stray glances at the mall and extended consideration and appraisal of other men's spouses and meditation on past objects of lust and spending time alone with women who are not our spouses and so much more. We must have the Spirit, men, and we must strive for holiness, both personally and in the embrace of the local church. It is a difficult thing to be a monogamous man, armed with a sinful nature and existing in a sex-saturated world, but we can resist temptation. We've got to fight for holiness, we've got to prize Christ and find our joy in obeying Him and turning away from the world, and we've got to celebrate marriage and cultivate happy, romantic marriages. Only then will we avoid Mr. Spitzer's mistake; only then will we avoid his tragedy.