Joyfully At Home: Chapter 15 - Part Two

Good morning!
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Spring has finally returned to Michigan.   I saw daffodils plants peeking out of a southern-facing slope.  My lilac bush has had enough snow melt around it that I can continue taking down most of the woody stems.  It's more like a small lilac tree - and that's not healthy since a lot of the stems are cracking under their own weight at the ground.   My parents have received their first doses of a COVID vaccine.  My twin is fully vaccinated.  My younger brother and I are in a friendly race to see which of us can get vaccinated first since we are both essential workers.

My mood has greatly improved since I can get outside for walks every day again.  Armed with a new cheery mood, let's dive into the fifteenth chapter of "Joyfully At Home" by Jasmine Baucham.  In the first post on this chapter, we saw that Jasmine's definition of a novel, ground-breaking home-based education was confined by the dictate that students learn to support the exact same ideas as their parents.  In this next quote, Jasmine gives us a glimpse into the educational method of her family's school while reminding us that the educational goal of total agreement with her parents' views worked in her case.

When we graduated from high school, therefore ( in 2007, and my brother this past year), we knew about evolution; we'd read Darwin's magnum opus! But the difference between our education and the schooling other than our generation were receiving was that we learned about evolution from a Christian worldview. When we graduated high school, we knew about Marx socialism; we'd read Marx and Engels for ourselves! But the difference between our education in the schooling of others in our generation with what we learned about socialism from a Christian worldview. (pg. 177)

Page 177 is a long, call-and-response style recitation of what Ms. Baucham learned - and how different it was because it was taught from her family's exact Christian world view.  

I was struck by how Ms. Baucham's education in science and economics mimicked the Christian Patriarchy/ Quiverful slap-dash method of Biblical studies. 

In traditional, mainline Christian churches, studying the Bible seriously demands more effort than cracking open the Bible and reading it.  Serious scholars discuss the methods used by the person or people who wrote a section of the Bible to reach their target audience.  That audience came with cultural and experiential expectations that were both universal - like how a mother comforts a child - and very alien - like how to morally act as a slave owner.  Armed with information about the culture of the writer and important current events at their time, we can begin to suss out the difference between temporal matters that bleed in and larger theological truths.

In CP/QF land, on the other hand, no one needs external context for anything.   Anyone can crack open the Bible, read a verse or two, and expound on that verse without providing any context.   

The Bauchams educated their children in the same manner.   Jasmine believed that she completely understood evolution at age 19 because she read "On the Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin.  She believes that she completely understood communism because she read the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels.   

Now, I don't have much experience in economics - but I have a ton of experience in evolutionary biology.   Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" is not required reading for evolutionary biologists at any academic level.   It was a seminal book in the history of evolutionary science - but it was published in 1859 so there is 162 years of experimenting, refining and change since then!   I have read "On the Origin of Species" because the history of science fascinates me.  The book was an interesting read - but Darwin had many, many unanswered questions at the end of the book.   And - to be fair to Darwin - the chances of him intuiting mendelian genetics, the structure of DNA and the genetic code from what was able to be observed in 1830-1858 was zero. 

I realized mid-sentence that I was forgetting that Ms. Baucham's biggest objection to Darwin wasn't that he couldn't explain the finer details of how island finches developed different beaks.  Her objection is that evolution didn't directly support the timeline of creation lined in the Bible.     From that perspective, her critical reading of Darwin is spotty and underwhelming.   "Yup, Darwin certainly deviates from Genesis 1 therefore his entire hypothesis is invalid" is a poor effort on all fronts.

I was - and still am - a voracious reader.   My mom attempted for a while to pre-read most of our books just to be sure we weren't venturing into nightmare territory - but between my twin sister and I trying to read our way though the library in elementary school she had to settle for asking us about what we were reading and discussing any themes that might be more adult than the average elementary school kid ran into.   

That's my life experience so this next quote is baffling to me:

As an important no, there were things we didn't read, not because our parents were afraid we jump ship if we were exposed to opposing viewpoints, but because there was a much more edifying way to garner the information my parents wanted to teach me. Thus, I took a pass on Madame Bovary. Also, as an aside, my parents didn't just send us to wade through secular humanist texts without first discipling us every step of the way, or, without first - before the texts were even presented to us - know (sic) that we were mature enough to handle what we were learning without becoming confounded or confused. They were very discerning about our level of discernment. (pg. 177)

Yeah, Mom probably would have had me avoid "Madame Bovary" in elementary school - but as a teenager?   As a young adult?  Oh, hell no.   

If CP/QF adherents are supposed to convert the world, they need to be mentally strong enough to hold a belief in the face of strong opposition.   I, for example, am quite vocal about how harmful many of their beliefs are to the development of their children. 

That's the level of disagreement they need to handle in life - but Ms. Baucham is saying that her parents didn't trust that she could handle mild cognitive dissonance as a teenager.   After all, reading a book from a different century in a different culture - which is essentially what she's doing by reading Darwin and Marx rather than Dawkins and Davis - is about the least threatening form of exposure to an idea that I can think of.   

I know that Ms. Baucham is trying to present her education as broad-reaching, modern and inspiring to other Christians, but I feel like she was raised in a glass cloche instead of a field.   Cloches, cold frames and greenhouses are great at protecting young plants when they are small and the weather is extreme - but if used too long, the plant develops a weaker central stem and poorer roots due to the lack of exposure to wind and periodic drought.   Yup, the growth of a plant seems to slow down for a week or two during the hardening off process when the cloche is removed and the plant starts to solidify their stem and expends more energy on root growth - but that time of slowness is needed for healthy mature plants.   

Raising kids is the same thing.  I shelter my son a lot right now because he's 4.   Explaining the details of why we wear a mask in public to avoid COVID-19 would be truly disturbing to him - so I fudge the details.   On the other hand, I shelter him much less than I did when he was a small infant.  I let him run around with kids his age.  I send him to school with adults who are not his parents.  There are moments that he is sad or uncomfortable for short periods of time - but that's part of the process of growing up.   

Better to start hardening your kids off a bit at a time during childhood than launching them into the world without a strong core.