His views on marriage are misguided, but Kevin Williamson’s lengthy and delightful look at homeschooling in the new National Review is delightful. Here are a few tastes:
“People forget that some of the first homeschoolers were hippies,” says Bob Wiesner, a counselor at the Seton Home Study School, a Catholic educational apostolate reporting to the bishop of Arlington, Va…He relishes the story of a number of graduates of his program who attended a top-tier Catholic university and enrolled together in theology classes taught by the school’s most notorious liberals. They were of course more conversant with church orthodoxy than were many of their instructors. “The professors hated them. But the kids had fun.”…
Nine-tenths of American children attend government schools, and most of the remaining tenth attend government-approved private schools. The political class wants as many of that remaining tenth in government schools as possible; teachers’ unions have money on the line, and ideologues do not want any young skull beyond their curricular reach. A political class that does not trust people with a Big Gulp is not going to trust them with the minds of children.
October 3rd, 2012 | 6:04 pm
He opposes same-sex marriage. Is that the misguided part, or the part where he thinks that someone should be allowed to be a Romney adviser, despite being in a same-sex relationship?
October 3rd, 2012 | 8:08 pm
Actually, I agree with him on both of those points. I wrote about that here. A few of the points where I think Williamson goes wrong are 1) he argues that it doesn’t really matter very much whether a morally sound view of marriage is recognized in law; and 2) he argues the battle for marriage is unwinnable (I disagree here and in a still-ongoing debate I’m participating in on this blog). Fair enough?
October 4th, 2012 | 3:35 am
Jules Ferry, one of the founders of public education in Europe was more candid than most politicians, when he said its purpose was “to cast the nation’s youth in the same mould and to stamp them, like the coinage, with the image of the republic.”
One might imagine that he was a left-wing ideologue, but not a bit of it; a leading figure in the Party of Order, he was the minister of Thiers, during “bloody week” (the suppression of the Paris Commune) and the theoretician of colonisation in Algeria
October 4th, 2012 | 8:46 am
Could you provide a link to the article instead of to everything else?
October 4th, 2012 | 9:04 am
The article is behind a subscriber wall. Provided you already subscribe to First Things, why not consider adding NR?
October 4th, 2012 | 12:50 pm
Greg, I am pleased to read that old and very reasonable post of yours.
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