Higher Yearning
note in the following "."The student body has an average SAT score of 1260, and many students attribute their academic seriousness to self-discipline acquired through home schooling. (Numerous studies have shown that home-schoolers consistently rank equal to or above national averages for learning.) "
By Libby Copeland
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 27, 2001; Page C01
For some, this is their first time at a school bigger than their mothers' kitchen tables. They've made intensely private journeys, these 152 home-schoolers, to a fledgling college with four classrooms in the soybean fields of Loudoun County. They are the believers, the religious flank of the movement, and here -- at the nation's first college for home-schoolers -- they find a godly purpose. Though they are teenagers suddenly on their own, they do not rebel. They refrain from smoking and drinking and sex -- refrain, for the most part, from the trials and temptations of youth. They are here to build a more righteous nation, not to party or to find themselves.
"I'm 50, I still like to have fun," says the president of the college. But "there's a certain adolescent approach to fun that gets you in trouble."
His name is Michael Farris, and on one bright fall day he paces the well of a small lecture hall at Patrick Henry College. A boyish-looking, charismatic father of 10, Farris teaches constitutional law with a conservative conscience. The way he sees it, America's struggle between states' rights and federal power is an epic war of good and evil. Big government encroaches, while defenders of constitutional integrity stand stalwart against the tide. The Supreme Court is ground zero, Farris believes -- it has been trending leftward for 200 years.
How, he asks his class, can they take back thehighest court?
A sophomore named Sarah Cooke raises her hand. "Having justices in there who return to what the original intent is?"
A wise guy named Paul: "Have Dubya pack the court?"
Another wise guy: "Wait till they all die?" The class titters.
"You guys have got to get into the United States Senate -- that's the solution," says Farris. His students grasp the implication: Senators confirm Supreme Court nominees. Farris, one of the best-known figures in the home schooling movement, believes in the healing power of politics; he is himself a onetime Virginia gubernatorial candidate. "Go take over. That's the answer."
But if Patrick Henry College is to remake this nation, it also finds itself set apart from it. It's so new -- two years old -- that its main and only road doesn't exist on many maps. The campus consists of one two-story building that holds virtually all the facilities -- classrooms, cafeteria, library -- plus four single-sex dormitories. There's a baseball diamond, but no baseball team, and only one sport, soccer. (And because the school didn't make it onto college athletic calendars, the men's team recently suffered the indignity of having to play high-schoolers.) For study breaks, students drive 15 minutes from the campus in Purcellville to a Starbucks in Leesburg. When they're feeling feisty, they throw one another into the campus drainage pond they've named -- oddly -- Lake Bob.
Saying his school will be like "Harvard in the late 1700s," Michael Farris mandates that his students take a rigorous load of classical courses, including ancient languages. There's a curfew and a classroom dress code. Chapel is mandatory every morning and, as at many of the nation's more than 100 evangelical Christian colleges, students sign a statement of religious belief. Students uniformly identify themselves as Republican or libertarian; there's not one known Democrat on campus. And though the school doesn't keep a racial breakdown, a reporter sees not one black student in three days, and only a handful of students who aren't Caucasian.
Students here have spent their lives in the shelter of their parents' homes, shielded from what the movement regards as the troubling "isms" of the public schools: secularism, multiculturalism, liberalism. At Patrick Henry, they are shielded still. From this haven, they prepare to cross over to a wider, wilder world -- a world, the student handbook warns, "often hostile to the values of the Cross."
On the Right Path
Patrick Henry represents the maturation of a movement decades in the making. The number of home-schoolers nationwide is estimated to range from 850,000 to 1.9 million, and the National Home Education Research Institute, an advocacy organization, says this is growing by 7 to 15 percent a year. For those students educated at home for religious reasons -- a sizable portion, though by no means the total -- just any college won't do.
This was the case with Joshua Gibson, who was home schooled after sixth grade. His mom, Patty Matthews, brought Joshua and his older brother home when she began to feel the boys were under-stimulated in the Oklahoma City public schools. She was troubled, too, by the science books "teaching evolution as a fact" and the health books teaching sex education.
When it was time for college, Gibson entertained a notion of applying to Columbia University. But an alumnus warned: "You're putting yourself in a position where you're going to be asked to question a lot of things." At Patrick Henry, Gibson says, the professors don't try to "tear down what you've built, what your parents have spent 18 years building."
Gibson is a personable 19-year-old with an acute sense of self-awareness and ambition. He headed the student senate last year and ran unopposed to head the Republican club this year. On Monday mornings, like this one, he wears a suit jacket to class; he says he likes to start the week off on a serious note.
Today Gibson has a brief lull between morning chapel and Latin class, so he relaxes in his dorm lounge. He's feeling peppy, he says, which is good, because it means his new sleep-study cycle may work out. He has joined one of the latest trends on campus: going to bed at 10 p.m. and waking at 4:30 a.m. to study. It's "social buzz kill," he admits, but "at 4:30 in the morning there's not anybody up" to disturb a person's concentration.
At Patrick Henry, Gibson is not considered a nerd for taking his studies so seriously. Some of his classmates estimate that they study 35 hours a week. They bring their laptops to class to take notes and address their professors -- all but one of whom are men -- as "sir."The student body has an average SAT score of 1260, and many students attribute their academic seriousness to self-discipline acquired through home schooling. (Numerous studies have shown that home-schoolers consistently rank equal to or above national averages for learning.)
The atmosphere of academic rigor was part of what impressed Gibson when he first looked into Patrick Henry. He found the application intimidating, in a good way: It required three essays, including a five-page public policy position and a three-pager on the applicant's relationship with Jesus Christ. He read that the college mandates apprenticeships for upperclassmen, and figured he might live out his fantasy of interning at the White House. He could get the political experience he'll need to run for the state legislature back in Oklahoma.
"Twenty-one is the legal age for which you can run," Gibson says. "That's an option as my kickoff. What better to graduate from college and go right into the statehouse?"
When Gibson was about 10, his grandmother asked what he wanted to be when he grew up. President, he replied. And she said, What about being a pastor instead? It troubles him, he says, that people assume that you can't be a person of God and a politician as well. "I think that a person who really has true beliefs and values can flourish in politics," he says. "Let's hope, for the sake of America anyways."
Finding the Way
What is the purpose of college? Classes are arguably but a fraction of it. For many kids, the true learning begins with living away from home for the first time.
The college experience, as defined in the American cultural consciousness -- "Animal House" and "Revenge of the Nerds" and "Felicity" -- is an entropic process of late rent and later papers, binge drinking and midnight theology discussions, rushing a frat (and realizing you hate frats), dating someone you'll never forget (and one you wish you could), switching your major from pre-med to biology to, um, philosophy. And so on, until some magical spring day during senior year, it hits that you've achieved, through trial and error, the one thing you never tried for: adulthood.
Is the purpose of college to explore? To carve out your own space, apart from your parents? Or is it to strengthen the beliefs you came with? To arm yourself against a morally ambiguous world?
For Farris, these questions lay bare the very notion of adolescence itself. He says home schooling -- because it causes children to spend social time with their parents and other adults, rather than with their own age group -- sometimes has the effect of "skipping" the teenage years, of bringing young people straight from childhood to adulthood. This is a good thing; the modern concept of adolescence as a time for rebellious rites of passage is a fallacy, Farris says. He's not alone in feeling this way.
"This expectation that each generation will be at odds with their parents is part of our received wisdom," says Douglas Wilson, a pastor in Moscow, Idaho, who started an influential evangelical Christian day school 20 years ago. "We don't believe it's necessary to the human condition to have your kids rebel. . . . Amish kids don't do that, Brooklyn Jews don't do that. Why should Christian kids do that?"
Wilson is credited with starting the nascent evangelical movement known as classical Christian education, which Patrick Henry borrows from. Classical Christian education -- which blends biblical teachings with ancient principles of learning -- is supposed to approximate the model upon which America's first educated classes were taught. At Patrick Henry, the students must take two years of classical Greek or Latin, plus logic, rhetoric and philosophy, regardless of what they are majoring in. Currently, there are four degree tracks: government, journalism, creative and professional writing, or education. In time, Farris hopes to add majors in art, music, drama, film and television, to complete the second leg of the school's mission.
"The whole debate that's raged in conservative circles," Farris says, is "do we fight in the culture or . . . in the government? We say that's a silly argument. You fight in both."
As upperclassmen, students must apprentice themselves just like the Founding Fathers. They are encouraged to participate on the debate team. With all the mandatory courses, no more than four electives, total, are allowed during the four years.
"I don't think the undergraduate degree is the time to wander all over and do the smorgasbord approach," says Paul Bonicelli, dean of academic affairs. "There's no way to avoid an 8 a.m. class here. You don't even pick your own schedule."
Rather than searching within themselves for a purpose, Patrick Henry students are obliged to look in a better direction. Up.
One morning in chapel, Heather Herrick goes to the front of the cafeteria to lead the prayer. A senior, Herrick transferred last year from Boise State University. She speaks now of how she struggled at Boise with an environment that was at times "anti-God." She is dressed in a sea-green shirt and khakis, her dark blond hair pinned behind a broad, wholesome face.
She says, "I don't know if this is true for you guys, but this time of life is sort of a time of restlessness. . . . There are times when I don't have a lot of peace about where I'm going. But like David, we can say, 'As for me, I will be satisfied with your likeness when I awake.' "
Good vs. Evil
In philosophy class one day this fall, the professor reads a passage from the Bible and a passage from Plato's "Republic," then asks: Does music have a moral value?
Robert Stacey's playful, provocative manner has made him arguably the most popular professor on campus. He likes to probe his students' assumptions. Today he wants to know: Can the melody and tempo of, say, a rock song be inherently bad? Can an instrument be wicked? He looks around. Anyone here like drums?
A woman raises her hand. "I'd like to learn how to play the drums!"
"Then you are of the Devil!" Stacey declares. "Quick straw poll. Who thinks Danielle is of the Devil?"
A woman asks: "How do you determine what's good sound and what's bad sound?"
Across the classroom, Heather Herrick raises her hand: If music "induces feelings other than what is true, right, honorable, noble, then that's a problem."
But wait, says Joshua Gibson, sitting next to her. "To say that music in and of itself can cause me to sin -- you can't say that." You can't say "all drums are bad or all bass guitars are bad."
So, says Stacey, "it's all up to interpretation?" In that case, "I'm gonna try this: 'For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.' Is this relative?"
It isn't, of course, for Patrick Henry students. This is tough terrain to maneuver, which is precisely Stacey's point. In a world bordered by stark contrasts in good and evil, it can be difficult to navigatethe gray.
"I just want them to think about moral absolutes and have reasons why they believe them," Stacey says later. He insists his students study their faith with the same intellectual rigor they reserve for Plato. "When they leave here," he says, "they're going to have to go into the public sector. And they will embarrass themselves and embarrass us if they take naive, unfounded arguments out there with them."
Then, what is right and what is wrong? Students here renounce what Douglas Wilson calls the "radical relativism" of many college campuses. There are certain basic truths that each of them accepts. The Bible is infallible. Humans are by nature sinful. But beyond that, the details are hammered out every day in hundreds of minute ways at Patrick Henry. Senior Kristin Sabella avoids movies with a lot of sexual content. Gibson prefers music that offers "a positive, uplifted outlook on life."
As for dating, the school asks students to "court" instead, which means pursuing only those relationships they feel will lead toward marriage. To underscore the serious nature of a courtship, the honor code requires that before two people become a couple, each must call the other's parents to ask for permission.
"I think it protects women from the cycle of being used by men," says Sarah Cooke, an ebullient former competitive gymnast.
"It's personal responsibility," adds Sabella from across the table. They are sitting in a conference room, 10 Patrick Henry students -- articulate, amiable young men and women -- trying to explain to an outsider why they would forgo a ritual as ordinary and seemingly integral to adolescent life as dating. They've thought about this a lot, because they are often asked about it. They want to emphasize that they're making individual choices, not mindlessly obeying an arbitrary code.
It's not like there's a "six-inch rule," says Sabella, meaning limits of proximity with the opposite sex.
"Six-inch rule!" Cooke cries, and leans menacingly toward the guy sitting to her right. He plays along, recoiling theatrically as if he has seen a snake.
Differing Voices
Sabella and Cooke are -- like many of their peers -- acutely aware of the stereotypes that could be made of their school. They cut you off at the pass. They say, no, we're not brainwashed. No, we're not robots. They came to this tiny, experimental school because they wanted to be questioned and prodded -- they wanted an intellectual education.
"We don't just want to be regurgitators," says Cooke, who is considering a journalism major.
"I wanted to be an intelligent conservative," says Sabella, whose dream is to work on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, then home-school her own children. The point of college, she says, is "learning to understand, why does someone who doesn't agree with you think the way they do? . . . That's seriously lacking in the far right and in the far left."
Yet how do students achieve intellectual honesty where there is no one to argue the opposite position? When you ask about diversity, the standard response is, We're not all Republicans. There are libertarians here, too.
There are those who feel ambivalence about the ideological homogeneity. While Farris intends the college to always have a large pool of home-schoolers, he plans to target more public and private school students in the future, and that prospect seems good to students who want more variety.
"I like to play devil's advocate because I was taught by a liberal feminist professor last year, and she was one of the best professors I ever had," says Phil Van Steenburgh, who transferred from Winthrop University, a state school in South Carolina. "When you come here, when you're in a group of like-minded people, the tendency is to go with it."
That doesn't mean Van Steenburgh isn't a firm Christian and a firm conservative. And that doesn't mean he isn't grateful for the strong moral instruction of his home schooling and college years.
"I think we are at an advantage because we are much more stronger founded in our beliefs," Van Steenburgh says. "Whereas the person who's been thrown out into the public sector without any guidance, they don't know what they believe."
© 2001 The Washington Post Company |
