Letters to the Editor

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Is Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary's new homemaking curriculum a shrewd way to train future conservative warriors?
  • Firefly's homeschooling soapbox

    "In an era where home schooling has become the pipeline for producing the next generation of conservative warriors..."

    True enough...but homeschooling, and its variant unschooling, are also becoming pipelines for raising the next generation of independent critical thinkers, problem solvers, and self-motivated creators, of all faiths and no faith, conservative and ultra-liberal alike.

    Parents bent on manufacturing their children into the next generation of conservative warriors are going to do so with or without public-schooling their children. In fact, public schools provide an all-too-convenient motivation for doing so; they're an ever-present godless/socialist/humanist/whathaveyou huge government institution for them to scapegoat. Kids are trained in how to behave as if they're "behind enemy lines" when at school. (Bruce Bawer's "Stealing Jesus" gives a more extensive analysis of this phenomenon.)

    SBTS's degree program would be laughable if it weren't so insidious, not for its stated intent to equip homeschooling parents (who, in most states, can homeschool legally whether equipped or not), but for its implicit assumptions of the rather low academic abilities and ambitions of women, and the proper place of women in public intellectual life.