The last issue of Home School Marketplace explained what researchers are discovering about multitasking. It seems that trying to do more than one thing at a time muddles the brain in a variety of ways. Here are just a few.

• Multitasking adversely affects how you learn
• Multitasking creates chemical reactions in your brain that resemble addiction
• Multitasking produces stress
• Multitasking actually reduces productivity
• Multitasking creates shorter attention spans

The idea that multi-tasking, particularly with technology, causes information overload which causes distraction and decreased ability to learn or be productive has been supported by more and more research. But there is another hidden danger to multitasking that is even more disturbing than the ones listed above. There is some indication that heavy multi-tasking among children not only rewires their brain in such a way that it disrupts the natural learning process, but it also creates a lack of empathy and social connectivity, two of the characteristics of being human. Some scientists believe heavy multitasking, particularly with technology, can produce forms of autism resembling Aspergers Syndrome. In short, chronic multitasking in childhood can lead to an inability to relate to other people.It seems strange that a high level of computer and cell phone use can actually cause an inability to relate to other people since cell phones, email, and websites like Skype, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are all about social connectivity. But, actually, they aren’t about real social connectivity, they foster virtual social connectivity—a form of social interaction that relies on brief interchanges and minimal face-to-face contact.

I’ve actually experienced this with a friend I once was very close to. We would spend hours together each week and we kept up with each other by phone when we couldn’t actually be together. But once she discovered texting, most of our conversations began taking place by text in messages that were never over 160 characters long. The more she relied on texts to communicate, the less actual face-time she wanted to spend with me. Nothing really happened to make the relationship fade, it just gradually became reduced to a few texts every few days. And when I did see her, she spent a large part of our time together texting other people in the midst of our conversation. What had once been a rich, deep relationship of sharing our lives together became reduced to short snippets of contact. She had become unable to sustain the level of interaction and focus required in personal contact.

My experience correlates with recent studies that show people who spend a lot of their personal time on electronic devices (computers, cell phones, etc.) tend to be generally more scattered and less focused because their minds are always somewhere else and they tend to live in a virtual reality in their heads instead of being here and now and having real relationships with people and real interactions with life.

In a previous article I shared some of the research from Dr. Clifford Nass of Stanford University about how multitasking affects the ability to focus, to learn, and to remember what you’ve learned. Other Stanford studies have shown that increased dependence on technology has resulted in the diminishing of empathy by limiting the amount of human interaction that takes place. A recent analysis of 72 studies performed on nearly 14,000 college students between 1979 and 2009 showed a sharp decline in the empathy trait over the last 10 years.

Professor Poldrack from UCLA says, “There is a cost to the way that our society is changing. Humans are not built to work this way. We’re really built to focus.” The growing problem of lack of focus has been christened “attention deficit trait” by psychiatrist Edward Hallowell. “As our minds fill with noise, the brain gradually loses its capacity to attend fully and gradually to anything,” he argues.

And Professor Nass at Stanford thinks the ultimate risk of heavy technology use is that it diminishes empathy by limiting how much people engage with each other, even if they are in the same room. “The way we become more human is by paying attention to each other, he said. “It shows how much you care.”

Gary Small, a neuroscientist and author of the book iBrain, warns that children who spend their formative years multitasking lose out on chances to focus on developing crucial but slow-forming interpersonal skills. “With the weakening of the brain’s neural circuitry controlling human contact, our social interactions may become awkward, and we tend to misinterpret—and even miss—subtle, non-verbal messages,” he says. Such constant “attention switching” affects a person’s ability to interact with others and Small fears may be causing a form of autism, particularly in children who are immersed in technology. Small states, “You can think of it along the scale of Asperger’s syndrome, which is a mild form of it, where there’s not social connectiveness.” And one of the hallmarks of autism is a lack of empathy.

Mr. Nass at Stanford agrees and believes empathy is essential to the human condition. “We are at an inflection point,” he says. “A significant fraction of people’s experiences are now fragmented.”

So what can we do?

The most obvious thing we can do is move slowly but surely in the direction of mono-tasking and encourage our children to do the same. But if you must multitask, researchers recommend you do the following:

DON’T multitask in the afternoon. Your brain struggles hardest to multitask in the afternoon and can easily overload.

MEDITATE. Brain scans of those who meditate indicate that meditation makes brains more efficient at paying attention, so there is more brain power available when doing two tasks at once.

PRACTICE multi-tasking with simple tasks, like folding the laundry, not with complex tasks like talking on the phone.

Other measures you might want to consider are:

• Become a mono-tasker. Even when using electronic media such as the computer, try to focus on only one task at a time and minimize the amount of time you spend switching from one activity to another.
• Spend face time with others. Build in as much face-to-face relational time with the people you love without distractions or interruptions.
• Wean from screens. Keep the TV and computer off when you’re not actually using them. The brain finds it almost impossible to not look at a TV screen or computer monitor when it is on. So turn them off.
• Read more. Books require single focus.
• Try to be in the moment. Multitasking takes you out of the here and now.

This article is reprinted from the August 25, 2011 Home School Marketplace newsletter. For more articles on topics of interest to home educators as well as helpful resources for your homeschooling journey, sign up for the Home School Marketplace newsletter at www.homeschoolmarketplace.com.

I have been asked if there are ever circumstances where a boy might flourish in a school environment rather than at home with his mother, acknowledging that not everyone has that option.

I did not have that option and I always consoled myself by remembering that most boys in schools are taught by somebody else’s mother.

What are some of the obstacles a mother faces while homeschooling older boys?

After talking to a friend it occurred to me that these problems might not be exclusive to boys, only most of my experience is exclusive to boys so I will address that.

Two Scenarios

When boys enter 9th grade they are often immature. They still don’t care about much but as they begin to mature in 10th grade, I have found, they either become increasingly concerned that they are going to look stupid when they get out into the world, a bit self-conscious about being judged as a homeschooler, and as a consequence willing to go through almost any hoop you put them through in order to succeed, or they begin to think that the other kids they know have it a lot easier than they do and that public school is a piece of cake and that their mother’s expectations are completely ridiculous. All of my older boys so far (6 of them) have fallen loosely into one of these two categories in 11th and 12th grades. Other families are probably not quite so extreme. We tend to run hot or cold around here.

Solution for Scenario 1

The first scenario while not exactly a mature attitude is very easy to deal with. Lay it on thick, mom.

Solution for Scenario 2

The second scenario is much more difficult. As a matter of fact, the ideal at this point would be to get the child under other academic authorities. Mom should try to remove herself from the equation either through some sort of school, outside courses, online courses, dual enrollment, etc. Our options for this are growing exponentially in this age of the Internet.

As I have mentioned, I have not been able to remove myself from the equation which has added stress to my life. Insert Big Smiley Face. But in spite of the smiley face homeschooling a resistant son can be hard on mom. I suppose I might have lived to 100 if I had not had so many boys now I will be lucky to hit 60.

If you find yourself in that situation, with an uncooperative child, you are going to have to, as a last resort, pray.

Hope for the Future

After you have prayed you are just going to have to do the best you can. You are going to have to choose your battles wisely, you are going to have to communicate the ideas of self-government and you are going to have to be brave and let your child fail. And while you are doing all that, may I suggest that you try not to take the situation too personally.

Taking things too personally is a fatal flaw of any parent/child relationship. It causes you to lash out and misinterpret what is really going on. It causes you to overreact. This is especially lethal in parenting boys. A boy will naturally be confused and repelled by this sort of emotion. It will make him feel manipulated, especially if he is a very nice boy and ultimately wanting to please you. You see, a boy can be very nice and resistant at the same time.

It is most likely a situation that could not have been avoided due to the temperament of the boy and his reaction to your personality and expectations. If you can navigate through it prayerfully you can still go on in future years to have good relationships with your stubborn sons and they may still have tenderness and love for their stubborn mother too.

But perhaps you are thinking about all those boys in the homeschooling catalog that seem willing to sit at their parent’s feet until they are at least 30. I am sorry to say that you cannot order boys from a catalog.

You are stuck with the real kind that came filled with testosterone straight from the factory. The only way to deal with a real boy is to speak to the manufacturer about him on a regular basis, not expect him to act like a girl, make sure he is not on the computer too much and get him in the fresh air and sunshine.

May I suggest baseball?

Cindy Rollins is a homeschool mom of 9 children who lives in Hixson and blogs at dominionfamily.blogspot.com. Email Cindy at dominionfamily@gmail.com

By Paige Coker Rekers

At 15 my life revolved around one person – me. On the way to school one day at the end of my sophomore year, my mom gave me the ultimatum of either staying at the Christian school I was attending or be homeschooled with my two younger siblings. I scowled and said I would stick it out at school (I am sure eye rolling was involved and a slamming of a van door). However, as the day progressed, the Lord made it very clear to me that I needed to be educated at home for the remainder of my high school career. I was apprehensive at first but God gave me such a peace that I could not ignore it.

As I began my first year of homeschooling in 11th grade, I was stunned to see that children of all ages were interacting with adults, and each other in a positive way. While attending conventional school all of my life, it was very uncommon to see a younger student conversing with an older student even if they were a mere one grade apart. Very quickly I felt welcomed into a small community of people. That year was so pivotal in my young life. Always shy and introverted, I finally felt at home.

Opportunities to socialize and interact with others abounded. Without the stress of classroom settings, grades, teachers and peer pressure, my creativity flourished through sketching, creative writing classes, and discovering museums. I made friends with whom I am still close, even to this day. After graduation in 1999, I pursued Interior design at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. College became an opportunity to deepen the confidence I had gained in myself and in my abilities through homeschooling.

Now, 15 years later, I am able to grasp the importance of relating to others of all ages. I learned how not to ignore the innocent voices of the little ones. I also discovered how to respect the adults involved in my teaching which overflowed into my relationship with my parents. With two children of our own, my husband and I believe the Lord is leading us to teach them at home, and I hope they will learn these things. Homeschooling is just an illustration of life — people of all ages interacting with each other, learning from each other.

Paige, the daughter of Neil and Beth Coker, resides with her family in Murfreesboro, Tenn.

When I first read Susan Schaeffer Macaulay’s For the Children’s Sake I was intrigued by the idea of reading Shakespeare to children. At the time my oldest was only three.

My own experiences with Shakespeare up to that point had been watching Romeo and Juliet (Franco Zeffirelli’s beautiful version) in 8th grade, and then finally buying a huge, small-printed volume of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare when I was 17 just because it seemed like something cool to own. Back then my bibliophile disease was still latent. At that time I read, for my own pleasure, The Taming of the Shrew and absolutely fell in love with iambic pentameter although it would be years before I even knew what that was.

I was inspired by the idea of reading this delightful author to my own children but year after year went by. I read Charlotte Mason’s Original Homeschooling Series which also promoted the reading of Shakespeare to children, and still I had not found a way to incorporate Shakespeare into our lives. Every once in a while we would rent a TV and VCR and watch The Taming of the Shrew etc. but still we weren’t reading the plays regularly.

And then one summer when Timothy, my oldest, was maybe 14, we sat out in the backyard and read aloud A Midsummer Night’s Dream and it was a success. The children laughed in the right places and I gained courage. From then on we have read 2 to 3 plays a year. Now we have read almost all of the plays, a few several times.

This year we are reading Henry IV Parts I and II for the first time. I am so excited.

My general procedure is to read aloud a synopsis of the play from either Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare or Nesbit’s Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare.

We then read the play, scene by scene, one scene a day. I usually just read all the parts stopping to aid comprehension with discussion. Every once in a while I have had different children read different parts but that works better with plays we already know well.

We also try to memorize some piece from the play we are working on. Some of our favorite memory pieces from Shakespeare are: The St Crispin Day’s Speech from Henry V: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…” and Portia’s lovely speech on mercy from The Merchant of Venice: “The Quality of mercy is not strained.”

Finally we try and watch a video production of the play or even two different productions. The videos have been hit and miss ranging from the glorious Richard Burton as Petruchio to the seemingly harmless BBC version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream dated 1960s which opens with a scene of now famous British actresses unclothed or from the dreadfully realistic King Lear which shows a hobbit without clothes or eyes to the delightful 1930s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream featuring Mendelssohn’s music. One of our favorite films is the rousing Kenneth Branagh version of Henry V. You will definitely have to do a little research online to make sure certain productions of the plays are appropriate for your family. The good news is that the information is out there.

The best sequence for long term retention is probably to read a synopsis of the play, watch a version of the play (Netflix is great for this), read the play out loud slowly, and finally watch a different version of the play.

My children have not all been enthusiastic Shakespeareans. They often groan and question why we read some of the plays. I always tell new students of the bard that if they do not like Shakespeare that is fine but it is the height of ignorance to conclude that it is the Bard’s fault rather than something lacking within themselves. Harsh, I know.

After years and years of reading and discussing, quotes and lines from Shakespeare have taken root in our hearts. We begin to recognize cultural tidbits that have derived from Shakespeare’s plays: “Teeth set on edge” “give the Devil his due” “budge an inch” “green-eyed monster” “cold comfort” “fair play” “stood on ceremony.” You probably quoted the playwright today without even knowing it.

The college boys have found having knowledge of Shakespeare is quite handy for class discussions and papers and popular with professors. In the end they have thanked me for the utilitarian uses of knowing the plays. Perhaps not my original goal, but something I am happy about.

Reading Shakespeare with some children is not always going to bring immediate results. I do have friends with those naturally Elizabethan children who revel in the readings. My children often just try to make the best of it. On the other hand, Alex and Andrew, my youngest sons, having heard the plays from the cradle seem to actually enjoy them.

In the last couple of years I have collected one resource that has greatly helped my understanding of the plays. It is Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare in Two Volumes. If I read through this book a little ahead of our Morning Time reading of the plays I can add interesting historical remarks such as who Hotspur was or what it meant that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon. Or after a confusing day’s reading I can pull out Asimov and straighten myself out.

It is pricey because it is out of print, but I highly recommend it if you plan to discuss the plays with the children. You could read it aloud to them but I suggest instead you use it as a way to increase your own wisdom and understanding of the plays and pass that knowledge along to the children as you read.

It is true that I have been aided by my own love of Shakespeare in persevering year after year but even with that love I had a hard time getting the horse out of the gate in those early years as my eldest son grew. But it turns out that reading Shakespeare is not so hard after all. It is already divided up into small chunks. All you need to begin is a few minutes every morning and before you know it your children will be all grown up and you will be making jokes with phrases like “get thee to a nunnery” regularly.

The beauty of building a family culture around Shakespeare is that it is something that can still be shared with a wide, though shrinking, cache of other people. It is lighting a small candle in the darkness of cultural decay and looking out to see other candles twinkling all around.

Cindy Rollins, who resides in Hixson with her husband and children, is a homeschooling mom of nine. Visit her blog at www.dominionfamily.blogspot.com. E-mail Cindy at dominionfamily@gmail.com.

By Jeanie B. Cheaney

Last month, in the journal First Things, senior editor R.R. Reno confessed his participation in “An Error Worse Than Error,” namely the purported goal of higher education to question everything. “Students are trained—I was trained—to believe as little as possible so that the mind can be spared the ignominy of error. The consequences: an impoverished intellectual life.”

Reno must know he’s late to the party. The premise of Alan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) is that “almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.” In The Abolition of Man (1947), C.S. Lewis described how the exchange of skepticism for truth created Men without Chests. In Chesterton’s parable of the lamppost, widespread zeal to tear down a public source of light (because it’s out of fashion and inconvenient) leads to men arguing forever after in the dark. All three authors were contemplating the effect of dismissing foundational principles as an aim of education. John Dewey already occupied that dark public square, passionately arguing that “education as such has no aims” beyond equipping workers to work.

So the idea has been around for a while, but in order to seem fresh and relevant, it’s tricked out in a new name: “critical thinking.”To think critically is a useful, often necessary tool; “critical thinking” is a noble concept that’s lost its dignity after a mauling by ed-school theorizers. Like a gullible servant thrust onto the emperor’s throne by manipulative handlers, it’s become a figurehead: a catchphrase for deconstructing old received truths to replace them with new received truths. No child is to be left behind: Roger Kimball recalls a parent orienta- tion meeting at his 5-year-old’s school, where the virtues of critical thinking were eagerly promoted for the crayon set.

If old standards are overthrown, what will take their place? The recom- mended substitute is “creativity”— no one noticing, apparently, that “creative critical thinking” is an oxymo- ron. Critical thinking is essentially destructive; it’s all about tearing down. To tear down false presuppositions is good and necessary but not complete; in education, the only valid purpose for destruction is to rebuild. That’s where creativity is supposed to come in. But creativity doesn’t exist in a vacuum—like skepticism, it’s a means, not an end. It cries out for a theme. To treat creativity as an end in itself is to assume godlike character for humans, as though they could somehow create ex nihilo.

Of the many consequences of the critical- thinking fad, two stand out. One, if the destruction is allowed to stand, educated humans will be in the same situation as the man from whom one demon was cast out only to have seven others take its place. Declaring the great truths to be purely subjective (and therefore, ultimately, untrue) is not progress. Instead, it returns us to paganism, where moral authority belongs to the elites and the masses fall prey to superstition. As the saying goes, “He who stands for nothing will fall for anything.”

Two, skepticism about major premises leads to over-reliance on minor ones. When the international website Wikileaks posted thousands of classified documents regarding the war in Afghanistan, it did so with the purpose of exposing American malfeasance. Wikileaks had the facts—lots of them. But focusing on isolated incidents obscures the larger issue of what we’re fighting about. Is the aim of one side—to destroy or neutralize an enemy that threatens world order— superior to the aim of the other side, which is to impose its radical agenda on an everlarger slice of the globe?

Facts can be marshaled or manipulated to support any contention, but without a common commitment to such basic ideas as freedom, order, and individual responsibility, they won’t prove anything. Foundational principles can’t be proved; they must simply be believed. Critical thinking can be useful in helping a student determine the truth. But it isn’t truth, and it won’t give him anyplace to stand.

Used by permission | © World Magazine, all rights reserved | www.worldmag.com

We live in a world that is becoming increasingly impersonal. The daily interactions we have barely scratch the surface to get to heart of the individuals we encounter. We greet coworkers in the hallways, we nod, we smile and we’re polite. We shake hands on Sunday with our church family members but for the most part, we never seem to penetrate or reach to find the important things that make us who we are.

Facebook boasts more than 400 million users communicating via its social media. The average user has 130 “friends.” These friends receive up-to-the-minute details of life experiences. It’s reported that 28% of users check their Facebook page on their smart phones before getting out of bed. Yet even with this constant source of connectivity, we seem to say less and less to each other. Facebook posts tend to take the form a few sentences of exasperation when we can’t seem to get the kids to go to bed, or posts bragging about the wonderful time we had at an amazing party. There is no real connectedness there. We encounter the same people repeatedly and really never get to know who they are.

When it comes building friendships and communicating on a deep level, men are by far at a disadvantage over women.We have been conditioned to believe that a true male bonding experience is a couple of guys hanging out drinking beer, making ridiculous and lewd comments about women while watching and reacting to a televised ballgame as if our lives depended on its outcome. Most manly conversations never get past the “look at my new toy” stage. We spend our time talking about the latest computer gadgets, boats or cars. Despite how most of us enjoy watching a good competition between two well prepared and disciplined teams, football is of little significance when compared to the order and dominion of God’s kingdom.

Like those around us, homeschool dads fall short of the duty of strengthening, challenging and refining one another. In fact, the mindless banter of most so called manly conversations today would make men of a few generations back shake their heads in disbelief.

Is it time to put aside careless exchanges and anonymity which we find in today’s conversations? Is it time to invest ourselves in the challenge, accountability and hard work it takes to lay aside childish banter and build up one another up so we can lead our families, friends, neighbors and coworkers in the paths of truth?

In the book Angel in the Whirlwind, Benson Bobrick tells of a time in America, when average men would meet in the taverns and discuss the important issues of life:

The inevitable talk was of politics, religion and trade. Some of the denizens talked ‘tolerably well,’ remarked one visitor who made the rounds of such establishments in 1744, and displayed “that curiosity which was characteristic of the American rustic everywhere.” In one New Jersey tavern, he overheard a discussion about physics, in another, an argument about sacred history between two Irishmen, a Scot and a French Jew. At Saybrook Ferry, Connecticut, some “country rabble” came in and to his surprise, began talking theology “so pointedly, in fact, about justification, sanctification, adoption, regeneration, repentance, free grace, original sin and a thousand other such pretty chimerical knick-knacks one would have thought they had done nothing but study divinity all their lives.”

Now the man quoted by Bobrick surely is wrong about the value of the Christian doctrines that he derides as mirage-like. But Bobrick’s account of our colonial forebears marks the difference between the conversations men have today and those of earlier times.

If you have a group of men in your life that mentors you, challenges you and forces you to think through tough issues, opinions and worldviews, you are indeed blessed! If you don’t, pray that God would bring such men in your path — men who won’t let you get by with the simple surface analysis and unexamined plodding of the average citizen.

On my blog this winter we are reading Anthony Esolen’s book Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child (2010, ISI Books). I won’t share with you all 10 chapters but I thought February, that worst of months for the homeschool mom, would be a good time to talk about the first way we can destroy our children’s imaginations: Keep them indoors.

“Modern times are particularly rough on parents. It is not quite as easy as it used to be to say, ‘Run along, darling, and play outside.’ There can be worrisome things outside. Outside there are two kinds of things: things we should be worried about and things we should not be worried about. Moms sometimes have trouble knowing the difference. We feel that keeping our children safe is one of our main jobs and we take it seriously. And yet we live in a time when ideas on safety have reached a maddening level. Our family has had two incidents that illustrate what I mean.We lived on a dead-end street with only 2 elderly neighbors. I let the children ride their bikes on the street. One day one of the older ladies stopped me and said, “Honey, I am sure you must be a good mother but I can’t understand how you can let your children ride their bikes in the street.” My husband and I talked it over and in deference to this woman and because we didn’t want to borrow any trouble we asked our children to stop riding their bikes.

In that small, rural community our other neighbor had a pond. My son asked the man if he could fish in the pond. The man answered that he was sorry but he was afraid if he let kids fish in the pond someone would drown.

Do you remember the movie Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang? In the country of Vulgaria all the children lived underground, hiding in tunnels. It is hardly a stretch to think that we are now living in Vulgaria. Children are unwelcome in almost any environment and when we can’t get rid of them one way we can always resort to safety issues to keep them well hidden. It is no wonder they sit at home and play on their phones and computers. They might get hurt if they proceed out-of-doors. Our fears for their safety might just be one of things destroying their imaginations.

Esolen says, “Preaching safety to the child, safety above all, safety always, world without end, has the considerable advantage of instilling in him the expectation that life should be provided with boardwalks and handrails.”

Interesting thought! Our concerns for the safety of our children may in fact be creating the nanny state, that ever-growing monster called The Government. This is illustrated by a story my son told me. After Hurricane Katrina in south Florida where it only grazed, within a couple of hours of the storm people were at police barricades demanding the police officers give them water, this in spite of the fact that for days prior to the storm newscasters had been preaching preparedness. I sometimes think that Americans feel that if we take our vitamins we will live forever.

So while we must use common sense about the real dangers we face in our culture, we must also not let fear and bad theology keep us from getting our children outside. It is outside where we meet God on his turf. The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows his handiwork.

Little Cares

    The little cares that fretted me,
    I lost them yesterday
    Among the fields above the sea,
    Among the winds at play;
    Among the lowing of the herds,
    The rustling of the trees,
    Among the singing of the birds,
    The humming of the bees.
    The foolish fears of what may happen--
    I cast them all away
    Among the clover-scented grass,
    Among the new-mown hay;
    Among the husking of the corn
    Where drowsy poppies nod,
    Where ill thoughts die and good are born,
    Out in the fields with God.
    — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Cindy Rollins, who resides in Hixson with her husband and children, is a homeschooling mom of nine. Visit her blog at www.dominionfamily.blogspot.com. E-mail Cindy at dominionfamily@gmail.com.

Culture gives a society form. Like a potter shaping his pots, culture forms and shapes not only art and literature, but all of everyday life in manners. Manners prescribe the form we use to deal with each other in every encounter, the form for properly dealing with birth, death, marriage, and all human celebrations and mourning.

When introduced, unless you aspire to belong to the utterly uncouth, you look the other person in the eyes, smile, and say, “How do you do?” These forms show that we acknowledge and respect each other – and also keep down gun and knife fights. Form is not slavery, but the indispensable aid to civilized life in every comfortable and uncomfortable situation. Form is not the strait jacket of the fanatic, but the comfortable and elegant suit of the civilized.

Culture is self-enforcing

Culture dictates that certain forms must be followed, even in the lowest dives. A lawyer of my acquaintance recounts an altercation in a Wayne County tavern years ago. A stranger entered, ordered an adult beverage, and thought recklessly to amuse himself by throwing spitballs at a lady seated nearby.

Words of rebuke erupted from the lady’s husband. The stranger cast aspersions on the lady’s beauty. Justifiably outraged, the husband at last shot the offending stranger, not much to any onlooker’s surprise and, luckily, not much to his hurt.

At trial, the members of the bar were speculating what sort of defense the husband’s lawyer might enter for his client, seeing that numerous eyewitnesses would testify against him. With no hint of dismay, the defense lawyer carried out an ordinary trial, until the time came for his final argument to the jury. Aware something was in the wind, everyone crowded into the courtroom to listen. It was a defense based on Wayne County manners, to a Wayne County jury. The lawyer stood before the jury and admitted his client had shot the offender, but added, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, there are ten things you may not do in a Wayne County tavern, and everybody knows it. No. 1, you do not throw spitballs at another man’s wife. No. 2, you do not call another man’s wife ‘ugly,’ even if she is.”

I forget now the other eight acts forbidden in Wayne County taverns, but the jury must have agreed with them all, for they let the shooter off with the lightest possible penalty. Certain forms must be observed.

Form is vanishing

Not so long ago Southerners were famous for their forms and manners. Even the humblest and poorest dwellings observed their daily forms, especially at table. Woe betide the child who ate before the blessing, and greater woe yet waited for him who reached for the fried chicken before the preacher. Men opened doors for women, and ne’er a cussword passed their lips in female company. The F-word was unspoken, let alone the now-ubiquitous twelve letter adjective-pronoun-noun-verb-adverb. One slip and you were branded for life as unworthy of decent company.

Yet today, even in the South, form and manners are quickly disappearing. It is a bizarre experience today to attend funerals and weddings where people not only eschew the forms of decent dress (“Please! I don’t want to see your midriff bulge. Tuck it in!”), they haven’t a clue what form the occasion calls for. Like true existentialists, they choose for themselves, one from column A and one from column B, and make up the form as they go. Anything will do, so long as it’s not traditional. Dance on the coffin? Fine. Take your wedding vows off a TV show? Great. Even when the results do not reach the utterly grotesque, they offer no persuasive argument in favour of abandoning traditional forms.

The fault lies with the church

The fault for this abandonment of ancient forms lies not with the state but with the church, for the church trains our inmost hearts and tastes. For its part the state still enforces its time-honoured forms. If you doubt it, attend any court. See what happens when the judge enters and the bailiff cries, “All rise!” Remain seated, and you will quickly learn what the state thinks of form. Next the bailiff will cry out, “Oyez, Oyez, this honourable court is now in session. Draw near and ye shall be heard.” Most likely the bailiff does not say this because he secretly speaks Norman French and understands that “Oyez” means “Hear ye” in French. No, he says it because that bailiffs have used that form since memory runneth not to the contrary.

By and large, the church has abandoned form, and thus made form and manners dispensable in people’s eyes. Once every church had a set form or liturgy it followed, whether Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopal, or Roman Catholic. Growing up Presbyterian, I knew the menu every Sunday: prayers, creed, responsive reading, offering, sermon, hymns, and benediction. However, when I went to church with my Baptist grandparents, the service wasn’t much different, except for the man in front waving during the hymns. My Methodist cousins were positively high church with their liturgy filched from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. It was, after all, the Methodist Episcopal Church.

Today most Protestant churches have abandoned form in a race to conform themselves to formless modernism. “Come as you are” has replaced “worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.” The worship permutations of shallow evangelicalism are dazzling. I have attended churches where the major draw was not the preaching but the coffee bar in the lobby, as the narthex is now called. Worship has degenerated to an orgy of entertainment as the “seekers” relax in cushy theatre style seating, slurp their lattes, and watch worship on a colossal overhead screen to the throbbing beat of the resident rock band. No participation is required. I once attended a church (once only) where there were 1,999 men in polo shirts and one in a suit and tie. Never mind who that fellow was wearing the tie or why he never returned. That church did not, however, obliterate all form, as they were diligently traditional in collecting the offering. Some traditions never die, I reckon.

Much as it stresses the imagination, I have even heard preachers boast that they never prepare a sermon, but just preach “whatever the Lord gives them.” The results are predictably less than riveting. Why does the Lord become so stingy when we abandon the forms of study, meditation, and duty? Beats me.

Nor have the once-liturgical churches lagged behind in this race to modernist bliss. In 1979, the once starchy Episcopalians abandoned the Scripture-packed Book of Common Prayer for a more seeker-friendly liturgy that made no one uncomfortable by the insensitive and tasteless mention of sin, repentance, or orthodox Christianity. The outcome? Orthodoxy has been cast aside along with the form that inculcated it, and the Episcopal Church now ordains homosexual bishops, women, and even cats for all I know.

Roman Catholics joined the race with Vatican II, the folk Mass, and other liturgical experimentation. OK, maybe a Mass in Latin had outlived its time, but what about the rest? Meaning lives in form. No form, no meaning. New form, new meaning.

Form’s revenge

Humans are inescapably formal. Forms do not give life meaning by themselves, but form brings the meaning of life into expression. I pull out chairs and open doors for my wife not because she is too dumb or helpless to do those things for herself, but because observing the form visibly expresses my love and respect.

The Southern statesman and philosopher John C. Calhoun said that the one condition humans cannot stand is anarchy. The boundaries of form and law — culturally or legally enforced — make life harmonious, gracious, predictable and manageable. Obedience to the law is liberty. Form’s limits draw the indispensable boundaries of freedom — and insult. Without form, freedom cannot live. Without form, the only limit to freedom is that gun in the hand of a Wayne County man, determined to avenge an insult.

I much prefer manners.

A small beginning

Most forms are enforced culturally and passed down from generation to generation by training children in them. In the South, we have a priceless cultural foundation four hundred years old, but it will die, is dying, unless we train our children in that culture. Throw a hammer through your television, and make it a family ritual to enjoy supper together. Start there. Train your children to eat with a knife and fork, to carry on intelligible conversation, and to meet strangers with a handshake and straight-on gaze. Train them to show respect for elders, peers and inferiors.

And when the boors tell you this modern world has rendered all those forms outmoded and old-fashioned, simply smile and nod. They’ll never realize that you have identified them as the nincompoops they really are.

Good manners demand that much courtesy.

Franklin Sanders edits and publishes an important financial newsletter, The Moneychanger, to which we have subscribed for years. It specializes in precious metals and is helping us Christians prosper in an age of monetary and moral chaos. <www.the-moneychanger.com>. A year’s 12 issues costs 22 dollars in 90% silver coin, or $149 if you have to write a check in paper dollars. Franklin Sanders S.P., Box 178, Westpoint, TN 38486. Franklin makes an active trade in gold and silver outside the state of Tennessee.

You may have noticed I tend to generalize. Richard Weaver in the introduction to his excellent book Ideas Have Consequences writes, “It is useless to argue against generalization; a world without generalization would be a world without knowledge.” Generalization is a tool that we use to communicate. Allow me to speak generally for a few minutes.

We often hear of the failure of public education. As homeschoolers we are quick to perk up our ears. It is almost universally acknowledged in our culture of empiricism that the main areas of concern for our students are math and science. Studies get pulled out that show our students lagging far behind other countries in those subjects.

Certainly our math and science scores are alarming but I would like to open your eyes to something that is far more alarming and insidious to our culture, a skill so neglected we do not even recognize it as missing. That skill is the 2nd R of the 3 Rs — Reading, Writing and Arithmetic. Our schools are failing to teach and our students are failing to learn one of the basic foundations of a civilized society: Writing.

Richard Weaver said that ideas have consequences. What are the consequences to a society when the skill of writing is a thing of the past? I will let you think about it and I will share with you some things that I have noticed. I was helping in a local tutoring program for underprivileged students. I was supposed to be helping the children understand their math problems. They were in third grade. I read the math book over and over again but could not make heads nor tails of it. I asked the program leader, thinking I must be missing some key mathematical brain cells. She also had trouble understanding the problem. This went on week after week. Finally, realizing I could not be that ignorant I asked several of the other teachers. None of them could figure out what the math book was trying to communicate. Perhaps this was done purposely by the publisher to make parents feel they could never teach their child or maybe it was just poorly written, so poorly written that students were hindered from learning basic math skills by poor writing.

The fact is the one subject public schools have virtually abandoned is writing. Even the efforts at promoting creative writing have largely gone by the wayside these days. Just start asking the students you meet what they do in school. Ask them if they write. What is even scarier is the confidence these children possess. They have no idea they are lacking a basic life skill.

Just as we have yet to see the true long-term affects of the housing bubble, we have yet to see the utter chaos that is coming in every field because of the great number of children who are growing up without learning to write.

My son, a police detective, mentioned that the one skill which makes or breaks a police officer is writing. Not only do policemen have to record everything they do every day, they have to do it in ways that stand up in court. Young people with an aptitude for police work must be taught to write.

You could almost say that writing is the cornerstone of a basic education. It should be the bow that wraps the entire package or maybe a better picture is a bow that ties together a shock of grain. Without that bow we have no organizing principle.

I have been critical of public schools but the fact is that many homeschoolers also shy away from writing or think of it as a subject for the talented or feminine.

This does not necessarily mean that you need to teach formal writing in a rigidly structured manner. I much prefer that writing be taught from an organic standpoint and I think Charlotte Mason’s ideas provide the exact right balance for that process.

While reading alone will not produce great writers, when coupled with daily writing it will make a huge difference in content, style and mechanics. Daily written narrations tie writing to each of these three areas. They bring in the added benefit of making the student comfortable writing which is where most schools flounder. The student becomes comfortable writing not because he is talking about himself (creatively) but because he is getting outside of his own head, that limited piece of mush, and he is doing this discipline every single day from 9 or 10 years old through high school and beyond. Formal writing is added when the child is comfortable with written narrations. In my opinion, writing, grammar, reading, oral instruction and editing should all work back and forth in a sort of symbiotic relationship. This is not to say that the written narrations are not formally critiqued. The written narrations are the platform for feedback.

The student who has become comfortable writing by writing daily and the student who has been given the skills needed to write coherently will have a big head start in college, yes, but even more importantly, I believe this student will have the one skill needed to build or perhaps even rebuild a civilized society.

Cindy Rollins, who resides in Hixson with her husband and children, is a homeschooling mom of nine. Visit her blog at <www.dominionfamily.blogspot.com>. E-mail Cindy at dominionfamily@gmail.com.

By Matt Trewhella

In America today, everyone thinks you should just go to college after you’re done with high school. Parents just assume it is their duty to make sure their child goes off to the university. Very little thought goes into this decision — other than which university.

I want to proffer the idea that maybe one should not go to college at all. Statistically, over 65% of college graduates never use the degree they received when they go out to work in the real world. In order to get their degree, the average college graduate accumulates $24,000 of debt. The debt for those who go on to graduate studies is routinely well over $100,000.

How can it be wise to start off one’s life tens of thousands of dollars in debt, especially for a piece of paper which — statistically – you’re probably not going to use? The Bible repeatedly exhorts us to avoid debt (Prov. 22:7; Rom. 13:8; etc). Christians need to end the “I gotta go to college; I gotta find a job” mentality. Most people walk around with the “I gotta go to college; I gotta find a job” mentality because they have no self-initiative. They’d rather be led around by the nose and hand all their life by society — rather than strike out on their own and risk making something of themselves.

They like living in a nation addicted to mediocrity. They like going-along to get-along. They like the comfort, ease, and wealth that the system has created, namely, go to college; get a good paying job; live my life out in self-centered fatness — and leave no mark on the earth whatsoever that you were ever here.

The education industry in America wants you dependent on them. They want you to think you need them. “But the only way to get a good paying job in America is if you go and get a college degree” so says my critic. A fair trade I suppose — you get their degree so that you get paid well (supposedly) — if all you’re interested in is money. You only have to trade your strength, your creativity, your independent thought, and your self-initiative for their comfort, ease and wealth.

Do you know how old the youngest Pony Express rider was? Eleven years old. Many of them were teenagers. The education industry in America doesn’t like young people getting such notions. They want to perpetuate adolescence. They want to keep all young people in high school (a hundred years ago only 10% of the population attended high school) and now they want to keep all young people in college for another four years (when I was growing up in the 1960’s, only 10% of Americans went to college, now 63% attend).

The result is perpetual adolescence. Young people ever learning (playing), but never coming to manhood or womanhood. Because of the “system,” young people do not take on responsibility and mature.

Because of this newly created extension of childhood (called adolescence), teens in most homes do not have any significant productive role in the family or in the wider general economy. This creates an “identity crisis.” Their biological maturity is not matched by any social maturity. They are denied the maturation process, denied responsibility, and are left in a no-man’s land between childhood and adulthood, as their “education” goes on ad nauseam.

I always tell my children, “If you’re not called into the ministry, then build your own business.” Avoid debt in doing so. If you’re thinking, “Oh, but how can I do that,” the education industry has already made you into the helpless waif they want you to become. Christians need to oppose state licensure for various jobs and trades. Christians need to set the standard in academia and give up the golden calf of state accreditation. Christian families and churches need to equip, instruct, and motivate Christian young people to enter the business world, rather than just the social-engineering of the college world.

Finally, Christian parents need to quit just assuming God wants their little Johnny or Jessica to go off to college and make good money. When I was young, we put our faces low to the ground and cried out to the Lord, asking Him what He wanted us to do with our lives. This is what is of paramount importance.

Matt Trewhella is the pastor of Mercy Seat Christian Church and founder of Missionaries To The Preborn. He and his wife, Clara, have 11 children and reside in the Milwaukee, Wis., area. To hear a sermon for young people on seeking the will of God, go to MercySeat.net and click on the sermon “America’s Sons.”