The Mount Rushmore of Homeschooling

Looks An Awful Lot Like... Mount Rushmore

As the school year begins, a trip down memory lane, courtesy of one of the world’s most famous monuments:

Chances are you know that Honest Abe was largely self-educated, with less than a year of formal schooling in his childhood. So was this gentleman:

Perhaps that isn’t that much of a surprise. After all, if they taught Defeating the British 101 at the local high school in Virginia, I suppose everyone would have done it…

Alright, so the presidency admitted a country bumpkin or two; it happens in the best of families. Yet, surely, you insist, the great Teddy Roosevelt – the man who was publishing naval history textbooks and ornithology treatises in his spare time as a Harvard undergrad – must have gone to school? After all, he didn’t grow up in a log cabin. His father was one of the wealthiest men in the country and was, moreover, the driving force behind the building of The American Museum of Natural History. Here was a man who clearly understood the importance of the pursuit of knowledge and had more than enough resources to ensure his curious son got the best education money could buy. Which is precisely why young Teddy was homeschooled – the family understood quite well that no formal, one-size-fits-all, mass-produced classroom curriculum could keep pace with Teddy’s interests and passions.

Roosevelt – like Washington and Lincoln before him – was a voracious reader. David McCullough’s masterful biography of the young Roosevelt reveals a family steeped in poetry and literature. McCullough argues that reading Robert Browning – at age 11! – changed Teddy’s life forever. He also devoured adventure books, every nature textbook he could get his hands on (especially lots of fellow homeschooler Audubon), and started his own natural history museum in a spare room, with spillover turtles kept in the laundry basket and dead mice in the icebox – all the while learning French, German, and Latin. His principal teachers were his elder sister and his aunt. His father would spend evenings reading to the family aloud from Walter Scott or ancient history and organized family theatrical productions, rehearsing lines with the children for hours – he also made the children take turns giving impromptu speeches after dinner, and of course memorize Bible verses on Sundays. Teddy’s mom, a real-life Southern belle rumored to be the inspiration for the fictional Scarlett O’Hara, knew Dickens and Shakespeare by heart and, a natural-born raconteur, captivated the children with tales of the most stirring adventures. Above all, Teddy and his family were outside, always outside – hiking for miles, boating, swimming, playing, and exploring. As McCullough perfectly summarizes (my italics), the Roosevelts were a family “uneducated in any usual, formal fashion but also uninhibited by education – ardent readers, insatiable askers of questions.”

What, then, of Thomas Jefferson? I suppose you can call him the black sheep of the Black Hills, since he’s the only one of the four who wasn’t a truant. Jefferson, like Roosevelt, came from wealth, and his family made sure to send him off to elite boarding schools as soon as possible. Yet before you write the author of the Declaration off as a total loss, take a closer look…

What kind of elite boarding school did he go to? Well, it was a home school! To be precise, the Reverend James Maury, Rector of one of Virginia’s oldest churches, ran a classical school from his home. Reverend Maury – not a staff of dozens, just the one reverend with no guidance counselor or secretary to the assistant vice principal in sight – taught his small group of pupils Latin and Greek, manners and morals, mathematics, literature, history, and geography. In short, Jefferson’s early education (like the schooling of all those who made up our brilliant founding generation) had far more in common with your typical classical homeschool co-op – or small, countercultural Christian classical school – than any public school you could find today.

What is my point? Well, return to modern day. Imagine your town erects a massive statue honoring Michael Phelps, while at the same time going around filling in every swimming pool. Or City Hall renames the local school in honor of Michael Jordan, while simultaneously passing an ordinance banning all basketballs.  I know a lot of athletes, I can keep this up all day, but, as usual, C.S. Lewis puts it best: “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” Let me add: we chisel massive mountain monuments to our nation’s greatest leaders while ensuring that no living child can follow their example.

If Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, or Roosevelt were born today, would they be growing up memorizing Bible verses, exploring the woods, reciting Shakespeare, and steeped in Greek and Latin? Fat chance. I bet they’d know all about the Genderbread Person, though. No chance of stirring up the ol’ moral imagination or cultivating virtue, but I bet they’d get free school lunches and personal laptops, so there’s that.

It doesn’t have to be this way; it certainly didn’t use to be this way. And you didn’t have to be a self-taught genius like Lincoln, or a wealthy boarding school elite like Jefferson, to learn something worth learning. Here, courtesy Jeremy Wayne Tate, is a typical eighth grade exam from a rural American public school district, a few years before construction began on Mount Rushmore:

This was not an exam from the nation’s fanciest prep school: “Bullitt County Schools were mostly one-room schools in those days, scattered around the rural county.” Yet the kids from a one room schoolhouse, without tablets or Common Core or even air conditioning, could answer questions most college graduates today could not.

Nor was rural Kentucky an outlier. Long time readers will remember my deep dive into a typical Illinois Public School textbook, one from 1927, the very year construction began on Mount Rushmore (also known as Year 53 BDE, or Before Department of Education, which was founded in 1980) . New subscribers, please do take a peek: it would be college level analysis today (except for all the parts about Jesus and various saints, which would be expurgated with the same kind of revulsion a public schoolteacher in 1927 would have felt, for, well, the Genderbread Person).

Mainstream schools can’t teach real history to Americans anymore, because if they did, too many of us would see how terrible our mainstream schools have become.  Look at that above eighth grade test, read the excerpts from that typical early 20^th century public school textbook. Compare to anything children today – let alone most current undergrads – are expected to master. Consider further that, for truly wealthy families of old like the Roosevelts and Jeffersons, even that clearly superior level of education was subpar and not fit for their talented children. Yet today we accept a far, far, far dumber education for all of ours – and many even celebrate it as a public good!

Next time you find yourself in South Dakota, or watching North by Northwest – or, er, National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets – ask yourself: what kind of heroes are you building monuments to in your child’s mind, and are you equipping your littles to follow their example? Or are you simply hoping that Michael Jordan learned to dunk from looking at a statue of James Naismith?

Thank you for reading, and here’s wishing you and yours all the best for this academic year!