By Reverend Brenda Hoffman

How do homeschool children get exposed to values other than the commercial values of a mass society?

Schools may be able to prepare children to fit into the mass society or to help them find a set of values with which they could resist and reject the values of mass society. What this really means is that schools can teach children to believe what most people believe and to like what most people like. However, they cannot do both: prepare children to fit into mass society while helping them find a set of values with which they could resist and reject the values of mass society. Why? Because, if you stop to think about it, you will see that these 2 items actually cancel each other out. Usually this means that educators opt to believe that they, and they alone, hold out to the young a vision of higher things. They seem to believe that they spend the majority of their time and energy defending children from the corrupt values of the mass media and TV. They also seem to believe that without them children won't hear about good books, Shakespeare, and culture. To them, they (the educators) are the only ones who are thinking about what is good for our children while everyone else is simply trying to exploit them. However, if you look close enough, you'll see that most schools are far more concerned with having children accept the values of mass society rather than helping children resist them. It's actually become so ingrained within society to think that in order for children to to live reasonably happy, useful, and successful lives they have to be considerably like most other people.

In reality, the schools' efforts to sell children the higher culture seldom work because it is quite obvious that these educators value it so little themselves. Today's schools are filled with people who are obsessed with the media-inspired worship of dominance, luxury, and power. This anticulture has done great harm by fragmenting, degrading, and corrupting them. If the schools had a true and humane culture of their own, which they really understood, believed in, cared about, and lived by, then they would put up a stiff resistance which would be able to win at least some of the children over. Yet, since the culture of the school is only a pale and somewhat more timid and gentle version of the culture of the outside world, nothing changes. So, today's schools are not only unable to guide our children away from greed, envy, and violence, the schools cannot even protect them against each other. Instead, today's schools, regardless of affluence, are filled with children who are only interested in money, sex, and drugs. Where are the children who want to do something to make a better world?

I honestly don't think that we should be surprised that our children are most interested in those things which most interest their parents, and other adults. I also don't think that it's the school's fault either. Today's schools are finding themselves being attacked from all sides. They weren't the ones who invented these values. However, to the extent that the schools have tried to combat these values they've failed. Therefore, they cannot claim that they're teaching children to accept and also resist these dominant values of our commercial culture.

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