Woodward: Flannery O'Connor and Home Schooling

Not really. I just decided to combine in a single title the two subjects that have consistently generated the largest number of comments on this blog.

Okay, okay -- I realize that's cheating. So here indeed is Flannery O'Connor on home schooling, sort of. It's from the beginning of The Violent Bear It Away, the one work of O'Connor's that I never got around to reading back when she was an enthusiasm of mine, but which I am reading and enjoying now. It's the story of an eccentric backwoods preacher/prophet who kidnaps his nephew as an infant in order to raise the child in the light of the uncle's own...well, we'll call it a world view.

His uncle had taught him Figures, Reading, Writing, and History beginning with Adam expelled from the Garden and going on down through the presidents to Herbert Hoover and on in speculation toward the Second Coming and the Day of Judgment...The old man had always impressed on him his good fortune in not being sent to school. The Lord had seen fit to guarantee the purity of his upbringing, to preserve him from contamination, to preserve him as His elect servant, trained by a prophet for prophecy. While other children his age were herded together in a room to cut out paper pumpkins under the direction of a woman, he was left free for the pursuit of wisdom, the companions of his spirit Abel and Enoch and Noah and Job, Abraham and Moses, King David and Solomon, and all the prophets, from Elijah who escaped death, to John whose severed head struck terror from a dish. The boy knew that escaping school was the surest sign of his election.

Personally, this strikes me as a dangerously liberal curriculum. My wife and I home school our five children, and we stop at Calvin Coolidge.