I was a baby revolutionary. I was not aware of it when it began, except to observe that I didn’t ride the school bus, didn’t have “homework,” and didn’t use a lunchbox—all of which seemed hopelessly glamorous by their absence. What I had instead was less tangible or easy to appreciate at the time: an organic rhythm to the day, a devoted teacher with complete creative freedom, and an infinite amount of time to read. Lincoln beautifully described writing as “the great invention of the world”: “great, very great in enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and space.” In company like that, though I was a class of one, I was not alone at all.
In the past decade, there has been an exodus from school. The National Center for Education Statistics estimates that in 2007, 1.5 million American children were educated at home—five times the number in 1990, when I didn’t go to kindergarten, just a few years after the powers that be stopped sending truant officers to knock on people’s doors. I like to call this wave the Revolution partly because, at a purely impressionistic level, it seems like the sort of people to whom revolutionariness is theoretically appealing are more likely to find it disturbing—there’s no telling what the social conservatives are up to out of sight!—and partly because “the Revolution does Shakespeare,” for instance, has a nice ring to it. (This is what my mother does these days with my younger brothers and their friends and any other homeschoolers within her gravitational pull: she directs them in full-blown productions of Shakespeare plays. Practicing a scene is an opportunity to talk about the characters, the tension, the context, the words; going over lines is an opportunity to imprint stretches of the greatest English ever written on the memory for good. I mention this as an example of the way that the new outré educators handle the responsibility of teaching.)
Parents choose to homeschool for any number of reasons. Mine kept me home because there are not enough hours in the day to justify parking a young child at a desk inside a room for mind-boggling amounts of time when there are so many other things to do. For every reason to homeschool, there is a chorus faithfully protesting it, and like most controversies in education policy, it is not actually about education policy. The most common concern by far is socialization, which as often as not has a political angle. This anxiety is nicely summed up by an op-ed that a commentator by the name of M. J. Andersen published in the local paper when I was in eighth grade, which, with equal parts bathos and condescension, pleaded with conservatives to keep their kids in school. At the time, it got my friends and me all riled up, and we dashed off an outraged letter to the editor about all the different people that we knew; now, however, I am more inclined to find it rather droll: “There these kids will be,” she wrote, “never knowing what it is to sit next to the one who smells, or wears ugly shoes; the one who runs like the wind but cannot add, and cries in defeat; the one with the funny accent; the one whose skin is darker or lighter; whose hair is silkier, or coarser, or teased high; the child who has more; who has less; who never speaks of home, because it is a sad and secret place. The public schools offer enough of an education in democracy to break your heart. They may be the only true civic training many of us will ever get. So what happens when hordes of children desert, and grow up unable to imagine anyone unlike themselves?”
It will be a sorry day when civic life is mediated wholly through the public schools, but this fear is born more of a failure of imagination on Ms. Andersen’s part than of reality. In point of fact, though, her unstated premise is quite right: we only really learn who people are by personal interaction. For this reason, it seems clear that she has never met real live homeschoolers, or perhaps she would know better. Certainly, where I grew up, different kinds of people living on the same land seemed to track on different orbits—or, more accurately, inhabit parallel universes. There was the general community, whose pulse was set by the Ivy League university where my father worked, and there was our invisible counterculture.
And though the habits of the counterculture were never as regressive as its critics like to think, set that aside and imagine for a moment that it was just as spooky as you please, because that makes the next part more interesting: in ninth grade, I crossed over and enrolled in public school, at an institution philosophically located on the outer reaches of the Left.
I liked school; strangely enough, it felt like summer camp to me, being part of an entire herd of kids steered from one activity to the next. But the politics—the politics were everywhere, and were like a person loudly talking to himself. There were no counterpoints and no one to convince, simply a gong to bang for the spiritual satisfaction of it, or perhaps to ward off evil energy from the Right. I was uncertain of my own views on most issues at the time, but while I thought them through, it troubled me that the sinister intent of people I knew at least a little bit about was universally assumed. I felt it was incumbent on me, as the sole emissary from an alien land, to put together a better public relations package.
This burden was dragging around with me when, one fine afternoon, I approached the bus stop where a classmate I somewhat knew and another I had never seen before were chattering away about abortion politics. I have no idea why two fifteen-year-old guys were sitting under a tree talking about that, or why I thought it was the opening I had been waiting for, but, announcing myself, I was instantly snowed under as my classmate leaped to his feet and unleashed an avalanche of thought. His friend evaporated, while he and I continued the discussion on the bus and later via e-mail. Over the next week, we worked our way through the meaning of history, whether truth is absolute or relative, the question of evil, and other matters well within our ken. I was lost. Worse, I felt that I was mangling important ideas that deserved a better voice, so, with a melodramatic flourish, I shut down the conversation.
Sam—that was his name (not really)—was a geyser of opinions and orations and ideas, who rambled around perpetually disheveled by sheer force of cerebral energy. He had a charmingly kooky demeanor, a big heart for everyone around him, an even worse sense of direction than I did, and a singing voice on loan from God. But I would not find this out for a long time, because I was so embarrassed that I totally avoided him. Meanwhile, however, I determined to do one thing: I would return to the issue of abortion, do some research, marshal my thoughts, and write a defense of life.
As it happened, there was a statewide speech contest on the Constitution that my U.S. history teacher was interested in sponsoring. A fellow traveler of Howard Zinn, she was a charismatic Texan earth mother who had us call her simply Marla and taught us how the Man done wrong. Her second-favorite mantra was “you bought the lie” —but her first was “use your voice,” and it was an idea she absolutely stood behind. There is a maxim attributed (erroneously) to Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” You have probably heard people say this before, and probably thought that they were full of it. Marla, however, spent untold afternoons helping me write and practice this anti-Roe speech, and drove me up and down the state to deliver it. She watched me speak with a look on her face like she wished she could believe in a world where that was her position, too.
Marla presided over a cult following of the most politically passionate students, whom she eventually assembled into a debate squad. Uninterested in standard-variety high school debauchery, these were the driven radicals, itching to do battle with all the imperfections of the world—and too absorbed in their own causes to take part in the casual corrosive attitude endemic to the rest of the school. Though the substance of their convictions was foreign to me, the intensity was familiar: they were kindred spirits through the looking-glass. A shy little intergalactic migrant, I had the pleasure of being welcomed into their open moon-bat arms.
The first to befriend me was Luke, a merry six-foot-plus impresario who could strike up a conversation with a hole in the wall. A hugger of trees, he was devoted to Ralph Nader, and liked to beat that drum in no small part to get a rise out of people who were existentially afraid that Nader would hand over the 2000 election to George W. Bush. “Vote your conscience,” was Luke’s beatific rejoinder. The mysteries of conscience were endlessly amusing to him, not because they were trivial but because, as I once heard somewhere, if we cannot laugh at what is sacred then we cannot laugh at anything—for what isn’t sacred? He was in my biology class, and any time the lecture ventured near such topics as “fossil record” or “natural selection,” he would begin bouncing up and down, turn to me with a Cheshire grin, and devilishly cock an eyebrow. He found this routine so hilarious that I didn’t have the heart to tell him I was not the creationist that he supposed.
(Unrelatedly, I have never been to Luke’s house at any hour of day or night when there was not a pot of ramen noodles bubbling on the stove. I eventually came to believe that this is a spiritual ritual for the family, an ongoing offering to a parochial noodle deity who diligently protects the household from becoming more normal than it is. I like to imagine they arrange their ramen duties by ship’s bell: “Joey, 03:00. Your watch.”)
Luke’s best friend, Daniel, was a white-hot flame of pacifism. He agonized about sanctions and no-fly zones and occupation and the works. In debate scrimmages, he spoke like the fate of the human race depended on what happened in the round. When U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq, he and Luke and company stood day after day in several feet of snow (always in Birkies, with or without socks), waving cardboard signs and trying to communicate to passing cars that war is horrifying. For whose benefit, exactly? We’re talking about rural New England roads with a few stray vehicles, whose drivers would reliably be anti-Bush already. This bordered on the absurd—but just as Luke saw comedy in the sacrosanct, there was something sanctified about this comedy.
Daniel was lit from within by deep moral instincts that were not mine. This is an unremarkable circumstance that becomes dizzying when you try to stare at it directly. What is the meaning of our beliefs, which come from outside ourselves, and point us beyond ourselves, but seemingly do not derive from the same source or point in the same direction?
It is tempting to relativize them, and easy enough for anybody who does not have firm convictions of his own; but this is to say that they mean almost nothing. This position has its very own decal: the stupendously annoying “Coexist” bumper sticker, in which each letter takes the form of a different religious or political symbol. Its sole purpose is to broadcast the moral superiority of people not confined to a particular tradition in the first place, and does less than nothing to further actual coexistence, as desirable as that may be.
Another popular approach is to dispatch the ideas that one doesn’t share or understand as either disingenuous or delusional. But apart from all the obvious problems with that, it bankrupts the strength of character in people—and what could be more dear, or less replaceable?
I support the U.S. military’s efforts in the war on terror, not because the collateral damage does not matter but because of what is at stake. (No one, after all, believes in war for its own sake.) And yet, our national conscience depends in part on people like Daniel, to whom the larger picture is not as important as the individual lives being lost—because to the bereaved, these losses are not “in perspective,” either. They are everything. And we would be a callous people if some of us did not mourn them as though they really are.
That is a policy example of a question that runs much deeper than policy. But it was a way to begin thinking about it. As for Daniel, he grew into his vocation and found himself a larger audience. For the past few years, he worked for a Palestinian news agency in the West Bank, until—for reasons that remain unclear—he was detained by Israeli authorities for several days at Ben Gurion Airport, repeatedly interrogated, and in the end deported back to the United States. “Most Likely to Be Involved in an International Incident” was not in our yearbook, but in a strange way it seems to me that he would not be fulfilling his potential if he weren’t doing something that came at a cost.
These were some of the people I most admired in my sojourn on the Left—Daniel with his peace on earth, Luke with his goodwill toward men, and Marla, the best kind of teacher. Also Sam, whom Marla had assigned to be my debate partner. I was none too thrilled, because that meant I actually had to talk to him, awkwardness and all. Sam, who was too kind ever to reproach me afterward, had an insatiable interest in everything—and what had been confusing before became exhilarating. Politics was only the smallest and least heady part. We would go to tournaments in strange cities, invariably get lost, and, like Shakespeare’s great old king, “take upon us the mystery of things as if we were God’s spies” while wandering around in the rain. The one time he ever struggled to find words was when I fell in love with him and he had to tell me that he was gay. That afternoon, all the songs and arguments and big ideas and vistas were dissolved, leaving only two kids trying not to break each other’s hearts.
It dawned on me years after the fact that this is what the op-ed writer chiefly had in mind when she worried about Right-wing homeschoolers encountering “anyone unlike themselves.” The hope is that exposure to “diversity,” as defined by various agendas, instills a kind of comprehensive sympathy where there was none before. The trouble with that line of thinking is that it treats people as if they exist only to belong to categories—and when you actually care for someone, the categories are what matter least about him.
Nonetheless, people organize themselves by labels well enough for there to be a sharp cultural divide, and there is a great deal of mutual suspicion being harbored in the trenches. Maybe it is equally distributed and maybe not, but that’s beside the point. Good people, disgusted by the vitriol, look for salvation in leaders’ perennial odes to bipartisanship, but that is also not the point. Political cooperation cannot paper over the apparently irreconcilable worldviews at the heart of who we are. And while there is no shortcut for the seekers—parallel lines converge at infinity; what of parallel universes?—we live in a marvelous, improbable, preposterous nation that stakes its ideals around the opportunity to seek. I would only note that “seek and ye shall find” is a two-Testament promise; it is also the underlying premise of the scientific method and of rational philosophy. In that, there is a crazy kind of hope for anyone who wants to come on out and parley.
Meanwhile, the country and its ideals will not seem worth defending to people who are busy raining bile on each other’s consciences. Loving America means loving Americans, in all of their bewildering variety, not as abstract categories but face by face by face.