Some Thoughts After Reading About the Scopes Monkey Trial

This week we read about evolution, specifically the Scopes Trial. We learned that John Scopes, a high school teacher in Tennessee, dared to teach evolution to his students even though it was a crime in that state. Scopes felt it was important to push against that law; he was prosecuted by William Jennings Bryan and defended by Clarence Darrow. At least one play and one movie have been made about the trial.

I expected Simon to be interested in the story--as a teenager, I was riveted by the play based on the trial, "Inherit the Wind." Besides, Simon's dad is a lawyer, and Simon tends to be acutely interested in any show-down between right and wrong, truth and its opposite. I thought the story would get some kind of rise out of him.

"This story is totally boring, Mom. Let's read the next one. I already looked--it's about Charles Lindbergh. He was a pilot. I think he flew to Paris."

"Simon, why is the story about the Scopes Monkey Trial boring?"

"Well, some people don't know that the Bible is just stories, just a bunch of myths. It's like Greek mythology, but instead it's about Moses and Jesus. They're just great stories. About that Scopes trial with a lot of super ancient lawyers--that's so lame. Who cares? The world is very old and we all descend from dinosaurs and apes. Everybody knows that. Don't waste time. The pilot--he's called Lindbergh--let's read about him."

I sat there flabbergasted. Where to begin? For starters, I wanted to say to Simon: Those great lawyers weren't THAT old! I wanted to say: This trial is crucial as a way to understand some central concerns of the 19th and 20th century--how can you be so dismissive? I wanted to say:How can you have figured out already how you feel about the God/no God question? You're only eleven.

But for Simon these are all easy questions. He's growing up in a secular home; he's homeschooled in a mostly secular milieu; he's an equal opportunity consumer of stories and myths: the story of Joseph one day, of Athena the next, of Robin Hood the day after that. He has no intimate knowledge of a world governed and defined by belief. In our home, we talk of Jewish and Christian traditions and celebrate with vim and vigor and lots of home-made food--but belief and prayer have no part in these events. Simon does not understand all that came undone, and all that was liberated, with the theory of evolution. For him the rub, the tug of war between belief and secularism, is endlessly dull, a waste of time. No match for Lindbergh.

* * *

I, on the other hand, live my life in that rub, especially since I became a home-educator. Before I moved to Miami and began teaching Simon and joining homeschooling groups, I had never met an Evangelical--they're pretty uncommon among Boston academics. Mind you, I was forty-five before that first encounter and had lived in this country over twenty-five years--and I was out and about all that time, not hiding under a rock. I'm not kidding: I had never met an Evangelical. Not one.

I have made every mistake possible in my forays into that world these last few years in Miami. I've said the wrong things, asked the wrong questions, made the wrong assumptions and jokes and suggestions, taught the wrong materials, supported the wrong party, espoused the wrong values, read the wrong books, newspapers, magazines.

Somewhere along the line, I gave up attempting to find common ground. Expecting absolutely nothing, I'm always delighted when I can get through an hour or two of socializing among a diverse group of homeschooling parents at a park group (some families are secular, some are not) without giving offense, or driving away fighting tears. I keep the talk to all things small, educational and uncontroversial: asking questions about the best way to teach reading, grammar and writing are always safe bets.

When I began attending these groups, I wished for friendship and community. Now I just hope I can keep my mouth shut and that Simon has fun with the other kids. Slowly, over the course of many years, Simon has made a few friends--so have I.

So the rub is not there. Being a raised-Catholic-Jewish-convert liberal agnostic among Bible-belt conservative believers is not the easiest thing I've ever done, but it's doable. What is difficult to handle is how the educated and informed in this country view the homeschooling community.

Every time one of the main publications in America prints a expose about how the Christian Right--and homeschoolers in particular--are fabricating a Christian take on American history, or taking science back to the 19th century, or questioning global warming, or infiltrating state education boards and thereby making sure these fictions make it into textbooks used in public schools nationwide, I get at least one e-mail from someone I know outside the insular world of homeschooling. They want to make sure I read the piece, that I know about it. They worry. I don't get a single e-mail from anyone that homeschools. The silence from that world is deafening. Oblivious to a gathering storm, they mosey along. (For links to some of the main articles published, please see the links included in my entry for February 20, 2010. This past week, The New York Times ran a story on how the Christian Right is gaining ground in some states, asking that global warming be presented in classrooms as only a theory up for debate.)

Why worry? There will be a backlash. Nothing good will happen for homeschoolers of all flavors, secular and Christian, if the most respected papers and magazines in the country are running articles and cover stories presenting homeschoolers as anti-intellectual, intransigent, ignorant, nutty. Regulations will be expanded and tightened. They will.

What can be done? There is a desperate need for all and everyone who is giving their children a rigorous college preparatory education to speak up, to write, to come forward, to organize. Those same publications need to know how diverse and varied homeschoolers are, that there are thousands and thousands--maybe the numbers are in the hundreds of thousands--among us who want our children to be ready for the 21st century.