Bill Gothard on Education

My parents began homeschooling me in third grade, and enrolled in Gothard's Advanced Training Institute, a curriculum exclusively for alumni of his Advanced Seminar, before I started seventh grade. Our family was part of ATI until I reached my mid-twenties.

The following statements are the main points from a session of Bill Gothard's Advanced Seminar. They can be found on pages 88-91 of the accompanying workbook and on his website. Looking back, these "principles" explain so much of my educational experience.

Advanced Seminar Session 16: Successful Education

(Bill Gothard)

• The ultimate goal of education is not to produce a degree, but to produce many godly generations. 

• God charges parents and grandparents, not teachers, with the responsibility to train their sons and daughters.

• God established the home, not the school, as the primary learning center; the school and church must be recognized as extensions of it.

• The most destructive force in school is peer dependence, and parents must constantly work to protect their children from it.

• God wants the priorities of every family to be built around daily engrafting of Scripture, rather than accumulating man's knowledge.

• The ability of sons and daughters to stand alone is the result not of rules, but of principles that assure a superior way of life.

• When knowledge is learned before godly character, it produces pride and arrogance.

• Parents who teach sons and daughters at home must be accountable to a local church (Christian school and the government).

• Sons and daughters thrive with appropriate responsibility, and it is God's goal that they be mature in their youth.

• God gave boys and girls differing aptitudes; when children are taught together, boys are programmed for failure.

• When schools group children by ages, older examples are cut off and rebels usually rise to leadership.

• When the Bible is separated from courses, the contents come under the control of human reasoning.

• True socializing takes place not in the arbitrary groupings of school, but in the real world of children-to-adult relationships.

• Valuable learning time is lost in school; two hours of home teaching is equivalent to six hours of school teaching.

• The key to effective education is not just a trained teacher and a professional curriculum, but a concerned parent and a motivated child.

• God has set a limitation on learning; thus, academic freedom is no justification for studying the details of evil.

As an ATI student, I attended numerous conferences that became pep rallies for volunteerism with the Institute or urged us to study our favorite topics from the safety of our homes. (I even spent eighteen months enrolled in IBLP's unaccredited correspondence law school!)

Inge Cannon was one familiar conference speaker. Cannon holds a master's degree in education and helped Gothard develop the ATI curriculum in the early 1980's. She later directed the National Center for Home Education, a division of HSLDA.

At an opening session of the 1990 ATI training conference held at the University of Tennesee in Knoxville, Inge Cannon warned us against the dangerous "High Places" of education. As she talked, I took careful and enthusiastic notes. I was just fourteen, and excited about this chance to sit with the adults.

In the Bible, God repeatedly told the ancient Israelites to tear down the idolatrous "high places". Cannon thus defined a high place as:

"any goal or objective so commonly accepted that it is validated and esteemed as good, even though it violates the will and word of God".

According to Cannon, the following "high places" are educational myths for home-educating parents to avoid.

The High Places of Education

(Inge Cannon--June 23, 1990)

• Comparison--i.e., SAT tests and bell-shaped curves, parents should not base their curriculum on these; also pluralism that pressures those with strong beliefs to "give in to those who believe nothing"

• Grading--earning a teacher's certificate, for example, merely means one has passed the right courses, not that one is "qualified to produce results"

• Completion--filling in all the blanks or answering all the questions or taking the final exam does not mean the educational task is complete; the object is to "know" the material, not merely to "cover" it

• Equivalency--"believing that a curriculum is proper and right when it matches the academic sequence and requirements of traditional, formal education"

• Tangibility--"believing only what I can see or touch is real, thereby de-emphasizing those elements that require faith or minister to the spirit of my child"

• Self-expression--"believing that the arts are too personal to be governed by absolute standards"; the arts can never be amoral

• Methodology--"believing there is only one right way to teach a lesson"

• Socialization--"Children don't learn anything good from one another!"

• Exposure--exposing children to all kinds of knowledge is unnecessary for a well-rounded education; children should be ignorant of evil, they shouldn't understand dirty jokes, they shouldn't study false religions; "There are some things God doesn't want us to know."

• Statistical Verification--believing [the Bible] "needs to be verified  by scientific measurements before choosing to obey its instructions"

During my time in ATI, I was just one of thousands of young people who were told that we didn't need college credits, that college would corrupt our minds with "vain philosophies" and threaten our faith, that there are some things "God doesn't want us to know", and that employers would come looking for us because of our diligence, obedience, and virtue. So, many of us dutifully eschewed degrees in favor of home-based study.

Gothard, incidentally, later changed his mind and now even touts the Ph.D. degree Lousiana Baptist University conferred on him in 2004, much to the chagrin of those of us for whom the new dispensation came too late. Hundreds of former ATI students live today with the socioeconomic consequences of what we were taught, even as we struggle to catch up to our college-educated peers.

What About Socialization?

From the time I left public school (3rd grade), I heard adults inquiring, "But what about about socialization?"

I learned to parrot the answers offered by my parents and their friends: we socialize with each other, we get along with adults because we are not artificially segregated from other age groups, children don't learn anything good from their peers, siblings can be best friends for life, and so on.

From these responses and others, I assumed that "socialization" was just another noun form of "social", as in "Ladies' Aid Social" and "Strawberry Social". That it was semantically equivalent to the gerund "socializing". Perhaps our parent-teachers thought so, too.

Then I found Keeping Them Out of the Hands of Satan by Susan Rose.

Published in 1988 when the Christian day school movement and its parallel, homeschooling, were in full swing, Keeping Them Out of the Hands of Satan is an ethnography in which Rose, a sociologist, shares her careful observations and comparisons of two very different church-run private schools. Though I had never attended a religious school, this paragraph felt comfortable:

"Evangelicals are engaged in cultural production, in creating new forms of educational experience for themselves and their children. . . ." 

Yes, they would definitely say so. This was familiar ground for any homeschooled kid.

But, there was more.

"Socialization is the process by which people and institutions transmit the values, beliefs, and behaviors necessary for appropriate functioning in their particular culture to others. It is a recruitment process--whether recruiting children into adult worlds or resocializing adults into different roles or a new subculture. Socialization involves 'the whole process by which an individual born with behavioral potentialities of enormously wide range is confined within a much narrower range--the range of what is customary and acceptable for him according the standards of his group.'"

I was dumbfounded.

Is that what they meant? Those people who asked with concern, "What about socialization?" Did they know that socialization meant learning how to function appropriately in the culture? And did my answers relieve their anxiety or simply cause them to shake their heads? Suddenly I wished I could remember who they were, those grown-ups who had expressed interest and concern in my educational experience and assimilation into society.

My mind immediately jumped to the night I picked up my little girl from a children's event at church. "The other kids said I was cutting in line," she reported. "What is 'cutting in line'?" And then I was a kindergartener again, standing in the hallway with my friends and classmates, waiting my turn at the water fountain.

Actually, children learn a lot of useful things from their peers. They observe each other; teach each other; compete with each other; challenge, encourage, reward, and even punish each other. Through peers, children learn the bounds of propriety and the range of acceptable behavior. They interact with individuals who share the same internal values despite external differences like style of dress, style of hair, favorite foods, word pronunciation, vocabulary, personal habits and family rituals. Exposed to the same influences and shaped by the same events, they share in the collective experience of their generation. With their peers, children also get to practice self-differentiation in ways that are simply not available within the cocoon of the home.

After reading Rose's entire book, I reevaluated my homeschooling career. Months later, convinced by a multiplicity of factors, we enrolled our oldest in 4th grade. Two years later, she is already better socialized and more differentiated than I was when I finished homeschool "high school".



For more discussion about socialization and homeschooling:

"What is Fringe?" --In a 1997 survey, 13% of homeschooled children did not play with people outside their families!
"Socialization Not a Problem"--a 2009 Washington Times article based on an HSLDA study
"Homeschool Mis-Socialization"--why so many of us homeschoolers feel we are missing a key piece
"Homeschooling, Socialization, and Me"--the experience of a homeschooled student
"Homeschool Parents Need to Take Socialization Seriously"--socialization challenges for adult homeschooolers
"Mrs. Karen, You are Laughing at Real People"--more real stories by homeschoolers