From the WSJ Opinion Archives
TASTE COMMENTARY
What They're Reading at the Kitchen Table
Home-schoolers of all stripes find common ground in some good, old-fashioned books.
Home-schooling is sort of like a college student's virginity: People figure it's a mark of religiosity, but nearly as often it's just personal taste, or a lack of better options. The majority of families who home-school are conservative Christians, to be sure. But another sizable portion are secular counterculturalists, and then there are the diplomats, foreign-aid workers or those living in the desert or Alaskan wilderness--anyone far from a school. Home-schoolers put their numbers at about two million, the federal government guesses closer to one million, but everyone agrees that the number is growing by 5% to 15% a year.
All of which means that there are millions of parents buying books for their children's kitchen-table schooling. And while many of these moms and dads are assigning their children books that would be familiar to school kids anywhere, many are not. A new class of best sellers has arisen--mainly old books, given new life by the Internet, specialty bookstores, librarians and word of mouth. There is no one book they all read, but each camp has its favorites, and some have crossover appeal.
Conservative Christians, for example, have flocked to the Elsie Dinsmore books, by Martha Finley, 28 novels that sold millions when they were published between 1867 and 1905. The books tell the life story of Elsie, a Louisiana heiress whose mother dies in childbirth, leaving Elsie to be raised by an irreligious father. Fortunately, a black nurse reads the Bible with Elsie, and she grows into an exemplar of Christian virtue from motherhood to widowhood and all the way into her dotage. Vision Forum, a Christian ministry whose book catalog is sent to many home-schoolers, has sold more than 100,000 Elsie Dinsmore volumes.
But Elsie is no favorite among secular or liberal home-schoolers. They, too, have a backward-looking impulse, but they're more interested in the return-to-nature aspects of the olden days than in corseted Victoriana. Pat Farenga, who has written several books on "unschooling," a movement that rejects formal curricula and lets children decide what to study, used to run a home-schoolers' bookstore in Cambridge, Mass. He says that his store's best sellers always included Noah Blake's 1805 book, "The Diary of an Early American Boy"--which described old-fashioned crafts like nail-making and shingle-splitting. A more recent illustrated edition has been popular "because it has all these beautifully drawn pictures of how to do things before technology."
Mr. Farenga's store, which closed in 2001, drew Christians as well as secularists. One thing that his most popular books had in common, Mr. Farenga says, is that they tended to be "about kids . . . figuring things out for themselves. Not like 'Sesame Street,' with adults showing children how to do things." Mr. Farenga cites the popularity among home-schoolers of C.S. Lewis's "Chronicles of Narnia," both a seminal epic by a great Christian apologist and an adventure tale of self-sufficient children, with their parents conspicuously absent.
According to recent polls, nonreligious families now make up more than 40% of the home-schooling market. For much of this group, the reading list is determined by the "curriculum in a box" companies. The most famous of these are K12, founded by former Education Secretary William Bennett and popular with parents who want a heavy emphasis on "values," and Calvert, in Baltimore, which created the market in 1906, when it began mailing its lesson plans to the children of missionaries and diplomats.
Calvert uses textbooks from the companies preferred by public schools. But there is one notable exception, which, like the common home-school literary works, is old-fashioned. Fourth-graders read "A Child's History of the World," written by Calvert's first headmaster, Virgil Hillyer, in 1924. Revised in 1994, it tells the history of the world, from the Stone Age to the Cold War, in 91 chapters, using language that a man might employ in speaking to the grandson on his lap. "There is a little narrow passageway with the mountains on one side and the water on the other through which the Persians had to go to reach Athens," begins chapter 26. "This pass is called Thermopylae, and you might guess what Thermopylae means if you notice that the first part is like Thermos bottle, which means hot bottle. As a matter of fact, Thermopylae meant Hot Gateway."
When it comes to their history books, conservative home-schoolers hunger for tales of great men and are suspicious of books written in the era of political correctness. And liberals like old histories for their utopian, premodern feel, when nature had yet to be despoiled. These preferences reach a confluence in the works of two authors who are both smashingly successful with home-schoolers: Laura Ingalls Wilder and G.A. Henty.
Wilder, of course, wrote the seven "Little House on the Prairie" books, published from 1932 to 1943. Her true-life tales of traveling west with her family feature adventure, churchgoing, traditional gender roles and some insensitive encounters with Indians. But they also have strong female characters and a loving attention to the natural environment. And, best of all, they feature a world before today's bureaucratized society.
"You can almost guarantee the Little House books will be on nearly everybody's lists," says Lynn Hocraffer, a mother of two in Illinois who runs a Yahoo user group for nearly 2,000 home-schooling families. From the wildlife to the geography to the Indian chiefs, Ms. Hocraffer notes, the context of Wilder's books is all real: "When you follow the one family, you are actually following the whole history of the nation."
Wilder's only competitor in the home-schooling popularity contest would be George Alfred Henty, an Englishman and contemporary of Queen Victoria who wrote about 70 books in which teenage boys get caught up in great happenings, from the Crusades to the American Civil War, and speak in bonny words to natives. Every few chapters, a boy's courage and honor are tested, but with the aid of God and his conscience he most often does the righteous, manful thing. It's Walter Scott for Victorian younguns, and today's home-schoolers eat it up. PrestonSpeed, a Pennsylvania publishing house founded in 1996 to bring Henty's works back into print, has sold about 25,000 copies of each of the 45 books they've so far reissued.
Though there is plenty of crossover, Wilder and Henty appeal to slightly different crowds. Liberals and secularists may be wary of Henty's God-talk and manlier-than-thou chivalry, while the most religious Christians would consider Wilder insufficiently pious. But what's more interesting is what these two authors--and their readerships--have in common: a preference for long books, often parts of a series, consumed with a leisure that public-school curricula don't allow; an emphasis on narratives, which children like, divorced from contemporary politics, which surely can wait; and a powerful sense that children are major players in the world, the kind of people, perhaps, who deserve better than large classrooms and who may grow up more likely to write books than to be told which ones to read.
Mr. Oppenheimer is the author of "Thirteen and a Day: The Bar and Bat Mitzvah Across America."
