Homeschooling for Kids Who Don't Like to Spell: But to Like to Worship (Jesus of course...)

UPDATE: A funny McSweeney's article satirizing Patrick Henry College (prolly sent by Joel)

A couple months ago I wrote a post - and a couple months before that I wrote a post about how people like David Horowitz (with the help of academic studies) feel that the academy has become a liberal whorehouse. While I concluded that it may be true that colleges were more inclined to hire biology professors who descended from monkeys, I never for once considered the growing (read:horrifying) movement towards faith-based college educations.

Sent to me by my lovely and brilliant girlfriend comes an article in the New Yorker titled, "God and Country."

In it New Yorkerer Hanna Rosin profiles the Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, VA. To describe the school metaphorically would be to paint the image of an insane Rube Goldberg contraption manipulated, dirtied and inevitably transformed into an evil-student making factory. Let me further the image.

Start off with families in rural parts of the country where news arrives a little late and progress is a thing of the past. Put the families through the church compactor and out the other end comes children with eerily similar features and bibles strapped to their backs and "10 Real SAT's" written under their eyelids. The kiddies are then baked in a homeschooling oven until they are 18 where Christ is their professor and Joshua is the TA. When the process is complete, the socially-starved homeschoolees are transferred to the Patrick Henry College to continue their reliducation and vocational training in politics and policy. Four years and 2,000 guilty thoughts later the young men and women are siphoned off into conservative think-tanks and Rick Santorum's office - completing the process from baby to neo-con.

The Patrick Henry College - aka Harvard for Homeschoolers - has provided the current White House and other conservative bastions with hordes of wide-eyed interns. The philosophy of the institution is entirely pragmatic. Students are told to dress "business casual" as to simulate the Capitol Hill workplace. Walls of dorm rooms have replaced Salvador Dali prints with Dick Cheney mugshots; and as Rosin puts it: "At Patrick Henry, debate plays roughly the role that football does at Notre Dame."

Aside from the strange "courting practices" male and female students engage in and the no drugs no alchohol no Hollywood no Elimidate no fun policy, Patrick Henry should be viewed as a growing trend in closing the minds of a generation. Parents who feel that every stimuli their child encounters can be controlled send their kids off to places like Patrick Henry. And now that about 1.5 million kids are homeschooled (about 2/3 Evangelical), Patrick Henry look-a-likes are bound to develop to handle this growing trend in education. It is times like this that I admire my alma-mater Tulane with its new nickname "The anti-Patrick Henry."