Don't Let the Longhouse Take Over Your Homeschool Group
A case for masculine involvement in your child's education
I’d imagine that most everybody who follows me or is mutualed with me on Twitter (and if you’re not, then go look me up at @theo_chilton !) knows that I am extremely supportive of homeschooling. Our family homeschools our own child. I am constantly criticising the publik skoolz for their many deficiencies and crimes against both children and parents. I think I’ve pretty well established my playground cred on this.
So I say this because I want you all to understand that this post isn’t intended as a criticism of homeschooling, per se. Rather, it’s a criticism of a trend that I’ve been seeing in homeschooling circles for a few years now. What I’m talking about is the tendency of a “Christianised” or “conservativised” type of longhouse mentality to infiltrate homeschooling institutions.
An explanation of terms might be in order at this point for those who may not know what is meant by “the longhouse.” The term itself (in the denotative sense) describes a type of social arrangement in certain Native American tribes in both the Great Lakes region and in the Pacific Northwest in which whole clans within these tribes would live in longhouses, which (as the name suggests) were long, semi-permanent dwellings that could accommodate a relatively large number of people. Where the denotative (and as I’m using it, perjorative) sense of the term comes in is that the longhouse has become a symbol of female leadership around which many third wave feminists have gathered. In these tribes (at least the feminists believe) the longhouses were ruled by the elder women, who generally enforced egalitarian and feminine strictures on everyone, regardless of age or sex. In a sense, “the longhouse” is a metaphor for the type of social regulatory control that Gen-X feminist cat mothers and wine aunts would love to foist onto the rest of us.
So what does this have to do with homeschooling? Because homeschooling tends to appeal to conservatives and Christians, you’d think that the constellation of local and state organisations would largely be immune to this, right?
Let me illustrate my concern with a couple of examples in my local area. We live in a conservative county in a state which has a large population of homeschooling families, so there is consequently a well-established institutional apparatus that exists to support homeschoolers, not just in the schooling itself, but also with respect to “support” groups involving sports, yearbooks, electives, college prep, etc. Within the past couple of years, our family has become more active in participating in many of these groups. It is with a couple of these support groups that some serious concerns have arisen.
The first one is a supplemental education group that holds classes every Friday each semester. Because they only meet one day a week, these classes are not as rigourous as “regular” classes, but are meant to be “fun” while yet also imparting some actual knowledge to the kids who take them. I’ve taught a couple of classes on various subjects for the past couple of semesters.
I did not know this at the time I started teaching, but the board that governs and oversees this program is entirely female - by design. As in, the board does not allow any men to be added to the board. Ostensibly, the reasoning is that homeschool moms “have more time” to be able to devote to the group than men do, who all presumably have to work 9-to-5 jobs.
So be it. My wife taught there for a few semesters before I started and never had any problems with it, because there were a couple of women on the board who were fun and laidback and generally seemed to keep any longhouse tendencies in check. Unfortunately, after the last semester, one of them retired and the other had to move to the Midwest somewhere, so there were a couple of vacancies that had to be filled. One of the new board members is pretty cool, like the ones who left.
Sadly, the other is not.
She is a total longhouse personality. Unfortunately, she also has a personality that completely dominates the other board members. She immediately began bureaucratising this group, driving through a bunch of rules that weren’t really needed because nobody was ever causing problems in the areas addressed. She has literally done to this group exactly what corporations did to themselves when “personnel departments” started to morph into “human resources.” And, of course, a good share of the rules essentially involve trying to stop little boys from being little boys, in much the same way that female publik skool teechurz go out of their way to emasculate their male students. Thankfully, this woman has not been allowed access to Ritalin yet. Needless to say, a lot of folks are not happy and a lot of folks are leaving after the current semester, including our family.
The other local organisation where this has happened was with the yearbook group that is loosely associated with the county homeschooling organisation. Again, for as long as anyone can remember, everyone involved in producing, editing, and distributing the yearbook have been women. This year, the lady who had been the chief editor for a number of years gave it up and they could not find anyone to do it. Nobody would volunteer. They finally more or less drafted my wife into the role, even though she did not want to do it because she was already very busy, but they cajoled her at a meeting into taking it on.
So she starts to do what she’s supposed to - bugging people to send in pictures from various activities, figuring out the online software that they use to format the yearbook, etc. She was also planning on holding monthly meetings at our house to coordinate with the folks who were volunteering to do little side jobs here and there.
So, the first meeting rolls around. It’s a madhouse. Imagine ten homeschool moms and around ten of their kids who couldn’t be left at home by themselves crowding into our (capacious under normal circumstances) basement - and all talking at the same time with no semblance of order whatsoever. It was pandemonium. So after trying to get everyone’s attention for several minutes, my wife finally raises her voice (note that phrase) and succeeds in somewhat restoring order. She felt bad about having to do it, but she really didn’t have any alternative.
Okay, fine. But then, one of the volunteers gets sore at her about it. But not only that, she starts a whisper campaign behind my wife’s back. She sends out texts to the group account trying to set up group coffee meetings so that she can essentially tell everybody how mean and disorganised my wife is. She’s constantly criticising every design and activity inclusion choice my wife made. As it turns out, I strongly suspect this woman has a borderline narcissistic/sociopathic personality disorder.
It all comes to a head when she started demanding that my wife hold a telephone conference with her, which she did. But I sat in on the conversation - which this woman was NOT happy about when I started shooting down her arguments. She complains that my wife had yelled in her ear at that meeting (she hadn’t). She lectures us like we’re five years old about how “you shouldn’t yell at adults, or anybody else!” (Yes, sometimes you most definitely should.) She’s constantly demeaning and condescending, to the point where I basically stepped in again and told her to knock it off and act like a rational adult instead of a child (which she also didn’t like). The end result was that my wife finally decided that she didn’t need this nonsense and told her that if she wanted to run the yearbook so badly, then go ahead and take it.
Of course, this is what this woman wanted all along, but as it turns out, she couldn’t say so because knew that the rest of the group would not have voted to make her the chief editor because they all knew about her tendencies and didn’t want to work under her. And of course, as soon as she took it over, the longhouse opened up and now there are apparently (I’m hearing this second hand since my wife is no longer involved at all) all kinds of weird, non-intuitive rules that she’s imposed about which activities can be included, who can do what with editing tools, and so forth. It’s apparently imploding.
In both cases, I would attribute the failures in these groups to the fact that they have and have always had female leadership. Like it or not, there seem to be two general types of women - those who run the longhouse and those who get bullied by those who run the longhouse. And when you have an organisation - even an explicitly conservative Christian one - that has female leadership, eventually the longhouse type are going to worm their way into positions of leadership and take the organisation down the same bureaucratic, over-regulated, safety-and-niceness road that the secular world has largely taken. You’ll get a group where the leadership treats everyone - parents and kids alike - as if they’re toddlers.
Thankfully, the overall umbrella organisation that represents homeschooling in our county has not had this happen to it. The reason for that is because it has male leadership governing it. Therein lies the key. Like it or not, men and women are different. They have different strengths and weaknesses which God “built into” us at creation. One of the strengths of men - which women largely do not share - is the capacity for decisive leadership, for leadership that isn’t driven by emotion or sentimentalism. These longhouse women running these ancillary homeschool groups did what they did precisely because they confused “leadership” with “making a plethora of unneeded rules.” They mistake henpeckery for genuine authority.
This is why it is so vitally important for men to be involved at the local level in the homeschooling apparatus that is available. Sorry ladies, but these groups really do need to be guided by masculine leadership. Decisions cannot be make as a result of emotion or personal pique. Having seen what happens when you don’t have masculine leadership, I am more convinced of this than ever. So if it’s a matter of time constraints, then groups need to make time for men who work all day to still be able to participate - have meetings in the evening, streamline meeting agendas, whatever needs to be done, do it. And homeschool dads need to be willing to step up to the plate and get involved instead of just assuming that a child’s education is “women’s work.” Dads - get involved, or you’ll lose you homeschool resources to the longhouse.