The Damned

Today’s post is from Robert Kunzman, author of Write These Laws on Your Children: Inside the World of Conservative Christian Homeschooling. Kunzman spent ten years as a high school teacher, coach, and administrator and is currently an associate professor in the Indiana University School of Education. He is also the author of Grappling with the Good: Talking about Religion and Morality in Public Schools.

Quick—who are the only two nations who haven’t ratified the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child?

Somalia is one of them—no bonus points for that guess. Who else stands against the 193 nations who’ve ratified the treaty? None other than the United States of America. This may change under the Obama administration; U.N. ambassador Susan Rice recently proclaimed the situation a disgrace and indicated that U.S. ratification of the treaty was under active discussion.

But not if the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) has their way. Calling the UNCRC “anti-family” and “anti-American,” they have urged their 80,000 members—as well as those who’ve joined ParentalRights.org, a “grassroots” organization founded by HSLDA—to voice their opposition. To further their cause, they have been a driving force in promoting a Parental Rights Amendment, which now has more than 110 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives.

Why does the most powerful and prominent homeschool advocacy organization in the world see the UNCRC as such a threat? Ultimately, it’s an argument about who should have a say in the raising and educating of children.

I’ve spent the past five years exploring the world of homeschooling from a variety of angles, traveling the country and visiting with families in their homes, observing their homeschooling practices and talking with them about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. I quickly discovered that the range of philosophies, methods, and outcomes is vast indeed. But one fundamental conviction among homeschool parents emerges again and again: the state has no business telling them how to raise or educate their children.

This conviction is especially strong among conservative Christian homeschoolers, who most observers agree constitute the largest subset of the likely two million homeschoolers in the United States (HSLDA describes itself as a Christian organization). Not infrequently, parents pointed to the biblical passage of Deuteronomy 6:6-9 when explaining to me their motivation to homeschool. The Message, a popular Bible paraphrase, puts it this way: “Write these commandments that I’ve given you today on your hearts. Get them inside of you and then get them inside your children. Talk about them wherever you are, sitting at home or walking in the street; talk about them from the time you get up in the morning to when you fall into bed at night.”

This orientation toward parenting and education helps explain why homeschool parents are particularly resistant toward any government role or authority in the education of their children. Good parents (whether homeschoolers or not) see education, broadly construed, as part of their job description: raising a child involves constant teaching, and the most important lessons in life generally occur outside of school walls. But most homeschoolers take this a step further. They don’t see any real distinction between this broader notion of education and formal schooling itself—which makes sense, if homeschooling is just woven into the fabric of everyday family life. And if homeschooling is seen as simply part of parenting, then it becomes easier to understand why many homeschool parents view government oversight of education as an unjustifiable intrusion into their sacred domain.

For conservative Christian homeschoolers, educating their children is a God-given right and responsibility, and one they can delegate only at great moral and spiritual peril. Like many in the broader homeschool population, conservative Christians see homeschooling as a twenty-four-hour-a-day, all-encompassing endeavor. For them, perhaps more explicitly than other homeschoolers, homeschooling is a shaping not only of intellect but—even more crucially—character. This means more than just moral choices of right and wrong; character is developed through the inculcation of an overarching Christian worldview that guides those moral choices. These parents share a fierce determination to instill Christian character in their children, a process that entails protecting them from the corrupting influences of broader society. To accomplish this, the family becomes the defensive bulwark and sanctuary wherein children are prepared for eventual engagement with the world.

Parental interests aren’t the only ones at stake in the educational process, of course. A democracy depends upon the cultivation of informed citizens who can deliberate respectfully about the best ways to live together. And while most parents naturally believe that their efforts are dedicated to what’s best for their children, in reality this isn’t always the case; as the UNCRC asserts, children have their own educational interests at stake as well. But in the context of homeschooling—the ultimate in educational privatization—how to define and protect these various interests remains a complicated and contested question indeed.

In the context of discussing religion with believers, rationalists are making a grave error when they think they can simply present logical arguments to believers and have them accepted. The people who claim to “know” god are reacting to a visceral feeling which Dr R. A. Burton, MD says is an emotion we don’t control. The feeling we get that we know something for certain is a feature provided by evolution. Nonetheless, mystical experiences divorced from reality have utility, because for many people believing in God is like a placebo. In fact Burton draws this very analogy. The benefit of such a placebo should be recognized and respected, because for billions of people “knowing” their life has purpose is all that gets them through the day.

On the other hand rationalists can deal with the existential abyss of not knowing all the answers. Indeed science is comfortable with the concept that all knowledge is provisional, subject to constant challenge and revision when new facts warrant. Burton advises us to teach children there are no absolutes. He says our genes set us apart from one another, and certainty is biologically impossible to attain.

Burton writes: “The message at the heart of this book is that the feelings of knowing, correctness, conviction, and certainty aren’t deliberate conclusions and conscious choices. They are mental sensations that happen to us.” He says that somehow we must incorporate what neuroscience is telling us about the limits of knowing into our everyday lives. The book is On Being Certain Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not, St Martins Press

We all must learn to live within our biological constraints. No religious or scientific knowledge can be certain. But, getting people to go along with the cold hard facts is not easy. For scientists this maxim will be easier to accommodate than for believers.

Some research by The Cultural Cognition Project scientists reveals that arguing with people who are culturally disposed to disbelieve your point of view is actually counter productive and only serves to harden the resistance of believers to examine evidence objectively. This is an involuntary reaction and it happens instantly, the moment a threat against their world view is detected.

Cognition scientists are learning that once a belief is accepted as truth the belief is indelibly wired into the neural network of the brain. Certainty is a common state of mind and difficult to shake but there are ways to bypass resistance.

To be smart about engaging believers we need the help of the scientists at Frameworks Institute. There is more than one way to tell a story—making research understandable to the public is the expertise at Frame Analysis.

About Strategic Frame Analysis™

Since 1999, a rare collaboration between communications scholars and practitioners at FrameWorks Institute has worked to develop a new approach to explaining social issues to the public.

Strategic Frame Analysis™ is a proprietary approach to communications research and practice that pays attention to the public’s deeply held worldviews and widely held assumptions. This approach was developed at the FrameWorks Institute using a multi-disciplinary approach to evaluate the effects of various frame elements on support for social policies. Recognizing that there is more than one way to tell a story, Strategic Frame Analysis™ taps into decades of research on how people think and communicate. The result is an empirically-driven communications process that makes academic research understandable, interesting, and usable to help people solve social problems.

Quite simply, framing refers to the subtle selection of certain aspects of an issue in order to cue a specific response; as researchers have shown, the way an issue is framed explains who is responsible, and suggests potential solutions conveyed by images, stereotypes, messengers, and metaphors. The advantage of strategic frame analysis™ is that it allows the research to document and deconstruct the frames currently in the public consciousness and to understand their impact on public policy preferences. Additionally, it allows us to test and validate, through different disciplines, both the negative frames and the potential positive reframes that can further an issue’s salience. Finally, the effectiveness of the recommendations we make can be demonstrated; while we hope we are “creative” in our approach to communications, our findings are rooted in the social and cognitive sciences. We can explain what works and why it works, and demonstrate this across the research.

For more about framing and FrameWorks’ approach, read our Frequently Asked Questions.

How can you learn more about strategic frame analysis™? Click on the links below to read more about strategic frame analysis™ and how it can be applied to non-profit communications and advocacy.

* Strategic Frame Analysis E-Workshop
* The FrameWorks Perspective
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* Resources on Strategic Frame Analysis
See our Products and Tools section to review descriptions of our various research efforts and acquaint yourself with the variety of products produced by FrameWorks.

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http://www.frameworksinstitute.org/sfa.html

Groups like Project Reason, FFRF, and the Richard Dawkins foundation have the financial resources to hire Frameworks to design a scientifically sound way to approach communication of the atheist perspective. It should be painfully obvious to every atheist who ever tried to reason with a believer how frustrating and fruitless the effort can be. Even the brilliant (and often witty) efforts of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins,  and our best debaters fail to get through. We need a better plan to engage in dialogue with believers—one that takes advantage of all we have learned about human communication. Plus one that does not simply harden their views.