College for the Home-Schooled Is Shaping Leaders for the Right

["Arthur Hu(comcast)" <arthurhu@comcast.net>]

College for the Home-Schooled Is Shaping Leaders for the Right

March 8, 2004
 By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK





PURCELLVILLE, Va. - As one of 12 siblings taught at home by
their parents in St. Croix Falls, Wis., Abram Olmstead knew
he would fit right in at Patrick Henry College, the first
college primarily for evangelical Christian home-schoolers.
But what really sold him was the school's pipeline into
conservative politics.

Of the nearly 100 interns working in the White House this
semester, 7 are from the roughly 240 students enrolled in
the four-year-old Patrick Henry College, in Purcellville.
An eighth intern works for the president's re-election
campaign. A former Patrick Henry intern now works on the
paid staff of the president's top political adviser, Karl
Rove. Over the last four years, 22 conservative members of
Congress have employed one or more Patrick Henry interns in
their offices or on their campaigns, according to the
school's records.

"I would definitely like to be active in the government of
our country and stuff," Mr. Olmstead, 19, said as he sat in
a Christian coffeehouse near the campus, looking up from a
copy of Plato's "Republic." "I would love to be able to be
a foreign ambassador, and I would really like to move into
the Senate later in my career."

The college's knack for political job placement testifies
to the increasing influence that Christian home-schooling
families are building within the conservative movement.
Only about half a million families around the country
home-school their children and only about two-thirds
identify themselves as evangelical Christians,
home-schooling advocates say. But they have passionate
political views, a close-knit grass-roots network and the
financial support of a handful of wealthy patrons. For all
those reasons, home-schoolers have captured the attention
of a wide swath of conservative politicians, many of whom
are eager to hire Patrick Henry students.

When President Bush signed legislation last fall banning
the procedure it calls partial-birth abortion, Michael
Farris, the founder of the Home School Legal Defense
Association and the president of Patrick Henry, was one of
just five prominent Christian conservatives invited to the
Oval Office for the occasion.

Patrick Henry College is the centerpiece of an effort to
extend the home-schooling movement's influence beyond
education to a broad range of conservative Christian issues
like opposition to abortion, same-sex marriage and
obscenity in the media. The legal defense association,
located on the Patrick Henry campus, established the
college as a forward base camp in the culture war, with the
stated goal of training home-schooled Christian men and
women "who will lead our nation and shape our culture with
timeless biblical values."

"We are not home-schooling our kids just so they can read,"
Mr. Farris said. "The most common thing I hear is parents
telling me they want their kids to be on the Supreme Court.
And if we put enough kids in the farm system, some may get
to the major leagues."

That is an alarming prospect to some on the left.

"Mike
Farris is trying to train young people to get on a very
right-wing political agenda," said Nancy Keenan, the
education policy director at People for the American Way, a
liberal advocacy group, and a former Montana state
superintendent of public education. The number of Patrick
Henry interns in the White House "scares me to death," she
said. "It tells us a little bit more about the White House
than it does about the kids."

Mingling in the corridors of the White House and Congress
is also a long way from the sense of retreat at the heart
of the Christian home-schooling movement. It began in the
early 1980's as a few thousand evangelical Christians began
teaching their children at home in disgust at what they
considered the increasingly secular, relativistic and
irreligious culture ascendant around them - exemplified by
the ban on prayer, the teaching of evolution and the
promotion of contraception in the public schools.

The Home School Legal Defense Association, which now counts
81,000 families each paying about $100 a year in dues, was
founded in 1983 by Mr. Farris, a lawyer who had been a
protégé of Tim LaHaye, the conservative Christian political
organizer and best-selling author. Mr. Farris and his wife
home-schooled their own 10 children. Like Mr. LaHaye, Mr.
Farris is a novelist. He has written three legal thrillers
involving conservative Christian issues. His latest,
"Forbid Them Not," begins with a Democratic landslide in
the 2004 elections that leads to a nightmare of laws
blocking parents from spanking their children, teaching
their children fundamental Christianity or schooling them
at home.

Membership in the home-school association grew by more than
50 percent a year for most of its first decade, association
officials said. From the outset, the association fought
state regulations requiring home-schooling parents to have
college or high school diplomas, to pass certification
tests, or to submit to visits by professional educators or
social workers. It won a long series of legislative and
court victories culminating in a 1993 decision by the
Michigan Supreme Court, which eliminated the final major
obstacle to home schooling in any of the 50 states.

By 1994, Mr. Farris was ready to flex the association's
muscles. When Representative George Miller, Democrat of
California, introduced a bill requiring teachers to have
certain credentials, Mr. Farris warned the association's
members that home-schooling parents might face the same
tests (something Mr. Miller denied). Thousands of angry
home-school parents and their allies deluged Congress with
so many faxes and telephone calls that it temporarily shut
down the Capitol Hill telephone system.

The House ultimately voted overwhelmingly to delete the
provision. "They made a big impact on people's minds that
fateful day," said former Representative Dick Armey,
Republican of Texas, a longtime champion of home schooling
who proposed the deletion. "They got a taste of the game
and found out they could be a major player."

By 1997, however, most of the association's state battles
had been won and its membership growth had slowed to about
12 percent a year. Mr. Farris began looking for a new
frontier. "I try to figure out how we can fix systems, so I
started focusing on a bigger system," he said in an
interview in February.

His answer was a college just for home-schoolers.


"Parents would ask me, `Is there a school that has the
Christian character I am looking for?' " Mr. Farris said.
"And congressmen would ask, `Mike, do you have a sharp
home-schooler who can come and work for me?' "

One of the first and most significant contributors to sign
on was Dr. James Leininger, a Texas physician,
home-schooling parent and part-owner of the San Antonio
Spurs. Dr. Leininger had made a fortune as controlling
shareholder of the medical-bed manufacturer Kinetic
Concepts Inc. He also owned a conservative political
consulting and direct-mail business, and he had already
become one of the biggest political contributors in Texas.
He became known for backing Christian conservative
candidates to the state's influential school board. And, as
a board member of Children First America, he was also a
major patron of the push for school tuition vouchers.

At a 1999 dinner in honor of George W. Bush, then the
governor of Texas, held by one of Dr. Leininger's several
foundations, Mr. Bush called his host "a good man and a
great Texan," The Dallas Morning News reported.

Dr. Leininger did not respond to calls for comment.

"Jim
has been a very good and very faithful friend to the
college," said Jack W. Haye, chairman of its board and a
Texas executive of the Wells Fargo Bank. Other trustees
include Janet Ashcroft, wife of Attorney General John
Ashcroft.

The board helped establish a 106-acre campus with six red
brick buildings on rolling green hills.

Thanks to the generosity of its donors, Patrick Henry
operates with no debt, eschews federal financial support
and charges about $15,000 per student a year for tuition,
about $10,000 less than some comparable small colleges. The
average SAT score is about 1320, roughly comparable to
Notre Dame or the University of Virginia.

About two-thirds of the students major in government. It is
one of the few schools that offer a special program in
intelligence and foreign affairs.

Now Mr. Farris is trying to enlist even younger students in
Christian conservative politics. He estimates that there
are more than two million home-schooling children in the
country, or more than the number of children attending New
Jersey public schools, and in February he sent a letter
encouraging home-schooling families to enroll their
children in Generation Joshua, a new hands-on civics
program for home-schooled teenagers. Participants will
learn about government by helping conservative churches get
voters to the polls and by volunteering for the campaigns
of like-minded conservative politicians, he said.

"Home-school teens could become one of the most powerful
forces in American politics, rivaling the labor unions in
effectiveness," Mr. Farris wrote, adding, "The best way to
train the leaders of tomorrow is to have our young people
help to elect the leaders of today."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/08/education/08HOME.html?ex=1079740912&ei=1&e
n=c918a3547614cc2b