Dear Vision Forum,

I’ve read Mr. Sandlin’s original article in full, and I found it amazing that a Christian pastor thinks that families who embrace biblical patriarchy believe in “apron-centered, kitchen-table tutelage”—homeschooling that (as Mr. Sandlin wants us to understand) turns young men into mama’s boys who cannot excel in advanced subjects and creates brainless hordes of girls who (according to another of Mr. Sandlin’s sermons) cannot do anything but “make homemade biscuits and crochet blankets and...gather huckleberries.” Honestly! It sounds to me like Mr. Sandlin has spent too much time reading Betty Frieden and Gloria Steinham and too little time visiting the homeschooling families in the trenches. His caricatures do not bear any resemblance to the families I know.

Just for starters, my parents homeschooled my younger brother, my younger sister, and me. My poor, “shackled” homemaker mother somehow conjured up brains enough to teach my brother all the way up through Physics (though she had never gone beyond pre-Calculus herself), at which point he won a full scholarship to college at age sixteen. He is now a computer engineer, writing code that would boggle most minds and helping to run a successful software design company. Gosh, it’s too bad that he was tied to Mom’s apron strings all those years. I don’t know how he managed to get his pilot’s license, write articles for national magazines, and tutor our dad in website design after such a limited, “kitchen-table” upbringing. Beats me. And then there’s my little sister. She studied art, painting, drawing, and graphic design at home and laid out a book that was published when she was 15. She followed that up the next year with another book and today assists her husband with his own home-based website design business. Beats me how she can have the brains to do it, given that Mom taught her to crochet, sew, quilt, can vegetables, make jam, and set a beautiful table—not to mention the fact that she now has four young children of her own (the brainless baby machine that she is) and homeschools the two oldest.

Why does Mr. Sandlin seem to feel that training daughters to embrace a distinctively feminine, biblical role and giving them a solid, jam-packed education are mutually exclusive? Why can’t I teach my daughter to make biscuits and parse Latin? If I teach her to sew, clean house, organize cabinets, plan menus, budget, shop for groceries, entertain guests, and serve her family, does it automatically follow that I’m not going to give her a thorough education in literature, composition, the arts, languages, science, and math? If she doesn’t go away hundreds of miles to college, does that mean she is doomed to a life of brainless serfdom? Hardly! I’ve learned more and read more widely in the eight years I’ve been married than I ever learned in four years of college. Given the choice to go again, I’d gladly say, “No, thanks.” After the deep, thorough education my parents gave me at home, college was so much wheel-spinning. The summa cum laude honors I won hardly seemed praiseworthy given the little effort it took to make high grades in today’s dumbed-down college environment (where 70% of freshmen need remedial English). I’m no baby genius, either. My parents just taught me good study habits — habits that can make education lifelong and rewarding far beyond high school.

Mr. Sandlin seems to have embraced the narrow-minded view espoused by the feminists of the 1960s and 70s, who called housewives “parasites” and felt full-time homemaking could actually make a woman mentally dull and as oppressed as a concentration camp victim. Nonsense! Housewifery and brains are no more mutually exclusive than being an auto mechanic and reading Blackstone. As homemaker, author, and artist Tasha Tudor wrote, “Whenever I get one of those questionnaires and they ask what is your profession, I always put down housewife. It’s an admirable profession, why apologize for it? You aren’t stupid because you’re a housewife. When you’re stirring the jam you can read Shakespeare.” Thanks for adding to all the lovely stereotypes we homemakers have to live with today, Mr. Sandlin. There’s nothing like a knife in the back from the “good guy” camp when you’re already full of arrows from the other side.

“Happy Homemaker and Mother of Five.”