#016 Tim Barber [Parent Letter]

 Once I saw a website called something like “Give Advice to Your Past Self.” In reading these letters I wonder, what advice would I give my past self about sending my children to the Oaks? You see, I did that: I am (or was) an Oaks parent. My two children attended from K to 12. They are adults now and amazing people: mature, kind, stable, making a difference for good in their worlds. To what extent did the Oaks experience contribute to this result?

Why would I send my children, for whom I wanted (and want) only the best, to a very small, expensive, under-equipped, theologically and societally rigid fringe private school? The answer is complicated.

For myself, and maybe there are others who can relate, the answer begins not in a desire for quality education per se, but in the milieu of North American evangelical Protestantism that saturated my churchgoing worldview. Paramount among the base assumptions thereof is the idea that “the world” in general and worldly education in particular are all-powerful and all-corrupting entities. Secular education could only produce one result for any child subjected to its insidious poison: eternal spiritual devastation. District 81 was Not An Option. Home schooling was the expected path, but if unable to make the necessary sacrifices – which fell with practical inevitability to the mother – Christian school was the only acceptable alternative. And lo, shining like a beacon in the night, we have here a Classical! Christian! Academy!

In another letter, the charge was made that dereliction of the father was largely responsible for Oaks alumni who have “walked away”. (Which, I assume, means anyone who dares acknowledge their trauma; anyone who does not walk, talk, live and breathe Reformed theology 24/7; anyone who “tolerates sin” in any person or situation, anyone who regards social justice with anything other than deep contempt, anyone who uses the phrase “the Bible says” to start the conversation instead of end it.) Well, guilty as charged. In explanation if not defense, during my children’s formative years I was deeply enmeshed in a toxic church where both my parenting style and my spiritual “walk” were routinely and publicly weighed and found wanting. That psychological manipulation had me believing that my own influence on my children’s spiritual growth could only be negative. A school that could make up for my deficiencies, that could instill in them all the shining Christian virtues that I myself so regrettably lacked, was a lifeline that I leapt at. I say this to my sorrow. It was also touted as objectively the best possible education in terms of quality, drawing from the original wells of knowledge and free from the distortions and lies of the world.

I did not understand how strange the Oaks was, or rather I did not want to see it. I drank the KoolAid. I bathed in it, painted it on my doorposts, bottled it for my friends and bought stock in the company. My children, thrust without warning into this alternate reality, gamely adapted and even excelled - at least outwardly, publicly, for the benefit of authorities who were perhaps at times more dedicated to the perpetuation of their worldview than to the human wellbeing of any actual student. The internal damage was more subtle, but in far-too-late hindsight no less real. Oblivious, I happily attended the concerts, the balls, the field trips. What should have been glaring red flags were easily ignored in the warm glow of being Family, of being the Chosen Ones, the Elite, the ones who were Not Of The World. The sense of belonging to something Important, of standing together against all the forces of hell in a lonely band united by the Truth, is a powerful drug that often entices men, as C. S. Lewis has it, to “do very bad things before they are yet individually very bad men.” So I did not question the Eurocentric elitism, the bogus science lessons, the weird dress codes, the brutal homework loads, the slavery-glorifying Civil War re-enactments, the Attention Grabbers, the shaming, the spankings. We were doing it Right. I trotted my poor kids out to recite grammar chants at family gatherings like they were prize ponies, because it proved we were Right. Nobody else could do this. God was on our side.

In fairness, there was also much that was good. As I said at the beginning, my children are smart, gifted, compassionate and brilliant thinkers. The Oaks system did much to foster that in them and I give credit where it is due. They are also mature beyond their years. However, that their maturity may be as much that of the survivor or freed hostage as the scholar is a thought that brings me not inconsiderable sadness.

Would I send my children to the Oaks again, if the game clock could be reset? I will not say, because it is their story more than mine; it is not my place to decide for them if they would change it. But speaking generally, I cannot think it the best choice for most, and certainly not the only choice, even granting the premise that all secular education is evil - which I do not. There is really very little actual, useful work to be done in this desperate world that requires the precisely narrow set of cherry-picked facts, stunted sociology, ironclad religion and personal shame that the Oaks apparently regards as the ne plus ultra (oh look, Latin!) of the Classical Christian educational experience.

Tim Barber

For Tracking Purposes: #016