Running rampant on college campuses around the country is the poisonous concept that people should be shielded from ideas they don’t like and if they must be exposed to them, trigger warnings should be in place. Let me be real honest about this one. I’m a Christian homeschool dad. My viewpoints on many things put me in a tremendously small minority. I am doing my best to pass on those viewpoints to my kids. I am raising those kids in a culture that is incredibly and increasingly hostile to those viewpoints. My kids will face a fair amount of condescension and derision because of that. If the worldview that I hope to pass on to my kids can’t stand up to challenge and scrutiny then it will and should be abandoned. I grew to embrace a holistically Christian worldview not because I was coddled in a sheltered haven of happy thoughts, but because I was challenged deeply and personally as to why I believed the way I did. My parents laid the ground work for the faith that I now unashamedly call my own but it was the challenges of others that allowed that seed to bloom. I researched. I did my homework. I read countless books from both sides of the argument. Only when I wrestled with questions that were legitimate, only when I groped for answers to tough questions was I able to emerge on the far side with a fully developed coherent set of principles.
And so we come face to face with the question: What is so terrifying about being challenged? Isn’t that called education? Are your ideas so frail they can’t withstand that? What purpose is served by having free speech limited to designated areas? In what rational world are you free from viewpoints that upset you? History is filled with examples of people who couldn’t tolerate dissent (spoiler alert: it didn’t end well).
We homeschoolers have a mantra of sorts that sums up our educational philosophy. Education is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire. Fires are tricky things. The same gust of wind that extinguishes a candle fans a flame. The only reason to shrink back into the recesses of a coddled academia is the gnawing fear that your mind’s tiny flicker can’t withstand the drafty den of actual learning. If that is the world your mind confines you to then free speech isn’t your problem. Your problem is that you hate education and the world you are missing out on pities you.
And so we come face to face with the question: What is so terrifying about being challenged? Isn’t that called education? Are your ideas so frail they can’t withstand that? What purpose is served by having free speech limited to designated areas? In what rational world are you free from viewpoints that upset you? History is filled with examples of people who couldn’t tolerate dissent (spoiler alert: it didn’t end well).
We homeschoolers have a mantra of sorts that sums up our educational philosophy. Education is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire. Fires are tricky things. The same gust of wind that extinguishes a candle fans a flame. The only reason to shrink back into the recesses of a coddled academia is the gnawing fear that your mind’s tiny flicker can’t withstand the drafty den of actual learning. If that is the world your mind confines you to then free speech isn’t your problem. Your problem is that you hate education and the world you are missing out on pities you.
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