My favorite waiter will sometimes, between tables, rise up on his toes and twirl. He was homeschooled. He's not had his joie de vivre squashed by 12 years of factory schooling. Likewise, he's retained his natural curiosity and can think for himself. He's read (or attempted to read) Judith Butler and agrees with me that her "gender theory" is impenetrable nonsense. And I'm confident that once he gets into the weeds of his parents' small business, he'll emerge a fiscal conservative. If not, we can argue about it, because he can actually argue.
Twenty years ago I tried taking some education classes. In one, I asked about the source of some statistics related to the No Child Left Behind Act and the teacher replied, "Once you start asking about the numbers, you get in over your head." The same person remarked, in relation to some portion of the middle school curriculum, "these are the skills Tyson wants its employees to have."
All the teacher did was state the usually unspoken objectives of factory schooling: discourage hard questions (where did these numbers come from? what is the good life? what does USDA surplus mean?) to raise passive consumers and compliant employees; students who don't learn to comply are permitted to become clients for social services or the correctional system.
Though drawn from life, that's a dark caricature. Exceptions abound. Real education still happens in factory schools, in little pockets, against all odds. There are still plenty of good teachers, but they will tell you that they are over-burdened by paperwork and demoralized by teaching students to take standardized tests. No one really wants either, but the bureaucrats at the Department of Education have been tasked with wringing a demonstration of accountability from the great mass of mediocre un-fireable teachers, and they can't think of any other way.
Any alternative to factory schooling is worth a try. So it was discouraging to see on last Sunday's front page that homeschooling enrollment hit a four-year low in the 2023-24 school year. That said, at 27,528, it's still up 24 percent over the 2019-2020 school year.
The encouraging news was in the subhead: 1,453 cleared for vouchers. My great hope is that parents will pool funds from the homeschooling vouchers ($6,856 per student) to hire teachers. With the funds for a dozen students, parents could compete with starting salaries for financial analysts and software engineers. (Anyone who's mastered Python can pick up Latin and Greek in an intensive summer course; enough to offer a rudimentary classical education, anyway.) Some Arkansas parents have already caught on. According to Kanesha Adams of Pine Bluff, they're calling their efforts "micro-schools" and "learning pods."
In 1834, when the settlers of Cherokee Bay did the same thing (without state funds), it was simply called a school. This week I am looking at another contract for a subscription school, this one from Clark County:
I, James G. Johnson,
Do agree to teach a School for the Term of 4 Months, [to] commence on the 10 day of Nov. A.D. 1845. Consisting of Reading, Writing, Spelling, Arithmetic,
Geography, Grammar, History, and all the Branches taught
in a common English School to the best of my abilities. I do agree to
keep good order in my School and make up all time lost by me.
We the Subscribers Do agree to pay said Johnson one dollar and fifty
cents per Month per Scholar that we sign. Witness our hand and Seal, this
Day 10 Nov A.D. 1845.
The nine subscribers (Joshua Elkins, Nicholas Heath, Betsy Hardin, A.B. Caruthers, Barrac Snelgrove, Thomas McLaughlin, C.C. Rose, John Lisenby, and James Lisenby) offered 18 students.
While I've not been able to track down Mr. Johnson, the name Barrac Snelgrove is a researcher's dream, and it did not take long to figure out that the school would have been in Antoine, a vanishing community on the Clark County/Pike County line just east of Delight.
Former State Archivist Wendy Richter edited a massive history of Clark County (published in 1992), and it yielded plenty of information about several of the subscribers and their families.
Betsy Hardin, who subscribed for three children, was born Elizabeth Wilson in Tennessee. In 1828, she married Abraham Kuykendall Hardin, a son of North Carolina native Joseph Hardin, who settled for a while in Lawrence County and served as Speaker of the House in the Territorial Assembly at Arkansas Post in October 1820. In 1835 and 1836, Abraham Hardin acquired 240 acres on the west side of the Antoine River, a tributary of the Little Missouri. He later added 40 acres on the east side, so he was a man of considerable property when he died in 1844.
Alexander Benjamin Caruthers was born in Kentucky around 1810, and his sister married Thomas McLaughlin around 1834, so cousins attended Mr. Johnson's school together. Lucinda Bittick, born in Arkansas in 1818, married A.B. Caruthers in 1832; the next year (at age 15), she gave birth to Elizabeth Jane, the first of nine children (the last, Alvira, was born in 1859). Caruthers subscribed for two children, presumably Elizabeth Jane and Francis Marion, born in 1836.
Joshua Elkins subscribed for five students. He turns up at Antoine in the 1840 census, but by 1850 appears to be downriver, perhaps giving his name to Elkins Ferry, which saw the first battle of the Camden Expedition in April 1864. James Lisenby was a near neighbor, and three Lisenby children were living in the Elkins household.
We are fortunate to have documentation of Mr. Johnson's school at Antoine, including the subjects he contracted to teach. It's hard to estimate how many similar schools came together thanks to parental initiative and a qualified teacher.
Southwest Arkansas has a long history of formal education. Daniel Witter had a school in Hempstead County in 1822. Elizabeth Pratt of New York opened the Spring Hill Female Academy in Hempstead County in 1836. Madame d'Estimauville de Beau Mouchel sowed the seeds of the female academy at Tulip in Dallas County in 1845. (Pregnant, she left the state after her lover Solon Borland married another woman.)
Clark County still harbors two institutions of higher education: Ouachita Baptist University and Henderson State. I am in hopes that, under its new leader, the latter will recover from its recent academic decimation.