By withdrawing from the larger culture, homeschoolers aid and abet the culture’s failings—or so, at least, the charge goes. Christians have a responsibility to be not “of the world,” but, we are told, they also have a responsibility to be “in the world.” And therefore it’s our duty to send our children to public school. After all, Jesus calls us to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world, and how can we possibly be those things if we stay at home all day?

According to this logic, we are called not only to witness, via our children, to a diverse population of people but also somehow to salvage public education itself, as if this would right everything that’s out of whack in our society. To decline to do so is, in this view, both personally selfish and culturally destructive.

Though at this stage in my life I have a hard time understanding why I should feel a greater sense of responsibility to a government institution than I do to my children, I must confess that it has not always been so. Our oldest daughter spent four years in an English working-class neighborhood school, where she was conspicuous not only for being American but also for having parents who were actually married to each other and actually both the parents of all children in our home. Aside from the Bangladeshi Muslims who comprised roughly a third of the school population, ours was the only family with any discernable religious orientation whatsoever.

As such, we did feel responsible for the well-being of that school. The education on offer wasn’t brilliant—“random topics” seemed to be the general theme of the National Curriculum as taught at this particular school—but, as we told ourselves, it was OK. We could supplement at home. And meanwhile our daughter was receiving a valuable cultural education, right?

This is what we told ourselves even in the face of, for instance, the sex-education program we encountered in Year Four, the English equivalent of third grade. We were the only parents who asked to preview the materials; when we discovered, among other things, that they included an animated video sequence of teddy bears having fairly graphic sex, we exercised our right to opt out, and took the children to the British Museum that day instead, for cultural education on a different level, for once.

Random topics we could deal with. Animated teddy bears boinking we could avoid, at least in the short run. I suppose we could have gone on indefinitely telling ourselves that all this was OK—not great, but OK—if our daughter had been happy and thriving. But she wasn’t. Over time, most of her close friends moved to other primary schools with better test scores. The remaining school population was, as the English say, rougher. The overall atmosphere became rougher.

Well, we said, this is not good, but we can’t just abandon the school. Meanwhile our daughter, always reserved, became almost paralytically shy. On the playground, as she told us later, she concentrated on not being called ugly names by the boys. In class, she cried a lot rather than raise her hand. At home, she cried herself to sleep. On one occasion, as I distinctly recall, she was upset because in Religious Ed—no separation of church and state there—another kid had announced to the class, “God’s stupid,” and the teacher hadn’t said anything to him, and she had felt that this was wrong.

The incident had happened months earlier, it emerged—we certainly had known nothing of it at the time—but it still ate away at her. As I comforted her, my first impulse was to say, “Well, that’s not anything to cry about.” But of course it was. An adult might have spoken to the kid in question. An adult might have spoken to the teacher. What could an eight-year-old child do? Cry, that’s what.

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