For some, this is their first time at a school bigger than their mothers' kitchen tables. They've made intensely private journeys, these 152 home-schoolers, to a fledgling college with four classrooms in the soybean fields of Loudoun County, Va. They are the believers, the religious flank of the movement, and here -- at the nation's first college for home-schoolers -- they find a godly purpose.
Though they are teenagers suddenly on their own, they do not rebel. They refrain from smoking and drinking and sex -- refrain, for the most part, from the trials and temptations of youth. They are here to build a more righteous nation, not to party or to find themselves.
``I'm 50, I still like to have fun,'' says the college president. But ``there's a certain adolescent approach to fun that gets you in trouble.''
His name is Michael Farris, and he's pacing a small lecture hall at Patrick Henry College. A boyish-looking, charismatic father of 10, Farris teaches constitutional law with a conservative conscience. The way he sees it, America's struggle between states' rights and federal power is an epic war of good and evil. Big government encroaches, while defenders of constitutional integrity stand stalwart against the tide. The Supreme Court is ground zero, Farris believes -- it has been trending leftward for 200 years.
How, he asks his class, can they take back the highest court?
Sophomore Sarah Cooke raises her hand. ``Having justices in there who return to what the original intent is?''
A wise guy named Paul: ``Have Dubya pack the court?''
Another wise guy: ``Wait till they all die?''
The class titters.
``You guys have got to get into the U.S. Senate -- that's the solution,'' says Farris. His students grasp the implication: Senators confirm Supreme Court nominees. Farris, one of the best-known figures in the home-schooling movement, believes in the healing power of politics; he is himself a onetime Virginia gubernatorial candidate. ``Go take over. That's the answer.''
But if Patrick Henry College is to remake this nation, it also finds itself set apart from it. It's so new -- 2 years old -- that its only road doesn't exist on many maps. The campus consists of one two-story building that holds virtually all the facilities -- classrooms, cafeteria, library -- plus four single-sex dormitories. There's a baseball diamond but no baseball team, and only one sport, soccer.
For breaks, students drive 15 minutes from the campus in Purcellville, about 50 miles west of Washington, to a Starbucks in Leesburg. When they're feeling feisty, they throw one another into the campus drainage pond.
Saying his school will be like ``Harvard in the late 1700s,'' Farris insists his students take a rigorous load of classical courses, including ancient languages. There's a curfew and a classroom dress code. Chapel is mandatory every morning and, as at many of the nation's more than 100 evangelical Christian colleges, students sign a statement of religious belief. Students uniformly identify themselves as Republican or libertarian; there's not one known Democrat on campus. Though the school doesn't keep a racial breakdown, a reporter sees not one black student in three days, and only a handful of students who aren't Caucasian.
The students here have spent their lives in the shelter of their parents' homes, shielded from what the movement regards as the troubling ``isms'' of the public schools: secularism, multiculturalism, liberalism. At Patrick Henry, they are shielded still. From this haven, they prepare to cross over to a wider, wilder world -- a world, the student handbook warns, ``often hostile to the values of the Cross.''
Patrick Henry represents the maturation of a movement decades in the making. The number of home-schoolers nationwide is estimated at 850,000 to 1.9 million, and the National Home Education Research Institute, an advocacy organization, says this is growing by 7 percent to 15 percent a year. For those students educated at home for religious reasons -- a sizable portion, though by no means the total -- just any college won't do.
What is the purpose of college? Classes are arguably but a fraction of it. For many kids, the true learning begins with living away from home for the first time.
The college experience, as defined in the American cultural consciousness -- Animal House and Felicity -- is late rent and later papers, binge drinking and midnight discussions, rushing a frat (and realizing you hate frats), dating someone you'll never forget (and one you wish you could), switching your major from pre-med to biology to, um, philosophy. And so on, until some magical spring day during senior year, you've achieved the one thing you never tried for: adulthood.
Is the purpose of college to explore? To carve out your own space? Or to strengthen the beliefs you came with? To arm yourself against a morally ambiguous world?
For Farris, these questions lay bare the very notion of adolescence itself. He says home schooling -- because children spend social time with parents and other adults, rather than with their own age group -- sometimes means young people ``skip'' the teenage years. This is good, Farris says: The modern concept of adolescence as a time for rebellious rites of passage is a fallacy. He's not alone.
``This expectation that each generation will be at odds with their parents is part of our received wisdom,'' says Douglas Wilson, a pastor in Moscow, Idaho, who started an influential evangelical Christian day school 20 years ago. ``We don't believe it's necessary to the human condition to have your kids rebel . . . Amish kids don't do that, Brooklyn Jews don't do that. Why should Christian kids do that?''
Wilson is credited with starting the nascent evangelical movement known as classical Christian education, which Patrick Henry borrows from. Classical Christian education, which blends biblical teachings with ancient principles of learning, is supposed to approximate the model upon which America's first educated classes were taught. Patrick Henry students must take two years of classical Greek or Latin, plus logic, rhetoric and philosophy.
Currently, there are four degree tracks: government, journalism, creative and professional writing, or education. Farris hopes to add majors in art, music, drama, film and television, to complete the second leg of the school's mission.
``The whole debate that's raged in conservative circles,'' Farris says, is ``do we fight in the culture or . . . in the government? We say that's a silly argument. You fight in both.''
As upperclassmen, students must apprentice themselves just like the Founding Fathers. With all the mandatory courses, no more than four electives, total, are allowed during the four years.
``I don't think the undergraduate degree is the time to wander all over and do the smorgasbord approach,'' says Paul Bonicelli, dean of academic affairs. ``There's no way to avoid an 8 a.m. class here. You don't even pick your own schedule.''
Students here renounce what Wilson, the Idaho pastor, calls the ``radical relativism'' of many campuses. There are certain basic truths they all accept. The Bible is infallible. Humans are by nature sinful. But beyond that, the details are hammered out every day in hundreds of minute ways at Patrick Henry: Student Kristin Sabella avoids movies with a lot of sexual content; Joshua Gibson prefers music that offers ``a positive, uplifted outlook on life.''
As for dating, the school asks students to ``court'' instead, pursuing only those relationships they feel will lead toward marriage. The honor code requires that before two people become a couple, each must call the other's parents to ask for permission.
``I think it protects women from the cycle of being used by men,'' Sarah Cooke says.
``It's personal responsibility,'' Sabella adds. They've thought about this a lot, because they're often asked about it. They want to emphasize that they're making individual choices, not mindlessly obeying an arbitrary code.
Sabella and Cooke are, like many of their peers, acutely aware of the stereotypes that could be made of their school. They say, no, we're not brainwashed. They came here because they wanted to be questioned, prodded.
``I wanted to be an intelligent conservative,'' Sabella says. The point of college is ``learning to understand, why does someone who doesn't agree with you think the way they do? . . . That's seriously lacking in the far right and in the far left.''