PURCELLVILLE, Va. -- The foreign policy class begins with prayer.
Jeremy Purves and Amanda Powell bow their heads. The two Central Valley natives are ready for the intricacies of U.S. foreign affairs, but first things first.
God's grace studiously invoked, the class at America's newest college revs up. For the next 90 minutes, the intellectual game is afoot as the home-schooled kids-turned Patrick Henry College students pit idealism vs. realpolitik.
"We care about right and wrong," the 19-year-old Purves declares at one point with a debater's certitude, "and if a free people wants to fight against a tyrant, we will help them."
This could be any typical straight-laced college class: the students earnest, the teacher provoking, the final answers sometimes slippery.
But typical is the one thing Patrick Henry College is not, and that's precisely why so many Central Valley students have found their way to this singular, tiny school with large ambitions.
"For Christ," the college's motto proclaims, "and For Liberty."
From distant cities like Roseville, Merced and Visalia, students have come to Patrick Henry. Set in the rolling hills of transitional Virginia, where Washington, D.C.'s, orbit bucolically unwinds, Patrick Henry is the nation's first college devoted to the Christian home-schooled community.
Of the college's 86 students, six come from the area between Placer County in the north and Kern County in the south. That makes California's Central Valley the single most well-represented region at Patrick Henry, a school in its first year.
"Apparently, the most brilliant students in the country come from the Central Valley," Patrick Henry College President Michael Farris said good-naturedly, adding that "there are a lot of home schools in that area."
Patrick Henry does not strictly limit itself to home-schooled students, but that's the target audience. All but three of the college's students received at least some of their elementary and secondary schooling at home.
Jedediah Haven of Merced and Matthew Schwartz of Roseville, for instance, both combined private schooling along with three years of home schooling. Others, like 19-year-old Amanda Powell from the Kern County town of Shafter, were taught by their parents then took community college courses.
Whatever the particulars, certain traits shine through in deportment. Purves was wearing a tie one recent school day; Haven addresses adult strangers as "sir." In the entire 90-minute foreign policy class, the customary late-teen rhetorical tics including "like," "uh" and "um" are absent.
Latin is required here, for two years.
The students show little chafing under tight rules that include mandatory daily chapel, formal guidelines for courtship and a prohibition on visiting members of the opposite sex in their dorm rooms.
"The rules are no big deal," said 19-year-old Patrick Molloy of Porterville, who has designs on a congressional career. "It is more important to me to build a network for the future and take classes that I will actually use in my career and professional life than to drink, smoke or date a girl."
Molloy, who was home-schooled for five years, added that "the administration has been gracious in allowing us to voice our opinion about rules," and has even modified some slightly. He and the other Patrick Henry students say that, in any event, they're not that different from their peers at other schools.
"We are just normal college kids," Amanda Powell said, "minus the beer, drugs and sex."
Even as its reputation takes shape, much remains to be seen about Patrick Henry College's future.
The school shuns federal aid, including student loans that might help with the $15,000 annual price tag, so as to avoid entanglement with federal rules. It is not yet accredited, though that's in the works. It has no endowment. The college owns 106 acres and four new, single-sex dormitories, but all other facilities are fit into one handsome red-brick Colonial-style building. It accepts about 90 percent of applicants, though the students applying post commendable SAT scores averaging above 1,200.
An unabashedly conservative political consciousness permeates the place. Photographs of several conservative Republican congressmen illustrate the college brochure.
The students are of like mind. Law and politics predominate as career aspirations, and fully one-third of the student body belongs to the college debate team.
"I greatly enjoy policy debate," said Laurie Wilson, a 19-year-old student from Fresno, "and I was excited about coming here and continuing debate."
This is by design. Government started as the only major; next year, with Farris anticipating a doubling in the size of the student body, a major in classical liberal arts will be added. Farris says he wants his students to "influence all of American life in high-impact careers," and the students seem to take that to heart.
Roseville's Matthew Schwartz, for one, is a 19-year-old son of a Hewlett-Packard employee; he studied at Sierra College before coming to Patrick Henry. An aficionado of law and economics, he's wondering whether the military's Judge Advocate General's corps might someday need a tax specialist.
Another lover of the law is Purves, who fears the country has strayed from the principles enunciated by the Founding Fathers.
Haven likewise explained that it was this government focus and the opportunity for political apprenticeships that drew him 3,000 miles from home.
"I thought (the other) students would be the stereotypical, odd home-schooled child," said Haven, 21. Turns out, though, that "the other students are very much like me."