What makes a cult?
We fear and judge the unfamiliar and unconventional. But what if the mainstream is its own cult?
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“Is homeschooling a cult?” asks Amanda Montell’s popular podcast “Sounds Like a Cult.”
The description for this episode declares, “Homeschooling…can add up to something eeeeeeeerily reminiscent of a fringey, paranoid sect.”
Full disclosure: I did not listen to the episode. I am fairly certain homeschooling could be declared a cult, and that creepy, dysfunctional, bizarre sects of homeschooling exist, and that the children who endure them would declare homeschooling a barbarous practice.
I am also fairly certain that many children who have endured mainstream school – public or private – would declare it barbarous, cruel, and traumatic, an experience to be survived rather than a joyful and edifying education. Just as homeschool can be a “paranoid sect,” schools can be places where psychologically and emotionally abusive behaviors persist on the daily.
My child’s school, highly rated and very much in demand in Pittsburgh (Elena was 77th on the waitlist the first year we tried to get in!) saw teachers regularly denying students recess for not finishing their work quickly enough, or for talking to friends or other offenses. One teacher who supervised lunch was famous for declaring students had to eat in complete silence, once because a student accidentally dropped her blueberries.
A friend who went to volunteer at her daughter’s public school (our neighborhood school) left crying after witnessing a teacher shouting at the second graders on the playground, “Are you stupid? Are you stupid? Are you too stupid to line up? Do you need to go back to first grade?”
But school cannot be a cult, because school is the status quo.
Even if your child is bullied, harassed, presumed to be stupid, denied opportunities; if your child comes home crying, pleads not to go to school, tells you horrible things other students or teachers said to them; if your child is bored out of his or her mind, made to sit doing dull busywork half the day; witnesses other students’ violence – you will not be judged for sending your child to school.
Even when, in 2019, 66% of U.S. eighth graders scored “basic” or “below basic” in reading – meaning that they had only partially mastered or not mastered fundamental literacy skills – school is simply what one does.
But homeschooling – it’s a cult.
My argument here is not that homeschooling is better or worse than school. It’s not that either setup is inherently terrible or brilliant. I will likely send my daughter to school in the future. Most of my friends send their children to school. I teach at a university.
The point here is not to be anti or pro. It’s about the frames we use. What we take for granted.
It’s that one system is the default, and has become what the anthropologist Brigitte Jordan calls “authoritative knowledge” – that is, the type of knowledge that we have all accepted as given, fundamental, true, so much so that it has faded into the background, that we can’t actually see it as knowledge at all.
Jordan writes, “The power of authoritative knowledge is not that it is correct but that it counts.”
To reiterate: this type of knowledge isn’t necessarily the most accurate, may no longer even be particularly functional or relevant, but it’s become so accepted that it counts.
Knowledge contradicting it does not count, and will either be dismissed outright or held to an almost impossible standard. The baseline assumption for that counter-knowledge will be that it is false, dangerous, and – perhaps – a cult.
We can see this in the medical system as well. Look at birth. If something happens to a woman or her baby during a home birth, she’s liable to face intense guilt, disapproval, judgment, shaming. She took a risk, people might say, or, that was reckless.
But when this happens in the hospital, as it does with incredible frequency – one in three hospital births ends in major surgery, an insane statistic unless one believes that nature and the body are completely incompetent – the narrative goes, “Smart choice. You saved your baby.”
Even when, especially when, the baby and mother end up pumped full of medicines against their wishes, the mother suffers side effects and lingering damage, the baby winds up in the NICU for weeks – the mother made the best possible choice. It is legible and laudable.
One of the midwives I follow on Instagram shared a post recently about how we use the term “failed home birth” to mean a home birth that resulted in a transfer to a hospital, but we never use the term “failed hospital birth” for the myriad hospital births that violate a woman’s intentions and wishes, bully her, gaslight her, intimidate her, coerce consent, and end in trauma.
Hospital birth is the norm. No matter if many practices here aren’t evidence-based (Electronic fetal monitoring! Immediate cord cutting! Time limits on labor! Bans on food and drink!) and in fact ample evidence demonstrates risk and harm from them; no matter that many women leave the hospital feeling violated, confused, and heartbroken, and this launches a significant number of them into postpartum depression and anxiety; no matter that our country’s maternal mortality rate has doubled in the past two decades, with women of color suffering the most.
A black woman friend told me a while ago, “Oh, I knew to stay as far away from the hospital as I could when I was giving birth. No way. I wasn’t going near there.”
She knew the high risk that she’d be threatened, ignored when she voiced her desires and needs, separated from her baby, and left with life-threatening complications, and it was unacceptable to her.
The slick bait-and-switch is that upper-middle-class white women tend to think that by virtue of being white and well-off they are part of a different system. Oh, I’m privileged, they say, guilty but relieved, thinking that they’ve escaped what my friend recognized.
What they fail to understand is that it’s the same system, just dressed up. The same bullying, the same lack of evidence-based practice, the same convenience for the medical professionals, the same fear-mongering, all of it, just with smiles and purrs instead of threats to call CPS, with softer rocking chairs in bigger delivery rooms.
But a woman will not be judged for having her baby in the hospital. She dons the gown. She opens her legs when asked. She complies. “Do you want your baby to die?” She believes the stories she is told, because what else is she to believe? What else is out there? What choice does she have? With an episiotomy, a fourth-degree tear, a ripped-open abdomen, shaking or vomiting from drugs she didn’t want, she repeats, “All that matters is a healthy baby.”
What is a cult, anyway?
The definition of “cult,” according to Merriam-Webster’s:
great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work
a system of religious beliefs and ritual
Our school system. Our medical system.
I have a good friend here in Pittsburgh with whom I talk regularly about these issues. We disagree pretty significantly on them, but our conversations are always illuminating and useful for both of us. I tug her a little bit my way, she tugs me a little bit back hers.
Once, talking about doctors, she told me about realizing, after a medical procedure and advice, “A lot of the times, they’re just guessing.” She said this without malice or judgment.
“Yes,” I said, “But they’re always guessing the same way.”
As in: their guesses always exist within a particular model. In the hospital, the guess is never: a woman’s body is competent and capable. She knows what she needs. Her well-being, intuition, background, and desires matter. The guess is never, maybe I should attend to her spirit and mindset before I inject synthetic hormone into her vein. The guess is always: the body is flawed, the body cannot be trusted, it is better to act than to do nothing.
We humans think we know so much. We think we have it all figured out, all our studies, all our research, all our science, all our experts. Yet many of us were washing our apples with bleach in the early days of the pandemic.
Yet we still don’t really understand how much of the body works. Yet the biology of a simple leaf, as Richard Powers pointed out in a gorgeous lecture in Pittsburgh a few years ago, defies the brilliance of our cities.
Much of the time, we’re guessing.
Which way do we guess? Within what paradigm?
My point here isn’t to say that medical or school systems are inherently terrible and to be totally avoided, or that alternatives are necessarily superior.
It’s to push on our assumptions about what is right, natural, authoritative, normal, and safe. What is a cult and what isn’t.
To question the givens so many of us are beholden to: what if, actually, it all wasn’t so certain? What if we shifted our ideas about risk, about power?
What if these choices our society has made about essential systems were just that: choices, ones we can remake?
These are terrifying questions, but they’re also freeing. They also allow us a whole new set of possibilities at a time when the ground feels very unstable.
We can cling to what we have, we can double down on it, we can keep labeling anything outside of the status quo a “cult” or “misinformation” or “dangerous,” or we can try a new lens.
Wonder a bit at what life outside of these systems, on our own terms, and in community, might look and feel like.
Dream, and let those dreams change us. Actively choose a life and way of being that feels right, true, resonant, and beautiful.
Daniel Greenberg, a physics professor at Columbia University and the founder of the Sundbery Valley School, an alternative school that would later become the subject of many books and academic studies, once wrote, “Knowledge is to be judged not so much by its truth or falseness as by its usefulness.”
A radical claim, especially now: what is useful, as we enter this new era?
What makes us happier, more connected, more enlightened, more at home in our bodies and communities, more free? What feels right? What feels good?
What if it contradicted everything we’d been told to believe? Felt unsafe? Felt edgy? Felt radical? Felt wild? Felt full of potential?
When I first started homeschooling, I received messages from so many people about how much their homeschool journey had transformed them.
Michaeleen Doucleff, the author of Hunt, Gather, Parent, wrote me to say that after she’d traveled the world with her three-year-old researching her book, she ended up moving to Texas and starting a co-op school: a bold and difficult choice if there ever was one.
She called it “the most rewarding thing I've done in my life besides having a daughter.”
Lest you think this person is a crazy cult leader, Doucleff is an award-winning science journalist with a PhD in chemistry from U.C. Berkeley.
E.O. Wilson, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author and Professor Emeritus of Entomology for the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard (also not exactly a cult leader), said of training future scientists:
“Hands-on experience at the critical time, not systematic knowledge, is what counts in the making of a naturalist. Better to be an untutored savage for awhile, not to know the names or anatomical detail. Better to spend long stretches of time just searching and dreaming.”
Long stretches of time just searching and dreaming.
Imagine a world where this was not only possible, but the norm. For our children. For us. What would it create? What would it liberate?
How can we find out?
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soooo fascinating about michaelenn doucleff!