c. 2004 Religion News Service

(Samuel K. Atchison is an ordained minister and has worked as a policy analyst and social worker to the homeless. He currently is a prison chaplain in Trenton, N.J., and a fellow of the George H. Gallup International Institute in Princeton, N.J.)

(UNDATED) One of the blessings of a good, book-length testimonial is in the comfort it brings to those who are traveling the same road as the author. Such is the joy I received in once again reading selected portions of “Morning by Morning” by Paula Penn-Nabrit.

Whenever I peruse the book, I am reminded anew and afresh of the parallels between her family’s experience and mine.

“Morning by Morning,” which was reviewed in this column last year, tells the story of how Penn-Nabrit and her husband, C. Madison, traveled the then-lonely road of the African-American home-school family.

Taking her title from the hymn “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” Penn-Nabrit says she and her husband came to believe that their sons’ expulsion from an elite, expensive country day school, “ostensibly because of a late tuition payment,” was God’s way of providing them with an option they had never before considered.

Specifically, they realized that with their Ivy League/Seven Sisters educations _ he graduated from Dartmouth, she from Wellesley _ “our educational credentials, objectively, were superior to those of any of our kids’ teachers.”

This realization, together with their goals for their sons’ education and their fears that the boys would continue to face racism in a more traditional setting, led them to educate their children themselves.

Such was the state of affairs in the black community in 1991 that the Nabrits’ decision was considered a radical one. Yet when my wife and I came to the same conclusion more than a decade later _ for many of the same reasons _ our choice was deemed no less scandalous.

It seems that for many African-Americans, the notion that the best teachers, resources and schools for their children may not be found in tony white suburbs is an appalling one indeed.

Many upper-middle-class blacks, in particular, have gotten caught up in the stay-in-this-school-for-the-social-connections game common among private school families.

The problem, however, as Penn-Nabrit points out, is that the overall paucity of black students, faculty and administrative staff in such schools “supports the myth of the exceptional Negro. This is the person who looks black, but isn’t really like `them.’ The myth contributes to self-loathing and a desire to disassociate from other black people.”

Yet, despite general disapproval among the black masses, an increasing number of African-American families are nonetheless making the decision to home-school their children. Though estimates vary, it is believed that between 30,000 and 100,000 or more black children are currently being home-schooled.

As is the case with the majority of white home-school families, many African-American home-schoolers hail from Christian backgrounds, and their moral and religious beliefs were a major factor in their decision to home-school. Yet, as with the Nabrits, concerns about our society’s increasingly postmodern, if-it-feels-good-do-it morality are coupled with a desire for our children to be socially conscious and racially authentic.

That is, we desire our children to become well educated, biblically sound, Christian leaders who will be capable of engaging in a meaningful way the social, political, spiritual and racial issues that will face their generation.

While certainly not a panacea, particularly for dual-income families, home-schooling nevertheless provides black parents with a viable means of controlling their children’s education.

Fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, it is an idea whose time has come.

KRE/PH END ATCHISON