Live from Music Row Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the president of the Tennessee Home Education Association, Claiborne Thornton, in the studio to discuss the concept of an educated citizen.
Leahy: In the studio right now, having a delightful conversation this morning with Mr. Claiborne Thornton, who is an engineer who trained at Vanderbilt. Thirty-eight years ago, just a little bit ago, he founded the Tennessee Home Education Association, been part of it ever since.
Claiborne, this is fascinating. Talk about a commitment – 38 years. Don’t you ever get sort of, well, I’m kind of tired of doing this? Can someone else take up the mantle?
Thornton: I don’t think so much of being tired of doing it. I guess I would think of it as sharing the joy of it, because it’s a fun experiment. It has been for these years.
Leahy: Can the day get better? Sharing the joy of 38 years of running this group.
Thornton: When you look into that family’s face and you see them feeling like they have pulled their kid out of a mess and brought them into a safe space so they can train them, so the kids can learn their values from their mom and dad and start plotting and planning their lives. And it takes a long time for that child to grow.
Leahy: It does. It does. If you look at K-12 public education in the United States, it’s a disaster. Public education is terrible. The National Report Card of Education just came out. Scores are down again. And of course, you’ve got the left-wing ideology out there as well. About 56 million kids in the country are at K-12 age right now.
50 million of them are in public schools of one sort or other. About three or four million are in private schools and about two million are home-schooled across the country right now?
Thornton: In Tennessee, which is where my focus is, I think we’re 1.1 million in the public schools. We’re about 80,000 in private schools. All the different types of private schools added together, and that number has been fairly consistent since back in the ’80s because there are just so many seats and there are so many dollars, because that’s an expensive proposition to go to private school. The number of home schoolers has grown over this from 1984 until now to where we are probably in excess of 200,000 now.
Leahy: Two-hundred thousand home schoolers.
Thornton: In Tennessee.
Leahy: And growing. COVID, growth. Vaccines, growth, CRT, growth.
Leahy: Critical Race Theory …
Thornton: Growth. People understand that they want their children to have a healthy life, and that, in this country, in a constitutional republic, requires that citizens be educated. A republic cannot exist without educated citizens.
Leahy: Well, I want to talk about that. When you talk about educated citizens, how do we create educated citizens? What do you do, sort of in the home-schooling environment?
Thornton: I think that the issue that I would like to look at is – well, let me go back a little bit before I get to that. I asked Senator Dunavant many years ago, as I looked through the Tennessee Code Annotated, why there was no definition for a word in there.
Leahy: You asked who?
Thornton: Senator Leonard Dunavant. He was on the Senate Education Committee. And so I asked him why there was no definition of a word. And interestingly, most times when you write a law, the first thing you do is have a definite set of definitions for the term.
There’s no definition of the term “school.” Interesting that it’s not there. He said, oh, no, we don’t want to get into that. Rather than try to define what a school is in the state law, I would rather think in terms of defining what an educated citizen looks like.
An educated citizen knows how to, I would say, how to speak and write English. They know how to do math. They understand our government, they understand our civics, and they understand basic fundamentals.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
