In his young adulthood to be countercultural was a badge of honor. To reject the establishment, uniformity, regimentation, and the homogenization of culture was an act of courageous resistance. To walk to the beat of a different drummer was authentic. To flout authority, particularly government authority, was liberating.
That was then. Now many of his leftist friends seem to have unwittingly abandoned those formerly-held convictions. Mills is made especially aware of this by their reaction when he informs them that he and his wife are home-schooling their two youngest children. He writes about his experience in a column at First Things.
Here's Mills:
Thus I was surprised some years later to find the kind of people with whom I’d grown up—the leftists, the intellectuals, the activists, the public-spirited—suddenly alarmed at the growth of homeschooling. (And I first experienced this surprise when we still expected to send our children to the public schools.)Mills has more to say about this strange reaction of liberals to the idea of homeschooling in his essay. I know anecdotal evidence doesn't count for much, but I have to say that in the last seven years I have had dozens of home-schooled students in my classes. Many of them were still high school-aged kids taking college courses, and almost all of them were among the best students in the class. They were every bit as sociable, intelligent, and mature - often moreso - as their peers who had attended public schools. What's more, they often brought to class a level of background knowledge that their publicly educated peers lacked.
The critics treated it as a threat to the social order and a source of sectarian divisions. Some expressed concern that homeschooled children would find themselves unable to function in a pluralistic society. Many also argued that they would get an inferior education, but that always seemed to be a secondary concern, and grimly amusing coming from advocates of the near-monopoly of a public school system whose failures were beginning to be lamented even by liberal observers.
The critics found themselves so alarmed, of course, because now politically, culturally, and religiously conservative parents were educating their children at home and rejecting the influence of a system in which the critics—so many of them former countercultural types themselves—were heavily invested, and from which, as a Marxist would note, so many of them drew their salaries.
The homeschoolers were no longer a few hippies and leftists, whose numbers were always going to be small and their influence marginal, and who were reliably leftist anyway. Now the homeschoolers were a growing number of average parents, whose countercultural commitments were of the conservative and not the leftist sort, whose numbers might well increase and their influence grow stronger, particularly if the establishment lost its control over the education of children, which happened to be its primary way of reducing parental influence in, to borrow a famous phrase from my youth, the battle for their hearts and minds.
People who have no obvious stake in the matter, like most of the people who have expressed dismay at my wife and my decision to homeschool our children, tend to side with the establishment against the parents. They’ve somehow absorbed the key elements of the ideology, like the concern for “socialization,” which is either a faux concern for the children’s well-being or a real concern for their being educated outside of and probably against the ideas public schools (with exceptions, of course) inculcate and impose.
The idea that homeschooling is hurting kids is true only if by the word "hurting" one means that these students aren't being indoctrinated in the liberal orthodoxies and moral anomie that prevail in many of our public schools. It's ironic, though perhaps understandable, that liberals don't like, and even oppose, giving students a way to avoid those "benefits."