DANVILLE, CALIFORNIA--The odd squawking sound wasn't coming from my radio. It was a motorcycle cop trying to get my attention. I spotted him in the rearview mirror and felt 15 again. My cheeks flushed hot and red. My checkered driving past had finally caught up with me.

Nowadays, teenagers are required to take both classroom and behind-the-wheel training. But in 1968, driving instruction requirements were vague at best, leaving it to parents to figure out what to do. My mom was an overworked housewife with eight other kids to worry about. I think she saw our brief driving sessions in the family station wagon as a chance to get in a smoke before the onslaught of dinner.

"Am I making you nervous, mom?" She exhaled white puffs. "Of course not. Try to stay on the right side, honey."

If mom or my two older brothers couldn't take me, I settled for my dad, whose patience extended about as far as the length of the driveway. "For Christ's sake. What the hell are you doing?" was the closest he came to actual instruction. 

How I ever passed the DMV test still baffles me.

Now the officer in the stiff leather boots tapped on my car window. I rolled it down. "I clocked you doing 41 in a 25, but I'll put it down as 38." 

I got the feeling I was supposed to thank him. His silver mirrored sunglasses reflected back my own tiny and pathetic image. "I...can't believe...it's my first ticket." The lie popped out like a bad zit right before the Friday night dance.

In truth, I committed my first "infraction" during my junior year at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I lived in a student-housing enclave that resembled a dilapidated Third World village, and local police, understandably weary of the suntanned student-activists who referred to them as "pigs," issued scads of tickets to speeding cars headed for parties, the beach, anti-establishment demonstrations, or maybe even class. 

I didn't worry about traffic tickets; I got around on my bicycle in those days. But one afternoon, pedaling through a four-way stop, two uniformed officers in a parked black-and-white flashed their lights, motioning for me to come over. I looked around, thinking they meant someone else. Certainly a bike was exempt from the laws of the road. Like a squirrel or a stray cat.

"You went right through that stop," one of the officers said. "We'll have to give you a citation." "Oh, okay," I agreed, shoving the yellow slip of paper into my pants pocket and cycling away, making a mental note to look up the word "citation." I was pretty sure it meant "warning."

Three months later, a couple of armed law enforcement agents pounded on my apartment door, bearing heavy chrome handcuffs and a warrant for my arrest. The charge was "failure to appear in court for a moving violation." It took me a minute to recall the yellow paper, by now a wad of fiber caught in the lint trap of the coin operated dryer a block away. 

"Oh...that...I...was on a-a-bicycle...I thought it was a wa-wa-warning..." I began to sob--the heaving, high-drama sobs of an adolescent English major petrified of what they planned to do with those handcuffs.

"Okay, miss. Calm down. Here's a new citation. Be sure to show up this time."

I sat in Superior Court on the appointed date, next to drunk drivers and red-light runners, waiting for the judge. "Your honor, it was just a bicycle...you know...pedals." I rotated my arms and hands, as if he was a foreigner who couldn't speak the language. He slapped me with the highest fine of the day.

When I went home for spring break, my dad gave me a four-speed Toyota Celica. I hadn't ever driven a stick shift. "You'll figure it out," he reassured me with a hug as I left for school. "But for God's sake don't burn out the clutch." I lurched and stalled down the street, onto the highway, all the way back to UCSB, and never again got a ticket.

Until 20 years later, that is, when I got pulled over for weaving in my suburban mom whale of a car. I was scanning an unfamiliar boulevard for a shoe store when my 15-year-old son changed the radio station. The grunge rock group Nirvana instantly sucked the positive energy right out of the car.

"Mom, make him turn that off," snapped my 13-year-old, thrusting for the radio buttons, inspiring a counter-grab from her brother. I swung to break it up. Tortured cries erupted from the younger two kids, hitting each other in the back seat. My son noticed the neon red and blue strobe lights before I did.

"Hey, mom, I think you're getting arrested." At that point the thought of quiet solitary confinement for the day didn't sound too bad.

I pulled over and my driving life flashed before me, with enough illegal turns and over-the-speed-limit trips to give this cop bound volumes of filled ticket pads. I rolled down the window and offered up both wrists.

"Just your registration, ma'am."

He peered inside the car at the kids, now so quiet we could hear the snap and crackle static of his hip-mounted radio.

"Did you know you were weaving?" I shook my head and wondered what kind of food they served in prison. Whatever it was, at least I wouldn't have to cook it.

"Just be careful, ma'am. Okay?"

With my third infraction, the speeding ticket, I ended up in traffic school. It turned out to be a religious experience. We spilled our guts like alcoholics at a 12-step meeting. "My name is Christine. I went too fast in a residential area." I admitted my sins, did the penance, and drove away with an untarnished soul. All for a grand total of eight hours and $162.

I love this country.

—Christine Parsons last wrote for TAE about adopting a dog (January/February 2002).

Generation Two
By Isabel Lyman

WHITEHALL, MONTANA--Steve Wagner is a soft-spoken landscaper who runs a little commonwealth located 1,915 miles from Washington, D.C. What he calls the Education Station is a community center here in the Rocky Mountains for homeschooling families and others who are interested "in non-governmental solutions to the problems of the culture."

Steve sometimes invites a teacher, minister, or author to hold a seminar for Whitehall-area homeschoolers. Today a newspaper columnist from New England--yours truly--is the speaker. My audience consists largely of teenagers and their parents, and we are deconstructing the copies of the Bozeman Chronicle: playing with headlines, pondering media bias, reading the First Amendment, and debating journalistic ethics.

Media mogul Ted Turner comes up during our two-hour discussion, for his mammoth Montana ranch, the Flying D, is only 50 miles away. Interestingly, Rob Arnaud, the wildlife manager for the liberal, anti-religious Turner, turns out to be a church-going homeschooling father. I learn that there is much work for reform-minded families in Big Sky country: Pushy environmentalists have shut down much of Montana's mining industry, federal land grabs have wounded private property owners, and the state income tax rate is as high as 11 percent.

Sitting in on my media seminar is small business owner and local church elder Tim Martin, 28, and his wife, Amy, 27. They live in Whitehall with their four children. Tim was homeschooled from fifth grade through eleventh grade in Florida, while Amy was taught at home during her elementary school years in Colorado. They are now teaching their own kids at home. So let us note a social landmark: Second-generation homeschoolers are now growing up across America.

Tim and Amy are living refutations of the lame resolution that the National Education Association passes every year at its convention,which reads: "Home schooling programs cannot provide the student with a comprehensive education experience." (The Martins suggest the statement could be made more accurate by scratching out the word "home" and replacing it with "public.") "Education just works better one-on-one," says Tim. "No school environment--no matter how good, no matter how much money is spent--can compete with homeschooling in this. Why do we think the 'right' way to do education is to put 20 or 30 children in a classroom with one teacher? That model is more fit for manufacturing than education."

Amy manages the daily details of teaching and caring for the youngsters, but Tim participates actively. "I spend at least one day a week working with Micaiah. We read, write, and do math together. I anticipate this involvement will grow as all my children advance in their work," he says. The couple also incorporate activities like gardening or hiking in Glacier National Park into their routine.

Another second-generation homeschooling family I met recently are the Murpheys. Jason, 24, and his wife, Raleah, 30, have two preschool sons they are planning to educate at home--as Jason was from sixth through twelfth grade. They believe it makes practical sense to have as much direct involvement in their sons' lives as possible. "A third party won't have the interest in our children that we would."

Jason is a member of the Guthrie City Council (outside Oklahoma City), and plans to run for a seat on the county commission. He says "the public school mentality" is the dominant philosophy that guides his fellow elected officials. "The mental outlook is one of being nice to the right people, so you'll be popular," he asserts. Combining his passion for politics and home education, Murphey has developed a mentoring program that will pair home-educated children with officeholders. "Upon graduation from high school or college, we would then sponsor those students for elective office," explains Jason with a smile, "invading the system with homeschoolers."

A sophisticate might dismiss Second-Gen homeschooling families like the Wagners and Martins and Murpheys as part of the exotic sights of the American Middle West, wedged in a mental tourist guide between "herds of elk" and "militia members." But the healthy effects of home education are increasingly on view for all Americans to see. For instance, more than 10 percent of the champion spellers making it to the National Spelling Bee in recent years have been homeschoolers, including 1997 winner Rebecca Sealfon (from Brooklyn), and 2000 winner George Thampy (of Missouri). Homeschooled Calvin McCarter from Michigan won the National Geographic Bee in 2002.

Based on my experiences interviewing homeschoolers for a book, most of these families are active and influential members of their communities. A self-directed, risk-taking mindset seems to be the norm among homeschooling clans. This tends to be true whether the scholars in question live in a log cabin with antelope roaming nearby, or just a stone's throw from downtown office towers. 

—Massachusetts journalist Isabel Lyman is author of The Homeschooling Revolution.