In his more overheated/cynical moments, he pretty much states that removal from public education is going to be necessary very soon, if it isn’t already. He seems to be somewhat more lenient towards charter schools (which are public schools, something many people don’t realize) depending on their character.

Generally, he’s very skeptical of public education, but allows for local variations; mainly he would argue, at the very least, to be a very, very involved parent who knows exactly what is being taught and is otherwise involved in Parent/Teacher orgs and the like and who chooses the school for your kids with careful thought and prayer (so doing things like choosing where you live, or getting boundary exceptions, or picking a charter school, etc.).

Do I see a time when such an option might be necessary? Yes. And it might already be here. But cultural forces within Mormonism heavily favor public education over home schooling (maybe because Elementary Ed is a popular major for Mormon women?) In all the wards I’ve living in inside and outside of Utah, home schooling families were seen as the unusual “weird” ones, rather than the ones ahead of the curve.

The homeschool surge of the 80’s was very much about religious values. The most recent surge is much less so. Institutional education is actually remarkably good at accommodating seemingly insurmountable ideological differences. Current changes to push “moral” agendas in the educational system are highly likely to be clawed back. Education is very reform resistant and is optimized to resist this type of usurpation via extremely strong hybridizing tendencies & structures.

I’d also note that some of the isolationist and luddite leaning sects still fully participate in formal educational structures (at least until legally mandated ages are reached). The Hutterites are a good example here. Education doesn’t seem to affect their emigration rates much. Frequency of physical separation from the group does (e.g. off colony jobs, frequency of town visits, socialization rates with neighbours, etc.)

Not being in Utah, I can’t comment on the educational culture there. It sounds like you are saying that how Utah voted a decade ago on vouchers is evidence that there is no cultural divide to be concerned about. I do agree with you that a Mormon Benedict Option involving education would be a hard sell to members of the Church. But can’t you foresee a time in the future when such an option may be necessary?

I’m merely hypothesizing that separating from “pop culture” and all the perceived ills of secularism would be difficult to accomplish if your children are immersed in it 8 hours a day at school. (At least outside of Utah).

What does Mr. Dreher say about education with regard to his proposed Benedict Option? I would assume that he would propose some kind of separation from public education.

That said I’m skeptical education is the problem even if I’m pretty horrified by some stories about what gets taught in some California schools about sexuality to the very young. But by the same measure I was pretty horrified by schools in the south when I lived there too for very different reasons.

Back in 2007, Utah voted on whether to allow education tax dollars to be used as vouchers for private schools. The measure failed spectacularly (62% against, with the initiative failing by a wide margin in every single county in the state!) If Mormons were so set against private education 10 years ago, it suspect it would be a hard sell today. (It appears it was a hard sell back in the stake academy days a century ago, too.)

This is one area that I think that we within the LDS culture will have to eventually address. I think our leaders are already preparing for the necessary shift away from reliance on public education, but I fear that this will be the most difficult internal cultural change for members of the Church to face up to.

A big thing to understand is that population level insights never port to what can be said about any individual or smaller group. Lots of people (e.g….google diversity dept) go wrong there.

While you can obviously google differences,
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/six-charts-illustrate-divide-rural-urban-america
a lot of people center on political affiliation, social conservancy, government size (control). But all these are pretty crude simplifications that are likely to induce as many misconceptions as they clarify. So what ends up happening is most people fall to a heuristic (mental shorthand) that works for them and resonates with their experiences.

My own way of understanding the divide is via multi-level selection (tension between working as part of a large group vs. a smaller group). But things quickly get complicated. There are lots of possible groups. And, different things work better at different group sizes for different people at different times. So, saying anything definite about one group or the other is problematic and subject to a lot of probabilistic problems. But, in general rural folk are probably more concerned about optimizing most things for smaller more honor based reciprocities than are urban folk. The anonymity of large groups prioritizes collective coherence in slightly different ways. You just don’t have the same type of physically guaranteed repeat interactions that you do when there are fewer people around and you can’t hide in a crowd.

In general, societies survive competition by either being small and well cohered / coordinated niche players or by being large coordinated-enough behemoths. Successful groups need a balance of each tendency in order to survive in ever changing environments with perpetually innovative corrupters.

I suspect the church operates like a rural group in that it makes repeat interactions highly likely and anonymity infeasible. But it operates like an urban group via its universalizing tendencies and missionary focus. This creates some interesting tensions. The glue that binds these types of tight ropes is probably orthopraxy and orthodoxy. Different religions find different ways to balance things with these two types of glue. And these balance points seems to change over time based upon the environment and how unstable the equilibrium between large-small group orientations become. Right now things seem pretty unstable but tight norms and high interaction rates seem to providing a pretty good buffer for us. But that can change if physical interaction becomes superficial and culture war issues require lots of management.