‘Mean Girls’ and the New (Home-Schooled) Kid in Class

The original 2004 movie “Mean Girls” contained something unusual, both then and now: a main character who was home-schooled. But not that kind of home-schooled.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) tells us in voice-over. “Home-schooled kids are freaks.” The movie cuts to a tiny bespectacled girl spelling “xylocarp” at the National Spelling Bee. “Or that we’re weirdly religious or something,” Cady continues. A family of boys in suspenders appears; behind them are sandbags displaying paper targets with human outlines. “And on the third day,” one of the boys drawls, “God created the Remington bolt-action rifle, so that man could fight the dinosaurs. And the homosexuals.”

“Amen,” his brothers chime in.

It was a funny bit no matter who you were back in 2004, dependent on Bush-era perceptions of home-schoolers as, well, weirdly religious, survivalist freaks who insisted that God made the world in six days around 6,000 years ago. Like everything in “Mean Girls” — and, indeed, Tina Fey’s entire body of work — it was an exaggerated caricature based on a kernel of truth. Home-schooling in the 1990s, at least in the United States, was largely insular, and mostly the purview of conservative evangelical Christians with views that could appear extreme even to others in the same pew.

I was a junior in college when “Mean Girls” first hit theaters, and the joke tickled me because I’d spent the last few years trying to figure out hierarchies myself: I’d been home-schooled, just like Cady.

Well, not just like Cady. I left my private school after the fifth grade to be home-schooled, and a number of the communities my family dipped into along the way were similar to the gun-toting, dinosaur-loving kids from the movie. (The first time I really felt like my youth was represented onscreen was last year’s documentary series “Shiny Happy People.”) I went to seminars where we were taught that dinosaurs did roam the earth at the same time as humans, that the fossil record was designed by God to mess with scientists, and a whole lot of other things.