What is the most valuable thing you could be entrusted with? Is it gold, the Crown Jewels, or maybe fine art like the Mona Lisa? No, the most valuable thing you could be entrusted with is the shaping of a child’s mind because, unlike all the things listed above, children are made in the image of God, and have souls that will live forever. Since your children are the most valuable thing you will ever have, it’s important to take the utmost care in raising and caring for them, and put in as much effort as necessary to do so. This isn’t controversial when it comes to feeding and clothing kids, but the moment education comes into the picture, many parents throw their kids into public school without a moment’s thought. This is a travesty. The education of our children should be the highest concern of any parent, but it is often the last thing considered, and children are harmed not only intellectually, but also spiritually by this kind of negligence. It is well past time for Christian parents to pull their children out of the government school system and educate them at home.
To see why, we need to start by understanding parents’ responsibility to God and their children, as laid out in Ephesians 6:4:
Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, addresses fathers here because, contrary to feminists and soft complimentarians (but I repeat myself), the father is the head of his household and is thus ultimately responsible for making sure this command gets fulfilled. Mothers are included in this command, and play an important part in educating children, see Proverbs 1:8. Marriage and parenting are a team effort.
Since parents are charged with bringing up their children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord, we next need to look at what discipline and instruction are. Discipline, according to Webster’s, is “training that corrects, molds, or perfects the mental faculties or moral character” and instruction is “the action, practice, or profession of teaching”. Discipline and instruction are the constituent parts of education, and to educate is, again from Webster’s, “to develop mentally, morally, or aesthetically especially by instruction.” To put it in mathematical terms, discipline plus instruction equals education. Education is not some kind of value-neutral transfer of data, it is the formation of the mind and worldview of the one being taught. In other words, education is parenting and parenting is education.
If you doubt, let’s take a look at the similarities between parents and schools. Parents, at least the good ones, have standards of behavior for their children; there are some behaviors, attitudes, and habits that aren’t allowed, and punishments for misbehavior. Likewise, schools have standards of behavior and can punish students for violating them. These standards forbid things like ‘hate speech’. Keep in mind that saying boys are boys and girls are girls is considered hate speech by the Left, who run the schools, so that your children can be punished for telling the truth.
Parents, intentionally or not, inculcate values in their children by example and by what they say is good or bad. Schools are doing the exact same thing when they promote inclusivity of gays, transgenders, and racial socialist groups like Black Lives Matter. They are teaching children to accept things, homosexuality, transgenderism, prejudice, and theft, that God hates. Likewise, the behavior of teachers sets an example for students in areas ranging from how they dress to their attitude towards the students’ parents. Students whose teachers disrespect their parents will come to disrespect their own parents. Students whose teachers talk about their same-sex partner will be much more tolerant of sodomy, which God hates, than they would otherwise be. Students who are instructed from secular presuppositions eight hours a day throughout their formative years will pick up those presuppositions, consciously or not.
Parents also establish family traditions, whether they mean to or not, through the activities that take place in the child’s life; and these traditions are one of, if not the most, important way that culture is created and perpetuated in society, by shaping the thoughts, attitudes, beliefs and habits of children. These traditions can be things like special things a family does to celebrate Christmas, or it can be more mundane-seeming things like the family gathering around the TV to watch ‘70s cop shows and eat nachos on a Sunday night. Even seemingly unconscious behaviors, like everyone pulling out their smartphones to watch their own shows and ignore each other, or a love of reading books are traditions that families form. Schools likewise form traditions through things like dictating a student’s entire schedule, rigid adherence to standardized curricula, rote memorization, and generally making learning a chore on par with cleaning hair out of a shower drain.
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and has feathers like a duck, it’s safe to say it’s a duck. Government schools enforce behavior standards like parents, inculcate values like parents, and form traditions like parents, so it’s safe to say that they’re parenting the children in their charge. This has been recognized for centuries, going back to English common law, from which we get the term in loco parentis, which literally means ‘in place of the parent’. It has been understood since the Middle Ages that teachers are parenting children. There is no excuse to try to divorce parenting from education.
Teachers are aware of the power they have as surrogate parents, and are more than willing to use that power to raise children to suit their own ends, regardless of what the actual parents think. Thomas Sowell explains well how teachers have given up even the pretense of value-neutral education in favor of churning out pint-sized activists for their favorite ideologies. For an even better example of how schools parent your children, watch this video in which Dr. Sowell explains the introduction, and consequences, of sex education. It is a perfect example of the government, through the schools, parenting children. Keep in mind what the schools’ response to the outrage of the actual parents: ignore them. Teachers don’t care what values you want taught to your children. They don’t care that you’re trying to bring up your children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. Rather, they support gender-confusing children, the LGBTQ+ agenda, and don’t really care what happens to your children outside of indoctrinating them in their own twisted beliefs. These are the people that you are allowing to parent your children, if you send your kids to government schools.
Now, you might be thinking of legal remedies to the situation, like the anti-grooming bill that just went into law in Florida. While I respect DeSantis’ effort, it’s not enough. Passing a law that bans teachers from indoctrinating children in their pet ideologies is bound to fail, because the teachers will find a way around it, or flat out lie in order to pervert children. The teachers think that what they are doing is right, according to their own twisted worldview. They do not respect you, they do not respect your authority, and they do not respect the God who gave you your authority. They are devoted to their cause above all else and will disobey the law any chance they get. Putting your children in the public school system, even with anti-grooming laws in place, is like leaving them in the care of a pedophile after having him pinkie swear that he won’t do anything bad to them. Inevitably, it will come out that, gasp, shock, horror, the teachers are teaching LGBTQ+ perversion to kids anyway. Parents will get mad, there will be a big brouhaha and much drama, some teachers may get placed on administrative leave (with pay, of course). Then things will die down, the teachers will be quietly brought back into the classroom or replaced with ones just as bad, and the parents, who would never leave their wallet with these teachers, will leave their kids in the schools. Finally, the Christian parents are shocked when their kids reject the faith and become genderqueer atheists who love Big Government, after letting Big Government parent them for fourty hours a week. It’s no surprise that people are so docile, compliant, and generally too comfortable with government overreach. It is only natural for people to love and trust their parents, and for many people, they spent most of their lives being parented by the government, not their actual parents. Christian parents who send their kids to the government to be educated parented are allowing the Left to do to them what the Chinese government is forcibly doing to Uighers, and turn their children against them, and against God.
There is no excuse for entrusting your children to the public school system. It exists for one purpose: to bring up your children in the nurture and instruction of Big Government, in which atheism, and sexual perversion are virtues, and there is no god but Big Brother. You wouldn’t trust these people with your wallet, don’t trust them with your childrens’ minds.
‘What about private Christian schools?” you may ask. Even Christian schools can be infiltrated by people who are soft on homosexuality, and that assumes that the government doesn’t force them to include Sodomy 101 in the curriculum on pain of losing their accreditation. In some ways, Christian schools are more dangerous, since parents and kids feel like it’s a safe environment, and they can trust the teachers; after all, they say they’re Christians. Just because they say they’re Christians doesn’t mean they’re not teaching heresy like social justice or the prosperity ‘gospel’. Just read the book of Jude; not everyone who claims to be a Christian actually is one. Granted, Christian schools are not nearly as likely to make your kids pledge allegiance to the pride flag, but you are still ultimately responsible for bringing up your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. A few questions that I think are helpful in evaluating any person or institution that you would entrust with your child’s education: would you be comfortable leaving your wallet with them unsupervised for eight hours a day? Your children are more valuable than the contents of your wallet. Have you examined the whole curriculum for every class? Remember, the best lies are the ones mixed in with truth. Will they let you sit in on the lessons to see what’s being taught? Have you done it? If that sounds like so much work that you might as well homeschool, I agree 100%. Educating your children is one of those areas of life where it’s easier and more effective if you do it yourself instead of leaving it to experts.
Now I’ll grant that homeschooling can feel like a huge inconvenience at first. You need one parent, usually the wife, to stay home, like the Bible says she’s supposed to (Titus 2:3-5). You have to pick the curriculum yourselves, and teach it. You’ll have to grade papers, help with homework, and find the answers to questions you don’t know the answer to. Worst of all, you’ll have to spend time with your own children, which risks forming a loving bond that lasts well after they’ve moved out and established their own households. (Yes, that last one’s sarcastic.) In all seriousness, though, most apprehensions about homeschooling are based in misconceptions, lies and outright indoctrination.
It is to the benefit of our ruling elites, teachers’ unions, and government bureaucrats for you to believe that you can’t educate your own kids, because then you’ll hand them off to the state, which means teachers and their unions make more money, the bureaucracy continues to grow in size and budget, and the elites get to have your children indoctrinated in what they believe is best. Thus, the most important part of considering homeschooling is to dump your preconceptions of it and trust God to enable you to do what pleases Him. With that in mind, we should consider the advantages of homeschooling, before we get into some objections to it.
One of the biggest advantages of homeschooling is that you control what your kids learn. Some may say that’s creepy and controlling, but these people forget (or willfully ignore) that it is literally your job to control what your children learn. Bringing them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord means there are some things, such as reading and understanding the Bible or how to act with integrity, that they should learn, and other things, like witchcraft or how to make pornography, that they should not learn. God gave you the responsibility to raise your children right, and He has also given you authority over them to fulfill that responsibility. Not only does this give you the right to control what your children learn, it gives you the duty to do so. Advocates of government-schooling portray this as creepy and controlling, not because they care about your children, but because they want to control what your children learn, to convert them into activists for their political causes.
Controlling what your kids learn comes with advantages other than protecting them from pervy teachers as well. Since you control the curriculum, you can teach things that your kids need to learn that government schools won’t teach them. This includes things like critical thinking, basic economics, and Biblical ethics. You know, all the stuff the government doesn’t want them to learn. You can also include courses that appeal to your children’s interests, instead of trying to stuff them into the Procrustean bed of one-size-fits-all government education. This allows you to focus on developing your children’s God given gifts and interests on an individual level.
When you homeschool, you can also make adjustments to the curriculum to suit your children’s learning styles. You can make classes more interactive if you have kids who don’t learn well sitting behind a desk (also known as boys). You even get to choose when and where to take field trips, so you can take the kids to places that they’ll be interested in. This is why homeschoolers take the best field trips.
Unlike public school, learning doesn’t have to be a chore; something you do at that place that looks suspiciously like a prison, and then come home to get away from. Instead, you can teach your kids to teach themselves (not as hard as it sounds, actually), which is a foundational skill for people who are successful in adulthood.
Most importantly, you don’t have to pretend to be ‘value neutral’ when you teach your own kids. You can, and should, teach from an explicitly Christian worldview. You don’t have to teach your kids that evolution is the truth, when you know it’s not; you can teach biology from an explicitly 6-day creationist (a.k.a. correct) standpoint. You can assign the 1689 London Baptist Confession as required reading, and no childless pink-haired feminist can stop you. You can even have prayer in schools and post the Ten Commandments on the wall. There is no better way to bring up your children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord than homeschooling, because nobody can stop you from teaching your kids God’s ways, and you don’t have to spend hours un-teaching them the nonsense that their government school political commissars, er, teachers have been teaching them.
Now, I know there are objections to homeschooling, so I want to address some of the most common ones.
1. Money
This can be a valid argument, although not necessarily a good one. Life can be expensive, and the modern American idea of a ‘normal’ standard of living is predicated on two incomes, a mortgage, a car payment, and a hefty stack of student loans. Homeschooling can be very hard in this context, to be certain, but, in the words of Dave Ramsey, “Normal sucks, who wants to be normal?” You will absolutely have to sacrifice some things that people consider ‘normal’ in order to homeschool. Dads, get used to fixing your own pre-owned minivan on the weekend instead of playing golf. Moms, jewellry is a thing of the past, now you’re going to get excited about kitchen appliances. Forget about vacationing in Hawaii, it’s too expensive (and is home to flying cockroaches).
Frankly, this is a matter of priorities. Would you rather sacrifice material possessions to raise your children, or sacrifice your children’s upbringing to have more stuff?
2. What about socialization? How will they make friends?
Growing up homeschooled, my parents made me all the friends I needed. We called them siblings.
All kidding aside though, this isn’t really a problem as long as you take your kids to church. They’ll socialize with the other kids at church naturally, and be influenced by older Christians who’ve been in the faith longer than you’ve been alive, most likely.
People who raise this objection forget that socialization can be a two-edged sword, especially if you let your kids hang out with kids who are a bad influence. It’s better that you know who they’re socializing with to keep them away from bad influences. This is part of raising them in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
3. You’re not qualified to teach your children.
This one sounds sensible, until you actually think about the assumptions behind it. The primary assumption here is that you are a dumb peasant who can’t teach your own children, because you don’t have a degree. They may not say it in so many words, but this is what this argument boils down to; an assumption that only ‘educators’, a government-approved elite class, can educate.
Since you are reading this, you are obviously literate and capable of using the internet. That’s all you need to get started, especially if you’re starting young. You don’t need to know trigonometry to teach a preschooler, you need to know colors, shapes and words. 1st grade isn’t much different, you just need to know how to add, subtract, and read simple sentences. I’ll let you in on a little secret: you don’t have to memorize vast amounts of information to homeschool, that’s what textbooks and the internet are for. If you don’t know how to do a complicated math problem, that’s nothing to be ashamed of, you can just look up a tutorial on YouTube and help your child figure out the answer. Now they’re not just learning how to do a math problem, but they’re also learning how to learn how to do things.
The fact is, you are better qualified to teach your children than so-called ‘educators’, because of how your incentives are aligned, as opposed to those of teachers. As a parent, you have a vested interest in preparing your children to succeed in the real world. You also have an incentive to teach them how to learn new things, because that dramatically reduces your workload, and is a very beneficial skill for succeeding after they graduate. Teachers, on the other hand, have no actual stake in the success of your children, because they get paid the same either way. In fact, teachers are incentivized to do the least amount of work, because that means less effort for the same reward. They certainly have no incentive to bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord, just the opposite.
This argument isn’t really about the welfare of your kids at all, it’s about keeping you and your kids dependent on the government and the teachers’ unions, which you won’t be if you realize that education isn’t some special blessing that can only be conferred by an elite class of ‘educators’. As long as education is monopolized by these elites, they can shape the minds of children to be Good Citizenstm, which is a nice way of saying dumb, compliant, genderqueer leftist revolutionaries.
The purpose of education is not the rote memorization of facts that public ‘education’ aims for (and doesn’t even achieve that much, most of the time), or to make your children into what the government considers to be good citizens, but is to bring up your children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. There is no one more qualified than you to do that. That’s why God gave your children to you.
4. I don’t want my kids to be weird.
In the words of Inigo Montoya, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” Take a good look at what passes for normal in our society. You’ll change your tune real quick.
To sum up, education is not just the rote memorization of facts, dates, and figures. Rather, it is the fundamental essence of parenting. Sending children to public, i.e. government schools, is simply giving away one’s children to be parented by the government and teachers’ unions. As a parent, it is your God-given responsibility to parent your children, not the government’s, and not anyone else’s. Foisting this responsibility off on the government and ‘educators’ who have a bias towards the radical left has bad consequences for the children, and for society in general, as it raises children to uncritically look to the government to solve their problems, instead of thinking for themselves. Big Government and the teachers’ unions aren’t going to bring your children up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord, just the opposite; they’ll bring them up in the discipline and instruction of Big Brother, Critical Race Theory, and sexual libertinism. The only way to fulfill your responsibility to God and your children is to educate them yourself. It’s not as hard as people make it sound. Yes, it will require some sacrifice, but you are sacrificing to obey God’s command, and that pleases Him. When you homeschool, you get to obey God, love your kids, and stick it to The Man, all while leading a life that feels like it has purpose, because it does.
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