NoelHeikkinen.com

Homeschooling

Dec 12, 2006 Uncategorized | Print This Post

.:mood:. Non-seperatist
.:itunes:. Over My Head (Cable Car) by The Fray

OK, this is hands down the best post I have read on homeschooling. Tim is very charitable to those who choose to home-school, and yet at the same time he explains why he and his wife choose not to. It is definitely a great read.

Grace and I home-school our kids for Kindergarten and First Grade, and then we send our kids off to public school. I will get into our reasons for this in a bit, but first here’s some thought from Tim Challies site:

In my experience (and I have quite extensive experience with families that homeschool) the decision to homeschool is an aspect of a larger ideology. There is a set of underlying beliefs that prompt a family to homeschool their children. In my experience an aspect of these beliefs deal with how Christians are to interact with the world.

This has been one of our rubs, which has made it interesting to home-school. We have noticed a definite “world-view” attached to many (not all) home-school families. And unfortunately, it has a few tenants we disagree with strongly. The two that stand out for us are:

1. Christians are to be “separate” from culture.
2. The United States is a Christian country or is supposed to be a Christian country.

This makes it interesting for us because we disagree with these so much that we are hesitant to get involved with any home-schooling groups. With that said, we are members of one group, but we have poured over their literature to make sure we know what we are getting into. We are only nominally involved and only in the areas where it helps our home-schooling effort and where there is little chance of our kids getting either of those two tenants taught to them.

We have awesome friends in this group who disagree with us, so make sure you hear that this is our conviction.

Tim goes on and says:

Douglas Wilson differentiates between homeschoolers and what he called “Homers” in an article he wrote for Credenda Agenda. Homeschoolers, he says, are “people who have carefully considered all the options available to them in the education of their children, have prayerfully weighed them, and have decided to provide their children with an education at home.” Homers are extremists who “have a completely different attitude toward the process of homeschooling. No longer an instrument or means of educating their children, homeschooling has become, in their hands, a very modern manifestation of home as ideology. In this thinking, home is a defining principle to which everything else must conform. Even the church is brought into the service of the home. Father is no longer a father; he is a prophet, priest and king. Any home is capable of doing anything that is worth doing. A radical home-centeredness takes over, insisting that the home can not only replace the school, but also the church and the civil magistrate, not to mention Safeway and General Motors.”

This nails it for me!

I totally believe we have freedom here and each family has to decide what is right for them. At the same time, we have to watch out that our families don’t subtly become an idol. I have seen this attitude infect and it is dangerous.

Now…why are we home-schooling for the first couple years? Many home-school families are shocked to find out it has almost nothing to do with our faith.

The primary reason we home-school for the first few years? My wife was a public school teacher and she has seen how the first few years can be an academic wasteland. And with her qualifications, she can teach our kids so much more the first couple years. Our hope is that it will give our kids a head start academically. So far, with Emma and Jesse, this has proven to be the case. They are both in public school and are doing exceptionally well academically.

Ethan is halfway through Kindergarten and he is reading and writing already.

The secondary reason we home-school for the first few years? We want to disciple our kids a bit more before exposing them to public school. We feel like 5 years old is a little premature to send them into the world. This is a deliberate choice. What do I mean by exposing them to public school? Well, after Emma’s first day of public school, I asked her how it went.

Her response?

“A boy said I was hot.”

Now that would be reason enough to yank her from public school all together for many people. But it is precisely the reason we have decided to send them into school in third grade. We want our kids to live in the world at the same time they are living in our house. We want them to come home and ask us what swear words mean. We want them to come home and tell us about their experiences in culture, because it will afford us with an opportunity to frame their experiences with a missional world-view.

Anyhoo, this is a surprisingly long post for me, so I shall leave it alone for now. I’m looking forward to what else Tim has to say on this topic.

I have to go right now, because Jesse just got home from school. He made me a Kwanzaa candle holder for me to go with the Kwanzaa mat he gave me yesterday. :)