A Christian Home Schooled

We’ve come full circle from the earliest days of education.  Parents, not governments, are responsible for providing education for their children.  It was given to parents to teach all sorts of things all throughout history– which is not to say that the parent did not have help of some teachers of specific fields– but parents used to be the only source of education for a student.

And this made a lot of sense, since a majority of people lived an agrarian lifestyle and had their children along with them in the fields, at home, etc.  At some point, it was decided that there was more to be gained by educating some people highly and then having them come back to give children education.  In this way, the parents could give their children a better education than they themselves had had.

As technology and industrialization progressed, more and more children were in the schools and the teaching profession began to boom.  Now, instead of it being the parent’s job to educate the child, it’s the government’s job to not only educate, but basically to raise our children!  They have them from six weeks after they are born until they are eighteen– and some parents are happy as long as they have kids that are nice to them (as a majority find that, to their surprise, their kids have a tighter bond to their classmates than their parents).

Enter homeschooling– a return to the pattern of old and something that forces parents to take direct involvement in their kids education.  What has made this possible is that parents now have as much or more education than some of the teachers and if they don’t, there are resources both online, in paper and locally that were never available before to the agrarian lifestyle.

In fact, if you couple the fact that parents are involved (which they pretty much have to be in any form of schooling) with the amount of new information that is available more readily at home, and the fact that a child has a much smaller class size and can learn at their own pace, it’s hard to see why this isn’t the superior form of education!

With the responsibility for educating the child comes the responsibility to make sure that they are socialized, that they are involved in their community, and that they reach out to others– something that’s not necessarily easy, but is worthwhile no matter where the child goes.

With much greater control on what the child learns, the parents can know with certainty that the child is learning about God, is developing a passion for the things of God, and who the child’s friends and influences are.