Home education in America has been legal for a while. I remember hearing about a challenge in recent years in California which involved a judge denying that parents have a constitutional right to educate their children at home (Criminalizing Home Schoolers, TIME, 3-7-08), and I know some states are more lenient while others are more intrusive when it comes to laws governing home education. It is at least legal here, though.
According to the website for the National Center for Education Statistics, homeschoolers in 2007 numbered about 1.5 million in the U.S., or about 3% of American students (NCES).
I was educated at home from the second half of 1st grade up until my senior year of high school. My wife and I began homeschooling the eldest of our four sons just this year, as he entered kindergarten, and we are committed to educating him and his brothers all the way through til graduation of high school.
What reasons have we for bucking the trend of public education? Many.
First off, these are our children; God gave us the responsibility for training and caring for them. We're not merely a breeding pair, my wife and I. We are their father and mother. Someday we will stand before Almighty God and give an account for how we taught, trained, protected and provided for these children. We take this seriously.
The public education system is bloated, bureaucratic, inefficient, chaotic, relativistic, amoral, godless, and incapable. It's a monstrosity that should be reformed or abolished. Sadly, however, there doesn't seem to be real accountability. Diffusion of responsibility is at least partly to blame.
It seems to me as though children who attend public schools are educated despite, not because of, the system. I want my children to be able to read proficiently, do advanced math, learn the lessons of history, acquire a fundamental grasp of the sciences - I'm not confident that the American public education system has a good record in this regard sufficient to warrant my confidence that sending my children to them would present a high chance of meaningful education happening. It feels as though I'd be rolling the dice.
Public schools are physically unsafe. Children bring guns to school and shoot up their classmates. When in the world would I have to worry about that with homeschooling?
Teachers have sex with students, students are taught to embrace as legitimate and praiseworthy sexual immorality, and are not taught to abstain from sex outside of marriage, but instead are given condoms and a moral vacuum in which to experiment with one another, get pregnant, contract STDs, and reap emotional and spiritual mayhem, all in the name of moral relativism and expressing themselves. So long as there's a morning after pill or abortion-on-demand to keep them from ruining their lives, we'll look the other way.
Back to the actual education part of the equation, the students in public schools are so distracted by pressures from their peer group to conform to various changing standards of coolness in fashion, music taste, attitude, interest, etc. that they don't focus on their subjects.
Public schools hold children in an artificial, unhelpful and unnecessary environment that requires either the advanced students to be held back in order to prop up average test scores for the students who are not progressing, or else the students who are not progressing are dragged along mindlessly in order to keep up with the advanced children, or else both simultaneously in order to reach the biggest possible group of students in the center! What is accomplished is neglect of many and, at best, a commitment to mediocrity for the majority. Meanwhile teachers are burnt out, students are disillusioned, and a great failure is being tolerated and propped up.
Public education is forbidden from including any godly, biblical or moral content in the instruction. What is produced then, putting aside any private attempts by parents or churches, is a godless, amoral education which explains all things in a naturalistic, utilitarian way, and scrubs a young person's convictions away implicitly (sometimes also explicitly) by the example set, discouraging them from having, exercising, or especially sharing convictions. That is to say that children are trained to be godless.
What is taught instead of a Biblical, Judeo-Christian worldview is a theory and philosophy of origins which is contradictory and hostile to the Biblical account, implying that either there is no God at all, or else the god we should worship is that absent watchmaker the Deists believed in. This Deist's god is not the type who would've sent Jesus to atone for your sins, not the type who would have intervened in human affairs to perform signs and wonders, or to give revelations of truth or his will - quite the contrary. If and when the existence of the supernatural is not denied, it is so insidiously and persistently implied to be ridiculous, backwards, ignorant, intolerant and harmful that I cannot conclude that the system, insofar as it is religious, is anything but anti-Christ.
How then am I to proceed as a Christian man with children?
- If I see it as my duty and obligation to protect these children, but I see the public education system as harmful in many ways;
- If I see it as my duty to instruct these children and ensure they're prepared with a knowledge and understanding of the world and their place in it which will help them to make wise, informed decisions in their adult life, but I see the public education system as severely deficient in this regard;
- If I see it as my duty to weave into daily instruction an understanding of God's Word and ways, a personal discipline and sense of right and wrong which will help my sons know how to be honorable, upright men, and how to respond to vile and wicked men in the world, and if I feel that the public education system is operating with complete negligence in this regard where it is not operating counter-productive to these ends;
How can I send my children to be educated by the public schools?
Consider this court document in the Romeike case, which I read this morning, and place yourself in my shoes. I find myself wondering about parents having their children taken away by a government, as the German government will do once this family is returned to their country.
How can this be seen as something other than persecution, especially where this German family sees their responsibility as many American homeschooling families do - namely, to educate their children themselves rather than entrusting the task to a godless, ineffective system? That is, how can we dismiss the claim of persecution unless we either minimize the legitimacy of their convictions or else downplay the pain which would be caused them by being forced to comply to a law which is contrary to their convictions?
Which is also to question how a decision can be made in favor of the German government's rights over those of this family's, and how can such be tolerated in America regarding the Romeike family without the same reasoning being used someday against American homeschooling families?
Forgive my naivete, but I was under the impression from reading history that many persons from around the world came to America to escape government overreach in their home countries, especially with regards to religious conviction.
How much more pain could you cause a parent than to take their children away from them? The court document I linked to above explains that the German government would not be enforcing their compulsory school attendance law out of a desire to hurt the Romeike parents, but is that entirely the point?
Suppose some government made up a law against breathing air. Then you could argue that the government choking the breaker of such a law to death wasn't so much about trying to hurt them, only about enforcing the law. Since when is the government the wronged party in this, when you break a ridiculous, overreaching law? Once the law is in place, can the government deny that it is in the wrong for choking the lawbreaker by explaining that the lawbreaker is really the one in the wrong for breathing air and breaking the law?
What is being asserted here is that the government reserves all rights unto itself which are not explicitly given to the people; but that is not a limited government, but rather a limited individual and an unlimited government. It will then be said that you do not have a right to do anything which has not been explicitly permitted for you to do.
Tell me truly, is there a more true definition of oppression?
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