Category Archives: Homeschooling

The System’s Children

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Socialization is the reason we homeschool.

People used ask me all the time why we homeschool. These days, everybody knows why, and I’m more likely to receive their apologia as to why they don’t than queries as to why we do. I have a book’s worth of good material after many years of answering that question. I get bored easily, so I’ve made a game of trying never to use the same answer twice. Here are just a few of our reasons, all of them true and worthy:

  • We believe it is our responsibility as Christians to give our children an unsullied Christian worldview.
  • We want to be more involved in our children’s lives than the school schedule can permit.
  • We enjoy hanging out with our kids.
  • We want to avoid bullies and bad influences.
  • We want better, more personalized academic choices.
  • We don’t want to get out of bed early enough to catch a school bus.
  • We certainly do not want to have to drive and drop off that many children at two or more schools every day.

Can you imagine getting a large-family number of kids ready for school every day? *shudders*

We’ve found so many good reasons to homeschool over the years–some weighty, some very light indeed–that I’ve never had to really explain what my own First Cause was. The more distance I get between my first inkling that we would homeschool (pretty closely following the day I found out I was pregnant for the first time) and today’s understanding (after 21 years of motherhood, I could list literally a thousand reasons to homeschool), the more I realize that the answers we usually give are, while perfectly fine, much lower in importance than the one I’ve kept closer to my heart, where the idea–nay, the heart-need–started.

Of course, nothing can be higher on the list than the desire to please our Father in Heaven, but this need flows directly from that, as it concerns the spiritual and emotional well-being of children. It really does all come down to that question most annoying to all homeschoolers: What about socialization?

The truth is, everybody is socialized.

After nearly a couple of decades of homeschooling, after seeing the differences in the way hand-raised children and schooled children behave, and after the massive explosion of homeschooling since 2020, I had naively thought the socialization question would be put to bed for good. It’s been a few years since anybody asked me about that–so long that I don’t even have any posts on the new version of the blog that I can quote or link to. But someone worried recently to one of my teenagers, during an ironically cordial and lucid conversation that gave the lie to the very words coming from the lady’s mouth, that she and her siblings are not properly socialized.

My teen looked the person in the eye, argued clearly her own opinion, and came away from the situation with the respect of the questioner. Is that not good socialization? How about the ability to work a grown-up job among people who swim in the main stream, and remain on good terms with everybody and get the job done well? Is that socialized enough? Able to speak with and relate to people in all stations and stages of life? Able to see the world entirely through a Christian lens? I certainly haven’t witnessed that kind of socialization among very many public schooled kids!

I’ve concluded that what they mean by “socialized” is “made compliant with my group”. One Boomer even called my daughter “brainwashed” over something very mild indeed: a disagreement over whether the piano she plays needs to be replaced or not. It didn’t make sense in the context of the conversation, so I can only conclude that this is just what he thinks of our family generally. I could recount other proofs of this attitude around us, but that will suffice.

If conformity with a group is the kind of socialization they mean, I’m happy to inform them that, yes, my children are socialized very well indeed. They’re just not socialized to the System.

System Kids

My daughter (the same one) was recounting a conversation she’d had with a co-worker recently. She is not at all shy about telling people that when she “grows up”–she’s pretty grown up already–she wants to be just a mommy. One co-worker of hers said at some point, in an apparent dig at the girl I’m so proud of, that she was going to go get a “big-girl job”. We both kinda laughed that off. Working women have no idea how immature and clueless homemakers often find them–with their girl-dinners and big-girl-panties and girl-bossing–and their apparent complete inability to imagine what they would do with themselves all day without somebody clearly defining their role in the System. I knew a mom once who couldn’t break the programming. She left the SAHM life because, and I quote verbatim, “I just want somebody to tell me what to do.”

I was thinking about that girl-language today’s young women use. Always girls, hardly ever women, and certainly never ladies. In fact, “ladies” seems to be a condescending, angering word to many of them. I’ve gotten some looks for saying “Hi, ladies!” to groups of younger females. Why do they react this way?

I think I’ve worked out why: This is the language they have to use to soothe and motivate themselves, because it is the language their own parents and teachers used to soothe and motivate them. As they cried not to get on the school bus, or not to go to the daycare, or not to have to go to school while they were facing their first periods, they had to ignore every felt need and go be big girls now. As they shed all of their feminine nature to go out into the world and do what they’ve been made to do since the first day they went to kindergarten, they learned to invert what it even is to grow up into a woman.

They are adults, but they were never given a chance to actually grow up. They were trained, indoctrinated, and sexualized, but not grown up. They’re the System’s kids and most of them always will be. Every day, they have to remind themselves that they are big girls, so they can go out to do what big girls do.

My Story

When I was a little girl, my mom stayed home with us until we children went to kindergarten. She was and is a gentle and sweet soul. I don’t know if anybody could embody motherly love better than she has. I mean none of this to blame her for not homeschooling me in a day when very few had ever even heard of such a thing. She was making her best choices with the information she had, and I have done the same.

I remember the first day I got on the bus. I was as excited as any child could be. Then when I got off the bus at the end of the day, happy but relieved to be home, I heard a bunch of the big kids laughing at me. Not having been told what apparently every other child was born knowing, I had come around the back of the bus instead of the front, and that provoked some very loud laughter and name-calling through the open window.

I realized then for the first time, very poignantly, that there were strangers about. I didn’t know any of these people, nor did I feel safe around them. I didn’t know the word “dehumanized” yet, but that’s how I felt. I don’t have many more school memories until second grade, in Mrs. Tugman’s class, so I guess the rest of the next two years was fine.

Mrs. Tugman spanked me a lot. She spanked everybody. I’m sure I’m not the only one who received her mistreatment. But that year, I was the literal whipping boy girl. Everybody else was left alone after she decided I was the kid who really needed her attention.

The first time she paddled me, it was because I had repeatedly gotten a math problem wrong. I wasn’t paying attention to my symbols, and just kept adding instead of subtracting every time she sent it back to me. It was a two digit plus two digit problem, and I was so focused on the carrying that I didn’t notice I was doing the wrong operation. She certainly could have just pointed that out to me, but she was hell-bent on making me guess why I was getting it wrong over and over and over. After she spanked me, I understood my mistake, so I guess she decided I was keeping my brain in the seat of my pants, and that was the only proper way to deal with me thereafter.

The other times she spanked me, though, it was for crying. I didn’t make many more math mistakes after that. But I displayed anxiety, and she got angry about that. Which, of course, led to more anxiety. Now, understand, I was not throwing temper tantrums. I was trying to hide the fact that I was about to cry.

I was scared. I was scared I’d get on the wrong bus. I was scared that one of the big kids on the bus would be cruel to me. There had already been hints that there were ugly things going on in the back of the bus that I didn’t understand, so I was scared there’d be no seat near the front by the time I found my bus. I was scared my mom wouldn’t be home when I got there. She always was, but my imagination disposed of her in a thousand different ways between the time I left home and the time I got back. I was scared I was going to mess up another math problem. I was simply scared, all the time. You can say, as many did and more will when they read this, that a child has to learn not to be scared. But those were rational fears. I wasn’t scared of an alien abduction. I was scared of real dangers, but had no agency to remove myself from the threat in any way. I was six, and I was alone. My only authority figure didn’t care about me, and in fact actively despised me.

Thankfully, we changed schools in the middle of that year and went to what I still believe was a very good school, as schools go. I often wonder who Mrs. Tugman turned her baleful eye on after I was gone. The other children at this school, save those few that I knew as neighbors, were unpredictable, and often cruel because I was quiet. I was gifted, and the teachers saw that, so I was really blessed in a way that other kids might not have been. I was allowed to sit outside the classrooms to draw or write, or go to the library and read books at my own level. I was allowed to go tutor smaller children, with whom I was not at all scared to engage, as long as I understood the purpose for it.

I was a particularly sensitive and imaginative kid, and school made me extremely anxious. It made me so anxious that I had full-blown selective mutism. I became an object of interest to the school psychologist, who spent an hour or two every week with me. I could not speak in this unsafe place. No amount of smiling and encouraging by my teachers was ever enough to break my silence.

I’m not telling you this because I think I was some kind of special kid. I wasn’t. That’s my whole point. I went on to have some good teachers and some bad. I learned to hide in books and imaginations of my own. I learned to talk later on, too, though it was always forced. Sometimes forcing myself to speak turned to anger instead of tears, getting me into trouble and confusing everybody involved, including myself. I made good grades. In a lot of ways, I adapted just like every other kid.

Finally, I had been socialized.

I was stuffing real, earnest needs away because nobody would address them. How could they? I couldn’t even articulate them! I’m not the only child that ever went through that, not by a longshot. Every child being thrown into an impersonal crowd of other children with barely an adult in sight is going through this at some level. They just either don’t feel it or, when they do, they are easily convinced that this is the way it should be. I simply had a more introspective nature, a better vocabulary with which to store up my thoughts, and a willful nature that would not accept explanations that didn’t fit my observations. By the time I got home, I was able to forget everything and be a happy kid! So down in the memory-hole all that feeling would go, until the next morning. My parents never even knew anything was wrong. I got “sick” a lot. Stuffing feelings does that to a child. They’re not malingering. They’re heartsick.

Ripping me from my family at that stage was completely developmentally inappropriate. It was a real trauma. But it was not just developmentally inappropriate and traumatic for me.

Every Child’s Story

This education system is developmentally inappropriate to all children. I was just more sensitive to it. I understood, in a way that escapes most 6 year-olds, that I was in a place full of strangers who only “cared” for me because they were paid to, who had me jump through their hoops because they were the only hoops they had. Dress what a teacher does up in however many lovely words you like, the fact is that there is no personal relationship to be had there. If there is a personal relationship, it is inappropriate. But children are persons! Young children need close contact with the real love of a mother for much longer, both in years of age and in hours spent each day, than they are allowed in this system.

Now, I did have teachers who were perfectly lovely people, and Christian in their intentions. I consider my education to have been very good for the poor region we lived in. It was fairly Christian, even, and especially good compared to what the schools teach now. But that the classroom is a stultifying and impersonal place, that smothers learning and the human connection was still true, even in those very good schools.

I could only be in a given teacher’s class for a year, sometimes two because the classrooms were mixed-grade, and then I would move on. Then in high school every subject was taught by a different teacher. Even there, I was again lucky to be in the gifted classes so that the teachers got to know us in a more intimate way. But I was marked to be a hoop-jumper, a test-taker, a problem to be solved, even there. Never a soul really knew me. The System only cared about getting me on the track that would program me for its own best use.

I resented that depersonalization of my Self very deeply, so when the time came to begin to teach my own children to read, write, and think, I committed to their spiritual and emotional well-being above all of their academic needs. We can do all that school stuff, that career stuff, but it will never be the true goal. I want my children to feel known. I want them to feel safe, and not traumatized into compliance with the System.

Public school is destructive to the finer nature that many children are born with. It is probably nature, much more than nurture, that makes a child sensitive or hardy. I won’t try to figure out in this post how most kids go through that grinder without breaking down as obviously as I did. Lots of reasons are worth exploring in another post, perhaps. The fact remains that those other children are being robbed of intimacy, too, whether they seem happy or not. I feel like one of the lucky ones because I was unable to finally, fully assimilate like the rest.

Many will read this and say “Well, I came through it just fine! In fact, it was good for me!” They believe that only because their indoctrination–one might call it brainwashing–was indeed completed. They became the System’s kids.

Many more children go into school sensitive and thoughtful than come out of it that way.

The System, from the first day that sweet little guy walks into kindergarten, works to rough up the very finest mind into the only kind of material the Machine can use: coarse and unthinking. He’ll learn all the alphabet, and something else besides: that his needs must be subsumed to the needs of the whole classroom. He is never anybody’s first concern. It is the separation from the family, and especially a loving mother, that does the most harm to a child’s spiritual development. I don’t care how Christian or kind you think his teacher is. He is being taught to be someone other than who he is in Christ, and in his family, his first little Church. He can’t help but become something else, because they can’t know him to begin with.

That is my whole first reason for homeschooling. I don’t want my children to be the System’s children. I want them to be mine. I want them to be their own. And I want them to be God’s.

 

 

How to Make the Most of Your Character Training Curriculum

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I went looking for some old posts on GAH 1.0, using the Wayback Machine. The archive did not, sadly, have the information I sought, but I enjoyed this old post so much I thought I’d repost it. I used to do homeschool product reviews, even though what I really want to do is write the truth. Some hapless soul sent me a character training curriculum to review. I did not review it, nor do I recall which product it was that inspired this wrath, but it seems to have involved stickers and rewards for “righteousness”. Here it is, for your edification and amusement:

How to Make the Most of Your Character Training Curriculum

by Cindy on September 1, 2015

Honesty. Integrity. Kindness. Generosity. Humility. Strength. Charity.

Look at all those pretty rows of tangible returns, gained through your loving and diligent teaching of “the Way” to your children. You’ve seen so much improvement in your child’s behavior over the months since you started training your child in Holiness. Where he had once stomped away in irritation from his crying little brother, he now stoops, with a glance over his shoulder to see if his ever-watchful Angel Mother is witness to his deed, to help Brother from his fallen condition. Where he used to grab greedily for the biggest piece of garlic bread, he now shifts his gaze, first to your hopeful face, and then to the smaller portion, leaving the larger for someone else.

It’s thrilling to see this child doing so much good! What can it be but the repentance that you’ve tried to teach him? Well, the chart is certainly helping, isn’t it? Now he knows he can do good, and you have bright, attractive displays to really remind him every day how good he can be, if only he will be mindful.

But don’t relax just yet, Mom. I’m impressed with your results, truly, and sometimes my children’s behavior is certainly more embarrassing to my carnal self than that which yours is displaying, if only by dint of our having no record to prove to you all the times that my child didn’t smack his brother in the head over a stolen five-cent piece of plastic named Lego.

You’re making me look bad, Lady.

In spite of all these results, though, there’s another step to all this character training. As far as I’ve perused these systems (which is to say, only far enough to sniff out the flaw in them), I’ve found them all lacking in one vital step which must not be skipped if you really want your child to learn to please God, rather than Mom, who is, after all, just Man with an apron and cookies.

If you do it this way, it might just work:

The next time you find your child in, not just childish rowdiness or disorder, but blatant sin, take that beautiful chart off the wall (or whatever record you had been keeping of all his good works). Don’t just take it down, mildly. Rip it down, angrily. It helps if you are a good actor, because it is unlikely that you, a sinner yourself, are going to be anywhere near as angry about your beloved child’s sin as Almighty God is about even the smallest perversion of his Goodness. Be wrathful, OK? It’s accurate.

Now, go outside. I hope it has been raining, because you’re going to need mud, the thicker the better. Lay…no, slam that poster down into the muck and mire. Jump on it with both feet (helpfully shod in your own nicest, holiest shoes) and really grind it in deep.

Now pick it up. Show your child what his works have accomplished.  “This, son, is all your righteousness. This is your record of good deeds and attitudes. This is every good behavior at which I’ve caught you in the course of training you how to display character. You’ve spoiled it. Go clean it up and put it back on the wall in the same condition it was before you sinned. Go ahead!”

But that is impossible. So when he cries with the shame of what he’s done (or maybe with his unrepentant anger at you for ruining all his visible virtue), you can then give him the Gospel you should have been giving him all along. “Son, the wrath of God is on all of us, the same way I vented my wrath on your ridiculous works-chart. But he sent his own Son to take all of that punishment I just dealt out to you. He died so that your chart might hang on the walls of Heaven, not marked out in individual good works or intermittently cheerful attitudes, but in the Blood of the Lamb, which covers every stain.

My child, I’m sorry I taught you to tote up your good deeds, rather than storing up your treasures in Heaven, to be cast down at the feet of the only One who is worthy of praise. Forgive me. And seek Christ’s forgiveness with me. This chart can’t save you. It can’t even help you look saved for any length of time, for “God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil.” All this chart can do is make you feel like you’ve made gains against your own sin, and that is a lie. You can’t do that. I’m sorry I lied to you.”

Now, does this all seem too cruel to you, dear Reader? Too nitpicky and overly spiritual? After all, we’re just trying to avoid misbehavior and get better kids for our efforts! We’re not claiming that this will save them. Are we?

But children are very easily misled, just as we are.

And the disciples came to the other side of the sea, but they had forgotten to bring any bread. And Jesus said to them, “Watch out and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.”

–Matthew 16:6

It only takes a little yeast to leaven that little lump. I’m not being cruel or poking needless fun at your charts. What I just suggested you do with that record of your child’s visible “holiness” is nothing compared to what I’d have written if I’d really dug in and fully reflected Scripture.

“We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. –Isaiah 64:6”

Polluted? Those are our righteous deeds!

Do you know what that “polluted garment” refers to? It is not just a skirt with some mud on it, mamas. The prophet here (I am informed by one who has a lot more book-learning than I do) refers, quite shockingly, to used menstrual cloths. Based on this, I had considered a much more dramatic and bloody suggestion for what you can do with your child’s proudly-tallied righteousness.

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. Who can know it?

“Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.”

“It is written, none is righteous, no, not one.”

“And when you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward.”

“When they come from the marketplace they do not eat unless they wash. And they observe many other traditions, such as the washing of cups, pitchers and kettles.”

How much of the Bible do I need to quote to convince you, Dear Reader, that character training is not just a potentially useful tool, or a help, or at the worst, a waste of time and resources, but an actual hindrance to the Gospel? Moms, stop pointing your child to these inadequate, self-righteous, works-driven “clean” spots on the outside of their cups. Give your children only the Living Water that can clean the inside and fill it so that it overflows and then washes the outside.

If, after this, you still think that “training in righteousness” by rewards and stickers is useful, or at least no harm, then tell me why. Not by your own result–that adorable, chubby-cheeked, compliant little cup of wrath you’ve been raising–nor by quoting the sellers and users of said devices, but by scripture itself, tell me what basis you have for teaching your child this way of becoming “holy“.

I’ll wait here, but not with bated breath, because you don’t have anything like that, and I don’t like what happens after I’ve held my breath for too long.

The Saturday Clean

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It’s Saturday. We might as well talk about housekeeping.

I was talking with another mom not long ago, and, as moms are wont to do, we got onto the subject of housekeeping. So many busy families struggle with keeping the house restfully tidy, especially when they homeschool. I’ve seen some truly scandalous messes. It’s hard to blame anybody, though, when life is so full inside a live-at-home household. These are not lazy families, and in fact are more on-the-ball than ours is in most ways. There being only 24 hours in anybody’s day, it’s not surprising that the cleaning might go by the wayside.

I cannot personally live that way, though, and I don’t think my children should have to, even if I could. I once knew a family whose child was twice seriously injured because of messes. Their shelves were too full of junk, and something fell on a child’s head. Stairs with litter and toys on them caused a broken ankle. It’s not just about looks, is it? I’m sure very few of my readers will be messy to that extent. It was a bad home situation in more ways than that, as I’m sure you already intuited.

But if you do desire a cleaner home, and especially if you’re a homeschooling family, maybe I can help you think about how to obtain that worthy goal. I struggled for a while myself! While most families are leaving their houses empty to go out and do everything in a dedicated space, and while that is what most of us public-schooled kids have been accustomed to, nearly every day in a homeschooling house sees three meals served (sometimes even cooked), messes made with papers, books, science experiments, and, of course, play. Our work and play make quite a mess! It can get out of hand quickly.

Company-ready? 

We have a routine that keeps the house basically livable–lovable, even–all day long. I once heard a lady call the condition for which we aim “company-ready”, but I think that’s short-changing the family. Why does only company get to see us at our best? Don’t we all deserve a nice home to live in? We don’t want to panic-clean when a friend decides to visit in the middle of the week, no! But so much more important than what others will think of us is having a place where the family can rest their minds and bodies, where they can concentrate or let their minds wander as needed, and where they can walk to the bathroom in the dark with a fair chance of getting there with unbruised shins and unstubbed toes.

Our home is for us, not company. Loving my home is loving my people.

My friend mentioned that her mother always had their family clean the house up on Saturday mornings. Well, phooey. I had thought I was so original, coming up with that idea. I came up with it independently, anyway. I sure didn’t learn it during my upbringing! Saturday cleaning is probably the ideal way to housekeep when a family is absent for the bulk of their useful days, but it’s not quite enough when you live at home all day, nearly every day.

So our daily routine, very simple and straightforward, is to eat, work, play. Three times a day, we have the meal, then do our chores and zones, and play, ideally, comes only after all the work is done. Our schoolwork falls into the morning workload, and then I try to fit in one more thing after lunch. (Do visit that link for more great homeschooling tips than I’ll ever come up with.)

Everybody has their own assigned zone to pay particular attention to.

Blackboard with room assignments

There used to be eight names here. They grow up too fast!

I don’t have any need to remind people to eat or to play, so we only really have one rule: We do not leave the table to play.

Pray, Eat, Work, Play

Our house wasn’t particularly messy when I was a child, but I don’t really recall having set times to do any cleaning. My mother apparently just did what needed doing so quietly that I didn’t notice it happening. She’s sneaky like that. But we also didn’t live in the home all day long, nor did we have a lot of company we’d like to be ready for at a moment’s notice. We didn’t have so much stuff, either. Don’t get me wrong: I’m grateful for stuff. I’m not a minimalist at all. Don’t @ me about that. Look how many words and italics I use! I’m hardwired for maximalism.

Children don’t learn to write and draw and read and build without plenty of materials to go through. And they don’t just naturally want to clean up before moving on to the next play, so the mess can get out of hand no matter how hard we try. Even though we do the clean-up and chores after every meal, by the time Saturday arrives, we still have a lot of work to do. The daily routine is insufficient, so we spend some time cleaning toilets, floors, behind furniture, etc. on Saturdays. When Mom yells “Saturday Clean!”, everybody hops to and starts whistling while they work. It’s a very pleasant time for all of us.

OK, that’s enough daydreaming. When Mom yells “Saturday clean!”, with only a little grumbling and bargaining about who will do what, and arguing about whether we should have to deal with other people’s Legos, and the occasional fisticuffs, the children manage to work out a pretty quick way of appeasing the household tyrant so they can get back to making messes again. We’ve got the motions down, but we’re still working on the attitudes.

Now, my house isn’t as clean as it used to be, mostly because it’s fuller and fuller of life every year. I also became much more relaxed (in a good way) after I’d been on a carnivore diet for a while. Things still get taken care of, but I’m not stressing myself out about it all the time anymore. I know it seems like the simplest, almost condescending advice (as it did to me, the first time I was told), but just build a routine. It doesn’t have to be just like mine, but I know so many young wives who feel like they’re drowning in all the little stuff while they try to pay attention to the interesting parts of life. For us, paying attention to our surroundings after every meal, just for five or ten minutes, has saved us a world of irritation. The Saturday part doesn’t even feel so big after that!

Now, I am going to go clean my basement, which isn’t part of anyone’s daily chores, and looks like it! Please feel free to comment below with your own cleaning and attitude tips.

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Permission to Be Ordinary

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This is a re-post from a post published first on May 11, 2014. Since homeschooling has become the thing to do, even with families who are not academically inclined at all, I think it bears repeating: Homeschooling is not justified by its academic or career results. Those things are nice, but they are not the point.

Homeschooling is going mainstream, and we’re about to lose one of our favorite arguments for it. 

Homeschooling is kind of an extraordinary thing to do, isn’t it? Even with the rapidly rising numbers of homeschooling families each year, we’re still in the minority (for now). Nearly every weekday outing I take with my kids requires me to explain to someone why my older children aren’t in school. People still don’t think of children staying with their mothers all day as a very normal thing. Parents just aren’t qualified to raise kids, you know.

When we think of homeschooling, we still think of violin-playing spelling bee champions with 140 IQ’s who were just too smart for normal school. And you know what? There really are a lot of home educated kids like that! It isn’t at all surprising that homeschoolers like to promote as much good press as we can for ourselves.

Stories in the news like this family with seven kids in college, all by the time they were twelve years old, and blog posts asserting that homeschooled kids are 120% more smarter than public schooled kids are constantly circulating the web, not because those are our best reasons for homeschooling, but because associating ourselves with such an outstanding group of people easily, if fallaciously, counters the arguments of which we grow so weary.

“You’re not qualified.”
“They’ll never get into college.”
“Homeschoolers are bad at math.”

Just a few weeks ago I had to listen to my neighbor explain to me that I can’t possibly teach my children math in the higher grades, so I’d better be ready to send them to school by eighth grade. (I’ve learned to just nod my head and pretend that I’m going to take that brand-new, brilliant idea into consideration. I really don’t care what the neighbors think.)

We homeschoolers love this kind of evidence that homeschooling “works” because pointing to other people’s results is a lot easier than explaining our core reasons for keeping our children at home. Our motives are good and wholesome and altogether defensible, but because we live in a society that scarcely even understands what education is for, those points also take longer to explain and upset people more often than the academic argument.

I have to wonder, though, if we’re not accidentally making the task of defending our choice harder by using these kinds of things to bolster our case. You see, our stellar statistics and outliers like the “Brainy Bunch” family set some unrealistic expectations for normal kids. The first generation of homeschoolers was almost certainly an unusual group of people. It seems to me that they required a unique set of characteristics–qualities that usually go hand-in-hand with high intelligence and academic achievement–to be able to boost the homeschooling movement from the gravitational pull of traditional education. That first generation had, at the very least, enough imagination to dream it up, confidence to follow through, ingenuity to figure out how, resourcefulness to keep it going under pressure, and courage to fight the courts and social stigma.

As homeschooling becomes more mainstream, though, we are going to see some regression to the mean (though I doubt that we could ever regress to the abysmal performance of public schools). Because homeschooling really is a viable and superior alternative, and for reasons that have little to do with math, more and more parents who would never have considered such a thing before are going to jump on the bandwagon.

Those stellar statistics are going to level out, homeschoolers.  At some point, our neighbors are probably going to notice that some of us are pretty awful at math and science, and most of our children are going to trade schools or straight to the workforce instead of to Harvard. For that reason, it would be good if we kept our debating skills sharp, so that we can explain why homeschooling is well within our rights, regardless of our outcomes. If our best defense of home education is that other homeschoolers are really smart, we are sunk, because most of us are going to be graduating children who become ordinary people.

And that’s OK. Cashiers and plumbers, homemakers and factory workers are every bit as necessary to the functioning of society as engineers and political leaders. Homeschoolers, as much as we cheer for greatness and excellence, and hope to see our children attain the absolute pinnacle of their personal capabilities, we need to give ourselves permission to be ordinary. The rightness of our choice to raise our own children isn’t predicated on our academic results or our children’s future earnings. It is based solely in our right and responsibility to raise our own children for the Glory of God. (Yes, I am aware that many people homeschool without any religious purpose, but they still have that right and responsibility, whether they know it or not.)

If we don’t keep our focus on that first principle, we’re going to make life mighty hard for our kids who are better at bricklaying than calculus. Not only that, but we might find our right to raise our own children, so hard won by the first generation of homeschoolers, diminished by our own focus on the wrong point. We need to speak the language of liberty when we defend our choices, rather than flashing the gaudy plumage of worldly success.

Test scores may temporarily dazzle our opponents into silence, but they will not stand the test of time like the simple truths of God-given rights and individual responsibility.

Large Family Homeschooling Tip

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Stagger your start.

I told somebody I was doing this, and she said “That’s some next level thinking, right there.” Well, shucks, if she sees it like that, then maybe somebody else will, too. Since I have only seven students this year, the eldest having turned down my offer of home-college, you’d think I’d be looking forward to an easier year. For some reason, I’m all nerves about this school year. Perhaps it’s the precocious nature of my youngest students, and their incessant demands to do more, or the fact that I flubbed last school year royally by trying to join a co-op against my own personality and academic judgment. Or maybe it’s just the caterpillar’s dilemma, homeschooling a family this size, it’s easy to get your feet all tangled together, not knowing which one should move next.

Whatever it is that has me feeling like an absolute rookie this time around, I just didn’t feel ready yet when the time came, but we really needed to get started. So I just started the two smallest on the first week. We dipped our adorable little toes into the kindy-and-first grade stuff, and I let the bigger kids do whatever they wanted for the week. Some of them decided to get out some independent work, and some of them played in the mud. It was a nice week.

Then I added the next three, “grades” 3, 5, and 6. Finally, this week, I added the high schoolers.

Did that help me feel any more prepared? Well, no. I still feel like there’s no way I’m ready for this. But we’re into the swing of it now whether I like it or not, and at least it helped me prepare my smaller ones to anticipate the routines, and to get familiar with the curriculum. It also gave me some sweet moments to pay extra attention to my littles. These baby days are so painfully short.

No matter how many students you have, you may find that starting them at different times is a less stressful way to get everyone moving.

Happy new school year, homeschoolers! Keep doing what you do!

Summertime. Stock-taking Time.

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The Hillbilly Homeschool for Jesus finds itself at the end of another “school year”.

It’s not the end, really, just a transition to the summer portion of the school year, with a little less math and a lot more sunshine. Also, I don’t have to document attendance for a while. I may have time to blog! The coming year will be my firstborn’s last year of secondary education.  We’re about to launch one, y’all! And it makes me all kinds of nervous.

Is this arrow straight and properly fletched? Did we aim well? Will it hit its target? 

And what was its target? I’ve been doing this day in and day out for so long I can scarcely remember the beginning. I went looking through the archives of GAH 1.0 to try and recover what exactly I was thinking when I started this homeschooling thing. One thing that won’t surprise old-time readers of my blog is that I am not nearly as cocksure of everything as I was when I started out. I have a lot more wisdom now, but also a much better awareness of my limitations.

Did my reasons for homeschooling change? Nope. Thank God, we started out with a firm purpose. If anything, our motivations have become more fervent than ever. We’re at the end of one child’s upbringing, but there are seven more behind that one, and some have barely learned to hold a pencil yet. I have twelve more years of this to do. I’d better be sure of why I’m doing it.

I had all the usual educational and God-honoring reasons for homeschooling, but I also had the lifestyle reason:

All the pointless bustling about from place to place kept me from ever really knowing my family. And it kept them from knowing me. Most importantly, it kept me from knowing God. Church was just another place we had to hurry to get to. My parents were just the people who made me go there. God was just something you do when you aren’t doing something else.
I don’t want to live that way, and I really, really don’t want my kids to live that way. So that’s why we homeschool, in a nutshell: so we can take our time and get it right.

I see a lot of newer homeschoolers (and man, there are a lot of new homeschoolers now) making the mistake of trying to make homeschooling something they do anywhere but home. Lessons here, sports there, competitions everywhere. I’m not saying they’ll get a poor education this way, especially if they’re of the more extroverted kind. In fact, they may get a superior “education”. But there are non-academic needs that can go unfulfilled when we allow ourselves be driven by sports schedules and co-op obligations. But if I have any regrets at all–and I’m not sure I do–they are related to our lack of collaboration with other homeschoolers. The community is important.

If other families are motivated by the outside stuff, then they should do it with all gusto, and I don’t want anyone to take me to be saying otherwise. But I fear that in the mainstreaming of homeschooling, the “home” part is falling by the wayside. For many, the co-op way might be more fun. The sports may be an integral part of what your children need. Having eyes on your family by other, likeminded people, will certainly be more reassuring than doing it on your own. Do these things!

But don’t neglect the quiet of the home, parents. The fact that my children are able to feel safe, peaceful, unhurried, productive, and purposeful in our home, rather than only rushing around outside of it, looking to the outside world for approval and direction, will make them far more capable as adults of ordering their lives without too much regard for worldly expectations.

Too much time spent away from home, even when the whole family is together, will make your house a lifeless place you only go when there’s nothing important to do.

Don’t spend so much time running around that your children have no time to think, no time to wander aimlessly, no time to ask you those small, easy-to-skip-over questions, the answers to which build up to a whole world view. It is, after all, their hearts that you’re after. It takes time to nurture hearts, and that time needs to be quiet and private if you want them to grow well.

Another purpose that we had in homeschooling was, of course, to train our children in discerning the times and choosing the Godly path.

In, Naive, Unworldly Homeschoolers, I scoffed at the idea that my children wouldn’t know how to deal with the world:

The basis of the “real world” complaint seems to be that if a child doesn’t go to a public school, he won’t learn how to be pure in the face of the sin of others. Exposure to bullies, peer pressure, drugs, anti-Christian authority figures and curriculum, and any number of other spiritually unhealthy things that children must face every day in public schools are, in this argument, held up as necessary way stations on the road to maturity.  And I admit, that line of reasoning sounds really compelling at first. After all, practice makes perfect! It’s right there in the Bible where it says…um…no.

 

I can’t find anything that points to the soundness of having your children exposed to wrongdoing from early on so that they can resist worldliness. While there is nothing there about the benefits of exposing children to “diverse” worldviews, there is much about the perils of casting stumbling blocks before the weak and malleable souls of children.

I still believe this, whole-heartedly. I’m watching my friends’ children, both homeschooled and public schooled, begin to grapple with the world as it has been presented to them. My heart aches when I compare one set of young adults to the other.

They all, whether public- or home-schooled, peer anxiously into the doorway of the adult world that they’re expected to enter and have no idea where they fit into it. They’re all going off to college and work, vulnerable and clueless, eager, the perfect mark for those who would take advantage of their naiveté. They all experience the same hopes and fears.

But I’ve noticed that only one set is able to smile at me with a whole-hearted smile. There’s a shadow behind the smiles of the other set. 

One set has a clear idea of what will give them peace in life. The other set is burdened with knowledge of things that shouldn’t even be talked about by decent people. The homeschooled set isn’t ignorant of sin, or of the zeitgeist. I talk about what we see out there with my kids often, and they view it all through a Biblical lens. They know, at age-appropriate levels, about abortion, sexual sins, drugs, and anything else you care to throw at them. They have a very good understanding of the world, and they know who their Enemy is.

They’ll make mistakes when interacting with the world, absolutely, but I have no fear that they’ll come to view dysfunction as a perfectly unobjectionable “lifestyle”. If they turn from Christ to follow the world, it will not be because they were raised in ignorance of these things, but because they are actively rejecting the Truth. (Oh, pray for the children!)

One set of kids has been assaulted daily with the message that they should not only not reject sinful urges, but that they should embrace it as a vital part of their very identity. While their Christian parents have sincerely done as much as they could on nights and weekends to teach them correctly, their fragile souls have been torn in two by the Enemy, who has had every useful hour of every day to indoctrinate them in his twisted ways for the last 12 years. It has taken a toll, and I grieve for their loss of innocence.

I’m not speaking only of the massive push for sexual sin to be embraced. Gay pride is certainly the most brazen manifestation of Satanic pressure those kids are feeling, but it started much more subtly, long ago, with the idea that parents are just biological units meant to keep a child materially alive while the government (and the church, frankly) is in the best position to teach children everything they need to know. We have been taught for generations to “honor thy authorities”, instead of thy father and mother. When I was in school, there were some aspects of our lives that we just knew (because the schools deliberately planted this seed in our hearts) that mom and dad couldn’t be trusted to understand. It has only gotten worse in the last 20 years.

As much as I am talking about the sexual license and confusion, I’m even more talking about the “milder” sins of disobedience to and contempt for parents, alienation from family as a lesser social group. Without that cultural violation of the fifth commandment, none of these more demonic manifestations could have been allowed to grow.

Now these young adults enter a very dangerous world, and only one set of them realizes that their parents are their best allies. The other set enters it thinking that they are alone.

In another post, Homeschooled Kid Grows Up, I wrote this:

(G)ood parents don’t raise their children in fear of how those children will judge them in the future, but in the loving hope that they’re making the right decisions

And, I will admit that this is the one that keeps me up at night.

What if my children don’t appreciate what I’ve done here? I do not raise my children with an eye toward pleasing Man, even when that Man is my grown-up son. As I told my friend the other day, there are holes in my parenting, and in their formal education, that you could drive a truck through. I know that what I’ve done isn’t enough. It can never be enough. I hate to break this to you, if you’ve even had the stamina to keep reading a post this long, but you aren’t going to be able to do enough for your children, either.

We can all only make an honest effort, taking into account our limitations. God has to fill in the gaps.

I don’t really know how to end this thing. I just wanted to reminisce a little bit and consider what the next twelve years of homeschooling will look like for our family, and whether I want to change anything based on what I’m observing in my (gulp) young adult offspring. As we graduate this one, we’ll be beginning phonics with our youngest. We have a lot of years left to see how these things turn out, and I hope the younger set can benefit from whatever we’ve learned with the older ones. I begin this last year of education for this child with only one panicky thought:

What did I screw up, and is one year enough time to fix it?

Homeschooled Kid Grows Up, Disagrees With Parents

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This is a repost from Get Along Home, written October 24, 2011

Obviously, the brainwashing wasn’t effective

A while back, Arby, at The Homeschool Apologist, addressed an article by a homeschooled anti-homeschooler. It’s a good post, and defends homeschooling pretty well, but I think that he concedes too much in even addressing whether or not the now-grown Libby Anne’s parents were correct in their method of raising her. Frankly, the issue is less about whether her “quiverfull”  parents were damaging their children by homeschooling than it is about whether or not they even have a right to believe as they do.

Though Libby Anne’s parents don’t actually identify with the “quiverfull” movement, she gives them the moniker in order to streamline the stereotyping process. She then proceeds to explain, with an apparently straight face, that even though they raised her quite well, they shouldn’t have been allowed to do so because the rest of the “normal” people do it differently. But whether they should have raised their children according to such rigidly “traditional” roles, is neither here nor there, in my opinion. We can have that conversation some other time.

The real question isn’t, Should people with weird lifestyles be allowed to homeschool?, but the more basic Do parents have a right to get it wrong? And I think the answer is yes. I’ve gotten all kinds of flack for saying that in the past, but it’s true. Parents have a right to screw up without interference. If they don’t, then we’d better all hand our kids over to the “experts” right now—the ones who teach your sixth graders these kinds of things–because not one of us is going to raise our children to adulthood without making some bad calls in good faith. Might as well make sure they’re all screwed up in the same, state-sanctioned ways, I guess! I know several adults whose parents did horrible things to them—divorce, exposure to pornography and violence on television, emotional neglect—but they were culturally “normal”, so no one questioned their right to do these things.

But when a family has the nerve to set out on a culturally unusual path and one of their children ends up disagreeing with them, even though that child was never abandoned or abused—was in fact loved and educated and treated quite well—well, that is a bridge too far!

Libby Anne admits that her childhood was happy, just not “normal”. Her main problem seems to be that she was taught to do menial chores like housework and taking care of siblings (you know, stuff that feminism tells us is beneath any sentient human being). She went to college, apparently with her parents’ blessing and financial support, but complains that her parents didn’t really want her to be educated because she was a woman suited only for being inside the home! They gave her responsibility instead of treating her like an overgrown child like the “normal” teenagers! They had the nerve to think that dating is a dysfunctional way to find a mate and hope for better things for their daughter!

Libby Anne’s parents committed the astounding crime of actually believing the things they said they believed. So much so that they taught it to their own children. I know! String ‘em up!

It sounds to me like Libby Anne’s parents did a smashing job. She’s a well-educated, articulate young woman who expresses herself quite adequately. The worst thing she can find to say about her parents is that they weren’t hypocrites. In keeping with their Biblical beliefs, they raised their children against the grain of the culture—never an easy thing to do. Her real problem isn’t with homeschooling, but that she wishes her parents had intentionally raised her to disagree with them. What kind of parent does that?

Perhaps someday Libby Anne will have a child of her own and know that good parents don’t raise their children in fear of how those children will judge them in the future, but in the loving hope that they’re making the right decisions. (Apparently I misread. She does have a child, and still doesn’t see what’s wrong with her attitude toward her own parents.) Libby Anne’s entire argument seems to be that her parents really believed all that Jesus stuff, and they shouldn’t have been allowed to teach their children what they believed without interference from the state.  I wonder how Libby Anne would feel if she lived in an actual Christian nation where the schools reflected Christian beliefs? She might possibly wish to take advantage of the right to homeschool her children so she could teach them differently, then, mightn’t she?

Reading the article, I kept wondering how I’d feel if it were my child turning against me in such a public way. What if one (or more) of my children grows up to not only disagree with my decision to homeschool him, but to actively oppose the rights of parents to oversee the education of their own children in this way? Is there anything I can do to keep this from happening? Unfortunately, I don’t think there is.

I can’t raise my children according what someone else believes, and neither could Libby Anne’s parents. She faults them for homeschooling her because she wishes that she’d been raised by people who agree with her adult self. But how could any loving parent send his child to be taught things that he believes are wrong, out of nothing more than fear of that child judging him later on?

Congratulations, Libby Anne. You finally fit in with the rest of the secular culture you’ve longed to join. You no longer even understand the most basic human liberty—freedom of religion.

Naïve, Unworldly Homeschoolers

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This is a repost from Get Along Home, written December 19, 2012

In any discussion with critics of home education, the objection will eventually crop up that “homeschoolers won’t know how to deal with the real world when they’re grown.”

It seems safe to assume that those who raise this objection aren’t worried that homeschooled children won’t be able to figure out how to buy groceries, drive a car, or effectively conduct personal business, given the fact that they are raised by people who do these things right in front of them every day.

Instead, the questioner seems most of the time to be referring to the cultural and moral differences between Christian homes and the non-Christian public schools. The objection could be accurately restated as “Homeschoolers will see so little of the brazen sinfulness of mainstream American culture that they will be shocked into helpless paralysis at the sight of {insert popular but blatantly sinful and unbiblical behavior or attitude here}. As if Good were such a weak little thing that the first whiff it gets of Evil will cause it to clutch its girly skirts and faint!

The basis of the “real world” complaint seems to be that if a child doesn’t go to a public school, he won’t learn how to be pure in the face of the sin of others. Exposure to bullies, peer pressure, drugs, anti-Christian authority figures and curriculum, and any number of other spiritually unhealthy things that children must face every day in public schools are, in this argument, held up as necessary way stations on the road to maturity.  And I admit, that line of reasoning sounds really compelling at first. After all, practice makes perfect! It’s right there in the Bible where it says…um…no.

I can’t find anything that points to the soundness of having your children exposed to wrongdoing from early on so that they can resist worldliness. While there is nothing there about the benefits of exposing children to “diverse” worldviews, there is much about the perils of casting stumbling blocks before the weak and malleable souls of children.

In fact, it is wise for a child to have time learn how to deal with in-his-heart sin before we force him to come to terms with the in-his-face kind.

“Train up a child in the way he should go.” “Bad company corrupts good morals.” “Yada, yada, yawn.” says the American Christian parent. “My kid is different.”

They somehow believe that children can learn to fight the good fight by being forced into the fray before being sufficiently trained in spiritual warfare–most of the time before the child has even come to a place of true repentance! Given the spiritual condition of this so-called Christian nation after many decades of that kind of thinking, I’d say we’ve got pretty good evidence that this approach hasn’t worked very well.

If this need to be exposed to wickedness and destructive behavior from an early age is really such a good reason for sending children to public schools, then could somebody please explain to me the purpose of all these anti-bullying, anti-drug, and anti-violence programs? Because if those programs were to work (which they won’t), Christian children in public schools would suddenly be in grave danger of becoming just as naïve as their homeschooling counterparts! Wouldn’t that be awful?

Stop trying to shelter your kids, public schoolers! They need this!

We all know quite well it that would be a good thing if every child were unbullied, unaware of even the existence of drugs, and able to trust that the people who are in authority over them are looking out for their best interests instead of, oh, trying to sleep with them, for instance. So why, if homeschooling parents are able to provide such a healthy environment for their children, is that a bad thing?

Homeschooling, contrary to this “real world” line of argument, is not done in order to keep children from finding out about sin. We can’t do that, because no one is innocent—not the children we’re raising, nor their parents. All have sinned, and keeping my children from public schools has not kept them from the “real world” of sin. Learning how to turn away from the World is a lesson that must be learned no matter the physical location of the child. It is not the existence of sin that must be taught on a daily basis, but what to do with sin in our own hearts.

I am constantly amazed (though I probably shouldn’t be by now) by the number of people who think that raising children in an environment that rejects the very idea of sin is the same thing as teaching them to confront evil. It’s not. It is teaching them to look on sin passively by removing even the language by which a child might articulate an objection to it. What immersion in secular schools does is train children first to tolerate sinful behavior, then to applaud it, and finally to join it.

Do not be misled: “Bad company corrupts good character.”–1 Corinthians 15:33

Cultural norms are inculcated primarily through education, not (contrary to mainstream–dare I call it naïve?–Christian belief) through occasional dinner-table conversations and AWANA. Those things may be influential in varying degrees for different children, but it is what is learned during the useful hours of the day–the work hours–that becomes a child’s baseline for thinking about the world. For public schools, the baseline is one of amoral “preferences” and outcome-based decision making (i.e.: Say no to drugs because they’ll make you ugly and poor. Don’t have sex…unless you can make sure you’re “protected” from the physical consequences of it.) For Christians the baseline is (or should be) God’s word.

Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
–Proverbs 22:6

Every Christian parent’s job is to make sure that when our children meet the “real world”, they’ll know how to please God in their interactions with it. Which method of child-rearing seems more likely to accomplish that goal?

Public schooled children and home educated children are all going to be tempted to commit sexual sin. Homeschooling won’t change that. But which child is more likely to view sexual sin as normal and tolerable, even admirable, rather than unacceptable, yet forgivable?

Both sets of children are going to have to learn to turn away from behaviors like excessive drinking and drug abuse, or self-harm and violent anger. But which child will believe that these things are wrong primarily because they hamper material or social success? Which child is more likely to internalize the truth that these behaviors are wrong because they are, at their core, sinful abuses of God’s most treasured creation: the one who hears it only in his “spare time”, or the one who gets it daily with his writing lesson?

Both sets of children will have to learn to choose the right kinds of friends. Which is more likely to do so: the child who has learned to “make no friendship with an angry man” and then has been guided in that by a parent’s heart in choosing his friends, or the child who has been told that everyone of his own age (and this is now even further segregated out by academic ability) is his “peer”?

A righteous man is cautious in friendship, but the way of the wicked leads them astray. –Proverbs 12:26

Which child is more likely to turn away—whether in disgust or confusion makes no difference, so long as he turns away—from the invitation of these “peers” to join them in immorality: the child who has as his default attitude an anything goes, “tolerant” worldview, or the child who has as his baseline a Christ-centered and constructive family-based culture?

My son, hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother–Proverbs 1:8

It seems to me that homeschooled children are more than equipped to “deal with” sin, if by “deal with” you mean “repent of it”. That is something they are certainly never going to find out about in public school. If spiritual strength is the goal, then public schooling doesn’t seem to have very much going for it. However, if your argument is that homeschooled kids might grow up to find themselves embarrassed not to know the meaning of certain slang or where to buy a bag of some illicit substance, then I say that’s the kind of naiveté that we could all use a little bit more of.

Virtue is harder to be got than a knowledge of the world; and if lost in a young man, is seldom recover’d. Sheepishness and ignorance of the world, the faults imputed to a private education, are neither the necessary consequences of being bred at home, nor if they were, are they incurable evils. Vice is the more stubborn, as well as the more dangerous evil of the two;… –John Locke

Public Schools and Naive Kids

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I’ve been fishing some of my better posts from GAH v1.0 out of storage for reposting. I’m not sure how relevant they are today, but they’re mine, and I like them. This one was written December 2, 2013. 

Public Schools and Naive Kids

One of the constantly recurring, and frankly silliest, objections to homeschooling is the embarrassing naiveté of homeschooled kids. The implication is that a child’s growth and maturity will somehow be stunted by not witnessing the full smorgasbord of sinful behaviors and moral pitfalls that popular culture has to offer. If he hasn’t had a joint offered to him in the school bathroom by the time he’s a senior, there is simply no hope that he’ll be able to say no to it when he’s twenty!

When I put it that way, of course, the hollowness of the whole objection becomes evident, even to those who will most likely still think it’s better for a child to be “educated” in the ways of the world by his peers and (God help us) D.A.R.E instructors.

Fine, you’re right: I fully intend to turn my kids out into the world with little more than a theoretical understanding of the kinds of criminality and perversion that will most likely be going on right under their noses any time they walk down a busy street. By the time they leave my nest, they’ll most likely be in the same social position I am right now; people who engage in those activities don’t even want to talk to me much, let alone invite me to their parties. So I’ve just raised my children to be the kind of bland, boring, morally upright people that the unwise, unstable, and criminal amongst us shun out of instinct.

Oh, how could I be so stupid?

Like I said before, there is no way that I can keep my kids from finding out about sin, being sinners as they are. I don’t expect to. But there’s a flip side to this whole naiveté thing, and that is the fact that, when I send my naïve children off to be educated by government-employed strangers, their naiveté is a serious weakness, making them prey to unscrupulous teachers, wayward peers, and even crooked police. If I keep them either at home with me or under the tutelage of Christian teachers I know to be working toward the same goals that I am, these little ones of mine will still be naïve children, absolutely! But what else do you want children to be? Jaded? Worldly? Street smart? I thought we wanted to keep them off the streets, not familiar with them.

Where does this perverse desire to destroy childish innocence come from? Certainly not from God, who says that we must become like little children, and not the other way around, if we wish to see the kingdom of Heaven.

Several years ago, I witnessed the whole adult congregation of a church gathering around a group of teens to pray for them because of the sexual pressures and violence that they were forced to deal with every day. Now, I’m all for prayer, and I’m glad they were at least doing that much for the poor kids. But what caught me was the pastor’s words before they prayed. He said “Our children have to deal with pressures every day that we as adults would never have to face. They need God’s hand of protection on their lives in a special way.”

So we’re sending kids into these spiritual and emotional pressure cookers, even though in the “real world,” for which we are supposed to be preparing them, this stuff (bullying, sexual pressure, drug use, etc.), doesn’t happen among decent people? In the real world where grown-ups live, if these things happen there are both practical and legal steps that a grownup can take to defend himself. He can simply choose not to go there; he can prosecute wrongdoing; he can find a new job; he can find new peers. But these kids, who don’t have the benefit of years of wisdom? Meh. Just cover them in prayer and send them to learn from these people how to walk in Truth.

This little episode at church was what did it for me. It was about 8 years ago, and it was what convinced me to homeschool.

He that walketh with wise men shall be wise: but a companion of fools shall be destroyed.
–Proverbs 13:20

Not long ago, I witnessed a similar thing with a group of parents lamenting the sexual pressure that middle-school girls must face at such a young and inappropriate age. “Lord, help them!” they said. And they sent them back into the cesspool the very next day.

My dad is kind of a funny guy. When I was a teenager, he’d often see me doing some household task and ask “Do you need some help with that, honey?” I’d accept his offer, only to hear, “Help her, Lord!” as he chuckled at the nature of the “help” he’d offered.

The difference between my dad doing that and these parents doing this is that my dad knew he was joking, and would then get up and help me. The Bible says some things about praying and doing:

If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, And one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be you warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit? Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone.
–James 2:15-16

Now, if we’re called not just to pray, but to do for the physical needs of our brothers and sisters, how much more does this apply to caring for the souls of our own children?

My children’s naiveté will vanish, despite the foolish concerns of naysayers, but it will recede through years of Bible training, not through the hardening effects of early exposure. My son will learn how to keep to the narrow path through the learning of Proverbs and being made aware of his own sin by God’s word, not through being slammed against locker doors because he’s the only kid that won’t get high with the rest of his social group between classes. My daughter will learn to honor her body by being around those who also honor her body, not from those who belittle and objectify her.

And he said to his disciples, “Temptations to sin are sure to come, but woe to the one through whom they come! It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were cast into the sea than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin.
–Luke 17:1-2

I went to a public school, so I know how that naiveté we’re so scared to see in our children gets worn away, and it is not through the maturing of a child’s spirit, but through the breaking of it. No thank you. We don’t want any of that kind of jaded “maturity” in our family.