Why do you home educate? We get asked that a lot. Home education is not very common in the UK, although since COVID it has increased in popularity for various reasons. It was not an easy step for us and we did not make the decision lightly. Taking full responsibility for your children’s education in a culture that almost blindly follows what the ‘experts’ or professionals say you should do, is a daunting prospect. There have been times we have doubted that we have done the right thing, and wondered how it will all turn out. Only a decade or two will truly show the results of our decisions. Having said that we would not do it any other way now. We fully believe in a (classical) Christian home education. It certainly won’t be right for
every family to do it like we are, and we are not saying this is the only way to give your children a Christian education. However, I am going to try to convince you this is a good way, and worthy of consideration!
The undergirding principle for all Christian parents is (or should be) what scripture teaches on the subject. There is at least one previous blog about this on the Lancashire Christian Education (LCE) website, so I will not go into any detail here. Suffice to say the Bible commands us to raise our children in a thoroughly Christian way. That directive is to parents, especially fathers. So as a Christian parent, the ball is thoroughly in our court, and though we may get help with the task (which we all should!), the main and key responsibility is ours.
Our son was attending one of the best schools in the country. He was going to a prep school that is consistently in the top ten Sunday Times best prep schools in the UK. And I do not have a complaint to make against the school in terms of its secular education, and its care for our son. However, the first reason (but not the most important reason) we took him out of the
school was that the education system was failing him. Research into how general western
education works shows that it fails a large minority of students, both at the higher levels of
achievement and the lower levels. Children cannot be plonked on a production line in reception and left on the conveyor belt until the age of sixteen or eighteen and all be expected to be the same. God has made us all wonderfully unique, and education in an ideal world should reflect that. We don’t live in a perfect world, in fact quite the opposite, but seeking to do the very best we can is something most would agree on. The factory conveyor belt (we were on the finest that money could buy) was not helping our son learn very well, and it was driving him toward rejecting the love of learning.
God has created a wonderful world with so much to discover and enjoy. Any sort of schooling should strive to inculcate the love of learning and give the student the tools to do so outside of the classroom setting. After eighteen months of homeschooling, the difference in him is gargantuan. I do not use that word lightly. Before we started, asking him to read a book out
loud would result in tears, resistance, anger and frustration. Now if we ask him to read out loud he will come back usually with more than one book and will be happy to read, and he reads on his own every day. His attitude to learning and the pleasure he finds in discovery is completely different. No school, no matter how well resourced and how small the class size, would have been able to accomplish that. It has taken a lot of time and effort, and continues to do so, but when we can see the results it makes it all worthwhile.
The second reason and most important is for his Christian discipleship. The Bible teaches a complete world view, with God right at the centre, as the creator and sustainer of all things. Everything in education needs to be understood in that context. There is no such thing as a ‘neutral’ education. All curriculums, systems, etc. have a worldview embedded into them. It either has the Christian God at its centre or it doesn’t. Christians in general have forgotten that education is discipleship, and discipleship is education. The only question is how will they be discipled? It is obvious even to the most unobservant Christian that our general culture in the UK continues to slide further away from ‘biblical norms.’ Why is this? Because the children in our schools and people as a whole, through social media, tv, and the general culture, are being discipled in all that is not Christian. God is central to every subject, and without that Christian worldview underpinning the subject, it ceases to be taught in a Christian way, and therefore it is taught in a non-Christian way, not a neutral way.
When our son was four and five years old, we were already having world view conversations (obviously at his level of understanding) because he was being taught non Christian views in a ‘neutral’ school. There are ‘Christian’ schools, and here I need to be careful as I do not have any current experience of them, but from chatting to those involved either in teaching or sending their children, the schools are limited in how they can teach a biblical worldview because they have to follow the national curriculum. There are more private Christian schools popping up with a deeply God-centred worldview, in an attempt to provide a true
Christian education. Our homeschooling efforts are driven from this point of view. Scripture is a regular part of every day, not only in the sense of worship, but also in the principles of how we approach everything. We are part of ‘Classical Conversations’, a classical Christian
homeschooling organisation. And of course we are part of LCE, which at present is a
homeschool co-op, designed to help families who desire to home school. Our primary aim is
to raise a brood of children who are devoted followers of Christ in who they are and how they live, but from the heart, loving the standard and He who has set the standard, not just obeying the standard grudgingly.
Our secondary aim is to provide the finest education we can to our children. Of course we want both, but we would much rather have the first than the second if it is a choice (which we don’t believe it is). Maybe this is the first time you have ever thought about this. I would ask you to be brave and think about it some more. It’s never too late to make a difference. I speak to grandparents here as well: I have spoken to a number of them who wish they could go back and do it differently with their children, and are keenly worried for their grandchildren. You are faithful in prayer, please continue to be. But also consider how you could help to educate your grandchildren in a Christian way. Ask the questions. Seek the answers in scripture. Talk to those Christians who are homeschooling. Ask them "why?"
We won’t get it all correct, no one does. But let’s seek to glorify God in all we do and raising our children in the Lord’s ways is central to that.
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