Homeschoolers Vote

When you homeschool, something important happens. As you begin to question educational conventions, you also see the cracks in just about every area of our current cultural consensus.

What do I mean by “conventions” and “consensus”?

Conventions are cultural assumptions and habits. For instance, our current educational system runs on some obvious “givens.” Here are only a few, as the complete lists is quite long:

We educate children so they can get a good job.
It takes 16 years for a person to be educated enough to get a good job.
College graduates make more money and are better people.
Children must do bookwork for six hours each day.
It is important for the government to control the national curriculum to create a consensus.

Which brings us to answer the question asked above as to the definition of a consensus:

…a general agreement.

This is where most social engineers and politicians agree: People are rascally. They tend to think in terms of taking care of their surrounding communities and families. It’s hard to control a population that has a million divergent values, so we must use schools to create a larger agreement among the governed (the Common School movement is one obvious example).

Of course, there are other ways to create consensus, such as a threat from a common enemy, a natural disaster (I’m thinking here of hurricanes…), a pandemic (ahem, ahem), or a perceived common goal.

This is a very old idea. It goes way back to the Tower of Babel. Seems old Nimrod was able to unite the people in the common goal of building a tower to reach Heaven (some have suggested Nimrod thought he could reach the throne room and overcome God).

Things never change. Man is still trying to declare that God is dead, but He’s not worried…

Moving on:

Funny, but the Kingdom Jesus spoke a out seems to move in the opposite way. While man-made consensus works from the top-down, the Kingdom of God works from the inside-out.

We don’t want a top-down consensus created by the government. We want the freedom to build that inside-out kingdom which will eventually take over every other institution in the entire world (see Habakkuk 2:12-14 and Isaiah 11:9).

We need to teach ourselves and our children how to look for and reject these attempts at the top-down, while striving for the inside-out.

When we vote, we don’t look for the perfect Christian minister that will force the people into a Christian Theocracy. Instead, we vote for the people who will enforce the Constitution which already allows for freedom.

We look for the people, flawed as they may be, who will concentrate on the most simple functions of government; protecting our country from threats from the outside, and protection from each other.

This is why we should take moral stands on things such as:

Abortion
Infanticide
Euthanasia
Sanctity of Biblical marriage
Gender issues

…because these are outside God’s original intentions. Like trying to run a combustion engine on sweet tea, governments which throw off God’s restraints end up destroying nations. When we cease to honor God, our minds become darkened, and everything after that turns to chaos (see Romans chapter 1).

BROKEN LEADERS BREAK THINGS.

Homeschoolers have been fighting this fight since the 1980’s. Back then it was illegal in most states to teach one’s own children at home.

But a bunch of mama bears got together separately but simultaneously all over the country and we got political. We formed telephone trees to alert everyone to what was going on (no internet or cell phones in those days). We bombarded our state legislatures in every way we could think of. This included phone calls, letters, peaceful protests, testifying before state congress, and lobbying.

After a few years, legislators knew better than touch the homeschool community.

Homeschooling brought Christianity out of the four walls of the church building and into every strata of society, including politics. And today homeschoolers can make a difference by voting and doing everything we can to fight for the freedom of our entire nation.