I hope you are in for a stirring post, because that’s what this one is! It’s going to be all about our purposes in homeschooling, and it’s going to get you motivated.
At first I’m going to go into a bit of a history lesson to lay the foundation, which will be interesting enough, but at the end we are going to get fired up—are you ready for it?
This post is the second in a series on having your best homeschooling year yet. We are interested in covering these three concepts:
- Enthusiasm—so that your children will be excited about learning for the rest of their lives.
- Knowing your purpose—to listen and obey one step at a time.
- Knowing your goals—to rear a child who is prepared for life as a whole person.
In our last post we covered Enthusiasm, and that was so much fun!
I actually had this entire post just about scripted, including quotes and links to articles, but it just was not hitting the spot. Originally, God just gave me the titles of each post, without a real understanding of what He wanted me to cover. So, I started creating this sort of “academic” essay, with bullet points and references, but something was off.
Then I had a conversation with a few of our young daughters, and it changed my perspective. Before I knew it, I was scripting from an entirely different angle, and this time I was full of passion.
Education is at a crossroads; two kingdoms are vying for the control of our children:
1. The State
2. Parents under the direction of God
First, let’s talk about The State’s purposes.
I believe there are enemies of God in existence, and I believe they actively attempt to thwart His goodness in this earth. I believe they war against the Gospel of grace, and I believe they enjoy seeing human beings suffer. Their aim is to gain, or at least maintain, their power at any cost, especially if it means deceiving and harming human beings in the process.
I also believe these are the forces behind many governments, or at least many government agencies, which pervert justice and use bureaucratic power to disrupt lives and create institutions which oppose the institutions God has already put in place to the betterment of human living.
These God-ordained institutions include the family and The Church (as in His ekklesia, not necessarily any building or specific denomination).
I also believe that, at the founding of our republic, this was understood, and a government was formed that would bolster and protect these institutions without interfering with their work.
I hope this doesn’t sound like gobbledygook to you. We need to be a bit technical here before we dive into the good stuff.
Way back in the 18th and 19th centuries, education looked very different than it does today.
In Europe, very few people knew how to read, write, and cipher. In some countries the literacy rate was less than one percent. This was because there was an elite class in rule over the people who saw an educated public as a threat to their power (this was true even in the church, as an educated congregation could threaten church power).
When people came to America, things were different. In America it wasn’t the elites that controlled everything, it was the people themselves who decided on important matters, and they needed to be educated so they could read and understand what was happening around them. Also, since America was settled mostly by Protestants, it was important each person could read the Bible themselves so they could develop their own relationship with God.
Our founders believed the role of the government was to make sure our citizens were educated so they could continue the work of the republic “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” This they hoped to accomplish by offering universal education to all citizens, including black Americans. We find this in the writings of Thomas Jefferson, Dr. Benjamin Rush, and also in the writings of Noah Webster, creator of the first American English dictionary as well as the first American textbook.
It’s important not to confuse “universal” education with what we know today.
The founders wanted education available to all. They believed every American should have access to education, but then some men came up a few decades after our constitution was ratified and decided education should not only be freely accessed, but it should be compulsory. This would mean families would be forced to place their children in school, and that these schools would then be run by the government.
In direct opposition to all that was fought for during the revolutionary war, a number of academic thinkers became infatuated by the systems of education in Europe; the very systems Americans fled from.
Prussia was especially interesting to these thinkers. They saw the systems put in place by Frederic the Great to be efficient in producing citizens who not only could function well in a structured society, but were also compliant to the wishes of the State.
They also saw that Americans would not knowingly submit themselves to such a system. So, they devised a plan to convince those in leadership to support this idea, an idea that would need the power of law to implement on a population that would be opposed to it.
Among the most notable of these thinkers was Horace Mann. Here is a quote which outlines his vision for education in America:
What the church as been for medieval man the public school must become for democratic and rational man. God will be replaced by the concept of the public good…The common schools…shall create a more far-seeing intelligence and a pure morality than has ever existed among communities of men.
This would be the beginning of the end of true, American freedoms and the beginning of the Nanny State, which would govern partly through the indoctrination of its youngest citizens. This shifted the center of power from the people to the State.
Today we can clearly see that the intentions of our founding fathers have been twisted and re-formed into something they would not recognize as being freedom. The government regularly interferes with families and churches. It passes laws and creates policies that make it harder for parents to fulfill their purposes, mostly via compulsory education.
As every despotic regime in history has discovered; in order to gain and keep control, you must begin with the children. This is done by removing the children from their families and familiar surroundings so you can empty them of their former culture to fill them with the ideas of a new one.
In the 1800’s in America social engineers were concerned with the influx of so many immigrants and thought it was their duty to create unity via education. This bolstered their efforts to create “common schools” where all families would be forced to send their children so they could be tutored in an American consensus.
This movement, which began in Massachusetts in the 1830’s, eventually spread across the country until today we can’t imagine anything else.
John Swett, California State Superintendent from 1863-1868, who helped form the state system of public schools had this to say:
the property of the State should be taxed to educate the children of the State…Children arrived at the age of maturity belong, not to the parents, but to the state, to society, to the country.
Dr. John Goodland in a report for the National Education Agency (the NEA) said this in the 1980’s:
Our goal is behavioral change. The majority of our youth still hold to the values of their parents and if we do not resocialize them to accept change, our society may decay.
A Harvard professor had this to say in 1973:
Every child in America entering school at the age of five is mentally ill because he comes to school with certain allegiances toward our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you teachers to make all of these sick children well by creating the international children of the future.
In our day, this cause has been taken up by an oligarchy made up of both political and corporate entities. Now the purpose is not only to create a political consensus, but a corporate one. Not only do we need compliant voters, we need a nation of consistent consumers to keep the economy rolling.
This is nothing new to you. You see the evidence every day, and most of us are disgusted—so the smarter, more conscientious among us has decided to do something about it and make a difference by bringing our children home out of the reach of the system.
And here we are. We are out.
But what do we do now? Where do we go from here?
First, we need to rediscover our original purposes, and then we need to act on them with all our might.
What are these, you ask?
From natural and Biblical understanding, parents are supposed to be:
1. Nurturing
2. Protecting
3. Guiding
First, as parents we make sure our children are nurtured. This means they receive comfort, love, and we do our best to provide them with the things they need to grow physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.
Second, as parents we are to shelter our children from harm, to their bodies, their minds, and their spirits.
Third, we are to guide them as they grow in making choices that will help them be successful in their relationships with God, other family members, and the outside world.
I hope you can see now how the purposes of the state contradict the purposes of us as parents.
Sometimes from ages as young as three years old children are removed from the direct oversight of their parents and placed in institutional settings for most of their waking hours.
It is not the mother who kisses the boo-boo and changes the child when they have an accident, it is a “caregiver,” whatever that means.
The school not only ushers the child through a day of scripted activities, it feeds him breakfast in the morning and lunch at noon. The school may even dictate what the child will wear, even provide the uniform.
And when other students act up and attack a child, there is no shelter or defense available except for the justice of the caregivers, often no justice at all.
It’s even worse when one of the teachers becomes the bully. Then life is miserable and there is no escape.
If a child has questions about his origins or why the world works the way it does, he is forced to piece together his own answers using the scant information he can glean from the curriculum or the media. Parents are usually so exhausted with working and keeping up with the requirements of sending their children to public school there is little time or energy for deeper conversations.
The classroom itself is geared to some imaginary middle-level child, so those who learn faster become bored, and those who learn more slowly become confused. If either set complains, they are declared to be either problems or failures and with this they learn to keep their mouths shut and tough it out.
And the guidance may be anything but good; just the same old materialistic humanistic rot that either puffs kids up until they are insufferable or pushes them down until all they can hope to do is drown out their own failure with drugs or porn or some other vice.
At any rate, the work of learning becomes secondary to being accepted as part of “a herd, a hive, or an anthill,” as J. T. Gatto has put it.
These days being accepted into the herd might mean undergoing some life-altering surgeries.
Oh, God, help us!
If you aren’t mad about all this, you don’t know anything about God, because He gets angry about the perverting of innocents.
Being angry is what got most of us here. Our righteous indignation has helped us make some good decisions to save our children. Now we need to return to our original purposes.
First of all, we need to take our anger and clarify our thinking. In our minds we need to stand in front of that huge giant of compulsory education and give it a talking to. It may sound something like this:
“Look here, you. I am not going to be dictated to by your mandates any longer.
God gave this child to my husband and me, not because He’s backwards, but because He is our Creator, and He knows what He is doing.
Each child is made in His image, and each child is precious in His sight. My child is unique and gifted and has a purpose far beyond what you ever could conceive.
So I’m going to raise this child, not according to your needs, but according to God’s direction and wisdom.
And I’m going to provide warmth and safety for him. I’m going to be there when he is cold, or scared, or needs some human connection. I’m going to accept him just as he is and bring him up to know His Creator, and to see his life has purpose in the grand scheme of eternity.
I’m not going to raise him to be a consumer, but a giver. I’m not going to train him to look to the government to be his answer, but to become the answer for others who are hurting or in need.
He’s going to look at a sunset and think of the God who put the sun in its place, and he’s also going to gain wisdom to know how to harness its energy from the God who gives good gifts to men.
I’m going to be close to my child so he can watch me live, even make some mistakes, so we can learn together the best ways to go about things. And I’m going to have daily conversation with him over breakfast and while we are out doing errands.
And he’s going to learn how to work, and how to pay his fair share, and how to be a blessing to his community, but not on your terms. It will be for higher goals than pleasing himself. It will be for an eternity when this life is over.
In case you may have misunderstood, I’m not surrendering this child to you, I’m taking him back, and if you want to place your creepy, cold claws on him, it will have to be over my dead body.
THIS is how we find our purpose. This is where we start. This is what changes everything.
If we keep our purposes in mind, then choosing curriculum, creating routines, and the rest becomes more confident. We stop flopping around like a fish out of water and start walking with sure steps on solid ground.
It’s tough, but not impossible. It grows us in character, it grows us in grace, and it gives us the opportunity to leave behind a legacy of good in the earth when we pass.
In the words of a song I enjoy:
When the going gets tough and the tough are long gone,
It’s just walk on, walk on, walk on, walk on.
Well, are you fired up? Are you realizing just how important homeschooling is, not only to your family, but to our nation and our world?
If so, then you will want to continue reading and/or listening as we go into the next two installments of this series:
- Goals
- Practical daily applications
If you would like to listen to this post as a podcast, be sure and click below:
