Why I love homeschooling

I love homeschooling--and for that I make no apologies.

Before I homeschooled my children, I was quite uneducated. I didn't know anything about history, or geography, or math. I didn't know how to be a friend, or a mother, or a wife, or even a Christian.

I thought I knew everything--I did quite well in school. My SAT scores were sky-high. I had traveled, I had experienced many things. I was "worldly wise", but I was not Godly-wise.

I didn't know it, but when I chose to teach my children at home, I took on much more than their education. What began with some workbooks and frustration blossomed into a lifestyle, and a rediscovery of what family life, life itself, should be.

It took a transition. At first I thought it was all about throwing some Bible verses in and giving my children an advantage. Lots of people I know start out this same way--it is to be expected of a generation filled with all sorts of disinformation about life and learning.

But very soon I began to become suspicious. My comfortable ideas about how the world worked and about my place in it became challenged more and more by the things I read and witnessed in my own children.

For instance, I was always lead to believe that every child should be taught to read in a certain pattern, at a certain time. When my first "pupil" refused to live up to the expectations of myself and others, I had to search for answers, and in the searching I found more than I ever knew I needed.

Over the years I have discovered that Christianity was never meant to dwell in neat little compartments--such as Sunday mornings and a few moments crammed between pop tarts and the drive to work. I found that God's Word was powerful to teach me things, things that had been drowned out by propaganda passing for news, loud music, fantastic television and the emotional appeals of movies at the theater.

In high school I was taught by a "scholar" who flattered a whole class of us into believing we were too smart for our own good. The course he taught was great for my writing skills--I learned the art of essay writing backwards and forwards--but everything else about it was full of beans. We were supposedly reading and writing about the "classics"--but they were only classics in the fact they had been published 15 or more years earlier, and that they were "politically correct" and meant to cause us to question our core beliefs. Among the tomes we were required to read were Siddhartha--a novel about "spiritual enlightenment" at the time of Buddha, and lots of Hemingway. I was a convinced Christian at the time, and I could barely read through so many pages of endless, despairing, meaninglessness. If these were the "classics", I wanted no part. My heart and mind was so thirsty for knowledge, but I had begun to believe that knowledge and Christianity were at odds--a sad fallacy that keeps many of us from living full lives.

Through homeschooling I have discovered, along with other homeschoolers, a richness of literature, science, and history never afforded to us through our former education. My children have a view of the world through the understanding of God's omnipotent, loving care and plan. They know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that God has been active in the affairs of man, and that His active role did not end with the garden, or even with the Epistles, but His will is being enacted today in the affairs of mankind.

And they know that Jesus must be Lord--not only of the macros of life, but of the micros. The way we speak to each other, the roles we assume, how we handle our financial affairs, all must bow to the supremacy of scripture and the leading of the Holy Spirit.

Contrary to all the current wisdom, we have not been dropped into modern history without any underpinnings whatsoever; we have the witness and examples of multiple pilgrims that have gone on before, who were not only clergy, but magistrates and scientists and explorers.

I once watched Richard Dawkins, staunch atheist apologist, give some reasons for his vehement lack of belief. He was standing before the majestic Rocky Mountains, surrounded by a grove of quaking aspens, their leaves shimmering like polished gold in the fall sunshine. He was saying there was no evidence of a Creator--and I wanted to laugh out loud. The fact he could speak with his vocal chords or see the surrounding beauty with his eyes screamed to me irrefutably of the Master. Fellow homeschoolers such as Ken Ham have reclaimed scientific reasoning from the delusion of unbelievers and put it in its rightful place--pointing us to the marvelous mind of God. Every plant, every cloud is now replete with the knowledge of the Holy.

Through the reprints of books formerly abandoned in favor of "modern" thought, we have rediscovered a way of thinking predating Darwin and the existentialism begun in the 1800's. Our hearts have become settled, and our minds fed a feast, by looking at history, politics, and purpose through the practical application of scripture.

There are huge organizations preoccupied with the demise of homeschooling, and it is no mystery as to why. People who question, think, examine and evaluate on their own are dangerous. They were dangerous to King George in the 1700's, and they are dangerous to the global Utopians who actually believe in a hope for mankind apart from God.

Of course one does not have to homeschool in order to means, and although you won't hear about it on the local nightly news broadcast, homeschoolers are challenging, changing and bringing the benefits of what they are learning to every strata of society.