It's that time of year again! The days are getting noticeably shorter, first day pictures are cluttering up our social media timelines, and those ugly yellow buses are making us late for work again. A new school year has begun! It's an exciting time--it's a scary time--as students, parents, and teachers embark on new adventures and experience new firsts.
It's also the time of year when people begin to notice that some kids don't get on those yellow buses every morning. Strangers wonder why your kids are at the park during normal school hours or why they look confused when asked, "What grade are you in?" It's the time of year that homeschoolers start to stick out (well, even more than they usually do).
My goal here today is not to tell other parents how to raise their children. That's not my job, nor, I suspect, would anyone listen anyway. My goal is to offer a reasoned explanation of why our family chooses to educate our children privately instead of utilizing the free education offered by our local school district. I only hope that one or more of these reasons might speak to the hearts of those who are working through this issue right now.
1) We want the home and the church, not the school district, to provide the temporal framework for our lives.
As I grow older (grayer, at least), I begin to understand better some of the decisions my dad made. My dad, who ran private schools for 40+ years, loved sports and education, but he never wanted his schools to take the place that the home and church should play in the life of a family. He didn't think it was benign or coincidental that children were spending increasingly more time at school-related activities, whether it be in the classroom or extracurriculars. Government school systems are actively competing with the home and the church for the hours of your day. They want to set the structure around which you plan your life. They want the society to revolve around the school system.
Our family has made a very intentional decision not to orient our lives around the oft-chaotic schedule of our local school system. We recognize that this may eliminate some opportunities, but that is a sacrifice we are willing to make. Every Yes to one opportunity is a No to another opportunity, and we have chosen to prioritize the opportunities of the home and the church.
Time is the one resource that is inescapably limited. There is simply no way to squeeze everything you want to do into your calendar. Our family has chosen to allow our calendar, which is to say our lifestyle, to be dictated by the activities and priorities of our home and church.
2) We want our children to be well-educated.
The results of this nation's educational system speak for themselves. We pump insane amounts of money into the schools every year only to produce semi-literate adults who are incapable of critical thought. Our educational philosophy in the U.S. has proven to be ineffective and inefficient. Even without the numerous other issues presented to the conservative Christian by the American educational system (see the next two points), our family would spurn government schools for academic reasons alone.
3) We want our children to know which bathroom to use.
Even if we weren't Christians, we would not subject our children to the socio-political ideology of the government schools. I cannot imagine allowing my children to learn about issues like sexuality, abortion, climate change, and economics from strangers (see final point below). At risk of sounding like a Boomer, government schools are producing a generation of Godless Neo-Marxists who zealously despise the ideals of their parents. It absolutely pains me to see conservative Christians confusedly wonder why their teenagers openly and belligerently espouse progressive ideas.
This is nothing new. Education, from kindergarten all the way up to graduate studies, has long led the way left. As all good social engineers have, the architects of our educational system understood the importance of capturing the hearts and minds of the populace from an early age. It is no surprise that a system run by the government has produced successive generations who cannot conceive of a world where Uncle Sam is not the Messianic Provider and Legislator.
4) We want our children to receive an education that is centered upon our Christian worldview.
The greatest myth imbibed by American Christians today is that of neutrality. We can compartmentalize different areas of our lives, we are told, so our religion need not impact our entertainment, education, etc. That is simply not the Christianity of the Bible. The Bible presents the Faith as an all-encompassing worldview that demands submission in all aspects of our lives. We are Christians not merely when we step foot into the sanctuary, but also when we enter the classroom, the workplace, the laboratory, the movie theater, etc.
How could I allow my children to be educated by those who do not share my worldview? How could I send my children to learn about the world and their place in it at an institution that denies the Creator? How could I educate my children in a system that fundamentally denies my understanding of who I am and how I am supposed to relate to God and others? To do so would be spiritually perilous for my children and patently dishonoring to my God.
But Math is Math, isn't it? 2+2=4 regardless of one's religion or politics, right? That might be true, but it is not enough for my children simply to know that 2+2=4. I want them to know why 2+2=4. I want them (eventually) to be able to verbalize a philosophical defense of why 2+2=4 every time the equation is worked. I want them to glorify God that 2+2=4.
There are many other pragmatic reasons that concerned parents might have for privately educating their children, like avoiding sex, drugs, and school shootings, but, while these are all certainly valid, this concept of worldview is really our family's primary motivation. All of life is connected. Everything we think, say, do, and study is affected by our fundamental presuppositions about the world, which renders neutrality in education impossible.
Even if neutrality were possible, it would be unacceptable for the Christian. Our Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer deserves and demands allegiance. We are to love the Lord with our entire being in everything we do (Deuteronomy 6), which means that we may not act as if He were irrelevant to our academic endeavors. To ignore God is to hate Him.
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