Why I believe in a home-schooled education

Let me begin by saying that choosing to educate children at home is not for everyone.

Quite frankly, it requires a lot of time and energy that many, perhaps even most, parents are not willing to invest in their child. And on top of time and energy, there is also a lot of sacrifice involved, such as financial sacrifice. And this is especially true for those families who not only support local public schools through their property tax dollars, but have also chosen to remain independent of the public school system and not collect a per-child percentage of the money various districts receive for having the additional students on their attendance rolls.

With this said, I believe in a home-schooled education because it is for the children. While it has been alleged that it is in the child’s interest that teachers receive higher wages because higher wages attract the best talent and thus a better education, it is hard to maintain this posture in the face of so many mothers who have made their children their career with little or no remuneration other than what their husbands provide for their family in general. Let’s face it: It is hard to advocate a need for more money to those who ask for none.

You know, the profession of teaching is a lot like that of the pulpit. The day was that those who aspired to it did so not for the wealth that they could procure, but for the lives they could lift. It was a calling, not just a career. But even as America’s pulpits are filled with those the Bible calls hirelings, those more interested in salary and benefits, even so has the profession of teaching stooped. But unlike the professionals, it is the home-school moms who do it for the children. The truth is that there is no teacher that has such a vested interest in the life of a child than the parent who not only brings that child into this world, but also pours out their own life on behalf of that child.

Truly, home-schooling is for the children.

But not only is home-schooling for the children, it is also for the family. We live in a world today that is at war against the family. From every direction modern society clamors for ever increasing amounts of time. While I realize our society is far more complex than days of old, the trouble is that when both parents have different schedules, priorities and lives, and each child has their own, they soon cease to have time for each other and the breakdown of the home begins.

Call me a conspiracy theorist if you want, but if you want to lead a bloodless revolution, you must separate the children from their roots. The family is God’s instrument for the perpetuation of culture. The truth is the real agenda behind removing mothers from the home into the workplace was not for the liberation of women, but a change in culture. And the real motives behind the U.N. Convention for the Rights of Children is not for the improvement of children, but the destruction of a culture.

What a home-schooled education does is return the emphasis for cultural transmission to the family. When children are educated at home, it is their parents from whom they receive their values, and it is parents to whom they give their trust. When family is emphasized it will be for family that their loyalty is given and from family that their religion will be received.

Yes, a home-schooled education is for the family.

And lastly, I believe in a home-schooled education because it is for Christianity. One of the most painful things that Christians have had to face in our generation is a country that has become increasingly hostile toward them despite a First Amendment that is supposed to guarantee them freedom to worship according to their conscience. An amendment that was added, along with nine others right at the outset, because certain of our forefathers could well envision what could happen if ever the leadership of our country fell into the hands of evil men and just the Constitution were in place. Well, that time is now; their worst fears have been realized. And rather than lose their children to the godless humanism so prevalent in our schools today, a stand had to be taken for God.

If we didn’t believe in the Bible so strongly, if the public schools were not so intolerant, we never would have had reason to leave. But yes, a home-schooled education is for Christianity.

Ron Hamman is pastor of Independent Baptist Church of Wasilla; contact him at 357-4229 or ron.hamman@gci.net.