Some Encouragement for Home Educators

 

Tax time can be a very discouraging time for homeschooling parents. I have no children in public school, yet I’ve spent thousands over the past few decades to finance the schooling of other peoples’ children. I know the argument—we pay for police, fire, and paramedics whether or not we require their services. This is true, and there are other civic services that I pay taxes toward without complaint.

But the state of public education is such that, if the comparisons to other civic services were taken to heart, we would have fire department arsonists, police criminals, and paramedics that euthanized their patients. In short, public education as currently practised, is a grave danger to children, and to the taxpayers who must pay the salaries of the teachers, administrators, and the properties and their upkeep.

Public education is a place where Christian values are forbidden, but where the secular left feels free to teach children that sexual perversion is normal, that skin colour determines status of victimhood or oppressor, and that the ultimate determiner of all that is right and good is government. But enough about that—that’s clear to anyone who has eyes to see.

As a homeschooling parent, you may resent the fact that you are paying for schooling that you must never participate in, while financing your own schooling at home.

All that is money gone.

But here’s the encouraging thing: you win, and those who took your money only have that. They do not have your children. Your children win. They will learn truths that will not be contradicted by a LGBTQpedo. Your kids won’t have their sexuality questioned. In fact, they won’t learn the lie that gender is a social construct which has nothing to do with the child’s sex. Your kids will not be a target for nonsense. Your kids will learn actual things with which they can grow into adults who honour the Lord with their work. Your kids will not wait until forty to have children, but will likely have larger families. That is a win.

Your kids will win because they won’t be so foolish as to sign up for “studies” –religious studies, feminist studies, indigenous studies, LGBTQ studies, or anything like it. If they do go to university it will likely be for the hard sciences and they will know how to digest knowledge and spit out the husk.

No matter the cost, if you keep your kids close to you, you will have won.

The Frustration of Modern Education

Van Til 3

“Our work as educators would be hopeless and futile if we engaged in it on the principle of synthesis discussed above. But what joy it is to know that Christ has come to save man and his culture! The first Adam by his sin refused to undertake the cultural mandate given him. When he was told to subdue the earth he would not do so as unto God his creator. But the second Adam undertook anew what the first Adam, and all men with him, failed to do. Now then, we who are saved by grace, we who have by the Spirit of God been born from above, need not beat the air. There is for us a true synthesis of all things in Christ. And we may offer this Christ to all men that they too with us might escape the futility and the absurdity, the immorality and the blasphemy, of seeking to synthesize what by their very sinful act they are all the while destroying. The task of educators who do not educate in and unto Christ is like the task of Sisyphus as he rolled his stone to the top of the hill only to see it roll down again. If the facts of the world are not created and redeemed by God in Christ, then they are like beads that have no holes in them and therefore cannot be strung into a string of beads. If the laws of the world are not what they are as relating the facts that are created and redeemed by Christ, these laws are like a string of infinite length, neither end of which can be found. Seeking to string beads that cannot be strung because they have no holes in them, with string of infinite length neither end of which you can find; such is the task of the educator who seeks to educate without presupposing the truth of what the self-attesting Christ has spoken in the Scriptures.”

Cornelius Van Til, Essays on Christian Education (The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company: Phillipsburg, NJ, 1979).

The Family as First Educators

“It needs more than ever to be stressed that the best and truest educators are parents under God. The greatest school is the family. In learning, no act of teaching in any school or university compares to the routine task of mothers in teaching a babe who speaks no language the mother tongue in so short a time. No other task in education is equal to this. The moral training of the children, the discipline of good habits, is an inheritance from the parents to the children which surpasses all other. The family is the first and basic school of man.”

R. J. Rushdoony