Boys are often a year or a year and a half behind girls developmentally at that age. My first reaction to the question was, "Relax, don’t worry about it". Resist the temptation to compare him to others, any others, for he is a unique individual with his own developmental timetable. It will almost certainly not match the one the schools use: it is based on some sort of mystical "average" the experts have dreamed up somewhere and is some kind of guide to a teacher with 25 kids in a classroom. But you are just one-to-one. This has tremendous educational and social advantages over a classroom. You can spend most of your time interacting with your son and he with you.....rather than he with a book or an assignment sheet of work to do, set by the teacher who is far too busy trying to maintain order and get through the subjects in the time available to spend more than a moment with any one child.
Read to him. Read books at his "level" of interest and understanding and at a level you would think is way above. Read stuff like Treasure Island, Pilgrims Progress, Gullivers Travels and other classical literature rich in vocabulary, character development and an honesty in grappling with human issues. Read at least two hours a day. Honest. This will improve his vocabulary amazingly. It will also provide you with countless opportunies to answer the questions he is sure to have about words, characters, the setting, the action, etc. This is all excellent instructional time, the best you could possibly hope for. Why? Because he is asking the questions!!! That means his mind is engaged with the material and his cognitive skills are being worked and his imagination is operational and his powers of enquiry and inquisitiveness are being fanned into flames. Each question constitutes what the experts call a "teachable moment", which in the classroom occurs only when there is a fortuitous coincidence of teacher availability, subject interest and enough curiosity by a child to overcome both inertia and the possibility of negative peer reaction for the child to actually ask a question. But with one-to-one tutoring, you can have dozens of such teachable moments throughout the day!
Reading to him also gives you the opportunity to ask questions about things you want him to be clear on. And the reading material, if it is any of the rich literature and biographies around rather than the dry Dick and Jane calibre of stuff they often get in schools, will provide many launching pads for you to tell stories from your own background experience: your extended family, tales from when you were a child (always a favourite with children), life lessons you’ve learned, your perspective on significant moments in history you’ve lived through, etc. You will be forming his world view, his attitudes, values, standards, concepts of right & wrong, good & bad, wise & unwise. These are the things which are used to build up his frame of reference through which he eventually filters everything he hears, sees and experiences externally, and through which he will filter his own conscious thinking and evaluation processes. This is vitally important. And the sad thing is, most children have this frame of reference formed with large measures of the attitudes, values and standards they picked up from school and playmates and TV.
If you are enthusiastic about reading, if you get excited about the reading material yourself, your excitement will almost guarantee your son’s excitement and anticipation of the reading sessions. It is great if you two are curled up together in an easy chair, but it is not necessary. Read to him while he is drawing or playing with Lego. Read while he is playing in the sandbox, or washing the dishes, or tidying up his room, or massaging your feet or folding the laundry.
At some point he will be begging you to teach him how to read, because you can’t read as much to him as he would like, and he sees you buried from time to time in a book indulging your own passion to read. And of course, you will have told him plenty of times about the treasures of excitement and fun just waiting for him to discover between the covers of those books sitting on your shelves.
We’ve all heard it said, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink". Maybe so, but you can put salt in his feed!! The salt is your thoroughly positive attitude toward reading, your enthusiasm for it and your obvious passion for indulging in the activity yourself! Yes, your example is fundamental to your son’s learning anything. We are here face to face with one of those profound gems of wisdom, marvellous in its simplicity: monkey see, monkey do. This is a bit too simplistic, actually, for we humans are a lot more complex than that.
To summarize, meditate on two very sobering passages of Scripture, the implications of which are easy to see, yet frightening in how they will be manifested down the track. Luke 6:40 says a student will be just like his teacher once fully taught. And Galatians 6:7 can be taken as a glorious promise or as a scary threat: God is not mocked: we will reap what we sow.
From Keystone Magazine
September 2001 , Vol. VII No. 5
P O Box 9064
Palmerston North
Phone: (06) 357-4399
Fax: (06) 357-4389
email: craig@hef.org.nz
Home education is not as easy as it could be because not only do we each have pre-conceived ideas to re-think and re-evaluate, but the society around is generally not at all supportive and sometimes downright anti. We began home education at a time when it was only the lunatic fringe and house truckers who would do such a thing, so we know how isolated, misunderstood and marginalised one can feel at the prospect of teaching at home. But we have also discovered the most difficult obstacles were in our own minds: pre-conceived assumptions about what "home schooling" (as opposed to "home education") was all about, and what constituted "teaching" and "learning". Re-thinking these things actually helped in the area of lacking energy!
There are a number of things one can do in regards to a toddler. Have special toys that he/she can play with onlyduring those occasions when you need intensive time with the other(s). Do your intensive work when the toddler is having its nap. Have the other child(ren) care for the toddler while you are doing individual work with another....it then becomes part of the other child(ren)’s home education in "child-care".
Sometimes you can play with the toddler yourself while having that intensive time with the other child.... Barbara would be nursing our newly-adopted son (and I mean physically nursing, as she had to go through a relactation programme to get her milk going.....an exhausing regime), while teaching our 6 year old how to read. We have three older ones who were sometimes available to care for the baby, but he is very clingy, so generally she had to do everything while holding onto him. (This is also good training for the other children, as they see before their eyes the commitment some babies require of their parents.) Note that there is intensive time needed to teach little ones to master reading (and listening), writing (and composition and spelling and comprehension) and arithmetic, the three Rs. General knowledge at the primary and even intermediate level can be gained by fun, relaxed family activities of reading, telling stories, going on field trips, doing projects, playing games. This covers subjects like geography, history, technology, sciences, art, literature, music, P.E., etc. You only need to worry about the detailed content if the child is going to sit exams for paper qualifications or is aiming toward tertiary study. By then one of the major aims of home education should be in place: to have instilled into the children such a love and desire for learning, that they will be almost totally self-motivated to pursue subjects at the upper-intermediate and high-school levels on their own.
To conserve or gain energy, you may need to have a total change of lifestyle. First, you may want to abandon all pre-conceived ideas of turning your home into a school. Much of how schools do things is a result of logistical requirements (one teacher to 25 children) which simply do not exist in the home education situation (one parent/teacher to a couple of children). Even so, some families can make their home into a school and run it with excellent results. Most seem to adopt a very casual approach, an educational lifestyle that ends up being totally comprehensive and immersed in the context of the everyday social reality of the home, the community, the workplace and the marketplace. Learning is taking place all the time in all these places without textbooks, pre-written timetables or programmes or any notes. What this means is that you may want to plan a rigid 2 hours or so a day, but beyond that you can have general aims. For example, do pages 24-25 of the maths text and pages 17-18 of the grammar text this morning, and in the afternoon we’ll do some art and then maybe read a biography or something else to do with English history.
OK, let’s look at tiredness. Being tired at the end of the day is often a good sign that you’ve put in an honest day’s work. If the tiredness is not relieved by a good night’s sleep or the Lord’s day of rest, then do all the sensible things: have a proper physical check up with your doctor and have a good look at your eating, drinking, viewing, exercising and sleeping habits. Cutting down on red meats and dairy products, drinking more water, getting to bed early and not staying up late watching the TV or reading while (and this is the worst) snacking away on chips and fizzy will make a world of difference in most cases. I struggled with guts aches and migraines for something like my first 35 years, just accepting them as part of life. Then somehow I noticed a connection between migraines and how much cheese I ate. As I explored dietary connections it became obvious almost immediately that certain foods caused me great problems: peanuts, cheese, coffee, eggs, milk, ice cream and saddest of all, my favourite maple syrup recipe which I’d make myself and would use to smother a huge pile of hot pancakes dripping with butter. Once I eliminated or strictly reduced these items, the problems stopped!
Be aware also of the fact that your entire metabolism changes with time and with changes of lifestyle. These changes may take place over a period of time and be firmly in place before you are consciously aware of the change. For example, you may have gone from a relatively care-free fit and trim jogger, working out at the gym, playing squash reqularly to a parent with many pressing responsibilities and no time now to chase the squash ball around the court. Yet during this time of transition, your eating habits may have remained the same. For many of us in this situation it means we are carrying more weight than we should, which certainly contributes to tiredness.
So three areas of investigation are warranted. First, how can we modify our entire diet, not only the volume of what we eat but also the variety and proportions and when during the day? (Home education pioneers Raymond and Dorothy Moore eat breakfast and lunch and virtually nothing in the evenings). Second, how can we work into our weekly schedule some pleasureable physical exercise, true recreation? Mums with little ones may feel they are running around all day as it is, but stop and analyse just what it is you do physically — lifting infants and toddlers in certain ways can be doing yourself lower back damage. Third, how can we cut down on the stress of our responsibilities? That is where re-thinking the whole area of what constitutes "home education" comes in. I have a farmer friend in California who solved his farm’s weed problem while lying in bed.....in his mind he re-defined what constituted a weed.
Re-think your household chores as well. Because home education is a lifestyle, a certain amount of orderliness and tidiness may have to be sacrificed....the dusting may go undone, as with the vacuuming and bed making. But they don’t have to necessarily....the children need to learn these tasks and to pull their weight around home and learn about responsibility, teamwork and routine in the process. We have six children aged 20 down to 3. Neither my wife nor I have washed a dish, hung out any clothes, cooked regular meals or mowed any lawns for years!!! But just as you must set reasonablegoals and expectations and standards of excellence upon your children when home educating, so with yourself. Do not expect yourself to be super-mum...it is only creating a rod for your own back. Life is full of trade-offs, and it is no different with home education. Coffee mornings with the "girls" may have to go or be replaced with support group get-togethers. You may have to ask others not to call-by or phone up between 9am and noon (or whatever you work out as your most productive times) as you will be permanently busy during those times training the next generation of God-fearing, thinking-beyond-the-box leaders of this country. Local support groups or a single other home education family can be a tremendous support in so many ways, from swapping resources and ideas to giving each other a morning a week without the children (or a certain "one" child!), so you can catch up on other stuff. Once you begin to see that education is a lifestyle and not a 9 to 3 activity, once you begin to experience the academic benefits of a tutoring situation, once you taste the many socialisation and family advantages by being together for extended periods of time, you will find these benefits far outweight any difficulties. At this point the "where there’s a will, there’s a way" principle kicks in, and you’ll be away rejoicing!
From Keystone Magazine
January 2001 , Vol. VII No. 1
P O Box 9064
Palmerston North
Phone: (06) 357-4399
Fax: (06) 357-4389
email: craig@hef.org.nz
Surely you home educators cannot expect the rest of us to accept that love for your child and an impressive library is a valid substitute for a teaching degree?
Ok, ok, I can already hear all you veteran home educators out there choking and gagging at this one. But let’s break it down and examine it.
The stated issue is that trained and certified teachers are obviously superior teachers to untrained parents. The assumptions behind this are many: that certified teachers are far more knowlegable than parents about what constitutes education; that the money and resources behind certified teachers in registered schools is clearly superior to what all but the more financially endowed parents can provide; that the entire school environment, from dedicated Ministry personnel and curriculum developers to textbook providers to overworked school administrators and board of trustee members to the enthusiastic teachers at the coalface and the brilliant variety of peers within the typical classroom, that all these things combine to provide a palpably well-rounded and comprehensive educational experience the like of which an isolated mum at home with only some out-dated School Certificate passes could never hope to match.
These assumptions, however, are all false for they are based on the false foundational idea that politically conceived, taxpayer-funded, secular and compulsorily-attended mass schooling is equivalent to even a basic education. Leaving aside completely the argument as to whether Christians should allow their children to attend secular schooling institutions, let us examine the simple logistical advantages of one mum teaching a small number of her own beloved children at home compared to the conventional classroom situation.
Most of us are aware of cases where teacher certification has not meant the same as teacher competency. In addition, there is the almost unrecognised fact that classroom logistics can make even the best teacher’s efforts an exercise in futility: over-crowded classrooms, lack of discipline, unsupportive administration, inability to give needed individual attention, time restraints which force them to move on to new material before the previous material is comprehended. Teacher certification does not ensure a quality education. In fact, many students who do not catch on at school must go home and get their parents to help out. There are already many parents out there who do the real teaching at night after school while the certified teacher gets the credit.
Home education is a tutoring or mentoring situation. One mum can give her full attention to one or two or three children at a time for whatever period of time is practical and comfortable for them all. Or she can focus on just one child for a piece of time and move to the next and then to the other. Overall she will have far, far more significant one-to-one time than what occurs in the typical classroom where the teacher can expect no more than ONE MINUTE of significant one-to-one time per pupil per day. Because of this the home school mum can cover a vastly increased measure of subject matter in the same length of time even though she may be dealing with a range of ages, possibly including a toddler and a newborn. She can assess more exactly whether each child has grasped the concepts or mastered the skills for she is observing the child for most of the waking day, is far more concerned for the child’s welfare and future prospects and is intimately in tune with the child, being her own flesh and blood, than even the most highly trained and skilled professional teacher could ever possibly be. The enthusiasm, commitment, love, vision, intimate knowledge, and one-to-one tutoring situation of the home school mum, combined with the God-given heart-desire of the child for its mother, ensures that the average home education teacher/parent is starting with vast logistical and relational advantages the classroom teacher can only dream about.
So what does a true and useful education consist of? For the school teacher it is in a politically determined mix of subjects pitched a certain way for a classroom full of children from all sorts of backgrounds and filtered through legal and other socio-political parametres with the aim of producing an outcome in students’ lives which matches a stated objective in a Ministerial document. If the powers that be decide a change is necessary, it will be a good seven years before the drafts are formulated, trialled, assessed, redrafted, approved, adopted and actually introduced and implemented. By then of course the initial problem has mutated beyond recognition and the target children have passed through the system and a new set are being served a special mix designed for a situation and a time which no longer exist.
For the home educating mum it consists of those basic skills plus general and specific knowledge she knows are required to get on in the world: she and her husband and extended family talk about what it’s like out there to be a worker, an employer, a homemaker, a spouse, a parent. They know the character qualities employers want, that they have always wanted throughout history, and that neither School Certificate exams nor university degrees impart those qualities. Christian parents in particular are individually crafting unique children to serve the God of the Universe according to the syllabus He has provided in the Scriptures. They are not that impressed with the state’s attempts through the schools to improve children, the country’s most valuable resource (right up there next to chilled lamb and green-lipped mussels), or with the socialists’ attempt to inculcate the simplistic non-judgmental vision of tolerating every perversion under the sun, somehow making our global village a better place in which to live.
The home educating mum knows that rooms, desks and books are dead things. It is imparting life from her heart to her child that makes an education. The most important lessons in her life she did not learn in the classroom but in the school of hard knocks. This is what she imparts. The children are not left interminably to interact with books or CD ROMs, but are encouraged to interact with mum and dad and other siblings and people in the real world of the home, the marketplace, the workplace and the community. They don’t only do word problems from a text book, but do real-life problems like working out the week’s menu from the available budget.
In short, marriage, parenthood and homemaking are probably the best teaching credentials one could have.
From Keystone Magazine
March 2000 , Vol. VI No. 2
P O Box 9064
Palmerston North
Phone: (06) 357-4399
Fax: (06) 357-4389
email: craig@hef.org.nz
This is such a common occurrence, it is virtually standard procedure. It is nothing to worry about: they are not turning you down, they just want some more information here or there. Fine, just shovel a bit more in there and send it back.
They will often request more information under the following headings: Broad Curriculum Area; Study Area; and Timetable.
"Broad curriculum - are you using the New Zealand state school curriculum? If not, you will need to provide details of the seven core curriculum areas...."
When responding to a request for an application for exemption from enrolment, the MoE sends out its own definitions of the key words from Section 21 of the Education Act, which require home educators to teach "at least as regularly and well as in a registered school."
Their definition of the word "well" stresses that the curriculum is your curriculum. Home Educators are not required to use the New Zealand state school curriculum nor are they required to cover the "seven core curriculum areas". If the MoE sounds like they want you to do these things, you should only need to remind them of the absense of any legal requirement to do so, and then be able to fully state your own particular subject areas, however they might be covered (subject by subject, thematic, unschooling, etc.) It is not unreasonable to expect a prospective home education parent to be able to clearly explain the broad curriculum areas which they intend to use. Never be intimidated into organising your curriculum along lines the MoE sets...unless you like their system better than your own. Ask a couple of other families in your local support group how they did it....that’s what the support group is there for!
You may feel that having written certain things, you will be obliged to do those things. Not true. The Ministry expects you to change your educational approach and tactics as time goes by: your perception of the educational task will grow and mature, the needs of the children will change, certain resources you started out with will prove ineffective with your children’s learning styles and/or your teaching style, etc. In fact, the Ministry has told me that they would be worried if you didn’t change over time! The application form is mainly so that the Ministry can see that you are a competent person, you know what you are doing, you have a plan, you can work the plan, and that both you and your children are excited about it! These are the main things to communicate in whatever you write....your thorough confidence in your ability to succeed, enthusiasm, excitement, anticipation, total competence, that you are plugged into local and national support groups, that you are flexible and totally committed.
"Study area - this should be described."
Fine. Describe it. Again, there are no requirements in the Act regarding "study area", although there will be plenty of preconceived ideas in the mind of the MoE official reading the application. These officials either need reminding or instructing about what constitutes acceptable home education environments: the kitchen table, toaster, crumbs and all; the beat-up but comfortable old couch on the back porch; or like Mark Twain said was the best classroom of all: a log down by the river with a child sitting on one end and a parent sitting on the other. The questions in the exemption application are clearly coming from a very narrow "classroom" perspective, as if they expect you to set up a regular "school" in your own home. Actually, many of us start out that way, but home education can be infinitely more flexible and fun and effective than that.
Remember that classrooms are set up for the mass teaching of a large number of mixed-ability and mixed- background children by one state (read: politically) trained teacher. The logistics of a home education scenario, which is the far superior and near-ideal tutoring/mentoring system, bear virtually no resemblance to the logistics of the classroom, rendering the home a far more effective, fun and efficient learning and teaching situation. Just think about it: how long do you suppose it takes to get all 28 seven-year-olds in a classroom simply to get out their maths books and turn to page 12? Within the last six months we had a Massey University College of Education student reveal how they teach them at college that today’s teachers can only expect one minute (that is ONE MINUTE) of meaningful time per student per day in the typical school classroom. So how can we miss?
"Regularity/timetable - please provide a timetable to show approximately how much time will be spent on each curriculum area daily and weekly."
We wrote back to them when they asked this same question and simply pointed out that we do not work to a timetable, so to write one up would be hypocritical. We also mentioned how the number of hours spent in instruction bear little or no relation to anything in the realm of learning. We carried on to describe how our time is taken up, a bit about the routine and probable disruptions. This seemed to be good enough, for we got the exemption. I still believe that if we are simply honest and are able to clearly articulate our personal policy/philosophy they are happy to (and probably obliged to) run with that.
Instruction in most home education situations is self-consciously a 24-hour-a-day occupation. For some it is helpful to perceive two realms of academic learning. The first is the basic skills that must be mastered: the three Rs. These can be further broken down into: 1) Inputs, such as reading, listening, comprehension, study and research skills, interpretation of the written word, voice inflections, body language, etc. 2) Outputs, such as writing, penmanship, grammar, spelling, composition, debate, oratory, voice modulation, body language, etc. 3) The four operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division plus a range of everyday skills such as measurements, estimation, ratios, percentages, volumes, areas, many of which one should be able to do mentally. The second realm of learning is everything else, virtually all of which one can learn for themselves once they have mastered the basic skills. You can organise this "everything else" realm anyway you like: subjects like history, science, geography, logic, technology, animal husbandry, woodwork, auto mechanics, languages, whatever.
There is no minimum or maximum number of subjects you must cover, there is no sequence prescribed that home educators must follow, there is no depth of knowledge one must obtain.....as the MoE says in its definition of "well": it is your curriculum. According to the MoE’s 1996 Homeschooling Desk File, "Ministry officers will look for some evidence of planning and balance that we would expect would be a feature of curriculum organisation in any registered school."
Sometimes the people reviewing our exemption applications infer that we need to be spending as much time on each subject as they do in schools. Again, this ignores the vast superiority in the effective use of time which is typical of a home education (tutoring) situation. They certainly cannot require any specific number of hours.
We home educators too often and too easily get intimidated by these MoE officials because the actual requirements of the Education Act, even when coupled with the MoE’s own definition of the key words from the Act "regularly" and "well", are so minimal and vague we just get the feeling there must be something more here required of us. But no, there isn’t. So let us not acquiesce to them, for to do so would set a pattern which would be recognised by them eventually as a standard practice, which would one day find itself written into legislation as a legal requirement.
The officials will always have us on, pushing the conventional school model on us by assumption. We need to simply hold our ground and politely refuse to be pushed around. We also need to be informed. Buy a copy of the Act and become familiar with the relevant sections. There really isn’t much. Subscribe to TEACH Bulletin to keep up to date with legislative developments. And keep in close contact with your local support group, and network with others around the country to pick up invaluable teaching tips and ideas on where to locate and how they use various resource materials. Home educators are re-discovering a lot of very effective teaching methods which have become virtually lost to our culture because of 120 years of compulsory, secular mass state schooling in classrooms.
From Keystone Magazine
January 2000 , Vol. VI No. 1
P O Box 9064
Palmerston North
Phone: (06) 357-4399
Fax: (06) 357-4389
email: craig@hef.org.nz
Ultimately there are only two approaches to education; or to medicine or social welfare or entertainment or politics or philosophy or whatever. One is Christ centred or Christian. The other is human centred or humanistic. This is part of God's creative order. There is a war going on. There are only two sides. And the war goes on until one side wins. We already know which side is going to win. And we are endeavouring to make ourselves, our families and our lifestyles clearly identifiable as being on Christ's winning side. The Lord Jesus Himself said, "He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters." (Luke 11:23.) So why settle for something less than the best?
You Reap What You Sow
The Rev. Edmund Opiz said, "There is something wrong with our system of education because there is something wrong with our theory of education." Because the NZ state education system, founded by an Act of Parliament in 1877, was based on a faulty theory of education, it is by definition a faulty system of education and is now producing a faulty product. This is known as reaping what you sow. It does take time for what is sown to germinate and grow to maturity when its fruit will be clearly recognized. The problems within the NZ education scene today have their roots way back in that Education Act of over 120 years ago.
For example, Section 77 of the Act, referring to primary schools, says, "the teaching shall be entirely of a secular character." It has been said that originally the word "secular" meant "non-sectarian", the understanding being that the education would be Christian nonetheless. (I have been unable to find this definition in any dictionary from any time period, so would suggest this represents a coup for the unbelievers of the time.) But having endeavoured to sow this neutral sort of idea toward Christian doctrine into the Act, the term "secular" has grown and matured to mean something very different. "In the absence of any ruling by the courts," writes then Minister of Education David Lange on 23 February 1988, (and later confirmed by Minister of Education Lockwood Smith in a letter dated 15 April 1993) "the department has in practice taken the term secular) to mean 'without any form of religious instruction or observance'." Religion can be mentioned or referred to but religious instruction or observance is out. That certainly does not describe a Christian approach to education. It is an approach which sees Christianity as a separate and optional field of study. Maths, English, History and Science can all be totally understood and mastered without any element of Biblical Christian instruction or observance. In other words, the human mind can comprehend these things without God's help. This is the humanist approach.
The Humanist Approach
It is, in fact, exactly the same approach recommended to Eve by the serpent in the Garden of Eden. She was presented with a sort of neutral approach toward God's command regarding the fruit of the forbidden tree. She fell for it. Take what God said, sure, but don't limit yourself to that. The serpent gave some interesting alternative ideas about the fruit, and Eve even added some of her own. (First mistake.) Instead of remaining totally submissive to God's unerring, infallible Words on the subject, she placed those Holy Words alongside these new alternatives from both the serpent and herself. She treated them all the same. (Second mistake.) She judged their merits according to her own mind. (Third mistake.) And her own human mind made its own choice. (Fourth mistake.) This is the humanist approach. Note the process. Collect as many facts, opinions and ideas as you can, regard them as all having equal value, weigh them up and make your choice. Note also the consequences. Absolute disaster for the entire human race.
This is precisely the approach taken today in the state classroom, with one important difference. The child is still presented with a large amount of information and encouraged to make his own choice. But because of the secular clause in the Education Act, Christian concepts of absolutes, right and wrong, accountability to God, life after death are not included in the information presented. The original serpent himself didn't have it so easy. He would definitely approve.
The humanist teaches that maths is a human invention, whereas Christians know it is God's invention and man has discovered it. The difference is that as a human invention, it is tentative and can be changed and modified to suit. Absolutes are not necessary. Two plus two does not have to equal four when we modify the system. The problem humanists run up against, however, is that this "human invention" of maths matches all of nature so perfectly and is even consistently applicable in outer space and on other planets. If it is simply a human device, there is no logical explanation for this. Why, it is almost as if everything had a common origin and were tied together in some kind of harmonius unity. Morris Kline, a prolific modern writer about mathematics, says, "It behooves us...to learn why...mathematics has proved to be so incredibly effective...Mathematics is man-made... (Yet) some explanation of this marvelous power is called for." Richard Courant, formerly head of the mathematics department at what used to be the world's center for mathematics, the University of Gottingen, remarked, "That mathematics, an emanation of the human mind, should serve so effectively for the description and understanding of the physical world is a challenging fact that has rightly attracted the concern of philosophers." Albert Einstein summarised the problem thus: "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."
In English the humanist will by and large dispense with spelling and grammar as long as one is able to communicate. Accuracy is not a desirable goal, as it tends to reflect the idea of absolutes, an attribute of God which humanists would rather avoid. His method of dealing with absolutes is to shoot himself in the foot by making the absolute declaration, "There are no absolutes."
The humanist approach to history is to assume the meaninglessness of the whole line of events, viewing them as chance unrelated happenings. In fact, history has been dumped in favour of the "value-free" approach to human events known as "social studies". Because one society and its values are just as good as any other, we will have a look at the lot and get ideas of different life values which we may decide to adopt for our own lives.
The humanist approach does have a morality. It is like a smorgasbord. You pick and choose your own values and standards, you chop and change them according to your situation at the time. And so in sex education and AIDS education and Keeping Ourselves Safe Programmes, children are given "all" the "facts" about contraceptives, discuss "safe sex", are told where to get free advice and supplies, how to obtain an abortion and where to find friendly, non-judgmental people to counsel you in this area, what constitutes a sexual approach, incest, exhibitionism, molestation and rape. "Facts" such as "incest, rape and sex outside of marriage are wrong" are not presented because they reflect Christian absolutes, and our education system is legally required to be "entirely of a secular character". They will say that certain things are "inappropriate", but that finally the child has to decide for himself. The humanist approach is to give the child all the "facts" (as they see the "facts") and then encourage the chld to make his own "responsible" decisions. But Christians know that until the child has had developed and trained and disciplined into him a moral framework with which to judge the facts, he is unable to make responsible decisions, because he is unable to process all the facts according to any consistent or logical frame of reference. He can only arrange the facts as he would food from a smorgasbord, heaping on some that appeal and leaving others on the side. That's why so many young peoples' lives today resemble a dog's breakfast.
The Christian Approach
The Christian approach is described and contrasted to the humanist approach throughout Scripture. Proverbs 3:5 is a very succinct summary: "Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding." See also Isaiah 1:18-20, Psalm 1, Colossians 2:8, 3:1-3, I John 2:15- 17, Romans 8:1-11, 12:1-2, Galatians 5:16-26, Ephesians 4:17- 24, John 3:16-21. God's words and man's words are intrinsically different. One is the Creator speaking. The other is the thing created speaking. "'For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways,' says the LORD. 'For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.'" (Isaiah 55:8-9.)
Educationalists have warned us about trying to balance the two. Speaking of the U.S. Government's policy of taking a neutral rather than a Christian approach to education, A.A. Hodge wrote the following back in 1887: "It is obvious that the infinite evils resulting from the proposed perversion of the great education agency of the country cannot be corrected by the supplementary agencies of the Christian home, the Sabbath school or the church. This follows not only because the activities of the public schools are universal and that of all the other agencies are partial, but chiefly because the Sabbath school and the church cannot teach history or science, and therefore cannot rectify the anti-Christian history and science taught by the public schools. And if they could, a Christian history and a Christian science on the one hand cannot coalesce with and counteract an atheistic history and science on the other. Poison and its antidote together never constitute nutritious food. And it is simply madness to attempt the universal distribution of poison on the ground that other parties are endeavouring to furnish a partial distribution of an imperfect antidote."
Note how Mr Hodge assumed a neutral approach was of necessity an anti-Christian approach. This is so. There are, after all, only two approaches.
The Christian approach is very unfashionable. It is intolerant of that which is wrong. It is one-eyed, narrow minded, biased toward the Scriptures, simple concerning evil and wise in what is good. It is black and white. It is divisive since it recognises and looks for right vs. wrong, saved vs. lost, good vs. bad, moral vs. immoral.
Critics say the Christian is out of touch with reality and that Christian education shelters children from the real world. Well, not long ago I was reading some Creation Science literature and discovered that my old childhood friend the Brontosaurus is worse than just extinct....he never even existed in the first place. Brontosaurus is nothing more than the result of over-zealous paleontologists and museum exhibit staff slapping together bones before determining for sure that they all represented the same creature. But any educator who does not view the child from the Christian perspective is just like those over-zealous paleontologists in that they compose, and teach to, a philosophical definition of a child which doesn't exist.
They say that the child is an animal, a product of blind, chance, meaningless evolution and survival of the fittest. Although we may see a lot of this survival of the fittest philosophy in action on the state school playground, the Christian approach acknowledges that the child was created by God for a particular purpose.
The humanist believes the child is born neutral, a blank tape, or perhaps even basically good. All the evil is learned from society, especially from those who hold intolerant, black and white, judgemental views and superstitions....code phrases meant to refer to Christians. Christians know that the child is not neutral but is a born sinner in need of discipline, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness since it does not come naturally.
So although it was a shock to discover that Brontosaurus is a type of dinosaur that never even existed, it is even more shocking to discover that so many NZ classroom teachers are tailoring their teaching methods, class objectives and subject content to a type of child that likewise doesn't even exist! The net result is surely to be that our children will graduate as a herd of functional Brontosauri, believing that they are "children" the like of which exist only in the theories of evolution-believing secular humanists. How can such children ever hope to cope in the real world when they are so sheltered from reality in the classroom? Exactly who is sheltering whom?
Conclusion
What is the difference between humanist and Christian education? "The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God,'" (Psalm 14:1), while the humanist educator, as in Mr Lange's definition of "secular", effectively says it out loud! "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; a good understanding have all those who do His commandments" (Psalm 111:10). Yet with God legislated out of the state classroom, the students who sit in that classroom haven't got a chance to grow in true wisdom. What is the concerned parent to do? He cannot hope to debrief his children and undo the damage done after each day in the state school. He must now have his turn to make a responsible decision. Either shell out for a private Christian school, or really do his whole family a favour and teach them at home. Home education is growing rapidly in NZ, among Christians and non-Christians alike. As Christian parents begin to reap the fruits of humanist education in the lives of their own precious children, they realise that Christian education doesn't cost....it pays!
At all costs, parents must demand the right for themselves to determine what kind of education their own children shall have. Otherwise, just as Professor J. Gresham Machen warned back in 1926, "If liberty is not maintained with regard to education, there is no use trying to maintain it in any other sphere. If you give the bureaucrats the children you might just as well give them eveything else." "Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's." (Matthew 22:21).
From Keystone Magazine
November 1998 , Vol. IV No.III
P O Box 9064
Palmerston North
Phone: (06) 357-4399
Fax: (06) 357-4389
email: craig@hef.org.nz
A home schooling situation to watch out for is teaching someone else's children. You may foster a stranger's child long-term; you may look after a relative's child long-term; you may adopt a child; you may home school another home schooler's child(ren) on a casual or regular basis in certain subjects. As commendable as these actions are, they will cause definite drawbacks to your home school that must be soberly considered before making this kind of arrangement an everyday lifestyle.
One of the major advantages of home schooling one's own children is the tutoring aspect, the one-to-one time with each child. This is immediately compromised and possibly sacrificed altogether when teaching foster children at home. Why is this? There is so much you have to learn about this foster student, how he thinks, his learning style, his attention span, his current understanding of every topic under study, his emotional and mental and intellectual maturity levels and abilities, his learning gaps, etc., etc. These are things you often know or have observed and internalised in your own children without, it would seem, any special effort to do so. (Incidentally, it is this aspect of parenting, the depth of understanding of one's own children, which makes parents so well qualified to teach their own children in the first place.) In addition, foster children often have their own set of problems arising from the reasons leading to their need to be fostered.
You now have to spend extra time with him trying to figure all these things out. And it takes time for him to learn how to fit into your scheme of things, which may prove impossible to do in the end because of his personal makeup and the totally new set of group dynamics now at work within your family.
However, homeschooling a foster child is an unparalleled opportunity to influence, love, nurture, train and discipline another life for the sake of the Gospel and the Glory of our God and Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ.
This writer was home schooling his four children when our family became co-guardians and custodians of an 8-year-old boy. This boy, whom we shall call Sam, had been to public schools until we got him. His attention span was 30-45 seconds. My children had attention spans of 60-90 minutes. We would often sit and draw or play with leggo, while I read science or history or geography to the group, stopping frequently to discuss words & concepts and to ask questions or follow tangents. Sam found this intolerable at first.
When he first arrived I gave Sam a page of simple addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division problems as he told me he was doing all of these at school. He finished this assignment in record time. Upon examination it was found that all the answers were wrong. I pointed this out and he was unable, it seemed, to grasp what I was saying. In fact, he just became frustrated and declared, "I don't understand," as he withdrew into a foul mood, arms crossed, head down, brows knitted tighly together. It turned out that he was accustomed to filling in the blanks, but had no idea that sometimes the red marks alongside the returned assignment meant the answer was wrong. He had no understanding of place values, no idea of how to add and carry or subtract and borrow. To add 24 + 35 he would add 2 + 4 + 3 + 5 and wonder what was wrong with his answer of 14. Even after working with him for 8 months, it was simply too taxing on his concentration and logic to arrange maths skills in a logical sequence to figure how much change he should get after buying several items. He had a twisted self-image, occasionally saying he was no good. His mental, intellectual and emotional levels were more like my 5-year-old, yet he was older by a few months than my own 8-year-old son. When an officer from the Education Review Office in Wanganui came to review our home education, she was surprised to learn that Sam was 8, as she had decided he was 6 or less after observing all of the children for 30 minutes or so at close quarters. We therefore assigned him a place between our 5- and 8-year-olds in the family pecking order. He never accepted that and began to devise ways to victimise our 8-year-old, whose place in the pecking order Sam was determined to usurp.
To effectively teach him anything at all required my full attention. I was reduced to giving assignments to my other children and hoping they could cope on their own. They resented this straight away as it was both robbing them of tutoring time and interrupting the normally quick flow of their own learning curves. Although we had always thought that our home school was pretty relaxed and casual, we discovered that to this product of the state schools, it was quite intense, unbearably so in fact. To accomodate this new addition, our whole home education process had to be both radically modified and slowed down. Now I know for sure what an impossible job school teachers face.
We considered sending Sam to school while continuing to home school our own. We decided that was unacceptable. It would make Sam seem to be a second class citizen in our family, make us look like we were not that convinced about home schooling, and then most of all it would just import straight into our home some of the problems of the state schools, problems we were determined our children would not have to endure.
Sam lives elsewhere now. I loved the challenge he presented and the progress we made. I believe we helped him form a Biblical self image to replace the hopeless one he had. We were with him when he prayed to the Lord for forgiveness and salvation. He made so many very big changes to his behaviour, that we find it amazing as we look back over the time. His attitudes were much more difficult to change; in particular, we were unable to shift his attitude of resentment to his place in the pecking order. Our own children's attitude hardened toward him as he victimised one in particular, and as his simply being there so completely changed our family's group dynamics. We continued to foster children, preschoolers for short-terms, and have since adopted two full siblings through the contacts made while fostering. Being adopted, these two could not be any more a real part of our family, although they are without question wired up differently than our natural offspring. But I would never try to homeschool again any foster child older than my youngest.
Taking on the job of home schooling a foster child is one thing, but how about home schooling the child of a friend or neighbour? Some of the possible problems are the same. In addition it may well cause your own home school to become more like the classroom you wanted your child to avoid in the first place. Larger numbers, less time for personal tutoring, children with different backgrounds pose all sorts of problems for an otherwise homogeneous and more-or-less harmonious family who understand each other and know how to work together. If these new children have been to public schools, then there will be all those negative aspects which have to be weeded out, which may or may not be entirely possible.
A few years ago, just after Sam had left us, I attended the Christian Home Educators of California’s annual conference at the Disneyland Hotel in Los Angeles. There were 4,000 conferees (parents only!), and each elective hour had 15 different workshops plus six more that were demonstration workshops of commercial resource people. I attended one workshop about home schooling other people’s children, but all they covered was taking in friends or neighbours for pay. They had ALL the typical problems.....chewing gum stuck under their dining table, kids carving their initials into their dining room chairs, lesson plans and marking every night....just like a school classroom! One woman there asked about home educating foster children. Nobody knew anything. So up went my hand, and suddenly all chairs were turned around and we had another workshop in progress. The other workshop attendees wanted to come to grips with really influencing a child who needed foster care, not with how to run a classroom. There is a place for serving others by tutoring their children, and I reckon we will need to see a lot more of it as the state system continues to fall apart. Just be aware of what any such service for others does to the prospects of your own children’s educational potential.
For about a year, for only one morning a week, I tutored mine plus two like-minded, like-standard children of close Christian friends. These sessions were a real pleasure. Being all close and alike in background and expectations made the teaching a real joy and a nice variation for all concerned. But I couldn't see us doing that any more than one morning a week, otherwise my own programme with my own children would have been compromised. If I were paid for teaching others, that would be a whole different story, as then I would be a de facto professional rather than a volunteer amateur. But even then I would still have to determine whether my objectives in home schooling my children were being served or severed by home schooling these others.
My advice would be to know for certain what your own personal objectives are for home schooling your own children. You must ask whether taking on another home schooler, either a foster child or the child of a friend, will help or hinder the fulfilment of those objectives. Be tough, be convinced of your calling before God, and be unafraid to say "No" to even the tear-jerking requests from both foster agencies or close friends.
From Keystone Magazine
July 1998 , Vol. IV No.II
P O Box 9064
Palmerston North
Phone: (06) 357-4399
Fax: (06) 357-4389
email: craig@hef.org.nz
How can you stick it? All day everyday with the kids at home?? Aaaarrrggghhh!!
We want the thrill of participating in our children’s learning process. All parents remember how much pleasure there is in watching for, coaching, developing and announcing each child’s first smile, first step, first word, first go on a bike, etc., etc. We get that thrill over and over as they learn to read, to write, to master maths, to put a science project together, or to see relationships in history. We also have the added bonus of knowing that they have learned and mastered that particular skill and not simply "experienced" it. The extra added bonus is that we have learned it afresh ourselves.
In fact, we find this home schooling so stimulating we actually get hooked on it. We would rather see the children learn than earn money. But then we see all activities as learning activities, earning money included. We have sought and found ways for the children to help us earn our income: assisting us who are self-employed by doing unpaid chores around the house for us, freeing us up for the paid work; directly helping us in running our home business; developing their own cottage industries, earning their own pocket money; several pairs of eyes and ears are better than one in locating bargains around town. The emphasis in all this is not on teaching as it is in the schools, but on learning. The children will learn virtually automatically when they can accompany and participate to even a small degree in some common everyday activity like pulling the weeds, shopping, changing a tyre, repairing the back fence, banking, posting.....the list, like the tasks to be done, is endless!
But children learn by helping you do the tasks. This is killing two birds with one stone: teaching the kids while doing all those chores and errands at the same time. They not only learn about the myriad mundane tasks that make up a day in the real world, but also come to see the place each task plays in the overall picture. In other words, they form a world-view based on the reality of your life in the home, the community and the market place rather than some Marxist/feminist academic’s spin-doctored theory about reality as he/she sees it from his/her ivory tower. Children learn local geography, economics, maths, time management, manual skills and more just by doing what you do during the day. It may take you longer to get through your list of chores, but because you are trying to look at these tasks through the eyes of your children, you will see these tasks in a totally new perspective. It will revitalise your own "boring" and "routine" day in a way you would never imagine to be possible.
We haven’t found home schooling to be expensive. I mean, even at "free" public schools the parents are continually shelling out for uniforms, books, fees, field trips, etc. "Free" public schools are also very time consuming and stressful for the concerned parent. There are all those delicate relationships with all those teachers and administrators, the other parents at PTA meetings, the tense debates at the school committee meetings, and the continual fund raising activities. And of course there is the transportation here, there and everywhere. Home schooling also takes time, but it is not time spent, it is time invested! And again, maybe as little as two hours a day is formal instruction, the rest is instruction "on the job" as you go about your necessary routine.
I believe the main reason that sympathetic friends do not themselves home school is because they do not want themselves or their children to be different. Sure, they want them to be better than average and distinctive in many ways, but not really different. But we do not want our children to be the same as all the others around, so that’s why we home school. We don’t want ours to be as cheeky, disrespectful, dishonest, disobedient and destructive as so many kids are today. We don’t want our children trained to be pleasure-seeking hedonists. We don’t want our kids to be so group-oriented that they cannot think, reason, evaluate, decide and then personally commit themselves to a course of action without the consent of their peers.
We are doing the best we can, I repeat, the best we know we can do, to maintain religious and civil freedoms in NZ by home schooling our children. The world-wide trend seems to be toward centralisation in government and ecumenicalism in religion. We aim to train up Biblically individualistic, independent thinkers, who are unafraid to shoulder responsibilities, but who are afraid of sin, who will, by God’s grace, evaluate all things by the principles set forth in the Bible. By so doing we will have produced children who will not be so easily pushed around by Big Brother, nor will the world be very successful at intimidating them to conform to its mould. We are not trying to produce anarchists. By training our children to be thoroughly Biblical in thought, word and deed, our children will be thereby effectively restrained from fulfilling their selfish desires and at the same time constrained to do that which is right.
We are doing the best thing possible to help the public, the private and the Christian schools.....providing them with some stiff competition. And I mean stiff. An average home with average access to resources with average parents with no special training are routinely producing children with top academic and social skills, while schools with masses of money and mountains of resources and highly trained and paid professional teachers, counsellors and administrators are having mixed results. Virtually any parent with only a half-measure of concern for excellence in their children’s education can easily raise up a family of superior academic and social accomplishments. Impossible, you say. Only natural, I retort. A home schooling parent is a private tutor. With only two hours of quality one-to-one tuition a day an average parent will certainly accomplish far more than all but the most exceptional teacher, contending with 30-40 mixed ability children in a classroom, can accomplish in a whole week....or longer. Almost every teacher will grant you that. And on top of that, who but you, the parent, is more concerned and motivated toward your children’s success? Who knows and understands your children better than you? You know when they are truly having an off day and when they are just having you on. Who else but you can ensure they get the morals, values and world outlook that you want them to have? I am sure you have heard the old saying, "If you want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself." This holds just as true in the realm of education as anywhere else.
It is a shame that the state educationalists are today perceived as the "professionals", the "experts", as if they alone held the keys for unlocking the child’s abilities to learn and for unlocking the mysteries of God’s creation that it may be understood. There is an exceedingly strong argument which can demonstrate that humanistically-trained state teachers do more to thwart children’s learning abilities than to unlock them. The fact that these same teachers are bound by law to teach from a secular or God-less perspective guarantees that they will not unlock the mysteries of God’s creation or ever properly understand them. I believe every parent must no longer allow herself to be intimidated, disparaged, patronised or put down by anyone within the state education system.
Instead of belittling her own abilities, I believe every parent must first of all seriously consider teaching her own children at home because in most cases she can do a superior job of it. If that is indeed totally out of the question, parents should then consider the Christian school, giving thanks and praise to God that there are so many dedicated Christian teachers and administrators with the vision for Christian schools.
The state schools are there as a last resort. That was partly why they were established — to provide and ensure a minimum of education to all NZ children. Yet I know of no parents who consciously say they want the minimum education being offered by the state. Parents desire more, much more. Therefore they owe it to themselves to seriously consider the home schooling option.
From Keystone Magazine
March 1998 , Vol. IV No.1
P O Box 9064
Palmerston North
Phone: (06) 357-4399
Fax: (06) 357-4389
email: craig@hef.org.nz
Why do you home schoolers insist on sheltering your kids from reality, from mixing in the real world?
Parents who teach their children at home are often accused of not giving their children a "fair chance", of causing them to miss out on a "normal" education, of sheltering them from the real world. But Christian home schoolers often level these exact same accusations at the state school educational authorities.....and with far greater accuracy. It is the state-run public schools which, having tossed out the Bible as its infallible point of reference, is now engaged in wholesale deception and deprivation of the nation’s children.
Let us not be timid about this first point. NONE of the students in the state schools is getting a "fair chance". The Bible clearly states why: "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight." (Prov. 9:10.) Children in state schools are being grossly deprived of a sound education and the ability to acquire wisdom. Legally the state curriculum cannot and does not inculcate the fear of the Lord as the beginning, the starting point, the necessary benchmark for gaining wisdom. Having rejected the only sure foundation for wisdom, upon what are our state education authorities building their educational edifice? Section 77 of the Education Act says that the instruction in state primary classrooms shall be entirely of a secular character. According to a past Minister of Education, David Lange, "secular" means "without any religious instruction or observance." That is, the teaching shall be from a point of view which assumes that God doesn’t exist. Now, Psalm 14:1 warns us that the FOOL says in his heart that there is no God, but here we have the Education Act saying it out loud, boldly, in black and white print! So what are we left to conclude about that which state educators can offer our children?
Besides, Godly education does not give a student a "chance", but a choice. The Lord lays before each of us only two options: "See, I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you this day, by loving the Lord your God, by walking in His ways, and by keeping His commandments and His statutes and His ordinances, then you shall live and multiply, and the Lord your God will bless you....But if your heart turns away, and you will not hear, but are drawn away to worship other gods and serve them, I declare to you this day, that you shall perish." (Deut. 30:15-18.) God promises (which is not the same as offering a chance) life and success in His terms to those who love and obey Him. He promises death and destruction to those who never learn to do so. State schools are legally required to teach children from a frame of reference (the secular clause from the Education Act) which tends to draw students toward the second option. Just as the state offers New Zealanders a "chance" in the Lotto games or with Bonus Bonds, so also the state seems to at best only offer our children a "chance" in the public schools.
It is the children in state schools that are missing out on normal education. The reason this is not so immediately apparent is that since most of us have already been through this education system ourselves, we still tend to unconsciously regard it as the norm for no other reason than that it was our own personal experience. Turning to the Scriptures for our norms, we get a totally different picture. First of all, education is the responsibility of the family, not the state. (Deut. 6:4-9.) Education is to be thoroughly Christian in nature, not secular. (Eph 6:4.) It is becoming obvious that because of the compulsory attendance law, most students have been snatched away from their parents’ care at too early an age. Children have been deprived in many ways as the state schools can only provide a bare shadow of the love, attention, understanding, empathy, guidance, role-modelling, encouragement, correction, discipline and tailor-made johnny-on-the-spot education and training that most Christian parents are more than capable of providing. Parents’ God-given responsibility to train up their own children has been largely usurped by the state. We must never allow ourselves to consider this state of affairs as normal.
Because the state school classroom is off-limits to consistently teaching the Lordship of Jesus Christ and the truth, relevance and necessity of His Word, the Bible, in every area of human thought and endeavour, it is the children in these state institutions who are being sheltered from the real world. Instead of being taught in a context of a universe created and sustained every moment by Almighty God, they are fed on the false, fruitless and futile philosophies of fallen men who legally cannot present the truth, Christianity, as even a viable option (not that many would want to do even that.) The Bible being off-limits, the mind of man is now put forward as the only "infallible" point of reference to which the public school student may legally be referred. Even well-meaning Christian education groups are propagating this deception because of a lack of understanding the issues involved. There are those who want to see Christianity taught in secondary schools as a viable, philosophical or religious alternative world view. That makes it merely one of many in the market place today. This is just a secular view of Christianity, and not real Christianity at all. Real Christianity is and claims to be the ONLY viable world view. (Why do we quibble and go weak-kneed at this point? Out of fear, that’s why. I know. Only today I missed a rare opportunity. My education professor at Massey asked me on this first day of the new semester in front of the whole class of 40 others what is the whole purpose of education. I merely said it was to properly take dominion over the whole earth. Why didn’t I say, "To enable us to take dominion under God over the whole earth and to make disciples of Jesus Christ of every nation"? Because, to my shame, I choked — me, a 46-year-old father of three teenagers, veteran of newspaper interviews, radio interviews, rabidly hostile talk-back hosts and even the Holmes show — I choked in front of 40, 19-year-old first year students.)
And space would fail if we were to launch into comparisons between the contrived and artificial environment of an age-segregated classroom with the grass-roots reality of a typical home environment which quickly and easily expands via almost daily field trips into the real-life environment of the community, the workplace and the marketplace. But these are secular arguments, which any intelligent person can readily see if they are willing to see them. They may add some reinforcement, but our basic argument, upon which we stand as Christians and realise we can do nothing different, is that we have had our marching orders from the King of kings Himself regarding the education of our children, and we MUST obey God rather than men.
From Keystone Magazine
July 1997 , Vol. III No.4
P O Box 9064
Palmerston North
Phone: (06) 357-4399
Fax: (06) 357-4389
email: craig@hef.org.nz
This is a really tough area. A mother who is on her own or who is basically left on her own in this home schooling task has an extra big challenge and one that may need to be handled with an extra big measure of sensitivity.
The solo mum teaching her children at home during the day is in some respects just the same as other mums: she has to do the job on her own for most of the time. But then there isn't the spouse to come home and, for a while at least, lift the burden of the care of the children off her shoulders. Older children can actually begin to do this for mum fairly early on, and part of their home education is to mind the baby/ toddler while mum instructs the other child/ren. But there are other aspects of support (spiritual, moral, emotional, physical, intellectual) which God seems to have purposed should be borne together with a spouse. To bear these alone is really tough, and should serve to drive us to lean more heavily on the Lord and other Christian friends.
Support groups play an invaluable role here. A regular meeting where the mums have the opportunity to mainly talk while the children "socialise" (play) together and require minimum supervision constitutes a first-class support group. There is no need for any official support group committee to come together and sanction, plan, schedule and announce such a meeting beforehand: one person ringing around her friends inviting them to come over from lpm to2pm Friday afternoon will get the ball rolling. "Let's do this again next week, and what do you say we talk about 'Reading'?" provides a great excuse for many similar times together as you work your way through the curriculum topics. Word will spread by itself, and it can eventually become an "official" function of the local support group.
The various families within the support group can also at times be relied upon to babysit a solo mum's children so that she can become involved in things outside her home, and maintain that wider perspective on life which makes coping with her own situation so much easier. And of course she will at times be available to babysit those families' children, a reciprocal deal which doesn't always have to involve the scarce commodity called "cash".
Another issue that may be of concern to some solo mums is the total lack for whatever reason of a Godly male role model for her children within their own extended family. My own dad died when I was 13, and some of the men friends of our family would take me out, just the two of us, on a substitute father/son activity. The gesture was great, but those occasions were always so strained and contrived and uncomfortable. This has been, historically, an area where the men in the church recognised the need and would take the natural opportunities to interact with the children during church activities and socials and those other occasions when families interact or visit one another. It is possibly felt by solo mums that they aren't included in interfamily socialising as much since there is no husband around to match the husbands of other families. My widowed mum felt this very strongly when it came to socialising with just one other family, but as soon as the social activity grew to three or more families, that feeling disappeared. Couples who know solo mums could try to be aware of this and take it into their consideration when planning their own social calendars. The solo mum might want to mention this concern to some close friends, but she can't really push it more than that. If the men around who know the situation are aware of the solo mum's concerns for her children don't respond to the knowledge and challenge of the situation itself, prodding them more than once or twice at most certainly will not have the desired effect. Sorry, but that just seems to be the way men are wired up.
The issue of unsupportive or unbelieving spouses can actually be more stressful. Much of what was written about support groups above is applicable here. If the husband is actually anti-home schooling, and refuses to discuss it, try for a Christian school, if there is a decent one nearby. If not, for the sake of the marriage bond and family harmony the children better do as dad wants: go to school. Take comfort in the knowledge that a strong, loving, harmonious, supporting and vitally-involved-with-their-children set of parents will still have by far the major influence in the child/ren's character and social and moral development, even though they attend school. Take advantage of dad's natural love and concern for his child/ren and work as a team to do plenty of extra-curricular activities with them. This doesn't have to be a big formalised thing ... a simple family picnic with plenty of parent/child interaction helps to build those foundational values and attitudes that YOUR family holds dear into your child/ren in a permanent fashion. Again, it is simply taking advantage of the incredible parent/child bond that God has wired into us all and consciously using it to maximum advantage.
The dad who isn't actively against home schooling, but isn't really for it either but just seems to leave it up to mum should really exercise more leadership and (as we say in our house) "don't just ignore the elephant in the room". Dads tend to be involved in their work and one other thing (not necessarily to do with home and family), and leave all else up to mum. Men like to be good at what they do, and hate making mistakes. Consequently they tend to stay out of areas they aren't familiar with or are not convinced about. Mums virtually ALWAYS end up with a whole list of skills required for running a household, while the dads only have one or two. After a while dads become aware of this and can start to feel a bit insecure about it, which could lead to even more reluctance to do anything new or different.
Well, we men simply have to break out of that kind of inhibiting, strangling, mind-set and force ourselves to get involved. It doesn't mean we have to run everything, but at least to think it through and be supportive of whatever we let the family be involved in. The Lord God Almighty is going to call us to account for how we have managed our families: just bringing home the bacon simply won't pass muster.
This certainly is not the final word on the subject. Please write in, anonymously if you like, with other ideas, tips or experiences or more specific questions. Lord willing, our combined wisdom will help to edify us all.
From Keystone Magazine
November 1996 , Vol. II No. 6
P O Box 9064
Palmerston North
Phone: (06) 357-4399
Fax: (06) 357-4389
email: craig@hef.org.nz
Without a doubt this is the one question, reservation and objection that is raised most often. It is usually the one raised first. It is often the one most hotly debated. And common experience among homeschoolers is that socialisation, rather than academic achievement, is the issue over which friends, relatives and educational authorities show the most concern.
Popular opinion assumes that children need long periods of interaction with a large group of age-segregated peers to acquire social skills. Now assuming that most of the time spent in the classroom is not spent in interacting but in paying attention to the teacher and doing the assigned work, where does most of the interaction take place? During lunch and break times, and before and after school. And who is supervising this interaction on the playground, on the school bus and on the streets to ensure that the right kind of socialisation is taking place? It is not the teachers but the children themselves. In the typical public school setting, children are being left to socialise themselves as best they can.
This fits in with today's prevailing philosophy which holds that children are inherently good or perhaps neutral, like blank cassette tapes, and that left to themselves, they will inevitably develop and adapt toward the highest good attainable by the group as a whole. (Although it is unpopular to say so, when this is translated into practical reality it means conformity to the lowest common denominator.) This inevitable "upward" development and adaptation is an idea developed from the theories of evolution.
Unfortunately it was developed in the absense of a) other tenets of evolutionary thought, b) common experience and c) traditional Christian/Western wisdom, all of which contradict this foundationaI premise upon which our modern ideas of child socialisation are based.
Let us examine these three contradictions to the prevailing thoughts on socialisation:
a) Another tenet of evolution is the survival of the fittest. This is the law of the jungle, eat or be eaten, brute force prevails, might makes right. This is the tendency of children's behaviour on the playground unless there are sufficient adults present to prevent it.
Even though children are infinitely varied, the socialisation at school causes them to conform to the codes dictated by their particular class or group. We have all witnessed the same phenomenon: There are the few at the top who are setting the pace and the codes, there are the vast numbers in the middle who quietly conform and try to keep out of harm's way, and there are those at the bottom of the pecking order who are ostracised, victimised, bullied, teased, etc., because they do not conform in their dress, their size, their looks, their speech, their behaviour or whatever.
b) Common experience tells us this profound truth: Monkey see, monkey do. Children emulate the behaviour of those around them. If they spend most time around their friends, they copy them. If it is with the Ninja Turtles on TV, they will copy them. If they spend most time around their parents, they will emulate them.
Most parents know only too well the immediate results of this "copy cat" form of socialisation. After lengthy play with their friends, children can be "hyper" and disrespectful and try out the unacceptable speech or actions they have just picked up from their peers. How true is the ancient proverb which says, "He who walks with wise men becomes wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm. " 1
c) Christian wisdom says that children are not basically good or neutral but are fallen, that is, they possess an inherent tendency toward foolishness which manifests itself in temper tantrums, disobedience, disrespect, dishonesty, destructiveness, etc. Proverbs 22: 15 says, "Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of correction will drive it far from him." In other words, children do not need other children to teach them how to be children. Instead they need loving, responsive adults committed to teaching them, training them, giving them the discipline and setting them the right example in the social graces.
Children do not of themselves learn the social arts of respect, honesty, patience, gentleness, kindness, faithfullness, manners, or self control; they must have conscientious adults to model, discipline, teach and train them to internalise these behaviour traits as habits.
Critics of homeschooling claim that such children will not be the same as their conventionally schooled friends and will not fit into the peer group. The origins of this concern are somewhat sinister.
First there was Horace Mann, an early leader in the public school movement. He favoured the Prussian patterns of state education because, as he put it, it was devised "more for the purpose of modifying the sentiments and opinions of the rising generation according to a certain government standard than as a mere means of diffusing elementary knowledge. "
Then there was John Dewey, the father of progressive education. He saw truth not in absolutes, but in terms of universal ideas developed and agreed to by a group. A "thesis" or proposed truism would emerge from the group. It would at some stage meet with an opposing idea, an "antithesis." Debate and conflict would ensue until a compromise or "synthesis" was reached. This synthesis then became the thesis and the whole process would be repeated. For those who don't recognize it, this is classic Marxist dogma.
Truth to Dewey was derived by a distillation process within the group. To educators like him, the interaction of children with others in order to help distill these universal ideas of truth is education.
Both Horace Mann and John Dewey believed that this type of education needed to be led by an elite, those educators who had been instrumental in the formation of public education policy, who could gently lead others through this "distillation" process. To have children who did not or would not fit in with the group would be to hamper the distillation of truth, as directed by this elite.
We find, then, that this concern over homeschooled children not being socialised is actually a political concern that they will not be as easily manipulated by the elite as those who do fit into this all-important group.2
The following comments are by Dr. James C. Dobson who is Associate Clinical Professor of Pediatrics, University of Southern California School of Medicine; President of Focus on the Family Magazine and Focus on the Family radio programmes which are heard daily on 1400 radio facilities around the world; and author of best-seller, Dare to Discipline.
I have been increasingly concerned during the past 10 years about the damage done to our children by one another. The epidemic of inferiority and inadequacy seen during the teen years is rooted in the ridicule, rejection, and social competition experienced by vulnerable young children. They are simply not ready to handle the threats to the self-concept that are common in any elementary school setting.
I have seen kids dismantle one another, while parents and teachers passively stood by and observed the "socialisation" process. I've then watched the recipients of this pressure begin to develop defense mechanisms and coping strategies that should never be necessary in a young child.
Dozens of investigations have demonstrated, (at least to my satisfaction), the error of the notion that children must be exposed to other children in order to be properly socialised. I just don't believe it. In fact, the opposite is true. They need the security and love of parental protection and guidance until their self-concepts are more stabilised and established.
In summary, I believe the home school is the wave of the future. In addition, it provides a third alternative to a humanistic public school and an expensive or non-existent Christian school.3
In 1960 Harold G. McCurdy examined "The childhood pattern of genius" in a study supported by the Smithsonian Institution of Washington, D.C. In summary, McCurdy wrote:
The typical developmental pattern includes as important aspects:
(a) a high degree of attention focused upon the child by parents and other adults, expressed in intensive educational measures and, usually, abundant love;
(b) isolation from other children, especially outside the family; and
(c) a rich efflorescence of fantasy as reaction to the preceeding conditions.
It might be remarked that the mass education of our public school system is, in its way, a vast experiment on tbe effect of reducing all three factors to minimum; accordingly, it should tend to suppress the occurance of genius.4
Too right! Here's a report from Tauranga that appeared in the Manawatu (NZ) Evening Standard of 16 March 1991: "A playground game involving sinking teeth into an unsuspecting school mate's bottom has left five students suspended. In the game, tagged barracuda, victims are forced to the ground and restrained while attackers bite a buttock." Cute.
Another answer to those critics who argue that homeschooled students are deprived socially is provided by Dr. John Wesley Taylor V. He used the Piers-Harris Children's Self-Concept Scale, one of the best self-concept instruments available for measuring socialisation, to evaluate 224 home schooling participants aged 9 through 18. Over half scored in the top 10% of the scale. 77.7% ranked in the top 25% of the scale. Only 10.3% scored below the norm.
Home schooled children score significantly higher than their conventionally schooled peers in this measurement of socialisation.5
Dr. Raymond Moore, Developmental psychologist and early childhood educational specialist from the Moore Foundation of Camas, Washington, has developed a three point recipe for sound character development:
1) An academic regimen which takes into consideration the individual child's readiness to learn as effected by the child's physical, emotional and intellectual maturity levels; his aptitudes, special gifts and abilities, learning style, etc.
2) An element of work in the daily programme which may range from simple routine chores to a regular income-generating cottage industry.
3) Service to others such as active membership in voluntary service organisations and visiting, baking, running errands for shut-ins, the infirm or hospitalised.
Dr. Moore maintains that the time and logistics of public schools and the need to integrate all three points into a unified lifestyle or "family corporation" indicates the homeschool as the ideal setting for sound, all-round character development.6
Some critics of homeschooling paint charicatures of what they say the homeshooling brand of socialisation will produce: introverted whimps and social incompetents. If we ignore for a moment the other factors involved in character development such as family background and support, it must be pointed out that these charicatures are already known in society and that they are products of the public schools. So too in fact are other social blights such as irresponsible hooligans, unmotivated slobs, gang members, vandals, and all the other social misfits who have graduated from the public schools' socialisation programme to subsequently be sent to our country's prisons, fill them to overflowing, and are now spilling back into society producing ever increasing crime rates.
If we now return to what are probably the major factors in character development, namely family background and support, and assert that increased hooliganism and crime is a result of disintegrating families, then we also have to assert that the schools are not able to correct this trend. Homeschooling, however, is an ideal situation for correcting this downward trend as families are of necessity drawn together to strive in unison toward the goal of educating and training each other for the whole of life.
Cornell University's Urie Bronfenbrenner points out the negative socialising effects of the peer group. The knuckling under of children to their agemates in habits, manners, finger signs, obscenities, rivalry and ridicule almost certainly infects all children who spend more of their waking days with their peers than their parents, as is usually the case with conventionally schooled children. They will become dependent upon their age-segregated peer group, and tend to be alienated from adults and others not in their age group. He says that this robs children of 1) self worth, 2) optimism, 3) respect for parents and 4) even trust in their peers.
Furthermore, this does not happen because peers are so attractive, but because the children perceive they are to some degree rejected by their parents.7
Here is just one story illustrating the negative side of school socialisation that appeared in the Manawatu(NZ) Evening Standard of 19 February 1991: "During cross-examination, defence counsel Les Atkins QC played a rap tape made by the girl and her friend the same year as the alleged (sexual) offences. The tape contained obscenities as well as inferences about the girl's current boyfriend's sexuality. She said the obscenities on the tape sung by her had no meaning. Everyone at school used such language freely. "
Martin Engle, who then headed the National Early Childhood Demonstration Centre, vowed that parents who insist on early schooling, for all its claimed advantages to their children, are either deceived or deceiving their children; and that in fact, the children feel rejected.8
He is supported by the late John Bowlby, London psychiatrist who headed the World Health Organisation early childhood programme. This rejection, suggests Dr. Bowlby, often amounts to a serious form of child abuse. We are depriving them of the security they need when we institutionalise them before they are ready. (Dr. Moore adds that the earlier you institutionalise your children, the earlier they will institutionalise you.) Says Dr. Bowlby, "...mothers who care for their children well are providing an irreplaceable service and one that society should hold in highest regard and be thankful for."9
The negative socialising effects of age-segregating youngsters into classes, putting all boys and girls of the same age into the same class, is especially damaging to the boys. We require boys to enter school at the same age as girls although we know that boys trail girls in mental and emotional maturity by about a year at school's start. Boys tend to be more likely than girls to fail, become delinquent or acutely hyperactive.
Michigan State University family ecologist Anne Soderman says, "Our failure to apply in the classroom what we have learned through research is evident in the secondary schools - boys outnumber girls 13 to 1 in remedial classes and by as much as 8 to 1 in classes for the emotionally impaired. " 10
Conclusions
Basically, the socialisation argument against homeschooling is one big myth. What statistics are available indicate that homeschool socialisation is in fact significantly superior to that proffered in public schools (Dr. John Taylor's use of Piers-Harris scale.) And the results of the schools' socialisation efforts observable in society today are bemoaned by just about everybody involved.
Notes
(1) Proverbs 13:20
(2) Theresa Rodman. The Teaching Home, Portland, Oregon: Vol. II, No. 4, Aug/Sep 1984.
(3) Abstracted from a personal letter to a professional colleague who had questioned Dr. Dobson's stance on homeschooling, quoted in The Teaching Home, Portland, Oregon: Vol. I, No. 2, June 1983.
(4) Quoted in Doctoral thesis of Brian D. Ray, President, National Home Education Research Institute, Seattle, Washington, 29 July 1986.
(5) John Wesley Taylor V. "Self Concept in Home Schooling Children", Doctoral dissertation, Andrews University, Michigan,May 1986.
(6) Raymond S. Moore. "The Educated Beautiful", Kappa Delta Pi RECORD, summer 1987.
(7) Urie Bronfenbrenner. Two Worlds of Childhood: U.S. and U.S.S.R., New York, N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, 1970.
(8) Martin Engle. "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Let Down Your Golden Hair: Some Thoughts on early Childhood Education." Unpublished manuscript, National Demonstration Center in Early Childhood Education, U.S. Office of Education, Washington, D.C.
9) John Bowlby. Maternal Care and Mental Health, Geneva World Health Organisation, 1952.
10) Ann Soderman. Article in Education Week, 14 March 1984.
From Keystone Magazine
July 1996 , Vol. II No. 4
P O Box 9064
Palmerston North
Phone: (06) 357-4399
Fax: (06) 357-4389
email: craig@hef.org.nz
Our public schools are staffed by well trained professionals who teach according to a modern up-to-date curriculum which is designed to bring children to their full potential that they may easily integrate into today's society and the workforce. How can you deny them these great advantages?
This is a typical statist comment, the kind that would also go on to say that children are our nation's greatest resource and therefore demand the best money can buy. You see, they quite quickly equate children with sides of lamb, butter and other "resources" of our nation which are sometimes sold to the highest bidder , sometimes bartered off to reduce debt and sometimes given away. I resent my children being spoken of in those terms. Thy also assume that money buys the best.
Well, what exactly is behind the National Curriculum? On April 19, 1987, the then Assistant Director , Resources Development, Department of Education, Wellington, met with a number of leaders of home schooling groups in Auckland. This gentleman stated that his own idealism had been somewhat tarnished after years in the state education system when he realized, in his own words, that education "was not only about children and learning, but also about money and politics." The Christchurch Press of November 5, 1985, had an article about the then Under Secretary of Trade and Industry, Mr Neilson, and his six-point programme for making Labour "the natural party of Government." Point three of this programme called for the introduction "of peace studies into the education system to achieve this end." The idea is to train children in the schools to think a certain way so that when they become voters they will just "naturally" think along Labour political lines and just "naturally" vote for Labour. At a speech at Massey University in mid-1990, Finance Minister David Caygill was reported in the papers as saying that Governments should mould public opinion, not follow it. He said it was the politician's responsibility to pursue policies that were in the public interest "even when the public disagrees." What better way to mould public opinion than when the public within the state education system is not yet old enough to have its own opinion?! Apparently , both Mr Neilson and Mr Caygill understood what Abraham Lincoln said over 100 years ago: "The philosophy of the classroom is the philosophy of the government in the next generation."
During the 1986 school trials of the draft programme Keeping Our Selves Safe, the Police Youth Aid Officer in Palmerston North chaired a public meeting to explain the programme to interested parents at Central Normal School. He was asked why the KOSS programme was targeting potential victims, school aged children, and educating them to understand and recognise perversions such as incest, sexual molestation, rape, exhibitionism, etc., rather than targeting potential offenders and educating them in self control. The constable answered with a shrug of the shoulders and the words, "I guess the children are easier to reach since they are a captive audience in the classroom each day."
A few years ago Massey University Education professor Ivan Snook said that the furore over sex education, morals in the schools, etc., was only a smoke screen. The real issues were power and control: whose were the children and who will control their education? Karl Marx was committed to seeing communism take over the world. He worked out a 10-point plan to see this objective succeed. One of the points was the establishment of free, compulsory and secular state education systems in order to train up the next generation in the philosophy of the state.
Many Christians and other concerned parents were thrilled with the way parents were promised a lot more say in running schools as a result of the changes brought about by the Tomorrow's Schools document. But most were totally misled. It turned out that what Tomorrow's Schools did was to off-load much of the expensive administrative headaches onto volunteer Boards of Trustees who receive token remuneration, while the core curriculum, what was actually being taught in the classroom, remained even more tightly in the control of the Ministry of Education. A quote by Phillip Capper of the Post Primary Teachers Association which appeared in the Dominion Sunday Times of 14 October 1990 is one of the most straightforward and honest statements by a professional educationalist one would ever hope to read. He said, "What I would like to see in the political debate about education is a recognition that public education is an exercise in social engineering by definition." And here is a snippet from the Manawatu Evening Standard of 4 December 1990. "Unresearched government-decreed practices in schools could socially, emotionally and intellectually deform children," says Christchurch Teachers' College principal Colin Knight. Dr Knight said the education system placed children at risk by continuing to neglect educational research. 'It is of serious concern to me that, despite the far-reaching effects of teaching on society, few educational practices have a sound research basis.' He said changes in what went on in schools were mainly brought about by politically initiated reviews and reports on questionnaires and Gallup polls, by parliamentary debate and political expediency.'
The New Zealand public school system is designed and operated according to political considerations. I have no qualms about keeping my children out of such a system.
From Keystone Magazine
March 1996 , Vol. II No. 2
P O Box 9064
Palmerston North
Phone: (06) 357-4399
Fax: (06) 357-4389
email: craig@hef.org.nz
When conversing with unbelievers, be it sharing the Gospel or explaining why we home school, shouldn't we endeavour to think Biblically but to speak secularly?
There is a strong current of thought among Christians that we need to modify the way we present the Gospel (or any other Biblically based principle by which we live) to the unbelieving and mostly unchurched people around us. If the public is to comprehend what we are saying as Christians we need to use language free from Christian jargon. We all probably agree with this sentiment.
But this is not the issue in the "think Biblically/speak secularly" debate. We told that our presentation of Biblical truths must not be too overtly Christian or else 1) we will get branded as Bible bashers and fundamentalists, 2) our unbelieving friends and family will switch off when we try to share with them, and 3) we will lose credibility and influence. Instead we must present Biblical principles in a way that does not immediately give away where we are coming from , is simple and appeals to the typical non-Christian NZer's sense of righteousness, justice, fair-play, reasonableness and innate conservative sense of traditional family values. This is the way to win friends and influence people.
There are, however, many things terribly wrong with this mode of thinking. It denies the Lordship of Christ. It actually offers nothing at all distinctively Christian. It fails to grasp the work involved in thinking Biblically. The motivation behind this approach is to gain popularity, influence and mana in the eyes of men rather than to bring glory and increased faithfulness to God. It assumes that unbelievers have virtues which they do not possess. It causes us to abandon our Biblical stance and to argue from the unbeliever's point of view. It also works against one of the main reasons many of us have for home schooling in the first place: surrounding our children with consistent standards.
First let us ask, ''Who's in charge here, anyway?" Is it the risen glorified awesome and majestic Lord Jesus Christ to Whom has been granted all authority in heaven and on earth, or is it the intimidation of our friends and family that controls the way we think, speak and act in their presence? Is Jesus Lord of all or only Lord of some? What is it we Christians are called to do while here on earth? If it is simply to add an inoffensive Christian flavour to society so that some people will think, "Well, that's so nice I'd like to join them," then I think we have missed the point.
We are to be the lamp set on a lamp stand, not to be seen by others so much as TO DISPEL THE DARKNESS.
NZ is crying out for ANSWERS, not possibilities or good ideas. As Christians so often we know we have the answers in the Bible, but we take it so much for granted. Unless we are prepared to offer Christ, that is the Word of God, as the only hope for this nation, our friends and families and their families, then we really have nothing more than any of the secular counselling agencies or Social Welfare Officers of the state are offering.
Our children listen to the way we converse with our non-Christian friends and neighbours. They listen to what we say. Now granted we must use diplomacy, tact and sensitivity in sharing the Gospel, and there is truth in the idea that we must first earn the right to share the Gospel with our friends and workmates. But too often we think of sharing anything Christian with non-Christians as "witnessing", and therefore as a separate activity. THIS IS A FALSE VIEW OF LIFE, and a view we DO NOT want to impart to our children. The Gospel and various aspects of it can and should be on our hearts and minds all the time, as they determine whether our speech and actions are distinctively Christian or basically the same as the pagan next door. Actually the truths of Scripture should not just be on our hearts and minds: they should be the frame of reference through which all incoming data and all outgoing messages are filtered. Only in this way can we think God's thoughts after Him, acting and reacting in ways pleasing to Him. .And we want to be building this consistently Biblical frame of reference into our children's hearts and minds as an integral part of our homeschooling programme. It is pretty tough to do when we do not have this consistently Biblical frame of reference in ourselves as yet. Many Christians, calling us to think Biblically yet speak secularly, themselves only know how to think secularly.
OK, so how do we go about building a consistently Biblical frame of reference? Work at it. We are talking about our minds here, our intellect, and the Lord Himself said that the greatest commandment was to love the Lord our God with ALL our heart, soul, MIND and strength. So use our minds to study the Scriptures on a continuing and regular basis. This is not the same as listening to sermons or tapes or someone else's prepared mid-week study when you may or may not have actually read the chapter under study. This means pursuing a topic through the Scriptures and other study helps as if you were doing the sermon. I personally enjoy studying up an issue I may find , say, in the letters to the editor column. To focus my study I make it my aim to write a reply letter as a result of what I have learned , and most of the time they are published. And sometimes it starts a real debate through the papers, giving me even more issues to study up (and incidentall y , more opportunities to share the Word of God with the population at large). Listening to tapes is of course an excellent way to imbibe spiritual truths, as long as you use plenty of discretion in who you listen to.
One thing the saints have done all through the ages, something which is a lot of work but which repays in vast dividends, is to memorize Scripture. Do not just think in terms of a verse here and a verse there. Go for whole chapters, and memorize entire books. The wisdom gained, the experiences of God bringing a verse to mind for just the right occasion, the insights while reviewing and meditating on passages memorized to keep them sharp, the time with the children as they listen to see that you memorized it correctly and when you listen to see that they memorized it correctly, the blessing to others by bringing a quote rather than a paraphrase to bear on an issue at hand are all well worth the work. And as home schoolers, we can as a family memorize a verse around the breakfast table and review it together at the lunch break and review it again at tea time. We took a whole year to memorize James chapter one, and found that our 5-year-old had memorized it along with us even though we left her out of the process thinking she was too young! And again, those precious times around the mea1 table or while studying together are great for discussing the meaning of a verse or the blessings of a recent time in study or meditation over a passage of God's Word ... these things all build in a Biblical frame of reference into our children.
In addition, these methods of loving the Lord with our minds will cause us to think Biblically. Then we may act and speak Biblically as well. This idea of thinking Biblically yet speaking secularly seems a bit inconsistent, and we do not want to introduce these inconsistencies into our children's education. To be consistent, let us first ensure that we think Biblically so that we are then ABLE to properly speak Biblically. OK, we may need to watch our vocabulary and stay away from certain Christian jargon, but we must use ideas and concepts that come straight from the only source of pure truth we have : the Bible. As the Lord says in Jeremiah 23:28-29, "And he who has My word, let him speak My word faithfully. 'What is the chaff to the wheat?' says the LORD. 'Is not My word like a fire?' says the LORD, 'And like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces?' "
From Keystone Magazine
November 1995 , Vol. 1 No. 5
P O Box 9064
Palmerston North
Phone: (06) 357-4399
Fax: (06) 357-4389
email: craig@hef.org.nz
Shouldn’t Christians keep their children in the public schools so that they can be the salt and light and evangelise as the Lord told us to do?
It is true that the Lord told us to do these things. But was He speaking to our children? We are responsible for our children... should we then make them responsible for fulfilling this command? Our children depend upon us... should we then depend upon them to do the Lord’s work? Are we not by this expecting children to do adults’ jobs? Are we not in fact expecting our children to do our jobs?
Why are children sent to school? Supposedly it is to get an education. The NZ Ministry of Education document Education for the 21st Century (1993) says on page 12, ‘The purpose of the school system is to give students the attitudes, knowledge,understanding, and skills they need to continue learning throughout their lives.” Notice the first word in the list: “attitudes”. What attitudes will the schools be putting into students? They will not include the Christian attitude that everyone is a sinner in need of salvation through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
If your child expressed this attitude about his teachers and classmates, he would be met with a firm lecture from the teachers about the value of all peoples’ faiths and the necessity for acceptance of different views. Your child would be told in no uncertain terms that especially during this year of 1995, the UN- declared Year of Tolerance, attitudes which divided people into Christians and sinners would simply not be tol. . . .well, you know... .they simply would not be allowed. If you expected your child to evangelise at school, he simply would not be allowed to do so.
Children are at school to take in, to imbibe the “learning experiences” going on about them, to respect and listen to their teachers and do as they say. Typically they will be outnumbered about 5 to 1 with other children who do not even attend any church. And are our children even yet regenerated by God’s Holy Spirit? Are we expecting unregenerate children to evangelise other unregenerate children? Even if they are born again, all praise and glory be to God, are they mature in the faith enough to successfully battle against the moral, intellectual, spiritual and even physical enemies they will face every hour of every day in the totally Christless and secular public school system?
Are your 8 and 9 and 10 year olds able to preach the gospel at all? Can you? Can they even recognise humanistic man-centred philosophy when it is presented to them in the classroom? Can you? The military do not send raw recruits into battle. They ensure they have had a minimum of basic training as well as a fair dose of specialist training relating to the field of battle to which they are being sent. Do you train your children in the art of evangelism and gospel presentation? If you as a parent are not or cannot or will not preach the gospel yourself to the people you meet everyday, and if you are not absolutely clear as to what constitutes secular or humanist or man-centred philosophies, and cannot readily recognise them, then is it really fair to expect your little children to do so?
And listen, isn’t the price a bit high? What if it turns out that the evil and the unrighteousness and the vanity and the pride and the materialism and immorality and the hedonism get a firm hold on your child’s heart, simply because he is in amongst it day after day? Remember, these kinds of evil are not foreign to a child’s sinful nature but are exceedingly attractive to it, and impossible to withstand if the child is not born again and strong in the Lord.
We all know the agony parents feel whose children have gone off the rails. Our job as parents is to rear our children in the way they should go, that is, to be servants and living sacrifices to the Lord God Almighty. Why then are Christian parents sometimes so seemingly eager to sacrifice their children on the altar of humanist, secular, Godless public schools? It just doesn’t make sense. It just doesn’t seem right.
From Keystone Magazine
March 1995 , Vol. 1 No. 1
P O Box 9064
Palmerston North
Phone: (06) 357-4399
Fax: (06) 357-4389
email: craig@hef.org.nz
Craig and Barbara Smith and their 8 home educated children and 3 Grandchildren: Genevieve (born 1980) and Pete (married 2008 with Natalie 2008 and...); Zachariah (1981) and Megan (married 2005 with Cheyenh 2007 and Dusti 2009); Alanson (1984); Charmagne (1987); Jeremiah (born Mitchell 1992 and now adopted); Jedediah (born 1997 and now adopted); Kaitlyn (born 2000 and now adopted); Grace (born 2005 guardianship).
We use a Biblical/Hebrew/Classical approach to our home education.
Stumble It!
