Beleive me there have been days when the stinking heaps of laundry , piles of papers, and endless ringing of the telphone made me wonder that same question. Well, let me edit that. We don't have stinking heaps of laundry. It gets backed up sure, but not into stinking heaps. And sometimes I just turn the phone off. And don't give it a second thought. The piles of papers are usually Chadwick's catalogs and ripped out coloring book pages, so the children's work does get graded.

The work and the restrictions of homeschooling are often what turns people off to it. No time for getting things done, too much time involved for teaching, not enough social time, perhaps not as many opportunities for recognition. I think that's a lot of why many folks don't homeschool. It's too much work and not enough payback. We even worry that we are depriving our children by not allowing them to go to public school .

So, why do I do this?

Well, God has planted something eternal in my heart. I want to help gently cultivate the ground of my children's hearts so that He can plant eternal life in them too, if you'll allow me to wax poetic.

But it wasn't easy. For a while I considered myself a progressive creationist and  a nominally Christian feminist. I got these attitudes, not from my parents, but from my peers and even from curriculum in the public schools I attended. Even worse was the private college I attended for a time until I had to quit school to work to help out at home while Mom had cancer.

I left my school days liberal and proud of it.  The faith I embraced in childhood was battered in school from the books I read, watching "Inherit the Wind" in English class as though it were fact, and being told the Bible is a bunch of fairy tales.  I remember class times spent in "breakout sessions" where abortion and other hot-button issues were discussed and approved by our 25 member teenage majority in a way that definitely did not reflect what out parents would have us embrace. Intellectual peer pressure to cast off the "old-fashioned" faith I was brought up on was everywhere. And there was very little for me to use to defend my childhood faith. A loud singing service last Sunday night? An emotional testimonial prayer meeting?  A youth group field trip? No, these were useless things in my battle to retain faith. They were at best attempts to make me feel a horizontal loyalty to other church goers, but no vertical connection to the God in Heaven.

I have been accused of being reactionary by homeschooling. Maybe so. Homeschooling is certainly my reaction against the near apostasy in which I found myself. Some say, "You aren't doing your children any favors  by keeping them away from the things you disagree with."  That's not true.

What I remember most from my public school and college days was going along with the crowd with this nagging feeling in the pit of my stomach that something was terribly wrong. I mostly went along with the crowd because although I had been raised in a Christian home and in a strict church I hadn't been given the tools to defend my faith. Even if I didn't do things that most of my friends did, I never tried to convince them otherwise.  I couldn't. I didn't know how.

That's why I homeschool. My children will have to get jobs, raise families, have neighbors, be part of society, and participate in the life of our country. I have no desire to shelter them  to the point of ignorance.  When the time comes for my children to deal with adult issues, they will have had years to learn under a Christ-centered education. They will have already been witnesses to Dad's and Mom's reactions and our resource on how to handle life.

My goal is for them to see that we depend on Christ and the truth He's given us in Scripture.  My ultimate goal is for them to be able to do the same. They need to know the whys, they need time to discuss with older Christians issues they face, they need exposure to the Word, and they need a solid education built on more than pop culture, breakout sessions, fuzzy math., and politically correct curricula.

My children  need Jesus. They  need parents who are willing to invest their time and resources into their lives in a daily, substantive, and even self denying way. They need to know the things I left school--as a supposedly educated person--without knowing.

That's why I homeschool.