Posted in My Homeschool FAQs

I was talking to another homeschool Mom earlier this week.  She had called me to ask some questions about the curriculum we use (Sonlight) because she was having some doubt about what they are currently using.  During the conversation I asked her if she and her husband had ever discussed what they wanted to accomplish with homeschooling.  She replied that they hadn't really talked about it, but they both just wanted their kids to get a good education so they could grow up and get good jobs.  This conversation took me back to when our son was 5.  We were still in the exploring homeschooling mode since our State did not require any schooling until the age of 6.  We started discussing what we wanted our child to get out of education.  We ended up making a purpose statement for our school.  Here it is:

The purpose of our homeschool is as follows:

To honor God and teach our children to respect, honor and love Him.

To create and encourage a mutual respect between parent and child.

To build strong relationships within our family and encourage our children to value our family.

To customize the education of our children and meet the educational needs of our children day by day.

To allow our children to be active participants in the direction of their education.

To learn along with our children.

To encourage our children to be socially active and to be a part of guiding them in appropriate relationships.

Well, after re-reading this 6 years later I am still pretty happy with what we came up with.  I did however come up with quick list of additions:

To bring up our children to accept Christ as their Savior and to love him with all their heart, all their soul, and all their mind. (This would be number 1 on my list.  When we wrote the 1st list we had only 1 child and he was already a believer.)

To instill a lifelong love of learning in our children.

To empower our children to be independent, creative and active participants in their education.

To provide an education that will allow our children to reach their goals in life so they may go out into the world and impact it for Christ.

To develop the kind of parent child relationship that will allow our children to feel comfortable coming to us with any question, problem or issue.

To show our children there are no limits to what they can learn.

Most of the things I am adding are because of things we have learned while schooling and raising kids.  Some of them are more like clarifications of the original list.  All of them are things that we are actively working on.  I was reading a Blog by spunkyhomeschooler yesterday on Outsourcing Parenting and I realized that this is exactly what we wanted to avoid when we came up with this list.  We did not want our child to be raised by the village (I am fond of saying "It takes a Village to have an Idiot! ), we did not want someone else to have more impact on our children than we do, we didn't want our children to be taught the worlds views, we did not want our children to get an education devoid of God,  We did not want our children to feel they had to be taught something in order to learn.

And how has it worked for us so far?  Well, I love homeschooling more today than I did when we 1st started!  I love that it is an entire lifestyle.  I love that my children are together all day and consider each other their friends.  I love that as parents we are the main influence in our childrens lives. I love that they love the Lord and enjoy learning about Him and serving Him.  I love that our family spends unlimited time together and that for both parents and children the learning never ends...