Click here to watch this entire series’ video playlist on YouTube.
I can just hear it!
Oh no! Not another guide for home education! There are dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of books, manuals, even tomes, created for every conceivable manner and means of addressing every possible perception of what home education is or should be!
This is true. I have read several of them. Most are very helpful, but this one is going to be different.
This one is written from experience gained over more than forty years, in a wide variety of educational settings, including public, separate and private schools, in two provinces and using two languages. Not only from the perspective of a long time public high school teacher, but from one who has been a contributing member of the Alberta home education movement since its inception.
Most importantly, this guide is written from what has been gleaned through my home visitations and other associated activities with thousands of families desiring what was best for their children and therefore should serve as a useful practical guide.
This guide is actually the collection of thoughts, insights and observations gained over a lifetime of focusing on what an education really entails. A lifetime of errors and corrections, mistaken ideologies, indoctrinated mindsets and a sincere desire to come to the knowledge of what God calls “the truth”.
So much of what we believe today is actually not factual, although some person or agency will claim that it is. The world has become a confusion of misinformation, the likes of which has never been seen in human history. We are living in an age of deception exacerbated by the easy dissemination of lies in this digital age.
Everything sounds good and all of it appears to make our lives easier. Our insistence on instant gratification has made us truly suckers and targets for those who would benefit from our ignorance.
Complicated by our belief that we are correct because we believe we are, brought to ridiculousness by our measuring truth through feelings, not to mention an apparent complete lack of faith, our world has become a chaotic, intellectual and spiritual mess.
Why do we need another Home Education Guide? Because the once unified Christian home education community has been played and directed into serving a profiteering industry. This industry has discovered that it is easier and more rewarding to prey on people’s ignorance than to expend the time, energy and money to redirect parents to the truth.
Think about this for a moment. If our understanding of God is flawed or in error, our understanding of what a Godly family looks like will be suspect and our belief in freedom is more likely to be a carefully disguised manifestation of bondage. As once was quipped, “there is no greater bondage than that being advance by those who THINK they are free”.
Jesus said He was the way, the truth and the life. I believe that. Not only because it is written in the Bible, but because I have lived long enough to have witnessed through many trials, sorrows, griefs and pains, both personally and vicariously, that this is true.
This guide will not be a directive to home school. I refuse to direct others to do what everybody else is doing as this would be building on the sand that is failing public education today. Leading others to do what everyone else is doing does not qualify as true leadership.
I know where I want to lead you. I want to lead you to the truth; the way, the truth and the life to be exact. Not some Christianized version of secular thinking and methods, but to the Kingdom of God, from which all things are added unto us.
If I am successful at leading you to a biblically supported, common sense, family-focused, home-based process of training and teaching your children to love the Lord their God with all their hearts, souls, minds and strengths, I believe I will have faithfully fulfilled the Lord’s calling in my life.
This guide is about freedom. It is about family. But, most importantly, it is about faith. A guide that is God-centred, family focused and freedom loving should be more than just a guide but a pattern I pray will last for generations, if we can keep from sliding back into the arms of the world as we have seen take place in the home education community of Alberta, Canada.
I have spent a great deal of time and effort to create this video guide, as it represents the heartbeat of this ministry. Although it is impossible to clearly define the steps you will take on your home education “adventure,” I hope this effort will provide some outlines and guidance through the times and events that can be expected along the way.
How you use the information provided here will be entirely dependent on where you are in your parenting and home education journey. You are all encouraged to subscribe to this blog so you can follow the discussion on what a Christian home education could, and should, look like, as it is being presented.