Children are created with a natural capacity for learning, and they are all unique. God loans children to the parents. The parents’ responsibility is to train and educate the child. Instead of personally exercising this responsibility, many parents send their children to schools.
Most people send their children to public schools. But parents do not know what goes on in the public schools. What power do parents really have in these schools? None.
We are told that the reason children must go to public schools is to have the educational process conducted by “professionals.” Supposedly we also need to provide opportunity to socialize the children, and we need to achieve a “standard” of education.
But the real reason for public schools is different. One is to have the process professionally conducted by people trained to deliver the government program. The public schools are government schools. The government wants its schools to create controllable, unthinking, compliant taxpayers. There is nothing more dangerous to a power-hungry government than independent, thinking people.
Why does the public school need socialization? To play on human needs that pressure students to make it difficult to be intellectually independent.
Some people question the socialization of home educated children. But they need to be asked, “When was the last time you found yourself in a room with 25 or 30 people of all the same age, all doing exactly the same thing, at exactly the same time? Is that normal?”
One home educating father in Manitoba who was asked about socialization responded: “Oh, that’s no problem. Once a week I take my child, beat him up, lock him in the washroom, and steal his lunch money.”
Some people claim they send their children to public schools as missionaries. “The children are the salt.” But there is no support in the Bible for using children as evangelists in this manner.
If you take a little piece of good meat and put it with a bunch of rotten meat, will the good piece of meat make the rotten meat turn good? No. If you take a little piece of rotten meat and put it with a bunch of good meat, what happens? The good meat is going to rot. Think about that in terms of schools. Don’t send your children to public school.
Private schools
To run a “faith-based school” in Alberta you must do everything the public school does, use the same curriculum, use their programed teachers, and then you get 60 percent of the funding that the public schools get. But what is different? Same curriculum, same teachers. The teachers may be Christian, but they must teach the same secular humanist curriculum. These schools are really just public schools within a Christian cultural context.
There are some private schools that do not accept government funding and these schools have much more autonomy and can deliver a program much more in keeping with the Christian faith. But they are severely underfunded. Parents with school-age children usually don’t have a lot of money. Private schools cost money.
There is also a danger in these genuinely Christian schools. Sometimes parents who send their children to these private Christian schools just assume that the school is doing what the parents are responsible for doing. But corporate parenting is not part of the Bible.
Parents’ Responsibility
In the Bible I cannot find support for having the professionals doing my job for me. It’s my responsibility.
Parents cannot blame the public system, the preacher, the teacher or anyone else. They will be directly accountable to the Lord for their children. It is their responsibility to educate their children.
Home education is the choice to make. It’s the only way that parents can be assured of a creation-acknowledging, Bible-based, God-centered education. It’s the only way parents can be assured that their children’s education will be in keeping with their faith.
Furthermore, each child is a unique person. With home education, you don’t make the child fit the program, you fit the program to the child. And it doesn’t take twelve years to provide the necessary education.
School is not about parents, whether it’s public, separate or private. Because as soon as you’ve got a bureaucracy, the only thing that is important (especially for a little private school) is survival. The academic welfare of your children is not the top priority of any school. But it sure is to you as a parent.
The only way to protect your children is to keep them home. If you send your children to school, any school, it’s going to have negative effects.
Parenting demands sacrifice, and it should be parents sacrificing themselves for their children, not sacrificing the children for themselves.
Some would say, “I sent my children to school so I could have some time, so I could go to work.” But if we truly want what’s best for our children, in light of God’s Word, we don’t have a lot of choice but to keep them home.