Part of the series Mostly Honest… Isn’t True
Written by Léo Gaumont, published on 2014-03-10.
Some of our parents have expressed a desire to better be able to identify the tricks being used to convince them to believe things that may not actually be true. This series will provide applicable examples of such.
We often refrain from being honest because we do not wish to offend those who need to hear the truth. Opinions expressed in this blog are intended to offend those who would advance anything, other than the truth, in order to benefit themselves.
Bible Reference: 1 Tim. 6:10
Before engaging in the exposé of questionable practices and offerings of home education providers and associations, let us be clear of three things. First, we must understand that through God’s eyes, things are right or they are not. No compromises are acceptable, therefore no compromises should be seen among professing Christians. Secondly, we must understand that we wrestle not against flesh and blood, even when dealing with real people and real organizations. The truth is not necessarily known to everyone, while some may know the truth, but choose to suppress it for more sordid gains. Finally, there are parents who are not affected by what is being discussed here as they have chosen, for one reason or another to distance themselves from government authority and the associated funding.
Parents in Alberta have it pretty good. They can choose to send their children to any of a variety of public and private school alternatives or to keep them at home and educate the children themselves or to have them learn through an online program. The provincial government not only provides these choices but supports them all with at least some level of funding. Alberta Education funding is determined by two major factors, the number of students and the amount of public program used. This is where the blessing of financial helps becomes the curse of home education. Since funding follows the student, providers need to recruit the parents to access the funding in the first place and then do “whatever it takes” to keep them in order to maintain the income, even if that means offering parents bad advice and/or public programming which comes with potential for increased levels of funding. In this environment, children become more a form of currency, to be bought and sold with an eye to profit by both providers and parents, than human beings in need of love, and attention towards the Kingdom of God. If money and/or power becomes the motivation for recruitment, rather than the equipping of parents to do the best they can for their children, a competition between providers, who supposedly share a common desire to advance and defend home education, is created. Competition is not necessarily evil in a business world, but is of questionable value when it comes to directing people to the truth of God’s Word, meaning that if all providers had pure motive with respect to parents, children and home education, there would be more cooperation and less competition. That, unfortunately, is not the case in Alberta. There exists an appearance of congeniality, but in actuality, there is more worldly wisdom at play than what one would expect of organizations claiming a Christian foundation. Most parents have a limited understanding of what the Bible has to say about the proper training and disciplining of children. Few parents have any idea of where the home education provider comes from or their primary motivation and even fewer can separate Godly from secular wisdom. Therefore, they can easily be taken advantage of through the use of clever yet questionable advertising, marketing and promises.
Most of the tricks and techniques used to capture parents can generally be described as advancing an acceptable standard of secular ideas. Parents who have had most of their training through public programming will fail to see that this simply normalizes something that is wrong in the first place. Rather than train parents to replace their secular thinking with a biblical approach to training children, they present a variety of “offerings” that are mostly honest … but actually not true. Rather than help parents to be good parents, providers choose to help them be something other than a parent, with an eye to manipulating them for personal gain.
Some of these “tricks” will be discussed in future blogs. In the meantime, parents are advised to know the difference between what the world has to offer and what God has directed.