Why we homeschool

The motto of modern education systems

As those who've followed me over the years know, we homeschool for very practical purposes. Namely that the schools had become bureaucratic messes more concerned about checking the latest requirements for goverment funding than actual education.  The content of what they were teaching or the idea of school violence were not really high on our list of considerations.

In terms of violence, the problem is clearly one of heart and soul.  Our nation rejected the Truth of Christ, and whether our religious leaders will admit it or not, that has to mean something.  Purposefully severing yourself from the light of the Gospel must have consequences.  If a nation trying to live based on at least some tenets of the Gospel could do so many things wrong, perhaps the solution wasn't rejecting the Gospel as a whole.  Hiding the boys from the results of this would only be a temporary thing.  The boys have to face a society at war with Christ eventually.

As for the content of the teaching, since our schools could have a wide variety of teachers, the content was pretty diverse.  While there weren't many down home fundamentalist types, there was enough variety to make us happy.  I never shrank from exposing my kids to other opinions or ideals, and if the teachers did the same, I was happy.

As can be guessed, the one area where the schools were becoming more intolerant and demanding conformity under threat of retribution was the issue of sexuality, sexual orientation, and gender.  If and when America dies, it will be on the battleground below the waistline.  And it will be the gay rights movement that marked the beginning of the unraveling.  In our district's case, the schools were beginning to move toward a 'thou shalt praise the homosexual or watch yourself' mentality.  But since we were already moving to homeschool due to the stated reasons, we didn't sweat that too much.

But as I watch where education has gone, and  the off the rails train wreck that it has become, I'm thrilled we made the decision when we did. I only wish we had done it sooner.  Rod Dreher walks us through but one example of the wasteland that is Western education.  True, it's dealing with Canada and England, countries with no particular loyalty to freedom that could (and some would argue, are) turn themselves into their own versions of an Orwellian paradise.

As my nine year old plods through his Mandarin Chinese lessons, it makes me glad that he knows who Pierre is relative to War and Peace, he understands the connection between Alexander the Great and Socrates, that he understands the contributions of Medieval Scholasticism, and that he has an appreciation for old literature, the classics, and even if he's not read them yet, will do so from the point of view of a non Social Justice Warrior.  His exposure to older films has also supplemented this, and much of his exposure to the classics began with us showing him older films that helped pave the way.

Though this sort of madness Rod Dreher points out was taking off by the time my older boys were in public school, it hadn't reached this level before we pulled them out.  Therefore, as they report from college, they are ones who know who Robert Frost, Charles Dickens and even Napoleon Bonaparte* were, as opposed to a staggering number of their classmates.  When my son reported that he alone had heard of Robert Frost in his creative writing class, I thought it a fluke.  Since both have been in college, however, I've found out it's all too common.  Not that all students are like that.  Some are quite informed and broad in their knowledge of a world beyond the narrow confines of Social Media.  But considering they are all high school graduates, far too many don't know what someone my age learned merely from watching Bugs Bunny, much less from graduating high school.

Such is the result of our education systems, and given the zealots and fanatics coming out of our schools, I can't help but guess isn't not a failing of our school system, but the intended mission for things to turn out as they are.

*Really.  When told to choose various historical figures for a report, one student in my oldest's history class passed on Napoleon due to never having heard of him.  The same with Dickens and, as I said, Frost.  These are just a couple examples.  I could go on, but no sense being mean.