Education: what's a dad to do (7): public schooling is not fine

The Public Square
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Most of the education of children outside factotum’s facts (which are necessary) happens in the vast majority of hours in which fathers and mothers love, read to, eat with, argue with (the sort of intentional arguments that serve as training wheels for when they leave the home—one of the most important parts of the education of our children), have family devotions, sing in the car, take walks, work up a sweat doing yard and garden and farm chores or cleaning house, and so on. I can’t emphasize this enough.

As I have pointed out before, no matter what hundreds of millions of dollars the feds pour into educational research, they find they can’t do anything that is as important as regular family meals, and the children who grow up in a home having them are impermeable to curricula, teachers, schools, etc.

About homeschooling boys, no boys become men without hitting their heads against men and other boys. Full stop. So if you want to teach this most foundational part of Godly obedience to the calling of God for life, namely sexuality, if you have boys, you better make sure you stay home and send your wife to work. Or if you have girls, make sure your wife stays home and you go to work. Starting in junior high school to freshman in high school. You may say you are the one father who can teach his son to be a man while working outside the home; and yes, you may be the exception that proves the rule. But usually, the men who think they’re the exception that proves the rule turn out to be both blind to their own shortcomings and the rule, after all.

I’d also recommend team sports for boys that are effeminate. Agree with most of what you wrote, Joel, but I am hesitant about your assumption you will homeschool your sons in high school. Many years watching this and even doing it ourselves, and we know the risks and usual outcomes. Love,

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Speaking as someone who was homeschooled the whole way through (though with some community college thrown in during my senior year), I can tell you one thing that really helped me. One of the good things about homeschooling is that you can design your schedule to have free morning hours to work. I worked a lot in high school under male bosses, several of whom were appropriately tough on me. So if you can find ways for your sons to work, that can really be a really great way for them to be with other men and learn how to work as well.

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Thanks for the advice, Pastor Bayly.

If I understand correctly, you are saying that a boy learns how to be a man by being in the company of men and other boys, something that isn’t going to happen with a mom homeschooling her son. I won’t argue with that, but there are intermediate options between exclusive schooling outside the home and exclusive schooling by mom inside the home. For example, I spend as much time as my wife does on homeschooling, so my boys will get a lot of academic time with me. I also work from home part of the time, and homeschooled kids can take classes and work outside the home. Nevertheless, I do appreciate your caution to me and warning about possible blindness, so I will continue to think about this in the coming years as my boys approach adolescence. There are shortcomings with every educational option, and the particular circumstances must be considered.

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This is exactly correct. The Biggest Validation of that idea is the entire Book of Proverbs. The collection, along with its introduction in chapter 1-9, fits a genre current in the Ancient Near East during the time of Solomon, to wit - a royal manual for use in the training of young men, to prepare them to assume positions of authority in the monarch’s administration. There are sections of the canonical Book of Proverbs which are so similar to Egyptian manuals that scholars are continually arguing over who copied whom. That any of these manuals would copy others is something of a no brainer. And, the Book of Proverbs contains proverbs which obviously originate in locales other than Solomon’s.

When you look inside the Book of Proverbs, you see that they are all aimed at a male audience (where such a determination is obvious). There are proverbs about how wonderful it is to have a good wife, and how wretched it is to have a bad wife. All such proverbs are, obviously, spoken from the perspective of a man who has a wife.

But proverbs about how wonderful it is to be a woman with a great husband? How wretched it is to have a bad husband? There is nothing like this - something from a female perspective for the express benefit of women - in the book. The closest one may come is the collection of wisdom of King Lemuel in chapter 31, which has the notation that it is what (or with what) Lemuel’s mother instructed him. And, even if it is his mother who instructs him, it is her son whom she instructs.

To sum up: Proverbs is a manual for wise men to use in bringing young men into the company of the wise. It is a book by men, to use to bring young men to maturity as members of the wise.

The other book of the Bible that assumes a man’s perspective on spirituality is the Book of Psalms. No Fannie Crosby treacle here!

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Yes, absolutely.
Twenty characters.

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I read this post and was reminded of a little breakout session Stephen Baker did a couple of years ago about Christian education.

Stephen told us he was going to be sending his high school son to Bloomington North. Homeschooling wasn’t working out, the high school Clearnote was involved in had shut down, and so Bloomington North was the most reasonable option. He explained to us that he knew that the public schools were totally corrupt, but he was going to do it anyway.

His reasoning has always struck me as wise. Public schools can be an option, but we should go into it knowing the utter corruption of the public schools. Everything we come into contact with is corrupt to some degree or other. A blanket refusal to ever consider sending a son or daughter to a public school is blinkered thinking.

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I am new to the forum. Was referred here by a good friend. I very much appreciate what is being discussed here.

My wife and I have eight children, ranging 6 months to 10 years. We have six boys and two girls. And as of late, I am very much rethinking some of my original presuppositions about the intrinsic merit of homeschooling.

A little background: my wife is the daughter of a Christian school teacher who traveled around to various schools during her upbringing. She was homeschooled part of the time, and attended whatever school her father was teaching at the rest of the time. I, myself, was raised by first generation believers, who were charter parents in starting the Christian school I grew up in (2nd - 12th grade).

When my wife and I began this venture of childrearing, it was a no-brainer to us that we would be homeschooling. Each of us has had enough exposure to the Christian school paradigm (non-denominational, vanilla evangelical at that) to recognize its shortcomings. Too many parents seem to think that Christian education is this binary affair where you just input non-believing Children into the system, and the system outputs them several years later as genuine believers with a thoroughly Christian worldview. This is simply fantasy. My own life bears witness. But I must confess that I have come to realize that I made an equally fallacious assumption about homeschooling — as if homeschooling were the magic sauce that would automatically make my kids into what they ought to be. It really just isn’t that simple.

While I do remain thoroughly convinced of many of the merits of homeschooling, I nonetheless begin to realize as my boys get older (my two oldest are 10 and 8), there are certain matters of masculine character that mom cannot effectively impart in the home, and that I have limited power to cultivate as a full time worker outside the home. I begin to see how my boys could really be served by rubbing shoulders with other boys and godly men. I just struggle now to find the appropriate context.

Being reluctant to place much stock in parachurch organizations (like Christian schools), I want to believe that the local church is the place where our man-raising would take place. However, in this post-modern evangelical era, our churches seem to be so bankrupt of genuine fellowship — wherein families substantively interact with one another and form the sort of intimate relationships that I must believe are possible in the household of God — that I have a hard time seeing how we’d ever get to a point where we as fathers would deliberately organize ourselves toward the goal of cultivating truth in the lives of eachother’s sons.

It’s all very vexing. One thing I know for sure: Pastor Tim is right that my little homeschool is no less affected by the fall then the Christian schools or the government schools.

How, O Lord, shall I make these boys into men? The children of my youth are supposed to be arrows in the hands of a mighty warrior. But instead of shooting these arrows into the future with deliberate aim and purpose, I shall be lucky if I have managed to at least fling them in the right general direction.

God help me.

Jason

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First of all, welcome.

So true. Without God it’s impossible, yet He promises to be a God to us and to our children after us. So let’s walk this road by faith, brother.

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Yes, exactly; we are our sons and daughters curriculum; we their teachers; we their Gospel preachers and teachers and disciplers. The acorn never falls far from the tree, so any abdication to this or that method, this or that curriculum, this or that teacher or school (and each of these choices is equally adeppt at providing good cover for what in fact is abdication) will have the end result of producing a child who gives every indication of having been raised by a father and mother who refused to train up their child in the way he should go that when he is old he will not depart from it.

But do not despair. Your very fear and mourning and hunger for true Christian fellowship is effective in providing those benefits to your children, and especially your sons. If we don’t whine, but mourn the weakness of the church and the absences of things we know She should give us, that is a wonderful witness to our children that can be used by God to fill the void their absence threatens to create in them Be of good cheer, dear brother. And pray. Always pray, that God will cover up your weakness and sins, giving you the blessing of godly sons and daughters who will be your friends and co-laborers for the Kingdom until death.

He answers prayer. Love,

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I’m pretty sure there’s no magic answer to the education question. I just know that most public schools stifle learning, teach to only a segment of their class population, and are more focused on instilling their own value system then on actually helping equip the kids.

It may be true that most teachers have their hands tied on what they can do, and it may be equally true that many parents won’t do the work of parenting, discipling, their kids, but let’s be honest, they (the schooling elites) don’t really want that.

As a parent with a Masters degree from a ranked brick and mortar state university, but who never graduated from high school, I just won’t roll the dice on who will produce a better citizen. Their track record is miserable and my own experience is enough to want to close down the whole system and auction it all off to the highest bidder.

They’re whole worldview (the education elites’) is that a lack of education is the world’s problem, and so they see education as a moral solution.

My worldview is that the worlds problems are moral problems and they need objectively moral solutions. My kids don’t need to spend 8 hours a day learning about the evils of gender stereotypes or of generational guilt. My kids need to learn to read and write well, better than me hopefully, and be able to analyze data logically. The types of data is up to them, I don’t really care, as long as doing so doesn’t dishonor God.

Sure my son while need his umbilical cord cut a second time…I’m sharpening my knife for round two. And sure he needs involvement with others in institutional settings, but why does he need that when he is most vulnerable. No I plan to equip him and raise him myself in how he should go, so that when he is thrown in amongst the wolves, he’ll have a few sharp knives of his own.
:wolf: :sheep:

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Just a story, nothing deep. We homeschool our only child (over the screams about ‘social’ development). We homeschooled in Germany for a number of years, and if you know anything about Germany, they are extremely hostile to the idea. I suspect this is because they see rights as originating with the State, and the State grants the citizenry a subset of rights. Completely, totally different concept of civil rights from the US. Anyway, one of those rights reserved to the State is education of the youth and they protect it very, very aggressively. If it weren’t for our protection as US officials under the Status of Forces Agreement, we would have been expelled from the country. The local State school threatened us repeatedly until they were made to understand this arrangement. In fact not too many years ago, a German family sought asylum in the US in order to homeschool, and they were granted it. The Germans - I don’t just mean the State itself, but the almost Borg-like hive mind of the citizens themselves - were furious.

(Our daughter is doing just fine now in 5th grade, engaged in extracurricular activities galore, learning how to do small farm stuff she’d never learn in a public school, and without any of those hideous social deformities we were assured she would get as a result of our terrible decision.)

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Where is Juergen Von Hagen when we need him? Love to see his response, although I wouldn’t want him to have to start his part in the conversation by defending himself against the charge of having an almost Borg-like hive mind. Couple things: just finished an interview with a man up in Canada who was telling me that everyone up there has their kids in public school which have no competition. He explicitly included people “in Reformed churches” in his categorical statement. Then outside my office in our main office is the wife of a PhD candidate here at IU who grew up the son and grandson of American missionaries to Germany whose parents had to leave German in order to keep their children out from under the state’s schools. They moved to Romania and didn’t go back to Germany until their children were outside the home. The matter of the education of our children is an exceedingly difficult issue that will only become more so in country after country as civil rights inherited from Christendom decay across the Western world. Remember the Pilgrims left Holland because, as exiles there from England, they saw their “little lambs” being corrupted. So says Cotton Mather. Love

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The hive-mind is hyperbole and said with a smile; I have dear, dear brothers and sisters in Germany who would readily admit that there is a German conditioning toward never… ever… being wrong about anything and not swimming against the current. This comes from a guy whose extended family is largely comprised of jokers, smokers and midnight tokers, and loves em all anyway.

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In this regard it’s been encouraging to see a few of the European countries (my memory is Hungary was one, maybe Romania too, maybe Poland?) working to protect and encourage the natural family. The UN guys are always trying to mandate wickedness and I honor these little countries’ tireless work. May God grant them success.

Love,

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This discussion of the situation in Germany has clarified something I’ve wondered in this discussion. I recognize that we are headed in the direction of more state control of our children and not less, and so I feel personally responsible to resist and delay that shift as much as I can in whatever small way that I can. And it seems to me that the more schools we have that exist without any government funding, the better. And this is at least some small part of my thinking as I consider where to send my children for education.

Let the reader understand: my family has accepted more government money than many of you… combined. So please don’t think that I don’t take government assistance. I do, and I’m not judging you for doing so. :slightly_smiling_face:

But, again, it seems to me that numbers matter here: the more children we have in schools not funded by the government, the better off we will be to resist governments encroachment.

Does that register with anyone else? Or am I just tilting at windmills?

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Sure, strikes chord, but as my mother used to say, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

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The series of posts on education have been something of a corrective for me. I’ve spoken out against government education, but haven’t been as critical of other educational choices.

Our church is majority home school, a few older children educated in the government public school (rural area, some Christian teachers, but on the whole moving faster and faster to indoctrinate students in anti-Christian crap), and a few who send their children to a small, WI-synod Lutheran school.

I’ve been especially helped by the concern for the impact on my boys being homeschooled all the way through high school under their mother. Helpful stuff. Much appreciated.

Also, a group of us have been meeting to consider beginning a Christian school (classical, likely university model). These posts were perfect timing to decrease our pride in thinking that we were something more than we were. Thanks.

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