OR: WHY WE DO WHAT WE NEVER THOUGHT WE WOULD EVER DO.
Every family is different. Every child and every parent is different.
Every homeschool family made this decision for reasons that are unique to them. So why did WE do this?
But God…
Homeschooling was never in our plan for educating our children. In fact, all of our children were in public school before I had ever heard the word homeschooling.
We knew that God has called us to begin a Christian school at the church we were attending. Our plan, though, was to wait until my husband retired from the navy in 1991 to launch.
You see the words “our plan”. As in many things in life, our timing is not always God’s timing. I would do well to remember this!
In the spring of 1989, our four daughters were in grades 1, 3, 5, and 7 and doing quite well in public school. Teachers and staff knew that we were very committed to our walk with God. They could tell that the children knew what they believed and why. Since they were well behaved and respectful in class and always worked hard, our faith walk was never challenged.
However, Virginia was about to launch a new “Family Life Education” program that we believed was not acceptable to us. We felt it stepped over the line into areas that should be parental responsibility and certainly not up to the schools to teach. So, I began to attend the school board and city council meetings to learn more. Their dad and I wanted to be able to make an informed decision for our children. I did the research, listened to the comments, and studied the FLE curriculum. It didn’t take long for me to know it wouldn’t work for us.
I felt strongly that we needed to remove the children from the public school, but had no clue how we would do that. The Christian school start was still a couple years away. Their dad was at sea and believed we could “make it work for the last couple of years until he could retire and start the school. So, “our plan” was to “opt the girls out”, which was an added option to the new program. Because of the public outcry, it was only way that FLE was ever going to make its way into the school system. Again, “our plan”.
Even though the new FLE curriculum was not to be implemented until the following year, they still had the “Fifth Grade Sex Ed Movie”. So we opted our daughter out and she went to the library while her classmates headed to the cafeteria and the gym for their movies. I was pretty pleased with our decision – until that afternoon when she came home from school.
She told me that when they went back into class, the teacher had gone to the lounge and one of the boys walked to the front of the classroom and dropped his shorts and undershorts, facing the children, fully exposed. I could almost hear the voice in my head asking how well “opting out” had worked. They young man received a 3-day in school suspension, but thoroughly enjoyed all the attention he was getting without any real consequences.
At this point, I felt pressed to sit down and read the curriculum that was being taught to our children in ALL subjects. I was shocked to discover that our children were being taught all of the things way back then that parents are so concerned about today. The curriculum addressed every lifestyle you could imagine as acceptable and right. Children were encouraged to explore their gender identities and to determine their sexual preferences by grade five. The list goes on. Again, just to be clear – these are areas that we believed should be addressed at home. Each family decides what is best for them and this was not best for us.
Then, I went a step further and read the curriculum for every subject at every level that was ALREADY being taught. Family Life Education was nothing new, really. Everything was already in the social studies and science courses!
Now, we had a more serious issue than we knew. At this time, navy families didn’t have the luxury of email, FaceTime, and cell phones. We had snail mail that took ten days to get to the ship and ten days to get back with an answer.
As soon as my husband read the letter detailing the incident with out daughter, the FLE curriculum, as well as the rest of the information for the other courses, the response was to pull the girls out of public school and do whatever was necessary, but they weren’t going back. Of course, by now the school year was over so we had a bit of a window to make some decisions.
Since we weren’t prepared to begin the church school for a couple more years, we decided to pursue homeschooling. That changed when the pastor made the decision to open the school earlier than anticipated. The church families needed an alternative and we began classes in the fall of 1989.
God has a way of orchestrating things for us and preparing us for implementing His plan and process. He moved us to start and pastor a home missions work. We homeschooled for awhile, but soon realized that all of our new families had their children in our living room every day for school! God had moved us through a process where we pastored for about 23 years with a Christian preschool and school in our church. Our children and our many or our grandchildren attended.
Then, after a debilitating car accident left me unable to teach in a physical classroom, we believed we needed to retire the pastorate and close the school. Neither of those options worked for us!
Our families didn’t want the school to close and asked if we could continue to do what we did with our students if the parents did their part at home. In other words, could I continue to work with their children online from a recliner, where my neck and head were supported. Absolutely!! We transitioned to working with homeschool families. This was perfect, as I could take care of my physical body, but be connected via the online curriculum we used to continue to work with our students.
Retirement didn’t work for us either and we now serve on staff at a much larger church in our area, where accommodations are made so I can work comfortably. We provide a weekly co-op for homeschool families in the area and I am able to focus on working with our students.
Clearly, our journey was convoluted and full of some twists and turns, but we learned so much as God led us through the process and navigated this road.
So, what happened? Why will we remain committed to homeschooling and working with families who want to do the same for children? Easy!
This is what homeschooling has done for our family and the many others we have served!
Spiritually, the children grew by leaps and bounds. Actually, we all did! When Scripture and prayer are the answer to everything, they simply became your way of life. We prayed before granting permission to go places or do things. We used Scripture and prayer when we praised, encouraged or corrected. We used it for guidance and direction. We went to our Sword and prayer whenever there were heartaches, headaches, or all of the other aches kids go through.
We knew our children better than anyone else. That meant we were able to recognize areas where they needed extra help and encouragement or where they needed more challenging work.
We understood the way they learned and were able to tap into a single curriculum that was conducive to meeting their individual needs, abilities, and learning styles.
Although we knew we needed to maintain forward progress, we understood we could ignore the calendar on the days when they needed more time to master a concept, but then speed it up a bit to get “current” during those times when the concept came easily.
We learned that every single moment of every single day is a teaching moment.
We learned that although we needed structure, there were times when we had to teach flexibility in order to make it through those life events that come our way. It doesn’t mean we ignore our commitments, just that we rearrange things a bit in order to meet those responsibilities and still handle “life”.
We learned to teach the children that they are responsible for their own learning and we are here to facilitate and help them. The end result: life-long learners who are hungry to dig in and research when they have questions – or even to confirm the words of a special speaker by digging it out themselves in the Word and through study.
We learned that friendship with our children will come when they become adults because we established the closest of all relationships with them when they were going through school. We parented. Then, we were blessed to friend.
There are so many blessings that go along with our decision to homeschool our children. However, the greatest blessing of all is knowing that we are doing exactly what He called us to do as their parents and helping others fulfill the calling on their lives to do so with theirs.
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up (Deuteronomy 6:4-7).
Knowing that I am pouring Him into my children when they sit, walk, lie down, and rise up, rather than allowing someone who has a completely different worldview, is not an option for us. It is a conviction.
So, the why?
Because
“I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in truth” (III John 1:4).