I have been inspired by the information on your website and have ordered your book. It should arrive next week. I have a question that has been ‘plaguing’ me for a little while. While I agree
with the scriptures that have been given here and in other books about God holding parents responsible to teach their children I am failing to see where God is holding parents responsible to teach their children academics. I know that we are to teach our children about God and His ways and living the Christian life, etc. The reason I am asking is because my husband seems to feel that if our children go to (public) school they will get the academics but what we teach and live at home as far as loving the Lord is what they will learn also so why the necessity for teaching academics at home? Personally, I enjoy my children and I want to give them a loving, Christian, unpressured atmosphere to learn in as long as I can. For some reason my heart breaks when I think of sending them off to public school. I feel like I’m putting them into the hands of people I don’t trust. I currently homeschool a 3 and 5 yr. old. But my husband continues to comment on when our children will attend public school, like maybe this homeschooling thing is just a phase I’m in. But I really don’t have an answer for him scripturally to support God wanting us as parents to teach academics as well as living and upholding a Christian lifestyle at home. Do you have any more insight or scriptures on this? Deidra

Our Seven Undeniable Truths of Homeschooling develops many of the arguments for homeschooling. Teaching the Trivium, Chapter Two addresses the question of whether the state has jurisdiction to educate, and Chapter Three addresses the question of whether the classroom is preferable.

To address your specific question — We cannot divide academics off as some separate part of education — parents can teach children to love the Lord, and public school can teach academics. Christians have been trying to do this for scores of years, and guess whose education is having the greater and greater impact and whose education is having the lesser and lesser impact? All education is essentially religious in nature, and the public school more and more teaches the religion of humanism — God is irrelevant, man is the measure of all things, and each individual must determine his own value system. Putting aside the fact that in general, public schools do a poor job of teaching the mechanics of academics (if the student learns it well, he learns it at home or on his own), the fact is that every academic subject must be taught from certain philosophical presuppositions, and these subjects are taught in public schools from the perspective of naturalism and humanism. The God of the Bible is ignored all day long, while alternately man or nature are exalted as idols for worship. I was in elementary school in the 1950’s when things weren’t nearly so bad. I am now in my sixties and I am still rooting out the lies I was taught to believe in public school academics. Academics in some private classroom schools may be better, but then we get into the question of classroom schools over homeschooling. Harvey