If You Choose to Homeschool, I Have Some Bad News

But also some good news

Choosing to homeschool your children will not solve your child’s educational problems. Rather, it trades one set of problems for a different set of problems, and your new problems almost entirely originate from the person you see when you look in the mirror.

You choose to homeschool because you want more influence over your children and their education. This is good and proper. The ghouls in the government school system thrive on telling two lies for every truth and want to lessen the bonds of familial loyalty. Government schools mold subjects.

True education seeks to mold citizens. Citizens who know their place in the family and in the wider polis. But if you seek to exercise more influence over your children, you will get what you ask for.

Whatever your faults, if you let them fester, they will contaminate your children. This happens regardless of how you educate your children, but with homeschooling, this is cranked up to eleven. All of your apathy, laziness, anger, and impatience will be reflected back at you, 24/7, in high definition. You will have a front-row seat at the IMAX for the corruption of your children.

The Good News

The good news is that you are 100% responsible for these problems, and with God’s grace, you can start taking steps to weed them out. It is a slow and agonizing process, and you will never be perfect. But you can be better. It is easier to take the log out of your own eye than to take a whole lot of splinters out of other people’s eyes. Of course, that doesn’t stop people from trying to perform eye surgery on other people with rusty tweezers and no anesthesia.

Homeschooling is not only a tool used to raise up your children properly, but it can also be a tool that God uses to sanctify you. Embrace it. Start tugging those logs out with both hands.

The Bad News

The bad news is that you are 100% responsible for these problems, and if your child does not get the education you want and does not grow into the type of person you want them to be, you have zero excuses.

It’s all on you.

Public school provides obvious scapegoats, ready to take the blame for how terrible your children turned out. If you homeschool, you can’t take advantage of that luxury. There is no one else you can blame to assuage your guilty conscience, and you cannot pretend to wash your hands of the whole endeavor. You can’t pretend that your abdication was “the best that you could do.”

And for most of us, this is terrifying. To see our own responsibility with 20/20 vision, yet have clarity about how we failed in that responsibility. In this, public schools offer the false comfort of an idol. They offer only a temporary opiate and not the cure for our failures. Because no matter what, you are responsible for your children’s education and any problems that creep up along the way. Public school will pat your hand and let you pretend that these problems aren’t your fault. In some grotesque parody, it will offer up the system and its teachers as sacrificial animals so you can pretend to have a clean conscience.

Homeschooling offers no such false comfort. It does not automatically get rid of problems, but it will require you to take a scalpel to your own heart and look at those problems more honestly.