Christian Education: A Series
Episode VI - The Solution!
There's this show called Love Line. It was radio program that I imagine, more than a decade ago, was intended to offer romantic advice to the young and the hip (well, if they were really hip, they probably wouldn't need the advice) in the L. A. Basin. Nowadays, it's syndicated nationally and fields questions regarding every kind of trouble known to the young and not-so-hip (the topics often still deal with relationships, but there are plenty of drug-, STD-, abuse-, and mental-related issues that are dealt with every evening between 10:oo pm and midnight. I don't listen often, but whenever I want to give a little there-but-by-the-grace-of-God boost to my self-estimation, I'll tune in for about fifteen minutes on the drive home.
And the thing is this: the two hosts, Dr. Drew Pinsky and Adam Carolla, have what I might say is an uncanny ability by which they guess the details of various callers' personal history with the callers' parents. I might say it's uncanny, but I won't. Because, quite simply, the odds that a person making horrible life choices or a person with a distinct inability to function in arenas of common sense - the odds that someone like this would come from a broken household or from an abusive or negligent family - those odds are pretty high. Listening to a show like that for any duration should emphasize quite clearly the need for children to have good parenting if they are to make it into and through adulthood intact as well-adjusted members of society.
A few years back, I would listen to Larry Elder on the radio with some small degree of frequency. He was just about the only talk show host I could listen to without getting a headache. He would speak mostly on topics from a libertarian point of view - which I found rather refreshing at the time, since mostly everyone else I had heard had been either on the far left or the far right. His libertarianism seemed to defy the stereotypes. But that's not important. What is important is that a couple years back, he began speaking less about politics and directing his show more towards a social agenda of calling people to take responsibility for their own actions - and especially directed it toward parents, encouraging them to raise their children in a healthy environment of a loving nuclear family.
It seems like a lot of people are getting the importance of good parenting.
And I'm one of them. And I believe the solution to the concerns people will raise about any educational environment is to be found almost wholly in quality parenting. Whether one homeschools, publicly schools, or privately schools, parenting will likely be either the thing that goes wrong or the reason the child succeeds.
Good parenting is a nice panacea, sure - but what does it mean? While its details will of course vary according to child and circumstance (i.e., there is no Way to parent), the governing principle is, I think, stable. A good parent is one who seeks the well being of the child, purposing to raise him in the nurture and admonition of the faith. A good parent, in so seeking, will walk appropriately the balance between offering the child protection and responsibility. When the child is young, the parent must be strong and must stress obedience - that the child might properly learn and be brought up in the faith. As the child matures, the good parent will gradually offer him greater and greater responsibility for his own decisions in life - that by the time of his full maturation, he might be well-prepared to take responsibility for himself. This involves the gradual relinquishment of demands for obedience. Little by little, the good parent will no longer require obedience, but merely suggest a course of action, offering counsel as wise as they might - allowing the child to fail of his own accord and grow stronger for it. This is, understandably, the most difficult of paths for a good parent to traverse - as no loving parent wants to see his child making mistakes, reaping troubles for his failures - but it is necessary for the welfare of the maturing child.
Woo, tangent.
Anyway, let's first look at the good parent's approach to public-schooling. Admittedly, teachers may present counter-Christian ideals in the course of the daily lessons. The parent's task then comes down to training the child in what is good and true and holy - that he might know falsehood when he sees it. The parent should be integrally involved in the child's life after school at least through the eighth grade. A child thus prepared should have little difficulty negotiating the labyrinth of high school pluralism.
I may use myself as an example here. My parents raised me to know good from evil, to trust in Christ above all. I knew from my parents example and from the witness of the church that not everything my schoolteachers taught was gospel truth. They were something of a tertiary authority. Scripture was primary and then I was to trust my church and my parents. Schoolteachers were to be valued, but not to the same degree. After raising me so unswervingly through my youth, my parents began to allow certain freedoms as I grew. And because of that liberty, I was able to consider other perspectives. I was able to question (respectfully, of course) certain principles to which my parents held and my friends eschewed. And in the end, for the most part, I would always see my parents' point - which worked only to strengthen my own convictions as well.
Therefore, when I came to high school, things like evolution were a shrug-off. World Cultures took on the merely academic feel that it should. I learned not to fear the opinions and beliefs of others but to recognize them as honest, heartfelt, different, to be respected, and wrong. Because of my parents good example, I was able to weather high school, not only intact, but with a stronger faith in the end.
The issue facing homeschooling parents is, in many ways, the other side of the coin. While publicly schooling parents have a propensity for negligence as far as involvement in their children's lives, homeschooling parents, generally, hold the tendency to lord over their children for too long. Too often, they become too involved in their children's lives, never allowing them the freedom to take responsibility for themselves until the last minute (usually either when they go to university or when they marry). While the child can end up well adjusted regardless, I have known many who upon reaching this sudden liberty, become drunk with the air of freedom - and so either fall away from the faith or make a tremendous number of poor decisions in a relatively brief amount of time.
The keys then are related to letting go. Homeschooling parents must learn that having other influences in their children's lives is a good thing. Even (and sometimes, especially) if those influences are not congruent with their own. They've got to realize that allowing their kids contact with a diversity of children is healthy - even contact with so-called bad influences can be healthy as the child matures. Really, in the end, homeschooling parents must realize that their goal should not be the protection of their precious children, but rather, their task is to cultivate their children into well-rounded individuals* who cherish the gospel and love their neighbor with respect and honest (even if he's a pagan).
In any case, this is all just to say that responsible parenting can overcome any of the hurdles, any of the so-called problems inherent with any educational system.
* this means no cloning - something too many parents try to accomplish, whether homeschoolers or public schoolers.
Labels: education, homeschooling
