Stacking the deck – round two

As I pondered what to say about homeschooling for this week’s carnival I decided to review some of our old posts for inspiration. In one of our first posts my wife wrote about how homeschooling allows parents to stack the deck. Today I’ll reiterate the main point and expand on the idea.

Janine and I have many goals for our children. These goals range from the physical and mental to social and spiritual. We want our children to be functional and healthy adults. We want them to be competent. We want them to be kind. We want them to have a relationship with God. We want them be happy people who will make the world a better place.

One of the reasons we homeschool is because public schools have goals which are sometimes orthogonal and more often in direct opposition to our goals. Government schools teach children to go along with the group. They don’t teach children to do what is right. Government schools, and society at large, send messages which undermine basic Christian values.

There are 168 hours in a week. Children need lots of sleep. At some level children only have fifty to eighty hours each week in which they can be influenced. If a child is spending thirty to forty hours a week in an environment which teaches them that the government is the right answer to any problem, that it is OK to experiment a little with sex, that religion is old fashion and that it is more important to feel good about yourself than to actually accomplish activities, then as parents we’ll be fighting an uphill battle. We will have given the high ground to the “authorities and experts” at schools who are in a position to be the oracle with all the answers. Children can get swept up along with the crowd and just accept what they are taught.

But with homeschooling we are able to make sure our children are taught the lessons we want them to learn. I am glad that with homeschooling we are able to stack the deck in our favor.