Still There said:
I know there are a lot of people on the forum that home school their kids, I didn't do mine because I'm not even close to being qualified, nor do I have the patience to do it, so my kids are in school - public.
Please pardon me, but as a committed home educator, I feel that is a very sad confession. What qualifications do you feel one needs to educate their own children? And if you lack the patience, why have anything to do with having kids in the first place?
Back when my first child was about to start her education, I was poorer than Job's turkey, and very intimidated when I noticed most Christian/Church schools were expensive, with lots of ancillary expenses. But I also knew that with the state of morality in that society, the LAST thing I wanted for my daughter was to put her in a "free" public institution. If an alternative had not made itself available to me then, I would have begged on the street or sold myself to keep her from the clutches of the world.
Consider, if you send your child to an educational center be it public or private, someone else has that little soul which God placed in YOUR hands and will call you to account for, for a lot longer time each day than you spend with them. Read their text books and their assignments, and very likely you will find that they are being indoctrinated with a lot more that you do not agree with than what you do. This is true whether it is public or private, but especially so in a public school. And the idea of "education" today has become much more philosophical in nature than practical, especially in the public sector. In other words, they feel it more important to teach their version of morality (your birth sex does not matter, its how you feel -- don't believe? See Jerry Brown's new transgender law in CA) and basic distrust of religion.
Why Johnny Can't Read may be an old book, but time has shown it to have been very prophetic and true.
Still There said:
I've noticed a lot of people pulling their kids out of private schools lately that are "home schooling" them. The reason I'm quoting "home schooling" is because that's whey they say they are doing but I know they are no way qualified nor near as organized and the kids won't learn anything.
I am no Calvinist by any means. But I do believe in the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Examining the scriptures, I very strongly believe that God is the one who places the gift of children in their homes, and it is the primary responsibility of the parents to train their children. Not the church's, and not the state's responsibility, but the parents. (You interested in scripture citations for all this? Proverbs is full of them & Psalm 127 is a good starting point) Beginning at that platform, I would hesitate to claim I know better than the LORD does. Case studies have long proven that children learn more naturally from their immediate family members than from any other source.
Now, to address the qualification and organization statement. Going back to when I faced my dilemma about educating my daughter, I stumbled upon a book on "
Unschooling" by John Holt. You can find a short explanation of
unschooling in a Wikipedia article. Or
this link is good, too.
Unschoolers make the claim, and have a lot of raised children to back up their claims with, that each child is "wired" differently with strengths and weaknesses. The traditional method of education which forces them to speed ahead or slow down to keep step with their peers actually hinders their progress. The logic runs like this: A ditch digger never needs Algebra. But in school, he is forced to take it anyway, but his mindset and skill set directs him ultimately down the path of ditch digging where for the rest of his life, those 2-3 years of algebra & geometry he took in his training facility was purely wasted. On the other hand, a student born with a natural capacity and gift for mathematics has a thirst for that area where he excels. He is capable of doing advanced trig and higher level mathematics by 9th grade, but has to slow up and wait for his class peers, unlike many of his forefathers before him who were doing very advanced mathematics and languages at young ages (Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, Einstein). That is why in the 1800's and before, this nation produced lots of inventive geniuses, but since the 20's and 30's, our creativity and inventivenss has declined severely ... which was the period of growth and development of compulsory education in America.
Holt's major theory is that developing children have a natural thirst for learning. They WILL learn what interests them and what they gravitate to if allowed to do so. He called it "Learning by Living." You may only see children doing housework and playing video games, and think, "Oh my, those kids are just wasting time." But they are learning skills such as math, geometry, chemistry, and reading all because they WANT to in order to achieve in their activities of daily living.
Another book I read was "
Homegrown Kids" by Raymond and Dorothy Moore." A lot of emphasis is given in this book about develpment levels. He stated children develop best at their own pace. He was with the Dept of Education, and she a reading teacher, both well qualified to write on the subject. When that door of a child's mind opens, they naturally try to excel, unless pressure and concern for failure before the child was ready causes them to use psychological avoidance techniques. That, according to the Moores, explains much of the increase in learning disabilities in modern students.
As a result of my reading, I made the decision that we would home educate whatever children we had with confidence. My wife, who had never been an "academic" person and was even held back one year in her public education, was not so thrilled. We began my daughter with some A Beka materials in preschool when she was age 4. Age 5/6 she went to first grade, and we became concerned that she learned numbers, colors, and even letters really well, but was not reading ... not even the simple words. The summer break between 1st and 2nd grades, my wife really tried to talk me out of home education because she worried she was not "qualified" and that had to be what was holding our daughter back from reading. But then, shortly after she started her second year, like both Holt and the Moores had written, "the light switch turned on." My daughter not only learned to read, but developed a thirst for it.
I do not have a television, and so my children learned different ways to satisfy their creativity. For my daughter, it became going to the library, and the world of books. It was comical years later when my daughter was a teen highschooler and my wife complained to me about her reading "too many books." I gently reminded her of her former worries before 2nd grade about her reading ability, and that now, to discipline our daughter, one of the methods was "grounding her from the library."
There were other bumps in the road, which I need not go into. But the point is that she learned what she wanted or saw she needed to learn. But my daughter could be as stubborn as any other kid when it came to learning subjects she had no desire for or saw the need to learn. Both of my children have displayed natural gifts and talents that were never a result of anyone's training. God does that, which is why some can play a piano or a guitar quite expertly at an early age without formal lessons. There is a lot more "miracle" within a child than you appear to expect.
Still There said:
Schools (private & public) have already started and their kids are sitting at home while mom post cute pictures of them sitting in front of the TV and playing gameboy and with other cute things on Facebook. This to me is not home schooling. You can't just let them sit in front of the TV all day long.
I'm worried for the kids. Do I say something or just turn the other cheek and look away??
Leave it alone. You have no idea of what the dynamics within the home truly are, you are an outsider looking in. The many things you have claimed to "know" about education and home education in particular within this post have already revealed that you have not studied the subject well, you only assume to "know" what the propaganda machine has fed you. Children have a natural inborn desire to learn their own unique set of subjects and will do so quite well at their own development level. Neither the government, nor you, have the right to invade that home and force a parent to conform to your educational standard. As the Bible says in 1Thess 4:11, "... do your own business..." I would recommend you mind the same. It would be a greater error to be the reason for the traumatic possible separation of a child from its parents than if they never once walked in the doors of a school room or cracked a book.
Also consider the scriptural truth of the law of sowing and reaping. The day very well come that someone does not like how you train the children in your home, what you are teaching them. "What? You are telling these little urchins that it is wrong for men to love men? Why, that's abuse!" Would you want someone going to children's services on you based upon their ideas of what you are or are not doing right by your own children which God gave you? Then don't set the precedent by doing such yourself.
Them's my thoughts. You asked. Hope you will read a little and consider. Trust the LORD to know what He is doing, and don't determine that it
must be that these kids are doomed to fail. A child really is a resilient and miraculous marvel of God's engineering, and He and the angels watch over them.
