Listen to the world and know that you are…
Inadequate to Educate

You are completely inadequate to homeschool and oversee your children’s education.

• You are not a degreed, trained, or experienced educator.
• You will screw up without a network of professionals for guidance and oversight.
• There will be gaps you cannot fill; entire subjects may be ignored or forgotten.
• You will teach political and religious bias.
• You likely do not know or adhere to educational standards and age-related milestones.
• Your children will be deprived of what the education system provides.

Skeptics may say…
It’s quite confident of you to assume all the roles of the many education professionals. Most have had extensive training and experience in their field. How can you even be adequate, much less successful?

Even if you hold a teaching certificate, you aren’t certified to teach every subject. You wouldn’t want a math teacher trying to teach your child Shakespeare, or an English teacher stumbling through equations in front of the class.

These teachers would never presume to do each other’s job anyway, as they are aware of what qualifications they do not possess. Yet, you have neither of these teachers’ general educational training, and still, you believe your homeschooling efforts alone will top them both.

How foolish.

 

Listen to those nagging uneasy thoughts about the system and know….
Inadequacy is Hidden in the System

Many parents feel inadequate or incapable of homeschooling their kids.

Why?

Because the system they grew up in unnecessarily, yet intentionally, complicates education for this purpose. And to justify its bloated budget and power.

Leave it to the professionals, it says.

The lack of communication and transparency in curriculum, required testing, overwhelming hierarchy of administrators, school boards, principals, teachers, counselors, school nurses, advocates, tutors, coaches, security officers, and secretarial personnel all serve to demote parents to the position of homework enforcer and taxi driver.

Yet as the power of the government school system grows, the more inadequately it meets the individual academic, emotional, and spiritual needs of all its students.

More is not always better, sometimes it’s just more. More time wasted, more busy work, more self-aggrandizing fodder. However, homeschooling can do in a few hours what takes the system months or longer. Learning really is straightforward.

Don’t be intimidated.

Your natural ability to instruct your kids along with your will to succeed, and the simplicity to do so, cannot be reproduced in mass. And that is intimidating to the system.

So why do parents cling to the system with Stockholm syndrome-like desperation?

Adding to the insecurities over their inadequacies is the disdain from other insecure parents cuffed to the system. They need others to stick with the system to justify their choices. Plus, many of homeschoolers have friends who are education professionals they don’t want to offend, because individually they are good people.

Instead, parents question their own perceptions and try to ignore the warning bells clanging in their heads.

Then these families become imprisoned in the status quo. Afraid to act. Bombarded by a cacophony of urgent concerns, fear of their shortcomings, and shame for wanting better and daring to believe more of themselves than the professionals.

However, those prison bars are imaginary. Or at most a wireless electric fence,  worth a little sting to run through to freedom.

But don’t take it from me. I get my confidence and commission, despite my inadequacies, from a higher authority.

 

Listen to truth and know you are…
Perfectly Inadequate to Homeschool

The next time someone says you can’t provide all your kids will need for their education and social growth, look them dead in the eyes and say…

“You are absolutely right. I am perfectly inadequate to homeschool.”

 

Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as
coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God.
2 Corinthians 3:5

 

Cue the heavy sighs from my non-Christian audience members. To which I will say…

Humor me. Read on. At the very least, you can chuckle at the absurdity you find in my source of strength and will to homeschool my children. Or because you haven’t gotten me a Christmas gift yet and reading this will suffice.

 

Let me put a bug in your brain, a seed in your soul.

You are inadequate to homeschool by the professional standards of education. So what.

The authority to educate is bestowed on education professionals by institutions who create, sell, and confer degrees for those who meet their specific required standards to educate children in mass quantities. An exclusive cycle that crowns itself the ideal model.

Public education is mostly a one-size-fits-all method that teaches to the middle, creates outliers, and ignores the individual.

By this framework, school systems do not benefit each child equally, and certainly can’t focus on each child’s needs individually, but rather schools find their success or failure in percentages. Thus so much unique talent, genius, creativity, heart, and potential is lost.

 

For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not
all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ,
and individually members one of another. Having gifts that differ according
to the grace given to us, let us use them…
Romans 12:4-8

 

If children were farm animals or produce to harvest, a mass system would be a profitable method. Tracking improvements and minimizing necessary failures in the population being the overall goal. Sadly, this is the best way we have to teach large quantities of kids who have no other option for education.

But children aren’t livestock.

 

Why, even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not;
you are of more value than many sparrows.
Luke 12:7

 

With a little self-sacrifice and prioritization, many parents do have another option though. Arguably a mandate. The educational authority has already been granted by a higher power.

 

…teach them diligently…
Deuteronomy  6:6-7

 

Our children are not cattle. Not a cog in a wheel. Each is a precious gift to be cherished and honed for God’s purpose, not to be farmed out and molded to fit the world’s expectations. Every child is unique with immeasurable potential and purpose from God.

 

For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for
welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.
Jeremiah 29:11

 

To a skeptical public, our inadequacies shine like the North star pointing to suspected failure.

You aren’t a certified teacher. You can’t possibly give your kids all the school system offers, they say.

The simple defense…

 

I can do all things through him who strengthens me.
Philippians 4:13

 

 

Still they press on to the the last line of attack on homeschooling. The lie of socialization. Parents have been conditioned to fear their children being different.

Yet, socialization is possibly the most important reason to embrace homeschooling today.

Your children won’t be properly socialized and adjusted to working with people of diverse backgrounds and orientations. You are sheltering and brainwashing them with backward prejudice.

 

Do not be deceived: “Bad company ruins good morals.”
Corinthians 15:33

 

No educational setting is without bias.

But “weird and unsocialized” is now code for lacking mainstream beliefs and conformity.

You are being a helicopter parent and hiding them from the world, they say. Why not let them decide their own beliefs, and teach them acceptance and tolerance?

 

I do not ask that you take them out of the world,
but that you keep them from the evil one.
John 17:15

 

Whether at home or an institution, views and beliefs are inferred, ignored, are impressed upon children by their teachers. Some unintentionally, but many with strong intent to indoctrinate.

Parents were meant to stand in the way of those who would corrupt our children. 

But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin,
it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around
his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.
Matthew 18:6

 

All over the country there is blaring evidence that the system is crumbling due to pandemic fallout and a clash of political ideology.

Don’t be pressured to stick around, weather the storm, and “be the change” at your child’s expense.

You may be countered with things like…
Removing your kids from the school is not the answer. It hurts other kids who can learn from our kids’ moral example. We should praise teachers and offer to help them in the classroom. They are not the reason for the problems in schools today. You should just stick around and advocate for change. Let your kids be the salt and light.

Taking on the system is a noble endeavor in theory. And a risky bet in practice with your child’s future being the wager. You owe the system nothing besides the thousands of tax dollars you must pay every year. Don’t serve up your children with an apple in their mouth for the cause.

Michael Farris, founder of the HSLDA, created a 30-week American Civics course
that will challenge and guide your high-school student through the founding ideals
of this country to decide if they are worth preserving and inspire them to act. 

 

Perhaps the best push back on the system is for families to abandon it in droves. 

 

“Therefore render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,
and to God the things that are God’s.”
Matthew 22:21

 

 

Listen to God’s word and know you are…
Perfectly Adequate to Homeschool with Him

Homeschooling is an enormous life-altering task. We are not adequate alone. There will be holes left to be filled. We will mess up and fall short.

But with God, parents are equipped and capable of homeschooling with amazing success.

 

“For nothing will be impossible with God.”
Luke 1:37

 

Homeschooling with trust in Him opens possibilities and pathways for our kids we may have never imagined had we not leapt with faith into the scary unknown of where homeschooling would lead.

Even when we come to moments of defeat, when we feel we can go no further, and doubt ourselves endlessly while losing sight of all our reasons for homeschooling, He is there in the silver lining of a lesson learned in the chaos.

So don’t give up. Pray for strength and faith.

 

And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season
we will reap, if we do not give up.
Galatians 6:9

 

 

 

More on this topic in the podcast episode:
Worn Out Excuses NOT to HomeschoolOr get links to all my best episodes on my podcast page HERE!