Over at Tim Challies' blog, he is working on a series of articles on Home Schooling vs. Public Schooling. It looks promising so far and it has prompted me to take a minute to remind all Christian parents of something: We all have an obligation to provide a Christian education at home for our children. This obligation does not change based on the educational option you select for your child. The regular pattern of training up your children in the way they should go is first a foremost a parental responsibility and must be established in the home, in daily family life.
When the father is present in the home, this responsibility falls on his shoulders and cannot be shirked or delegated. I am a pastor and we homeschool our children and I know personally all too well how easy it is to shirk this responsibility and all of the rationalizations we can conjure to justify it. Wives can be a great help to their husbands if they can perfect the art of encouraging their husbands to lead without nagging. I know my wife is very good at encouraging me. I thank God for her.
Think about the call of the Lord to Christian education in the home in Deuteronomy 6:4-9-
"Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates." (ESV)
The call here is to a lifestyle of teaching that lasts all day and encompasses all of life. One of the reasons I give for advocating either Christian schooling or home schooling for all Christian families is that these methods of education allow for a Christ-centered Biblical worldview to be incorporated into all subject areas. This teaches a child that Christ and the Bible are central to all of life.
But surely this lesson cannot be learned in an isolated classroom setting, whether it's the two hours a day my wife spends homeschooling our 7 year-old or the six hours a day a child spends in school. If we want our children to learn that Christ and the Bible are central to all of life, the only way to do this is to live it out ourselves in front of them and to tell them about it. Gospel "show-and-tell" must be our lifestyle.
The reality is that all parents do homeschool their children and that all parents are their childrens' primary teachers. So, the fact is that your children are learning from you each day what it means to live a Christian life. The advice I offer here (to myself as surely as to anyone else) is the same advice I give people who are hesitant about studying theology. I tell them, "Everyone has a theology and everyone lives life based on their theology. Your choice is whether you want your theology to be Biblical or not. If you want it to be Biblical, you have to work at it- study, think, pray, wrestle." The same truth applies to Christian Education in the home.
No one has a perfect theology and no one lives their theology perfectly either. The same is true for educating our children in the faith. We will never do so perfectly, but the Gospel is not good news for perfect people. Our failures and struggles become part of the lesson and often teach our children more than our successes. May God grant us the grace to live Gospel-driven, Christ-centered lives in front of our children and to teach them diligently every day.
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