One of the most terrifying things that God does with us is His regular practice of placing immortal souls into the care of parents who are, at least with the first one, absolute amateurs. There is the excitement of delivery and childbirth, there is the rush of emotion when you hold your first child for the first time, there is the gladness of family gathering around when you tell them what her name is going to be. There is all that.

But then comes the time when, a day or two later, when the nurse hands you the baby (in both senses), and says that you are free to go. The check out is complete. You look down at this defenseless child—I mean, absolutely defenseless—and you think, “You mean, we can just leave?” Something is cockeyed, you feel. You need a license to fish. You need a license to cut hair. You need a license to drive. But you can just take this immortal soul home, like you got him at a Grab and Go?

Incidentally, none of the foregoing should be taken as approval of all the licensing requirements. That’s a separate problem. If the state started licensing parents, they would screw that up also. This does not alleviate the weight that wise parents feel when confronting the responsibility they now have.

Now all of this is staggering, and should be felt by us as staggering. And God somehow lets us keep doing this. He keeps sending defenseless children into the homes of rank amateurs. Over and over again.

There are two basic responses to this, and they impinge on one of the great questions related to this, which is the subject of formal education. The two responses are those of humble receptivity, on the one hand, and dogmatic bluster, on the other. The latter reminds me of the old joke about how you can always tell a Harvard man, but you can’t tell him much.

I will appear to be changing the subject for a moment, but I really am not. Bear with me. I had the privilege of building the second house that we owned, and it was quite the learning experience. Nathan and I worked together on it over the course of about five years. One of the things I learned was that concrete pours have a great advantage over other kinds of work. To be clear, it can also work as a disadvantage as well. But here it is. When the concrete trucks show up and you start your pour, the reality is that two hours later, you’re all done. The patio might be kind of lumpy, but you are all done regardless.

Children don’t set in two hours, but they are nevertheless wet concrete. There are all sorts of applications here—spiritual, emotional, psychological, and so on—but this is a newsletter on education. Children are wet concrete when it comes to their education.

There are certain things that we do in life where the feedback loop is relatively short in duration. For example, Daniel and his friends asked for a ten day trial in which to compare their diet with the food served at the king’s table. “Please test your servants for ten days, and let them give us vegetables to eat and water to drink” (Dan. 1:12, NKJV). You do it for ten days and then you check. After you check, you still have time to adjust. You could, if you wanted, try something else for another ten days.

But when it comes to education, far too many parents have dogmatic opinions about practices the results of which will be seen in about eighteen years. In Christian circles, we are accustomed to point to the secular school system for examples of this—pointing at the slipshod instruction, or the sexual grooming, or the leftist indoctrination. But we have examples of the same kind of thing in our own circles. And by the “same kind of thing,” I mean the concrete setting in a misshapen form. I do not mean that they all set in the same misshapen form.

One of the most grievous examples of this would be the practice of “unschooling.” This is an approach that assumes (quite unbiblically) that children are natural learners, and are naturally inquisitive, and consequently that they don’t need any kind of formal structure to shape and guide their learning. The whole process is child-driven. Educational discipline and structure is perceived as a straitjacket that will only stifle and kill the child-like wonder that makes learning fun.

And occasionally such an approach will be honored by the arrival of a little C.S. Lewis, who wants nothing other than a houseful of books, from which he assembles his very own intellectual world. Fine. I will grant you that one.

But most of the time it provides us with a mash-up of Huckleberry Finn and The Lord of the Flies. There is a sense in which children are naturally inquisitive. They want to know what it is like to smoke one of their uncle’s cigars behind the barn. Or what it is like to play doctor with a visiting girl cousin. Or what it is like to play video games for 18 hours straight. Parents need to remember that some wounds don’t bleed until the child is grown.

As nice as it would be to think that this experiment will end with your child requesting to have Chopin’s Nocturnes played over again so that he can take notes this time, it is more likely to result in feral homeschoolers raiding the cookie table after services on Sunday, descending like wolves on the fold, like Sennacherib did in that poem by Byron.

I mentioned the importance of humility earlier. As daunting as it is to take a newborn baby home, as you have never done anything like that before, we need to remember that God’s people have been taking babies home for centuries now. Covenant children have been studying in schools for all of those centuries, sitting in rows, learning what they were told to learn. Individually we may not know what to do, but collectively we do. I would parents to avoid all forms of radical experimentation on your children. They will set more quickly than you anticipated.

The authority to name is part of the dignity of being human. God created Adam and gave him the responsibility of naming the creatures. Shortly after, that wonderful privilege extended even to the naming of Eve.

This action of naming goes far beyond a simple business of attaching labels. Naming requires ability in distinguishing appropriate categories of genus and species. Failure to do this properly can sometimes result in humorous collisions of ideas. One time one of our small children noticed a house fly buzzing around the room, pointed to it, and then proudly exercised the human prerogative of categorizing. “Airplane!” she said. No one thinks, for example, of categorizing animals simply by color or size. Large cockroaches and small field mice do not belong in the same category simply because they are both smaller than a bread box. Adam did not reject the bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh because she was unlike him in a way that a male animal was not unlike him. Adam exercised right judgment, and did not go off to form a brotherhood with the chimps and dogs, leaving Eve to a barren and corresponding sisterhood

Unfortunately, in our politicized age, such right judgment is increasingly rare. The practice of collapsing wildly diverse collections of people into one or two handy pigeon holes appears to be a major indoor sport. And whenever people have a will to misunderstand, plenty of occasions for misunderstanding will soon present themselves. In the realm of education, one example of this problem is well-advanced enough to begin distinguishing two categories of educators with different names.

One category, we should continue to call homeschoolers. These are people who have carefully considered all the options available to them in the education of their children, and prayerfully weighed them, and have decided to provide their children with an education at home. Homeschoolers rejoice when other Christian parents make the same choice, offering to provide help, and they rejoice when others make a different methodological choice and provide their children with a biblical education in a sound Christian school. They understand that all Christian parents who acknowledge and receive the parental possibilities placed upon them by God are working in the same vineyard. 

But I propose another name for an entirely different kind of group. Homers have a completely different attitude toward the process of homeschooling. No longer an instrument or means of educating their children, homeschooling has become, in their hands, a very modern manifestation of home as ideology. In this thinking, home is a defining principle to which everything else must conform. Even the church is brought into the service of the home. Father is no longer a father; he is a prophet, priest and king. Any home is capable of doing anything that is worth doing. A radical home-centeredness takes over, insisting that the home can not only replace the school, but also the church and the civil magistrate, not to mention Safeway and General Motors.

In contrast, homeschoolers are not defensive about what they are doing. They answer to God for how they bring up their children, and they know other parents will answer in the same way. They do not judge the servant of another; to his own master he stands or falls. Homeschoolers are thankful for the opportunities God has given them, and equally grateful for the challenges and problems. And when the challenges are pointed out, whether by someone who shares their method or not, that information is gladly received.

But homers are aggressive and imperialistic as they criticize other Christian parents who do not educate the same way they do, and they are prickly and defensive whenever anyone takes issue with them about anything. A conversation with homers does not remove confusion and misunderstanding, it creates them. And when a conversation has this effect, almost certainly an invisible ideology is governing the process and steering it into greater darkness. Not surprisingly, homers are frequent in the vanguard of church splits

Without proof, homers assume the authority of Scripture to be behind all their convictions. This is the biblical way to educate children, and anyone who thinks differently is not really sold out to biblical living. Sold out biblical living means that this curriculum must be used (not that one), this kind of jumper must be worn to the homeschool fairs (not that kind), this kind of natural honey is best for the growth of the brain (not that kind), and so on ad nauseam. Homers have not taken very long in giving homeschooling a bad name. 

This is a genuine tragedy because Christians outside homeschooling circles have not really distinguished themselves through an incisive ability in making necessary distinctions either. Many homeschoolers need only mention the fact that they homeschool before they’re asked where their seventeen runny-nosed kids are. And the answer is that there are only three children, they are all at Harvard, and they don’t really have any sinus problems. But thanks anyway.

In all our dealings, the golden rule always applies. Do you would be done by. Someone may say that this is all very well, but the Christian parents who have kept their kids in a traditional classroom would not really like the tables turned. (Let’s call them schoolers.) Actually, those parents who do not like careful discrimination, whoever they are, need to learn to cope. And those parents who are serving God in the education of their children will always rejoice when an accurate distinction is made.

Credenda, Vol. 8, No. 5