A Pastoral Word About Homeschooling

Introduction: My Skin in the Game
Today I want to make a few comments, observations, and give some encouragement on the topic of Christian homeschooling. First off, I want to honor the courage, the sacrifice, the love, and the faithfulness of millions of families who for several decades now have said to the statist regime, “not with my kids, you don’t.” My parents were some of those in the early 1980s when it was still considered very strange and rare. I was homeschooled through sixth grade, and most of my siblings were homeschooled all the way through high school. I consider my parents and many others like them heroes of the modern West, trusting and obeying God, frequently with very little resources, but giving God their widow mites and watching Him honor and multiply those sacrifices. We are in the position we are now, though beleaguered on many fronts, still putting up a fight, because there has been a generation that said, “no.” 

Related, while we enrolled our sons in Logos School here in Moscow from preschool, we homeschooled our daughters for several years in elementary school, and helped start a thriving homeschool coop called White Horse Hall that continues to serve our community many years later. I also helped start and taught for a small boys school for five years, which served a cadre of homeschooling families whose boys were going into the middle school and high school years. All of this to say, I’ve been involved in homeschooling since my own childhood, have conducted my own homeschooling in my own home, and I have helped organize and build homeschool-serving structures for the blessing and benefit of homeschool families over many years. While my family has been fully invested in Logos School now for a number of years, my observations and encouragements here should not be taken as the comments of an outsider, but as a pastoral word based on many years of involvement. 

Men in Leadership 
The first thing I want to point out is that the homeschool world is largely led by women. This is somewhat by necessity: moms are the primary teachers and administrators of most homeschools, with some exceptions. While many faithful fathers do give some oversight and direction to the homeschool program in their households, and some even teach some of the courses, many fathers are understandably tied up with their normal vocational work. And thus even in relatively happy and stable and thriving homes, the dominant tone can be set by the sensibilities of women. Of course, children are required by God to honor and obey their mothers, and in Proverbs, wisdom is a mighty woman. But without careful, thoughtful action, this can become lopsided. I do not mind hastening to add that some traditional, brick and mortar Christian schools are also functional hen houses, and many faithful homeschool families are far more balanced than many Christian schools. 

The point here is to simply be aware of this possibility or tendency and to prayerfully consider ways to mitigate it. And sometimes this develops because of the high degree of competency of many Christian women. Many homeschool moms are incredibly smart, well-educated, and organized leaders. But the more competent a woman is, the more competent the men around her need to be, her husband in particular. Let me be clear: good men are not threatened by highly competent women; good men respect them and honor them and deploy them. And at the same time, because God made the world in a certain way, we have to be on the look out for our various blind spots and weaknesses. The Bible clearly teaches that fathers are uniquely responsible for overseeing the Christian education of their children: “Fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4). This means that Christian education is to be ultimately overseen by men/fathers. And yes, this means that single mothers must still do the best they can as the heads of their households, seeking out the resources of their covenant community. 

Boys & Moms
Related to the above, I believe there is a particular challenge for homeschooling boys, especially as they reach adolescence. In general, as boys reach the pert stage of Junior High they will either increasingly buck or challenge the authority of the women over them (which is one kind of problem) or else they won’t (which is another kind of problem). Again, boys must learn to honor and obey their mothers, and if they are in coop class or traditional school, this includes any female teachers. But there is a natural impulse to leadership in boys growing into men, a natural impulse that is often filled with fleshly pride that must be disciplined. But the trick is to discipline the fleshly pride part and not the impulse to lead. On the one hand, traditional schools often castrate the junior high boys through certain forms of institutionalism (which is often only mitigated by good coaches and athletic programs). But middle school boys that receive most of their instruction from their mom are often tempted to feel strangely resentful, and mothers of boys in this stage can become exasperated. There is often a mix of sin and natural impulse all tangled up together. And wise fathers are responsible for untangling it. Sometimes this can be accomplished by hiring a male tutor, banding together with other homeschool families to hire a male teacher for some classes, or enrolling in a more traditional classical Christian school full-time or part-time. 

And where there is no tension at all between boys and mom, you should be even more concerned. Complete comfort spending all day with a woman (even a great woman) is challenging for men. And I can hear the objections coming: but what about a wife, what about sisters or daughters? Please don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying that a man doesn’t like being around his wife or mom or sisters or daughters (we do!), but we were made by God to go out, to work, and to return. And my point is that men are oriented to a mission, a problem, a project, and to leadership, and we are not oriented to relationships. We have and appreciate relationships, and we are required by God to give particular attention to a certain number of familial relationships, but we are generally not oriented to those relationships, like women are. And this is where the tangles and tensions can manifest themselves: boys are beginning to think about (or at least feel drawn to) the mission, the project, the goal of leadership, and moms are often more oriented to the relationship. All by itself, there is nothing wrong with these tendencies, but they can tend to begin colliding into one another and then turn into sin or be misunderstood by the other and cause hurt or confusion. If our land lacks strong, assertive, virtuous men, we must give particular thought to raising our boys.

The Principle of Concentration (and the Wrong Kind of Individuality)
One last observation: one of the great strengths of homeschooling is the general tendency for homeschool families and kids to have a high degree of individuality. And thus, the flipside of this coin is that one of the great weaknesses of homeschool families and kids is to have a high degree of individuality. Sometimes this is framed as a point of pride: “we aren’t like those traditional, brick and mortar schools: we don’t treat our kids like cogs in a machine.” And sometimes the traditional school folks return the arrogance by thinking of all homeschool families as raising feral children who don’t believe in grades and make all their own burlap jumpers. So let us first of all acknowledge that there are some examples we can all point to of each tendency and let us also admit that all such arrogance and pride is sinful, running in both directions, and that pride must be repented of and utterly repudiated. We really do need to emphasize the fact that we are individual households with particular assignments and responsibilities before God, and we have been called into a covenant community in which we need the accountability and camaraderie of one another. 

This has been particularly underlined over the last few years following the COVID panic and ensuing tyranny. Suddenly it became clear that we need communities. We need to build cities of refuge from these storms. We need church communities that will not be intimidated by tinpot dictators. We need business connections, supply chain connections, an alternative economy that can run independent of the DEI and woke technocracy and statism. And here, I’d simply encourage those more inclined to homeschooling to think about all of this together. Without succumbing to a dire-prepper mentality, it does seem that God is calling us to prepare for rougher waters for the next bit. This means we need all hands on deck for building houses on solid rocks that will withstand the storms coming. This means productive households, resilient and anti-fragile businesses and communities, and structures and programs of Christian education that continue to fill up our ranks with reinforcements with the next generation. And the point here is that your family and household are not enough all by themselves. A certain kind of rugged, libertarian individualism is what got us into this mess. Tyrants love scattered individuals — they can herd or eliminate them one by one, but a true conservative resurgence will be built through many responsible households knit tightly together in covenant communities – little platoons, as Edmund Burke called them.

One of the principles of war is concentration. A long, thin line of soldiers is not as potent as a thick concentration of soldiers pushing at one particular place at the same time. Related, is the fact that concentration creates more momentum that helps keep morale high and the mission central. When you’re all on your own (or feel like that) it’s easier to lose heart and forget what you’re doing. Since the task of raising covenant kids is central to our resistance, crafting weapons and reinforcements for the fight (Ps. 127), Christians need to think of the project of Christian education as something that needs to be done in community. We need community because we need encouragement. We are tempted to get tired, discouraged, and lose perspective. We need community because we need accountability. If traditional schools sometimes err in the direction of over-engineering, institutionalism, and bureaucracy, homeschools sometimes err in the direction of laziness, sentimentalism, and the wrong kind of individualism. We need community because it is not good for man to be alone, because two are better than one, because we are a body in Christ, because there is something particularly fruitful and potent about wise divisions of labor.

Conclusion
One of the most remarkable things we have noticed as our children have come up through Logos School is the blessing of concentration. We have been grateful for the men that serve on the board and administration who are mindful of these tendencies and working overtime to compensate for them and establish policies that guard and discipline them. The many opportunities for sports, music, theater, choir have put many faithful men and women in our children’s lives to shape them in ways that we never could. When many families are pulling in the same direction, with teachers, administration, and a board also pulling in the same general direction, the impact is potent. This doesn’t mean you think every last detail or decision is perfect or ideal, but there is something very helpful about working together on this project. All things being equal, faithful homeschooling is like guerilla warfare, training and deploying insurgents against the enemy, by ones and twos, that often inflict strategic damage all along the line, but the more Christian education is done in community (strong coops and classical Christian schools) the more it is like a military force, training brigades of soldiers, full of highly competent individual soldiers who have also been prepared to work together, concentrating forces, building institutions, businesses, and cities. 

One last thought: I fully understand that finances are often an enormous factor in educational options and decision making. And I would just say, on the one hand, there is nothing more important for parents than to provide a godly education for their children and thus, there is no sacrifice that any parent ever makes for a godly education that they will look back on and regret. On the other hand, I know that some classical Christian schools have simply given in to market forces and their tuition is set at levels most middle class families could never dream to afford, and in such situations, Christian families committed to working together must find alternatives or start their own. This is why I’m so grateful that Logos decided many years ago to work to make tuition affordable for ordinary working families and to never turn an otherwise qualified family away for merely financial reasons.

Photo by Belinda Fewings on Unsplash