As we approach the end of another academic year and particularly as my eldest is now not far from completing his years of home-education, my thoughts have turned to considering this question - 'What is our end goal as Christian home-educators?' It could just as easily be, 'What is our end goal as Christian parents?' as these thoughts apply to all Christians, not just those home-educating. Another way to think of it might be 'How do we measure the success of our children's education?' I personally consider home-educating to be the best way to have total control of how my children are trained and taught and I have obviously had this in mind as I write. I do however appreciate that not all Christian parents are in a position to be able to home-educate. But all parents are of course 'home-educators' for some of their child's day, even if not all of it, as the whole time children are at home they are learning, and parents are 'teaching' through implicit teaching (the way they live their lives) and through explicit teaching (specific subject teaching). I have sought the views of several Christian home-educating families and combine them in this post. I hope you find it helpful. It's a question we would have been well to have considered before setting out on the road of bravely educating our children ourselves (or even having children), but usually such questions get lost amongst the other things that occupy our thoughts at that time... curriculums, explaining to others what we are doing and trying to justify our actions along with just coping with having young children around. That was certainly our case! Many parents will be happy if their offspring produce them a nice set of good exam results and may-be that could be used to measure the success of a child's education. There are obvious flaws in this of course. Not all will produce good results. Does that mean the child is a failure? Many will try and tell us of course 'No it doesn't,' and they are right, but for the child whose education has been heading up to these exams all along, reality may be otherwise and I think the number of calls to 'Childline' and the like, when results come out gives testimony to this. There is another question which is 'Do these results actually reflect a 'good' education'? The answer to this will depend upon your confidence in the body that set the knowledge to be learnt to pass the exam. Few consider this question, but Christian parents would do well to think about it. However I presume that as home-educators and Christian ones at that, we have not just thought of education in mere academic terms. I think to be fair most of us do want our children to succeed as best they can, but we realise that education is more than just pure academic success. There is the mind, the body and the soul to be considered. And yet, when many around us are telling of their child's academic success it is sometimes extremely difficult to persuade ourselves that it is not the only thing that matters, especially when our child may not have gained high grades, or we may even have chosen not to major on exams at all, for whatever reason. So what should be our end goal? Obviously, as Christians we desire for our children to learn God's will for their lives and to live in obedience to Him. God's Word will be central to all that we teach and all t hings will be evaluated against god's Word. As parents we need to be 'people of the Book'. After that, I have no definitive answer, just a few thoughts to help you consider this question for yourself, whatever the age of your children. I'd like to start by asking you to imagine what sort of a person you would like your son/daughter to be when they become and adult. I came up with this list - you may think of other things: Godly men and women. Hard workers. Truthful employees. Loyal to company and friends. Upright in all their dealings. Faithful to their spouses. Men equipped to be Heads of their families and Ladies to be 'helpmeets'. Committed people: committed to their families, to their churches (where applicable) and to their place of employment. Caring, compassionate people. Serving people. Useful members of their communities. Men and Women who can think for themselves and can evaluate all through the lens of God's word. And so on. So how do we achieve our end goal? First off, we need to work from the bottom up. We need to make Scripture our bottom line for understanding anything. Scripture needs to underpin the reasons why we do/say anything in our homes - as after all, our school is 24 hours a day, seven days a week and even if you send your children to school, your home sets the tone. I think sometimes we are prone to forget this and think that it is only in our family Bible-times, or school time that we must consider our reasons for doing things, but it applies to the whole way we live life before our children, from the things we enjoy, to our attiutudes and everything in between. Of course this does apply very much to our curriculum too as we must learn, ourselves first in many cases, how every subject must be built upon God's Word. The Bible will lay the foundation for our understanding of everything we teach and want our pupil's to learn. Even maths calls for a clear understanding that 2 + 2 only equals 4 ALWAYS because of the unchanging nature of the God who set out the laws by which the universe is governed. Academic work is not a separate compartment where we can tack Christianity on to a “secular” model – there is no such thing as “secular” in a way the whole of the universe belongs to God and is under his sovereign control. This is not possible for us fallen creatures to do perfectly, of course, we are constantly trying to work from own fallen presuppositions and to tack on the “Christian perspective” – if necessary by adapting it (although we don't notice we are doing this!) to what we think ought to be right. We can still keep checking ourselves though and prayerfully ask to be directed back to seeing the whole world through the lens of Scripture. Obviously, ultimately we pray that our children will accept the offer of salvation and come to know the Lord Jesus Christ personally. This is not something we can make happen, however we can bring them up in the 'nurture and admonition of the Lord' (Ephesians 6:4) and that must certainly be our main objective. Along with this will be instruction in righteousness. We can't make our children righteous but we can train them in Christian virtues such as honesty, truthfulness, modesty, humility, perseverance, gentleness, respect for those in authority over them, pure, moral etc.. These are considered old fashioned nowadays but are so desperately lacking in our society. Obviously our children will follow our example and we must be careful to live godly lives before them as well as teach them these truths. These are lifelong things to learn which can't be learnt in a few hours cramming for an exam! All children learn something of them, and their opposites, whether it is directly taught or otherwise, but Christian parents will look to deliberately train their children in these things and look for evidence of them in their children's lives. We can train our children to work hard and enjoy learning. This is in stark contrast to the education of most, which trains them to a life of entertainment and ease. Unfortunately this has overspilled into our churches where few are now prepared to take on any responsibility, wanting instead plentiful children's entertaining activities and worship that makes them 'feel good'. We will want to potray learning as a life-long adventure, rather than a childish thing that our children will leave behind when they leave school. We can raise them to be happy in themselves and confident. In contrast to many youngsters these days who judge their value by how many 'likes' they have on social media, our children will judge their worth by healthier standards - preferably God's standards. We do this by grounding them in good biblical teaching so that they understand the way the world works, and how they fit into it, and then by taking a vested interest in them, not just during school time but out of it as well, right into adulthood. See my post on socialising children. Contentment is also a good thing - though this is something we need lots of practice to acquire! Let us seek to model it to our children. They will understand that rights come with responsibilities. Again this is in contrast to the world where many youngsters think they have rights with no responsibilties. Let us seek to train our children to embrace responsibilites as opportunites to serve, within the family to begin with. They will have learnt that all behaviour has consequences. How our flesh recoils from having to live with the consequences of our wrong behaviour, and yet how many these days (including sadly ourselves) will try and justify their actions and claim their right to behave in such a way. Let us not be parents who protect our children while young from the due reward of their wrong behaviour and thereby do great damage to the health of their souls. We will seek to educate our children in running a household, organising, supervising, working with others (teamwork), leading (where applicable), manage a budget, and so on. We will teach daughters to be submissive wives and our lads to be godly husbands - through imitation and teaching. We will want to guard against anything that might take our children away from the Lord. Sunday sports activities comes to mind, but this could include things like the entertainment provided in the home (including the type of toys)/social media/out-of-home activites etc... Any activity that consumes large amounts of our/our children's time and consumes our passions can easily take the place of God in our lives. We need to watch and be vigilant and be ready to re-address the balance when needed as be sure, these things will come - often! Watch out too, for activities that take your child out of the house, away from your instruction. We will want to be parents who evaluate all things as to their spiritual worth to us as individuals and also to our family, measured by God's Word - not just do them because 'that's what everyone else is doing'. Not even if that's what everyone else in your church is doing! What will our children not necessarily be? They may not necessarily be rich or clever. Be careful, as many secretly if not overtly these days want their children to be 'top'. The world's pressure is for our children to 'succeed' and it is so easy to succumb, though it often doesn't really know what it is looking for or why. We need to be different. I was challenged recently by reading the questions: 'Would you be upset if your child became a minister (or minsiter's wife), on a low income? Or even if s/he gave up all to become a missionary?' Good questions to ask as they reveal our heart motives for our children. Can we do this? Ok, I have painted a perfect picture! It will not be this easy and the end result will not be perfect. This too, we must grasp, as it is easy to fall prey to thinking that 'our-way' (whether home-educating or sending to school) will produce the perfect result. It won't. There is no such thing and this knowledge will help keep us from judging Christians who do differently to us (which is easy to do in self-defence when we feel pressurised). However, let us get it into our heads and hearts that as Christians we have a different end goal to the world. Let us not be ashamed of our endeavours. We may not be 'successful' whatever that means, however the Lord sees our hearts and knows our intentions. Let them be to do all for His glory. How do we begin? Obviously, we start with obedience to God's Word. Then alongside our OBEDIENCE in bringing up our children we need TRUST. We must be careful not to take on ourselves more than the Lord has required. We must remember that ultimately it is God's work in our children. We do not have responsibility for producing the end product, however we are called to be faithful to our Lord and bring our children up in the 'nurture and admonition of the Lord' (Ephesians 6:4). The end product could be good character or poor. As we look to the Lord in ALL things and faithfully bring up our children according to HIS word then we can have peace even in difficult times - not just when we see these goals becoming a reality, either educational or spiritual. We must aim for obedience, which will of course be imperfect, and learn to trust. Whatever the outcome, or the opinion of others (and they will have one!) we can be joyful in seeing the Lord's plan unfold for our family. Of course, we must always mourn over sin and were a child to rebel we would be pleading the Lord to turn his/her heart to Him in salvation. When we have prayerfully done our best we must leave it with our gracious heavenly Father. If we have trusted Him, then The Lord will overrule our mistakes and use even them to His praise and glory. It's a tall order - let us not grow faint-hearted! May we ever encourage each other! May I reccomend a book to you? 'Not Without Tears' is a biography of Mrs Favell Lee Mortimer, who was home-educated, and later in life became a pioneer of Bible teaching for the very young with publications such as 'Peep of Day' and 'Line Upon Line' which you can find still in print today. This is an amazing story of her life, sharing how an ordinary mother, possibly with an unconverted husband, sought to home-educate her children. The book highlights the mother's frailties, her (well intentioned) 'mistakes', children who want the pleasures of the world and find life at home restricting, lack of good teaching at church, and through all these things, shows how the Lord so graciously worked in Favell, from a young age, long before she sought the Lord for herself, and prepared her to do a great work for Him. It gave me great hope and encouragement. The book has been written by Chris Eastwood, who has home-educated her three grown children and who will be familiar to many as the author of 'God's dealing with our Nation' volumes 1 and 2 and the supplier of the Mothers Companion. Click on the picture to view. £7.99
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Welcome!After studying for an Early Years Specialism degree (B.Ed. Hons), and teaching in mainstream education, I home-educated my own children, after my husband and I were persuaded of the need to take responsibility for bringing up our children 'in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.' (Ephesians 6:4) We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.
This costs the purchaser nothing extra. In this way I can continue to provide free resources. Thank you for your support. Looking for a read-aloud?
Here's one I heartlily reccomend for ages 10 +. Search
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The First book from Christina Eastwood - the first in a triology - only £5.99 (ages 8 to 13).
Now available in PRINT!
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