Expanding the Circle

Homeschooling parents should prepare for the time when they need to “expand the circle” of influence in their children’s lives as it pertains to certain academic subjects. This is often accomplished in co-op settings, tutoring, part-time attendance at a day school, or even getting a jump-start on college. These opportunities serve several good purposes: allowing the children to learn from teachers with potentially greater expertise and experience AND allowing the homeschooling parent to concentrate on younger children in the family. However, the parent must remain at the helm, directing the course of study and monitoring the process as well as the result.

I learned this first hand as my children participated in junior college classes. Making use of this resource is beneficial when it comes to lab sciences and other activities that are better experienced in group settings (choral ensembles etc.). It can also serve as a testing ground for interaction with groups that are not distinctively Christian. However, along with the beneficial aspects are a myriad of potential snares. This is where the early practice of making the study of God’s law-word the foremost aspect of your homeschool will pay off. By teaching all subjects and disciplines from the perspective of what the Bible has to say on the subject, you train your children to see every area of thought and life through the lens of Scripture. They are thus better prepared to recognize assaults on their faith.

It is imperative that your child understands that your responsibility and role as a parent is not nullified or abdicated because he is going to receive instruction outside of the home. Although you are delegating some of your parental responsibilities, you still are answerable to God and culpable for failure to uphold His standards. This means that even if the institution that you send your child to fails to respect the role and authority of parents, the Fifth Commandment remains in force!

I recommend that before children take college level classes, parents teach the biblical philosophy of the subject and require certain reading or instruction in preparation. For example, before taking a psychology class it would be valuable to read and listen to R. J. Rushdoony’s material on a biblical perspective of psychology (Revolt against Maturity and his many lectures on the subject) and make use of other excellent resources. Sending a child to a Christian worldview conference would prepare the student to recognize the behavior modification techniques and psychotherapeutic perspectives that permeate many of the courses he will encounter.

My daughter recently enrolled in a required college-level class called “College Success.” This semester-length class is especially designed for new and transfer students promising “…to cover college survival skills, career decision making, educational planning, and degree and transfer information.” However, as those info-mercials on television add, “But wait! There’s more!” Unfortunately, a lot more than what most Christian parents might bargain for.

Some “highlights”:

• Students were required to participate in a personality assessment, based on Jungian psychology, designed to steer them toward majors and careers most suited to their abilities. They were given a series of oddly phrased questions, instructed to pick one of two answers, even when neither adequately reflected their actual perspective. In my daughter’s case, the analysis of the test results directed her away from almost every area of talent and inclination we have seen demonstrated throughout her life and toward careers that were comically unsuitable.

• Excessive amounts of homework questions that delve into the “inner thoughts,” fears, anxieties, and personal problem areas must be completed daily with students using as their only resource remedies lifted out of the pages of modern psychology. (No other perspectives need apply!) One method of dealing with problem solving was so convoluted and unintuitive, that I still do not understand it and get a headache contemplating the possibility of ever having to apply it.

• One of my daughter’s homework assignments asked: “Which of the resistors to change is most evident in your life? Discuss the specific actions you will take to overcome it.” She responded that she has a tendency to fear the unknown in certain subject areas and that she plans to discipline herself against falling into that trap, while trusting God to help her. Her instructor responded by giving her 1/3 of the total points possible for that question with the comment, “Your response is weak and incomplete. Trusting God is not an action. It is a belief. I would like to read more specific, thoughtful responses.” (I guess my daughter has not “learned” how to regurgitate the psychobabble as well as she should!)

My guidance to my daughter as she goes through these experiences is that she must make sure she survives the assaults on her Christian faith by discussing her assignments, lectures, and other aspects of her course work with her dad and me so we can all take time to replace any lies with the Truth. One byproduct of this course is an increased gratitude on her part for the Christian education she has received.

We look at this season of her education as an opportunity to understand first-hand the ways of Babylon, while, like her biblical forebears (Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego), refusing to bow the knee to the idols of our time.

The Church's Secret Weapon

If you have not already viewed "Return of the Daughters" I highly recommend that you do so. But, prepare to be challenged. Be prepared to have many of your embedded concepts of humanism and secularism unearthed and dislodged. Be prepared to see how faithful Christian families are saying "yes" to God's plan and "no" to the world's.

This documentary could have just as easily been titled "Return of the Fathers," because the heads-of-households interviewed have fully embraced their roles as trustees for their biblical trustee families.

When families no longer squander the talents, energies, and contributions of their unmarried daughters -- sending them away from the home to pursue "success" -- we will see another milestone accomplished in the rebuilding of our culture to the honor and glory of Jesus Christ. As the film asserts, unmarried daughters serving their fathers by forwarding their fathers' dominion-oriented commitment to press the Crown Rights of Jesus Christ are the Church's secret weapons indeed!

Myth Busters

"Every child entering school at the age of five is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well—by creating the international child of the future."

~Psychiatrist Chester M. Pierce, addressing 1973 Childhood International Education Seminar

Despite the pagan educator’s explicit intent to indoctrinate children into a worship of the state, Christians continue to send their children to government schools. Some Christians believe that their local schools are different because the teachers there are “nice” and maybe even “smart.” What they fail to realize is that “nice” and “smart” are buzzwords used in service of the reprogramming of children—often without the nice and smart teachers being themselves aware of the malevolent design of government schooling to program and indoctrinate their children into a pagan statist religion.

(Read more)

In light of cultural events all around us, it is time for many professing believers to get their heads out of the sand and take God's law-word seriously!!

A New Slogan

After hearing the expression one too many times recently, “Think globally; act locally,” I realized that I needed to formulate my own expression on biblically solid ground. Therefore, I am now launching my new initiative:

Think biblically; Act lawfully.*

The modern environmental mantra posits a world that needs programs and policies to protect the earth, often at the expense of good judgment and workable solutions. The Scriptural counter-slogan posits a world of sinful men in need of a Savior’s redemptive atonement.

I suggest serious-minded Christian parents who wish to disciple their children to assume their charge to be “Kingdom Seekers,” to post the Think biblically. Act lawfully expression in plain sight and refer to it regularly to measure all decisions and perspectives in light of it.

For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments: and his commandments are not grievous.
For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world: and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.
Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God? (1 John 5:3-5)

*May substitute the synonyms righteously and/or faithfully.

Go Marry a Canaanite

You would think that by now the heavily flawed “missionary” argument for sending Christian children to the state-run public schools would have died. After all, even most evangelical pastors admit that college usually delivers the fatal blow to many Christian young persons who enter the university calling themselves Christians and leave having abandoned the faith. In spite of this evidence, we still hear the pietistic argument that if our kindergartens, grammar schools, and high schools are not filled with Christian children, souls will be lost and we will have failed in carrying out the Great Commission. These “missionary-minded” proponents fail to make the connection between the twelve years of state-sponsored, humanistic education and the realigning of loyalties that finally manifests itself in the college years.

Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.
For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting (Galatians 6:7-8).

In the midst of this travesty, we have intense emphasis on "missions" from numerous pulpits and Christian conferences striving to develop a "heart for missions" in the people of God, while remaining blind to the enormous mission field that exists in many homes in our own backyards. I guess it is easier to travel thousands of miles to far away places in order to share the gospel, than to teach God’s law-word across all the academic disciplines and then confront the culture with a cogent and whole-hearted application of the commandments of God.

Recently, a friend and I were discussing the silence of most churches on the subject of Christian education when he offered the tongue-in-cheek comment, “Just go marry a Canaanite.” Isn’t that what is really being communicated, as those “missionaries” from Christian homes are sent to secular, God-hating places to receive their education?

Jesus told us in the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares that a time would come when people would act on the outside, just as they thought on the inside. In theological terms, that is called being epistemologically self-conscious. More and more, I find I have little tolerance for conversations with professing believers who want to defend their tareness and claim that those who espouse Christian education should just calm down. After all, can’t we wheat and tares just get along!

Math: A Neutral Subject?

One of the women I mentor who participates in my Women of Honour Skype Bible Study teaches high school math* in a girls’ school in the U.K. She shared with the group an experience she had recently. As you can see, no one has to go outside one’s sphere of influence to proclaim the Crown Rights of Jesus Christ.

"I have recently taught converting between measures to a group of year 9 students (grade 9 - 13/14 year olds). I like to challenge my girls to think, as they are very spoon-fed in the state school system. At the start of today's lesson I wrote: "Does God care whether we measure accurately?" on the board and asked the students to write their responses in their books.

Their reaction took me by surprise. It was as if I had dropped a nuclear bomb in my classroom. The students immediately became very hostile toward each other and toward me, which is VERY unusual in my normally calm classroom. I was expecting:

· The view that God has to love us all as we are, no matter what. (Love to them defined as tolerance.)
· The Deist view (that God has left us to do as we please) to come up (which it did), but was shocked by the anger and venom in their response.

These are normally very sweet, quiet, Catholic girls, yet today they were anything but that.

I did have the opportunity to share Proverbs 11:1 ("Dishonest scales are an abomination to the LORD, but a just weight is His delight") explaining that inaccurate measures could lead to breaking the 8th Commandment.

The majority of the class was very hostile to the message, but some students did write this down and I believe will consider what I was trying to share with them. I have certainly learnt much from this experience and will have to seek the Lord for wisdom as I proceed to try to establish an understanding of the ways of God.

This experience has made me more aware that there is a battle on and it is a fierce one. The need to reform society to the ways of God is so great. I am so grateful that we have the opportunity to participate in this study and pray that God will use us all in this task as we see His Kingdom advancing.”

*Mathematics: Is God Silent? is available from www.ChalcedonStore.com

The Return of the Homemaker

Over the New Year’s Day holiday TV stations ran marathons of old TV shows. Viewers could pick from science fiction with The Twilight Zone, the 1980s fare of blended families with The Brady Bunch, and the one that found its way onto our small screen, The Honeymooners. This show peeks into the lives of two men (one a bus driver and the other a sewer maintenance worker) whose wives were stay-at-home housewives. In addition to my personal recollection of my parents and grandparents thoroughly enjoying this half-hour comedy, (recorded in front of a live audience), I was tickled at the almost non-stop laughter that came from my 16-year-old daughter. Here was a show that had as its presupposition that a woman cared for and managed her household (even when there were no children present) and that a man’s job was to provide for his family. Yet, the wife never came across as stupid or subservient. The show enforced the Biblical reality that it is not good for man to be alone.

Many would argue that The Honeymooners depicts a culture that is long gone. Not so, says an article entitled “Return of the Fifties’ Housewife” :

"She sews, cooks, knits, gardens and raises chooks. The housewife is back – with younger women embracing traditional domestic crafts in droves, new figures show.

Sewing machines have rocketed off shelves in the past six months, with Lincraft reporting a 30 per cent increase in sales.…

"Demand for sewing classes has increased – and one of the biggest growth areas has been knitting yarn, with a 10-20 per cent increase in sales compared to this time last year."

The new housewife also appears to be turning our backyards into vegie gardens, with sales of vegetables and herbs surging across nurseries over the past 12 months, according to the Nursery and Garden Industry Association…

"There has been a substantial shift in our mindset to a more old-fashioned, frugal lifestyle – that real waste-not-want-not approach," said social analyst and AustraliaSCAN consultant David Chalke…

"There are a confluence of forces - the global financial crisis, environmental concerns and a new cocooning - which are pulling together to form the new homemaker."

I would submit, however, that there might be more to this trend than a bad economy or the other explanations rendered. I see it as a repudiation of the failed promises of women’s liberation and gender equity, correctly identifying them for what they are: attempts to dissolve the family unit.

However valuable learning to sew, cook, garden, and manage a household is, they must be subordinate to a solid understanding of Biblical law and how it relates across all the disciplines of life. That is why a focus of the Chalcedon Teacher Training Institute* is to help women prepare for their high calling of a Proverbs 31 woman by means of directed study and mentoring. For any who would like to participate, contact me @ lessons.learned@yahoo.com.

* See "Taking Homeschool to the Next Level: Equipping Parents for Kingdom Advancement," Faith For All of Life, Sept./Oct. 2008. Available by subscription.