This is the second of our four part series on: School Choice. Today we’ll tackle homeschooling. Our first post was: Public School and Homeschooling.
By Heather Patenaude
When someone comes to me wanting to know about homeschool their own children I normally say to them first, “You need to establish your philosophy of education.”
In other words, “Why do you want to homeschool? What do you hope to gain from homeschooling?”
There can be two motivations for homeschooling.
We can homeschool out of fear or faith.
Fear driven homeschooling is very much focused on the externals that we want our kids to be sheltered from. This can look like a great reason to homeschool. But at the core: control and fear is what is driving the parents heart to homeschool. And ultimately it is pride.
A homeschooler that is driven by fear and control can be: fault finding, critical, self-righteous, quick to blame, compare themselves to others, and have a false sense that homeschooling will produce Godly children. They can feel like homeschooling is THE only way Christian parents can responsibly educate their children.
Then there is the faith driven reason to homeschool. Which is where we feel like we’re motivated to homeschool. We feel like homeschooling is in obedience to God for our family.
So why do we homeschool?
Before we had children John said, “I want to raise warriors for God’s kingdom.”
That is our long term vision with raising our boys.
We feel like homeschooling gives us the greatest opportunity to have intense discipleship with our boys. And this is our main reason for homeschooling.
We hope to win their hearts, train them in the ways of God, give them selfless hearts for service to others, a grasp of the scripture at a young age, train them to be men of integrity, impart Godly wisdom and not worldly wisdom, give them a love for learning and reading, prepare them to protect and provide for wives, prepare them to be God honoring dads, prepare them to be leaders in the church, and model to them in our family and marriage the beautiful picture of the gospel.
With this as our focus we feel like the best way we can do this is through home educating our boys.
Of course there is absolutely NO way we can do any of this apart from the grace and goodness of God. John and I are in prayer often that God will give us wisdom for us accomplish what He is asking for our family. We remain under His mighty hand, seeking His face, and relying on Him to guide and direct.
We know that we will remain faithful, we will sow and water, but God will do the growing!
HEATHER PATENAUDE is passionate about living a Christ-centered life. This passion flows over to being a wife to John and a homeschool mom to: Miles 8, Luke 6, and Clark 3. Heather is “doing” motherhood right along the side of most of you and hopes that she can encourage you to look beyond your “bath time” challenges and embrace the beautiful calling of motherhood!
Picture is the first day of school 2012/2013