In light of the tragedy of a school shooting in
Houston, TX, on Friday, May 18, 2018, homeschool groups and leaders are
reporting a spike in requests for information on home schooling. I have
advocated the immediate withdrawal of Christians from public schools for my
entire public career, and well before. The recent spike of interest is
certainly welcome, and I would like to add that there are even greater reasons
and further encouragement to homeschool than the recent tragedy.
I’d like to help you make this decision, and I’d like
to help you get started homeschooling your children. That’s why I’ve prepared a
free download for
you, which I’ll share in just a second.
It is
unfortunate that it takes a tragedy to spark our interest in what was once the
commonsense, default position for Christians. This history is often left out of
our American history lessons: with very few exceptions, there were no public
schools in America until after 1830; and yet, we educated our children to
the same standards of literacy as London or anywhere else. The early Christians
who founded this nation home educated their children with the support of their
churches and fellow believers and communities. They not only did so just fine,
thank you very much, they did so in a way that quite frankly often exceeded the
standards of today.
In fact, a list of famous homeschooled Americans would
baffle the average American today. Yes, we today would probably cite Tim Tebow.
Yay! Touchdown for homeschoolers, right?! Yes. But add to that notch on your
belt these others: George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas
Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, William Penn,
Patrick Henry, Daniel Webster, John Jay, John Marshall, George Washington
Carver, Booker T. Washington, Susan B. Anthony, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas
Edison, Eli Whitney, Orville and Wilbur Wright, and countless
more. You get the picture.
And probably in most of these countless
cases, the mother and father were not trained educators themselves. They did
not have degrees in early childhood development, secondary education, or
English lit. In short, it was people just like you who homeschooled the
majority of America’s greatest leaders, heroes, and personalities. There is no
reason you cannot do this successfully, too, and still have children who are
active and engaged in social activities, sports, civic responsibility, and
more, maybe even the next president or Supreme Court justice.
Did you know that
in the late 1830, public schools were invented to replace the influence of the
churches and Bible? Did you know they were created by socialist liberals to
take the children of conservative Christians and turn them against the faith
and into socialist liberals over time, and at the expense of the parents? It’s
all true, unfortunately.
I’ll let you decide if they have succeeded or not.
From my perspective, when the young men start dressing in trench coats wearing
communist regalia and calling themselves “Marxist,” then march in a shoot up a
school, I’d say the socialists have succeeded enough to end the whole
experiment.
Yet too many today have no better answer than to blame
the guns and the rights of law-abiding citizens. This time, however, it wasn’t
the media’s favorite scapegoat, the AR-15 “assault weapon.” It was a simple
old-fashioned shotgun and a .38-special revolver—two of the commonest guns
there are. Are they going to move to ban these now? Are these really the
problem?
I’d say the guns are not the problem. The schools are a
big part of the problem. The only common denominator in every school
shooting so far is that every single one was in a liberal-paradise “gun free
zone.” But neither do I advocate making public schools into armed zones.
Christian children need Christian education, and the best, safest, and most
productive way of doing that is homeschooling.
The question, “Why would you send your child to be a
sitting duck in a gun-free zone?” cannot be more bone-chilling in this day, but
it should not be any more bone-chilling to the Christian parent than the
question, “Why would you send your child to be a sitting duck in a Christ-free
zone?” Yet Christians do both anyway, every day. Perhaps an even more difficult
question to answer is, “What will it take to wake you up?”
For some, the answer to that question is, “A school
shooting in your own back yard.” Even Rush Limbaugh got this one right. When a
former Obama administration official, Arne Duncan, piped up saying we should
boycott schools until we can tighten gun control laws, Limbaugh rightly retorted, “Hey, Mr. Duncan, you may not know this, but
parents started doing that a long time ago. It’s called homeschooling. And more
and more parents are boycotting the public school system each and every week in
this country. These eggheads are so, so far behind things.”
I fully agree. We need to be better informed on these
matters. It is not enough to do the right thing only finally in reaction to
some tragedy. The truth is, we have avoiding doing the right thing
for the right reasons for far too long. Every Christian ought to have their
kids out of public schools immediately on principle. All that is required in
most cases is a lifestyle change on our part, and perhaps a little initiative
and encouragement. What are we waiting for?
For this reason, I have decided to give away, for
free, an important and relevant part of one of my most popular books, Restoring
American One County at a Time. Chapter 1, “On Education,” is now available
as a FREE download. Please
take advantage of this free offer. It will help you make one of the most
important decisions for your children that you have ever made.
In this booklet, I discuss reasons to
homeschool, the biblical and historical mandates behind it, some reasons
secular progressives created public schools to begin with, the alternative
secular religion they professed explicitly for this reason, and the later
reasons public schools grew to be the norm—so much so that we don’t even
question it anymore, to our tragic loss. We’re just immersed in a culture of
government-run schooling and we don’t even realize why it’s not right. Finally,
I discuss real, practical steps you can take to get involved in home educating
your children, and I’ll lend you plenty of encouragement along the way.
Please take advantage of this free offer from American Vision.
Visit our store
for more resources on education and for home educators, and feel free to
write, message, or email us any question or comments you may have. We’d love to
help you restore Christian education one child, one family, one home at a time.