From Dr. Al Mohler
In other news, it is very interesting to note something that’s being observed nearly nationwide. As many school systems are coming back on in terms of in-classroom attendance, a lot of the kids aren’t coming back, a lot of the students are not back in the classroom, and a lot of the reason is not actually tied to concern about COVID-19. Instead, what you see are headlines, such as recently ran in The Wall Street Journal, “More Parents Shift to Homeschooling.” Let me give you the bottom line in the reports. The bottom line is this: even as many school systems have come online, many school leaders are actually shocked that few students have come back, far fewer in some cases than had been expected. When people have asked questions about why, many parents have simply responded that they are not yet ready to send their kids back into the classroom. Now, the interesting thing is when they are indicating their intentions for the fall, some of them say they still intend to continue to teach their children.
So what’s going on here? Well, The Wall Street Journal tells us that many parents who had not intended to homeschool, had discovered even after the shock of becoming instantaneous homeschoolers about March of last year, just about a year ago, they discovered that what they feared, and what they initially hated and caused all kinds of anxiety, has turned out to be very healthy for their family, and they’ve decided they like it so much, they’re going to keep homeschooling their children. As Valerie Bauerlein reports, as parents grow increasingly frustrated with remote learning during the pandemic, some are deciding to pull their children out of school and try teaching on their own. In North Carolina, we’re told the state’s homeschool monitoring website crashed on the first day of enrollment. More than 18,800 families filed to operate a homeschool from July 1 to January 22. That’s just a little bit more than a month ago, that closing date, more than double the school year before.
Now, this is really interesting because yes, there’s a lot of pressure on the part of many parents and in many communities to reopen the schools, and I think that is important, by the way. I think given the social role played by many schools, not only in education, but in particular, in social services for children, especially in many urban areas, the fact is the schools need to open. And in many cases, the obstacle to opening the schools is actually not COVID-19, it’s the school unions, the labor unions for teachers that are trying to opportunistically make gains in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But going back to The Wall Street Journal report, the paper tells us, “Homeschooling in the US has accounted for a small portion of all schooling since the 1970s, but it has been growing from a traditional base of education reformers and religious conservatives to families worried about issues such as bullying and violence. Homeschooling represented 3% of students nationally in 2016, the latest figures available, compared with 88% for public and charter schools, and 9% for public schools. But as the coronavirus pandemic upends the school year, data from several states shows,” says The Wall Street Journal, “more parents decided for practical reasons to take control of their children’s curriculum and schedule.”
Practical reasons. Well, there are many practical reasons. The ability of families to set their own schedule, there are all kinds of practical reasons having to do with the involvement of parents directly in the education of their children, children and siblings socializing together, in a way that sometimes is made virtually impossible by the fracturing of children and families during the school day. But there are more than pragmatic issues here, pragmatic issues that might extend to the quality of education, and even the performance of these students, when it comes to testing and college admissions.
But beyond the pragmatic, there are very important principled issues why I believe this transformation is taking place, and it’s not just reports like this in The Wall Street Journal, they are reports that are coming to me personally, just about every day, and certainly, repeatedly every week. Families that had not previously considered homeschooling, particularly Christian families, are beginning to rethink that equation.
And I think this is very important, and I think that even as homeschooling is not institutionally, that is to say, is the only school choice, the right choice for every Christian family, I have argued for my entire adult life that every Christian family is, in essence, a homeschool, and all Christian parents are homeschoolers, the issue is the seriousness with which Christian parents take that responsibility. They may partner with others, or just classical schools, or Christian schools, or any number of different school options, but the fact is, God has given parents the responsibility to raise their children and to educate our children, and that’s a non-negotiable, non-delegatable responsibility. We may have partners, but we’re going to answer to Christ for our children, not those partners.
But in the principal category, there are all kinds of reasons why I think even given the moral issues, even given the issues that are coming at us in such velocity since the inauguration of President Biden, given the Equality Act, and given executive orders that have taken place, what we’re looking at is an increased velocity in the moral revolution that’s taking place. All kinds of teachings that we now know are going on in classrooms, public schools, private schools, yes, even many Christian schools, and I’ll be discussing that in coming days, in which very toxic curricula are being taught to children in such a way that they begin to question even the teachings of their church and the teachings of their parents, because of the teachings of the schools that their parents have put them in.
There’s some interesting aspects of this story far beyond that, for one thing, it’s not just that The Wall Street Journal and others, especially in the education community are noticing the trend, it’s also that in that Wall Street Journal article, there’s a very interesting sentence, and I read it directly from the article, it goes back to this, “Homeschooling in the US has accounted for a small portion of all schooling since the 1970s, but it has been growing from a traditional base of education reformers and religious conservatives, to families worried about other issues.” You’ll notice what it says here, is that the core of the homeschooling movement began among education reformers and religious conservatives. Very, very interesting.
Why those two different statements, education reformers, and religious conservatives? Well, it’s because many in the media, many in politics and beyond, just assume that if you meet a homeschooler, you meet a conservative Christian. Now, statistically that’s likely to be true, but that’s not the entirety of the story. The fact is that Christian conservatives didn’t start the homeschooling movement in the United States, the hippies did, the children of the left, the so-called unschoolers who rejected traditional schooling because they didn’t want the government, that is, the man teaching their children to be conformists.
So if you’re looking for the origins of the homeschooling movement, in this sense in America, in the modern age, don’t look to, say, rural Kentucky, look instead to the Pacific Northwest, to Washington, and Oregon, and Northern California, find people who wouldn’t be described as con
servative Christians, in the main, who nonetheless, were taking their children out of the schools, because from the left, they feared that the schools would turn their children into little conformists. But then the Christian homeschooling movement arose, and why did it arise? It arose because many Christian parents understood that they did not want their children to grow up to be little conformists, when it comes to the spirit of the age. By the way, I’ve written about this and talked about it on The Briefing. If you want further documentation, you’ll find it at my website.
The constitutional respect for the right of parents to homeschool their children was largely won, not by the hippies, not by conservative Christians, but By the Amish, by the Amish, who argued that they had a right to raise their children without compulsory education, and they won key victories in the United States Supreme Court, and those victories have applied to yes, the hippies and conservative Christians as well. There are, by the way, still some on the left who homeschool their children for the very same reason as homeschooling emerged in the 1960s, and especially in the 1970s. But the fact is that the vast majority of homeschooling parents are conservative Christians, conservative parents, who are very concerned about the education of their children so much so, that they are unwilling to place them into schools, where they have very high probability being taught that which their parents do not want these children to be taught.
By the way, the opposition to homeschooling, in the main, are those who want to teach our children that which is different than what we would teach them, and they want the public schools, they see the public schools as the main vehicle for doing this. Now, as we’re going to see in coming days, elite private schools are, if anything, in many cases, even worse when it comes to ideological corruption, but we’ll have to wait until we look at that just in coming days. What we need to see right now is that there is a trend towards homeschooling, and it is important, and it is of particular importance for Christians. I see this as good news.