Home-schooling: the dillemma

September 15, 2008 in Uncategorized
Tags: bubble, education, home-school, postmodernism, truth

[Disclaimer]

The good

I always thought home-schooling was the greatest thing since Sunday School. Here are a few of its many advantages:

1. They are isolated from evil influences.
2. They are exposed almost exclusively to the Truth. The way bank tellers are trained to recognize false bills is by being exposed only to real bills. They know to reject immediately anything that they haven’t seen before.
3. When they are exposed to lies, they are warned ahead of time and debriefed afterward.
4. They are given all of the answers to life’s most difficult questions. (Frankly, these answers are so simple that a child can understand them.)
5. They strengthen the healthy bonds with their God-given nuclear family.

This is the ideal educational environment, pure and simple.

As a college professor, I have a unique perspective on this. I get to compare home-schooled students with other students when they are first exposed to the larger world of the University Bubble. The difference is startling.

First, home-schooled students already know everything. There is no temptation for them to indulge in intellectually capricious behaviors as other students do: “learning” and “changing their minds”. There is no need for them to “learn” since they already know everything. They already know the answers to all of the important questions in life. The answer is, “only people who don’t believe in Jesus ask questions like that!” Students who already know everything are much easier to deal with for us professors.

Home-schooled students are more selective in which courses they take. They don’t take courses like “History of Literature in Film” (or whatever it’s called). In such a course, students are hung over the precipice and exposed to R-rated movies that portray things that should not be spoken of among believers. Now, I don’t mind a good R-rated Mel Gibson or Rambo film that deals with Christian values like murdering bad people. But this course forces students to watch movies that try to make issues look complicated rather than black-and-white.

And of course the home-schooled children know better than to take a course where they have to read a book written by someone from a non-Christian culture. Fortunately, there are plenty of programs here at our University allow that (such as “Biblical Biology”).

The bad

But a scary thought occurred to me recently: what if people who are not conservative evangelicals also home-school their children?!?!?! I’m talking about Muslims or non-Bible scientists or literary critics or homosexuals. This thought was so scary to me that I had a hard time facing it, at first.

If their children are isolated in their little home-schooled world, think of all of the disastrous consequences!

1. They are isolated from the Truth and everything good!
2. They are exposed almost exclusively to lies and are told not to believe anything but those lies! When they see the Truth, it is so foreign and scary to them that they immediately reject it!
3. If they ever hear the truth, in spite of their evil parents’ efforts to deprive them, their parents rush in to offer some nonsensical counter to the truth.
4. Their poor, immature brains simply accept the “reality” presented to them by their parents. In their depravity, they actually believe that they understand the world through their nonsensical lens.
5. They develop an unhealthy attachment to their parents and siblings and are inexperienced at navigating the real-world social scene.

This is the sickest kind of brain-washing, make no mistake!

What could a college professor possibly do with such a student? No amount of logic, evidence or instruction can get through to such a mind. Imagine it! The student has some ridiculous pat answer to every question! Their answer doesn’t even make sense but they can’t see that!

Try to teach such a student that everything their parents taught them was wrong and they get all upset and transfer to another school!

They think that they already know everything! If a student thinks he already knows everything then there is no way he is going to put in the very hard work that would be required of such a person to learn the Truth. They are completely closed to the Truth!

At our University, they would not be able to avoid some courses that force them to wrestle with Truth (all students must take Bible and Christian Theology.) But because their parents have brain-washed them, they don’t take it seriously. They fool themselves into thinking that they have an argument that refutes the Truths presented in these courses.

I haven’t even touched on the sick relationships these students would have with their controlling, over-involved, unhealthily attached parents. Nor will I go into the obvious problem they will have when they try to navigate the complicated world of social interactions with very little experience at the age of 18.

What to do?

So what is to be done? Here are a few proposals:

1. Only allow people with the Truth to home-school. This will never fly these days with those postmodernists running things.
2. Require parents who home-school to get some training in the Truth. Again, this won’t be accepted these days.
3. Outlaw home-schooling and teach Truth in public and private schools. They used to do this but those activist judges and “civil liberties” lawyers ruined that for everyone.

I really can’t think of any more good options.

Readers, help me out here. What can we do about the fact that there are many children out there who are victims of parents who hide the Truth from them and feed them silly nonsense all day?