A Process for Wisely Deciding How to Educate Your Children
“some of the most difficult decisions parents will ever make are the decisions about how to educate their children, since for most parents, they will have to regularly revisit the matter as their lives change, as their family grows, and as different options become available or unavailable.” - Challies
No matter what method of education you choose for your children, the penalty for failing to get them educated is the same; they will live in your house until they are 40. So at the end of the day, it boils down to "the onus is on Mom, Dad, and child to get it done".
Not everyone can trust the public schools--they contributed, IMO, to my niece's gender dysphoria--and not everyone can afford private/parochial/church schools, and not everyone can afford to have one parent stay at home to educate children. But that noted, everyone can keep an eye out for what's going on in whatever school their children attend, and take appropriate action.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
Agree. It’s easy to lose site of the big picture and what the ultimate goal is. Well, there is more than one goal. You want to be able to look back and feel like you did your best or pretty close to it, but the real goal to keep front of mind from day 1 is “an adult who is well equipped to navigate life, exercise good judgment, engage in productive work to an at-least-self-supporting level, and keep the faith.”
That could be said different ways and improved, I’m sure, but I think sometimes parents get too focused on notions about correct process rather than on the goal, the outcome. So much of process isn’t under our direct control and is more traditional and subcultural than biblical—and also can’t really be quite the same for every child.
In the end, the kid is a human and is going to eventually be an adult human. So you want them to be ready to stand on their own two feet, do their own thinking, and know how to self-teach skills. The ‘do their own thinking’ part carries with it that they are not going to think the way you want them to, as a parent, and getting there on time, means they’re going to start not thinking the way you want them to years before you can be comfortable with that. It’s OK. You are a parent, not a puppeteer, and you are rearing a human not programming a robot.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
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