It Takes a Father
by R.C. Sproul Jr.

What would you do if you met your neighbors, and were delighted that they home school their children? And by all accounts these are decent people. They don't play their music too loudly, they don't go out trick or treating. The kids are polite, always with the "yes sir," and the "no ma'am." But then something goes awry. You lean over the fence and offer little Johnny some cookies. He runs screaming into the house calling for Mommy. Mommy comes out all agitated, but trying to remain calm. "I'm sorry, " she says, looking wary, "but we cant visit anymore, and our kids cant play together. We didn't know you worshiped demons." "Demons?" you ask, "what demons?" "The ones you just tried to get Johnny to eat. Don't you know that Reverend Jones Koresh Rajneesh says that cookies are the baked souls of demons? We don't eat demons in our church because we're keeping our pods pure for when the giant grasshoppers come from the four corners of the wind. I'm sorry for you though. We don't take people over 5 feet tall into our church.'"

Reluctantly you admit your ignorance on these issues and ask for more information on this religion. The neighbor gingerly hands you a book, and off you go. You discover in this book that this church believes reading is a tool of the devil, that 2+2 is 17, and that the world is flat. The pod, you find, is purified by four hours a day of standing on one's head. What do you do?

You think back to the little time you spent with little Johnny and his siblings. They're such sweet kids. They are a little short, but maybe that's from all that standing on one's head. What do you do?

Suppose you change the scenario a little bit. You watch the new neighbor children get off the school bus one afternoon. They throw rocks at your dog. You see little of them, though you almost always see that tell-tale blue glow flowing from the one-eyed idol in their living room. The kids call you "Hey you." They teach your children new and unacceptable words, plus tell them exactly how to put a condom on a banana. Mom looks down her nose at you at the grocery store when you pick up some hamburger, because, she explains, her children explained to her how they learned meat was murder from their school teacher. Of course the kids can read (well, if there are picture hints), add and subtract (with the help of a calculator), and though they can't find these United States on a globe, they know the world is round.

In both these scenarios someone else's children are getting a horrible education, one at home, the other at the local government school. Our tendency is to treat both problems as if they were the same. We are frustrated that some parents teach nonsense, and that all government schools teach nonsense. In our debates over the merits of school versus homeschooling, we almost always argue like the pragmatic products of government schooling that we are. Home schoolers tend to highlight the horrible things taught in government schools, and the great test scores of homeschoolers.

Government schoolers, well, all they can do is hold up some horrid example of so-and-so whose little Suzy still can't read, and to defend their local government school because it's not like all the others. (Don't forget this bit of wisdom: "We went to government school, and we turned out alright.")

The bottom line, however, is that the weakest homeschool is better than the best government school. The reason has nothing to do with end results, but with the beginning obligations. That is, parents ought to teach their children because only parents have been given the authority to do so. A parent's obligation is not to see that their children are well educated, but to educate their children well. A poor homeschool parent is no more a failure in meeting that obligation than the parents of the government school valedictorian. Both are failures.

How many parents don't homeschool because of their fear that they're not up to the task? They have believed the world that it takes an expert, and disbelieved God who enjoins parents (Deuteronomy 6) to teach their children what they need to know. And the ranks of homeschooling are swelling principally because as government schools sink deeper and deeper into the morass, more and more parents are saying, "Well, I bet I could at least do better than that."

The fear is misplaced not principally because parents can do better than government schools (though of course, they can), but because God says parents are to do it. That's enough, or at least, it should be.

It's not as though God gave parents this charge, and forgot to take into account that some parents might botch it up. "Oops, better get down there and create a superintendent of schools, just to make sure." When God gives authority to one institution, the danger is always there that, they will mess it up. But that isn't an invitation to transfer the obligation to another institution. God has given husbands conjugal obligations. But when husbands fail to meet them, no one says, "Hey, let's get the government to do it," nor "Call in the family minister from the church. He's got to take over for Mr. X who is falling down on the job." We can be sure that the wrong institution will always do worse, no matter how good their intentions.

God has given particular children into particular families. And it is the father who will answer for those families, not the church, and not the state. He has both the authority and the obligation to teach his children all that God has done, and all that He commands. Yes, the church may help. It may teach him how and what to teach. And yes the state can uh, ....keep bad guys from breaking into the school home. But the father will answer, not only for what is learned, but for who taught.