How to think about homeschooling

Draught Horse Press is still feeling its way towards one of its goals, namely to provide support to families with older homeschooled children. Faithful readers will understand that the approach we follow barely qualifies as an approach; it is more of an attitude, and can be realized in so many different ways that it isn’t possible (or desirable) for us to create an off-the-shelf curriculum. But there always seems to be a next thing, a small step we can take to make our offerings more helpful in this area.

We’ve added quite a few titles over the past year with older children in mind. And in the 2005 catalog, which will go into the mail in a couple of weeks, we provide one-page guides on how to use the books we sell to teach children in ten different areas: reading and writing, economics, history, literature and art, philosophy, the Bible, Christian doctrine, the Christian life, modernity, and agrarianism. Maybe most important, we sell When You Rise Up, Dr. R.C. Sproul Jr.’s book that lays out the understanding of child training that our approach to homeschooling is based on.

Still, it takes a fairly adventurous person to take what we say about homeschooling and use it as a basis for their own efforts. We think it gets easier after some experimenting with the approach; parents come to see that children really do learn when they talk to them about important things, and that it leads the children to view parents as a source of wisdom, and that parents are more qualified than they have been told to make decisions about what is important for their children to know. We fully expect that nobody will make it through our ten-topic “curriculum” because after trying our suggestions in a few areas, they will have sufficient understanding of the approach, and sufficient confidence in it, that they will proceed to construct a family curriculum of their own, based on their own traditions and convictions. Such a curriculum may include titles that we carry; it will certainly include many titles that we don’t carry.

The key, then, is to encourage people to try our approach in one or two areas. To make this easier, we are taking another small step, namely writing a handful of four-page topic guides which go into more detail about the books we carry on that topic, what they’re about and how you might use them to teach. Our goal is to have a few of them available by the time we exhibit at the CHAP Homeschool Convention in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in two weeks. These guides are free, and will also be available for viewing and download on the DHP website.

This material is aimed at catching the eye of homeschoolers who know little or nothing about the approach. We’re giving the series of guides a somewhat agressive title, “How to Think About X”, e.g. “How to Think About Reading and Writing.” We’re also going to try out a slogan, printed on a fairly large poster: “Teaching older children is simpler than you’ve been told.”

To introduce the topic guides, I’m also writing a four-page overview that will be called “How to Think About Homeschooling”. Here’s the first page or so of the guide.

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At Draught Horse Press we subscribe to a view of homeschooling that may appear unusual to you. We’re providing this brief guide to our approach so that you will be able to decide if our offerings can be of any help to you. And even if you decide that our approach is not suitable for your family, we hope that the matters we discuss in this guide will contribute to your own understanding of how to train up children.

What would you say is the purpose of life? One’s answer to this question largely determines how one understand the task of training up our children, since all parents want to equip their children to live a life even fuller and happier than their own. Our own answer is very simple: we think the purpose of life is to be a godly person, marry a godly spouse, and raise a godly family. And so we think the goal of education is to equip our children to do just that.

Notice a few things about this goal. First, a godly life is not a brass ring that will be grabbed by a small group of especially gifted folks, and it is not a lottery jackpot that will go to the lucky ones. It is a life that is within every Christian’s reach, and one that God expects every one of his children to live. If we think of a godly life as something so lofty that only the very pious will ever be able to live it, we need to adjust our thinking. The godly life is a normal life, lived by ordinary Christians, requiring no special skills or extraordinary gifts. All this means that we can rest assured that it isn’t all that difficult for godly parents to train their children in godliness.

Second, under this thinking the core curriculum is very small. Our children need to be taught what Dr. R.C. Sproul Jr. calls “the three Gs”—who God is, what He has done for us, and what He requires of us. This is the only knowledge that every child must have. Everything else is optional.

Third, although outside of the three Gs not everyone needs to study the same thing, everyone needs to study something. Our children cannot live full, happy, and godly lives without knowledge and skills. The particular knowledge and skills you choose to impart will depend on your family’s traditions and preferences. You may choose to school your children in horticulture and animal husbandry, or accounting, or classical languages, or civil law, or Christian doctrine, or truck driving, or English literature. As long as the knowledge and skills you impart will contribute to a full, happy, and godly life, you have chosen well.

So much for the goal of education. What can we say about the content of education, i.e. what exactly are we to teach our children as we work towards the goal? Our understanding is this: education is the process of passing along our family traditions and convictions to our children. To be blunt, we reject the notion that a child can grow up to be anything he wants to be. Our parents and grandparents worked long and hard to learn the ins and outs of living a particular sort of life, whether it involves farming or scholarship or business or truck driving, and their knowledge and wisdom is a legacy that we are foolish to reject by choosing to live differently. We should follow in their footsteps, living a life that builds on their legacy and adds to it, and then work diligently to pass that legacy on to our own children.

So far we’ve suggested that the proper goal for education is to equip our children to lead a godly life, and that the proper content of education is a family’s traditions and convictions (which for all families includes the three Gs). What about the means of education—how exactly do we recommend that parents go about teaching their children?

We believe that Deuteronomy 6 tells us exactly how we are to teach our children—by being diligent to talk to them about important things, while sitting in the house and walking by the way, when we lie down and when we rise up. We believe that education is conversation. So in the early years we make some use of textbooks and workbooks, but as soon as possible we move on to a very simple technique —pick a book, read it, then talk about it. Sometimes the children read the book on their own, sometimes we read it to them, sometimes they read it to us. The questions come tumbling out, and they always lead to long and fruitful discussions of how our family understands God and His creation.

It’s a pretty free-form approach, and homeschooling parents will naturally ask two skeptical questions : Is it adequate? and, Is it workable?