My sweet wife, homeschool mom extraordinaire, turned to me a few years ago and made a suggestion. “You have been talking about home schooling all over the country for years. How would you like to try home schooling yourself?”
Our oldest son was 11 years old at the time, and she had had a go at it for . . . well . . . 11 years. Of course I could not argue with such impeccable logic. So that was the day I started home schooling my son. And that was the day that we stopped home schooling our son.
On that first day, I immediately realized that we had a problem. I had to make a living for my family. But here was this little 11 year old boy who needed a mentor, an educator, a tutor, and a father. Now I was challenged with how one balances these things.
After two years of “homeschooling” or whatever I am doing with my son, here is how it shakes out. As we drive from county to county and from state to state to minister, we listen to a set of lectures on world history from a Biblical worldview. Occasionally, we are forced to shut off the tape, and for twenty miles we talk of the development of modern empires or the persecution of the Christians under the Romans.
One time, as we were speeding down one of the dirt roads out in Elbert County approaching our home, Daniel hit a snag while factoring a trinomial. I worked on the problem with him over the emergency brake, and it worked pretty well, except that I forgot who was driving. I had to hit the brakes a little hard, and we almost wound up in the ditch at the intersection of Roads 17 and 98.
I usually spend a few hours at the office hammering out a message for church on Sunday, so Daniel takes the time and works on an exposition of II Samuel 6 for our family worship time in the morning. I will constantly interrupt his academics so he can do a little research on a radio program I am working on or order a part for our computer system off the web. While I’m in a business conversation with a client over lunch, my son sits next to me and monitors the cell phone, taking a message or two for me.
I have to admit that this is not a classroom. It does not take place in a home and it is a little disorganized. I’m not sure you can call it education, in the modern sense of the word. And, I’m not sure you can refer to me as an educator. Am I an educator or a mentor?
While my son at 13 years of age may be working through Algebra II and may write like most college students today, his “academic” advancement is the least of my concerns. The real issue with which I am constantly concerned is the state of his faith and character. How is he developing towards the calling God has on his life?
All of this has brought me to question whether I am a teacher? I know that I am a pastor, an executive director, a radio broadcaster, and a writer. If I am educating my son, and I am all of these things, then precisely what is the role of teacher?
The major problem with modern education is that educational institutions have separated themselves from faith and life. Of course, faith and obedience are inseparable, though distinct. Nevertheless, a teacher is not one who merely bequeaths knowledge. He does what Jesus did. He trains the faith, character, and life of those that he teaches. Therefore, when you ask an educator what he does for a living and he responds, “I’m a Latin teacher,” he has given something less than a Christian response. He ought to say “I disciple in faith and life, and I teach Latin.”
A biblical epistemology (or theory of knowledge) always includes a life-integration element, and this dictates the environment for education. “Be doers of the word and not hearers only.” Therefore, a teacher cannot be one who “know”s and doesn’t “do.” As Jesus did, we must mentor in faith and life, and do it by example of faith and life. If we have never learned to plug knowledge into life, we have failed in the communication of that knowledge, and it becomes stagnant and rotten.
As an elementary example, I would apply this to my seven-year-old daughter Bethany. She is learning to read for the first time. But she learns to read for a purpose, and it is not so that she will be able to read the “great” philosophers of Aristotle, Plato, and Rousseau. It is so that she will be able to read the Bible and be a doer of the Word and not a reader only. Within days of her being able to read her first sentence, she joins the rest of the children around the family circle in our Bible time in the morning, reading her own verse in turn. This in itself, motivates her to be a fine reader! She sees that there is a purpose to her reading lessons. She can join in with the others in family worship and be a part of the Christian life of the home as we read Gods Word, discuss it, and apply it together.
We want our children’s education to be instantly meaningful and purposeful, which means that it is applied. They will learn to write, but they will write letters to Grandma and letters of encouragement to an elderly widow in the church. They will learn to sing so that they can sing worship to God on Sundays – I can hardly think of a better life application. Can you?
Thus, even in a “liberal arts” education, children must learn the Word and the Word must not be stagnant. In the process of learning grammar, logic, and rhetoric, they must minister to others in word and deed, which includes all sorts of service and dominion work.
A’ Students Teach
A common adage in the entrepreneurial world tells us that A’ students will end up teaching, and B’ students will work for C’ students. This is because schools are in the business of being, well, schools. (It should be no surprise to us that President George W. Bush was a C student at Yale University.) Therefore, those that do well in schools will grow up and work very well in the business of schools! But schools are not life! Schools are not homes, churches, and dominion work, and as far as they are disconnected from these areas of life, they have denied a true, biblical theory of knowledge. Anybody who takes the sterilized class seriously becomes a teacher and perpetuates the “school” mill.
There are three contexts for mentoring, and none of them include what many think of as a school. The first is the home; the second is the church; and the third is the business. In a Christian world, it is the ministers, priests, elders, or pastors that mentor in the church. This was common from 400 AD to 1300 AD, a period when Christian thinking dominated culture in Europe, prior to the humanist Renaissance. Fathers and mothers mentor in the home. This has been common for about 6000 years, more or less. Masters (doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects, carpenters, and firemen) mentor in dominion work. This was the education received by most Americans until the early 19th century, with the exception of those that would go into the ministry (who were taught by other ministers in seminaries like Harvard and Yale). Ministers, fathers, and masters. None of these are teachers and yet all of them are teachers! Could it be that God intends all of us to be teachers (Titus 2:4, Deut. 6:7, 1 Thess. 2:11)? Could it be that the development of a teaching class and teaching colleges (a relatively modern phenomena) is a product of a deficient epistemology (theory of knowledge) and an improper understanding of what a teacher does?
I still remember the sardonic comment used by one of my better teachers in my undergraduate days. “If you can’t work, teach,” he would tell us, “And if you can’t teach, write a textbook.” This sounds a bit like James. “For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass. For he behold himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was.”
Of course this does not mean that a mentor never assembles 12 students in a room to talk of a vine, an unfaithful servant, and the deep love he has for them. It seems to me that Jesus did this kind of teaching. But this teaching reaches the heart and does touch the issues of faith and life. Classrooms have become increasingly sterile places where everything is allowed except faith, useful dominion work, and life in God’s law order.
The content of that educational material will be driven by the work that must be done in the life of the student and by the worldview of the mentor, not by some government agency with its concept of statist life.
Years ago, I graduated with a four-year degree in engineering from one of the top three engineering colleges in the state of California. It was a school that boasted an intensive hands-on educational program with laboratories in almost every course. Despite this superior academic experience, I will testify that this preparation was still vastly insufficient. For the first three years of my engineering career I was virtually worthless to the corporation for which I worked. I made expensive mistakes and relied heavily on the more experienced engineers. The company found it necessary to put all new recruits through an intensive series of classes on basic skills never touched upon in my university training. It took me almost eight years before I could say that I was a competent engineer.
From the beginning of my career, I realized that the only way I would become a good engineer was to work closely with good engineers in the field. Whenever I entered a new engineering company or advanced to a new position I would seek out the best mentors in the division. I sat next to them in design review meetings. I took my designs to them for their review and comments, even though I may not have formally reported to them. I watched them and listened to them, as they asked the right questions in the design reviews. After many years, I became a good engineer and a competent engineering manager.
Over 14 years of engineering, Dennis was the best process engineer I ever met. His work was outstanding and his promotions were well-deserved. Once I asked him how he had become such an extraordinary engineer. He told me that he spent his off-hours during his college years repairing small engines in a rental shop not far from the campus. Amazingly, he attributed little to his academic background and everything to a rental shop!
It is no wonder that the most successful businessman in America, Bill Gates calls American public schools “obsolete.” Speaking before an assembly of US Governors in February, 2005, the billionaire said, “By obsolete, I mean that our high schools even when they’re working exactly as designed cannot teach our kids what they need to know today.” Interestingly, that billionaire recommends for a solution: rigor (character), relevance (life integration), and relationships, which we would claim as several of the core principles undergirding home education.
Beyond a shadow of a doubt, home education has revived this vitally important element of life integration to produce a wildly successful education. Let’s not stop there! As your children graduate and move on to college, continue to apply these time-tested, God-established factors of good education. Seek out teachers that are doing the Word whether it be in music, engineering, or life. Seek out universities that work as closely as possible with the marketplace. Moreover, ministry training will best occur in the context of the church itself. If a young person is taking classes in the medical field, he should be working at a hospital at the same time. Or, if he is studying law for three years, he should be working in a law office at the same time. While the connection of his classes to his work (knowledge and application) may not be seamless in the training process, hopefully he will learn how to take the classes he learned in the morning and apply them at the law office in the afternoon.
Success in life is finding the calling that God has given each person, preparing for it, and doing it to the glory of God. As our boys and girls are trained to apply knowledge to the calling God has on their lives, they will become the most indispensable, relevant, highly productive young people we have seen in our nation for at least a century. They will be the future leaders in business, church, family, and the civil arena.
This article addresses one of the ten secrets in Kevin Swanson’s book, “Upgrade: the Ten Secrets to the Best Education for Your Child.”