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Home education in NZ and the Christian faith
Introduction
I hope this site is as open and helpful to all home educators as possible.
The aim is to encourage home educators from all walks of life - just as
I have been helped and enriched by home educators with diverse views and experiences.
After running this site for several years, and nearly a decade and a half
of home educating, I added this page to express some personal insights
which have only recently become clear (sort of).
In no way do I want to alienate many of our wonderful friends and colleagues
who do not follow our Lord Jesus. This is a public web site so feel free to read
on - but the page title and topic heading should give all readers fair warning that,
on this one page, you will encounter content which deals with the Christian faith.
Just as our home educating offended a significant number of our Christian friends,
so too some of what I say here might be hard for some Christians to hear. I simply
ask that you seriously weigh up what I say, and let it lie for a while. I have learned
with home education that what seems crazy may actually became relevant later. Perhaps
the same will apply here.
So with that introduction:
Discipleship and home education
When I first started home educating, I did not specifically think about it as
a "Christian" thing to do. As a Christian I simply try to follow God -
which if course is easier said than done. In this area, I didn't try for example,
to teach adding by using say angels instead of apples, etc. We just went on with
our lives as normally as any home educator can. There was no specific "Christian"
curriculum, just as there was no specific "History" (or any other) curriculum.
Truth is truth.
As I progressed, I discovered that home education does indeed have many many
advantages for the spiritual development and discipling of children. Although this
wasn't why I started, I can certainly see benefits now. Probably the most important
of these is the reduction in peer pressure, which in turn helps improve the quality
of relationship between children and parents. (Of course there will still be challenges
- but on a totally different scale.)
I can see now the command in Deuteronomy to talk about God's commands as we go
through life is indeed a very sound and practical model for raising children. It
should be applied both to the sort of knowledge dealt with in our schools, and also
in our Sunday Schools. If we decide not to delegate the former to others, how much
more important is it not to delegate the latter?
There really is a big difference
When I first started my home educating journey, I did not regard home education
as basically much different from school - it was more like an alternative. School
was fine - after all, I went through it and came out OK (although some would question
that).
During my journey, I discovered that Ivan Illich, John Holt and many others have
been saying this over the last half-century - and since school as we know it is
only 200 or so years old, that is a very long time. In fact other writers up to
a century ago proposed alternative models, without necessarily criticising schools
as directly.
By coupling all of that research with my own experience of both school and home
learning, I cannot help but conclude that school is fundamentally flawed, and no
amount of playing with curricula, methods, etc. will ever make it work effectively.
My sad conclusion is that very few schooled children will fulfill their potential
because of school - and many will suffer needlessly because of it.
The parallels of school with church
Each of us must respond to God's call - not to human ideas. For the majority
of Christian home educators who are happy in their church situation, I encourage
you to really go for it - to be as fruitful as you can - because the time is short,
the harvest is plentiful and the labourers are few. Currently we're not even keeping
up with population growth - we need 30, 60 and 100 times harvest - not just a few
percentage point gains. Don't settle for less.
However, in the last couple of years or so I have begun to see a bigger picture.
I am involved with one of several developing networks in New Zealand. The difference
between these and traditional house churches is that they are not so much meeting
in a house, as learning to explore a very different way of following Jesus. (Not
that there is one way - far from it.) It is also very focused on planting more churches.
Over Queen's Birthday weekend (2004) several networks got together for a conference.
The guest speaker was Wolfgang Simson - who works with DAWN and who wrote "Houses
that change the world". It was truly inspirational and scarily challenging.
(I don't think anybody agreed with everything he said - not even the organisers
- and all of us were taken outside of our comfort zone.) For me the most interesting
part was his description of a typical journey out of traditional church into house
church - because he described my journey.
This is only a very brief summary. We start at -2, with little awareness of problems
with traditional church structures, and we're happy there. (As a natural cynic I
wonder if I have ever been there.) From there we move to -1, where we can see problems,
and look forward to God doing a new thing and fixing them at some undefined time.
At ground 0 we are out of the traditional church - and in fact dying to it. From
+1 we can see the "promised land" but aren't yet there. It is a place
where having got us out of the traditional church, God has to get the traditional
church out of us. At +2 we are functioning like the church in Acts. Just as the
age of miracles is definitely not over, so the age of the New Testament church is
not over.
During this presentation, Wolfgang said it generally takes up to a month of detox
for every year spent in a traditional church structure. I was amazed to hear him
say exactly the same thing about church that we say about school! (And as there
were several home educators at this conference, we exchanged knowing looks.)
The following year we were blessed to have friends of Wolfgang - a British couple
who live in Texas - and are leaders in the new home church in the USA. The best
thing I got from them was chance to learn from their mistakes - such a refreshing
change from the many teachers I've heard who've never made any mistakes.
Conclusion
I've been doing a lot of thinking and meditating on what this means. The answer
I have arrived at is so simplistic it's almost not worth saying - yet it seems there
is something vital here that God is trying to say to the church. God values small
things, and in society, he particularly values families or households as the basic
unit of society. Man invents great systems, but he cannot improve on God's design.
We build organisations - God builds organisms. We need to work to support the family
- which is an essential part of God's plan. No wonder it is under such attack.
Two practical things that we can support come to mind. One is the Grapevine magazine
as it attempts to support families around New Zealand. The other is politicians
who do support what we call traditional family values. They are up against a pretty
strong campaign to destroy the family. I'm sure their are others (perhaps Plunket,
Parents Centre, etc.) but I don't know enough about these.
If you don't identify with any of this, please stay focused on doing what you
can where you are. Be fruitful and keep running towards the goal. But if now or
at some time in the future you are interested in finding out more, e-mail me, read
Wolfgang's book, or search the Internet. You might find more "weirdos"
than you think.
Thanks for reading this - I fear I've not done the subject justice. Also coming
back two years after I wrote this, I understand some things quite differently -
it's quite a journey. This is why I'm happy to answer any e-mails privately. However,
you might also want to join a Kiwi Yahoo group to hear others on this topic. check
out everyhomeachurch
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