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Socialization: My Main Reason for Homeschooling

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homeschool socializationIf you’re a homeschooler, you’ve probably often been asked, “What about socialization?” Both the skeptical and the concerned like to broach that question. Sometimes it takes a more subtle form: “Are your children involved in sports?” I suspect that some people ask me that just to make sure that my children have interactions with other human beings. Well, of course, they do!

Homeschool families face this concern from generation to generation even though the movement has produced many well-adjusted adults. So is socialization a legitimate reason to not homeschool? As a homeschool father, I believe socialization is one of the best reasons to homeschool.

Will homeschooling produce social misfits?

Concerned friends and family members often worry that our children will become social misfits. Of course, we share this concern. We want our children to develop social graces.

But the worst place to learn social grace is from a group of peers. Trust me, I’ve worked with junior high boys at summer camps; you don’t want your children learning social graces from their peers. The truth is that most children learn social grace from their parents, regardless of where they get their schooling. When parents of publicly educated children fail to teach their children how to interact with others, their children are socially awkward.

What is socialization, really?

Generally, when people talk about socialization, they’re referring to interacting socially with others. But that isn’t what sociologists and educators mean. They define it as the Oxford English Dictionary does: “the process by which a person learns to function within a particular society or group by internalizing its values and norms.” In other words, socialization is children coming to understand what attitudes, values, and behaviors a culture considers normal.

What does public school socialization produce?

What does society think is normal behavior for our children? All sorts of immorality, substance abuse, conspicuous consumption, and disregard for authority.

Paul’s description in Romans 1:29–31 captures much of what our society considers normal: “[People are] filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy . . . , deceit, malignity; whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenant breakers, without natural affection.”

This is what society considers normal, and public schools have been very effective at socializing generation after generation in these norms. I certainly don’t want that socialization for my children.

What socialization do I want for my children?

As my wife and I teach our children, we’re also trying to socialize them. But we want them to consider God’s values and His expectations normal. We want them to graduate from high school producing the fruit of the Spirit.

As Christians, we’re not supposed to fit in. Romans 12:2 commands us not to be conformed to the spirit of this age. When our children reject the world’s norms in favor of God’s norms, I consider that successful parenting. So when people talk to me about socialization, I tell them that socialization is the number one reason I homeschool.

Shopping for Math Number Sense at the Grocery Store

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Shopping for Math Number Sense at the Grocery Store
My wife Megan is a terrific teacher who effectvely uses real-life situations to teach our grade-school children number sense. When we recently celebrated our youngest daughter’s third birthday, our two oldest children wanted to buy something for her. So my wife gave them some extra chores and paid them enough money to buy one of those fancy helium birthday balloons—on sale for ninety-nine cents! My five-year-old stored her coins in a tin container made for holding tea.

Once they made it to the checkout line, Megan had the cashier ring up the balloon as a single order so my daughters could pay for their gift individually. When the cashier announced the cost, our kindergartener took her tin can and dumped all the coins out. Coins clanged on the floor and rolled to a stop. Then she started counting out the change for her purchase.

Megan said she was a little embarrassed, but our daughter counted out the needed change for her contribution to the gift, and our girls bought the balloon.

While the shopping excursion took extra time, it was a powerful homeschooling moment in my daughters’ understanding of math.

Starting with Creation

Children understand math when they begin their exploration of mathematical principles in God’s created order. When we teach counting, our family starts with counting grapes. Then we help our daughters learn place value by connecting blocks into groups of ten. We want our children to know that all those mathematical symbols represent something real. We call connecting mathematical symbols with the physical world number sense. It’s something they can touch and move. Starting with objects in God’s creation when learning math ignites a child’s understanding.

With the light of understanding, children are ready to practice so that math becomes automatic for them.

Practicing with Creation

We teach our children math so they can exercise good and wise dominion over God’s creation. This means that accurate computation is a means to an end. If we can show children that the math skills they’re learning will enable them to do more in the world around them, that gives math a purpose, and math mastery becomes more satisfying than getting a perfect score on a worksheet. They’re learning to solve real-life math problems by practicing with creation.

Bringing it together at the grocery story

Grocery shopping provides an ideal situation for developing number sense. Touching and moving physical coins and dollar bills allows them to manipulate objects as  they do the calculations. Then they can see how the money they have in hand corresponds to price tags in the store. This is the essence of number sense—knowing how those numerical symbols relate to the real world.

Now children are ready to use computation. “Do I have enough money to make this purchase? How much money will I have left over?” When they get older, they can calculate how much sales tax will add to their purchase. All of these activities demonstrate to children that their math skills are critical for everyday activities, such as buying groceries.

Math is a powerful tool for wisely stewarding the little part of creation that God has assigned to each of us. When we start teaching math to our children, it should have meaning that goes beyond plus and minus signs.

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3 Things My Homeschool Curriculum Can’t Do

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Family with Curriculum

Walking into the exhibit hall at a homeschool convention can be an overwhelming experience. There are so many booths! Just like at a bazaar, you can buy fresh food, legal advice, blankets, oddities, and toys. At one convention, I picked up some hair styling devices for my daughters.

And then there are the curriculum providers. The options seem endless. There are Charlotte Mason materials, literature- based programs, and traditional curriculums. At some conventions, you’ll find more than a half dozen providers of classical homeschooling curriculum alone. With so many options how do you choose?

A curriculum helps you package content, create learning experiences, and stay on track. It can do quite a bit to make homeschooling successful. But as much as a curriculum can do, it can’t make my child learn. Learning is what happens inside of my child. Curriculum provides information that is outside my child.

When it comes to how to choose a homeschool curriculum, I think it is important to consider what a curriculum can’t do.

1. No homeschool curriculum can love my child as an individual.

Everyone creating homeschooling curriculum loves children. But they can’t love my child as a unique person. Only my wife and I can do that.

Children need to know that the person teaching them loves and wants what is best for them. Education requires a lot of work on my daughter’s part. For my child to learn and grow, she must have the assurance that her effort is worthwhile. If she suspects that the person providing the information and teaching the skills doesn’t care about her well-being, she won’t internalize the content.

Individualized love is what makes classroom teaching so challenging. A classroom teacher must establish a relationship of trust with each child in a group of  twenty or thirty students. And the teacher must do that every single year. A loving home provides that individualized love naturally.

2. No homeschool curriculum can create accountability for learning.

Since learning happens on the inside, we can’t just put educational content around a child and expect learning to take place. I’ve seen this failure several times with my daughter. We handed her an assigned reading or exercise, and she went through the motions without engaging her mind in the learning. As a result, the information just poured through her head like water into a bucket with a hole in the bottom.

Children need to know that their parents care enough about them to ensure they’ve got it. Whenever our daughter becomes lackadaisical in her learning, we correct the attitude and show her that she must internalize the information and skills. She has been quick to respond, not only taking responsibility for her learning but also enjoying it.

3. No homeschool curriculum can challenge my child to do his or her personal best.

Each child is different. Sometimes a child misses every fourth question on chemistry tests, but you know he’s doing his best. Other times, you can tell your child is getting a hundred percent of the questions right but isn’t doing his best.

There was a time when my wife and I saw our daughter getting perfect scores in two subjects, but she wasn’t trying her hardest. So we talked to her about it and started writing harder tests. At first she didn’t think it was fair. But by the end of the year, she was excelling and was satisfied that she had done her personal best.

Homeschool curriculum presents information in an engaging way. It gives roadmaps for learning so that children are ready for the next step. Curriculum can also provide activities that develop skills and deep understanding. But it cannot create a nurturing environment in which children know that they’re loved, that the learning is for their benefit, and that they will always be challenged to do their best. Only a parent can provide that environment.

3 Connections Between Faith and Learning

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Biblical vs secular worldview

According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, more than 60 percent of homeschoolers choose to teach their children at home because they want to “provide religious instruction.” That was true for my parents when they decided to homeschool me, and it is true for my family as my wife and I now homeschool our children. Secular public education is not an option for us. We want to provide our kids with a Christian education that makes the connection between faith and learning in our homeschool.

Secular Disconnect

If you ask most Christian parents whether they use secular lessons in their homeschool, they typically say, “No way!” But that’s assuming that secular means denying God’s existence. Actually, secularism claims that religion is a private matter and as such shouldn’t influence considerations regarding public life. So we have public officials who say, “I’m a Christian, but I don’t let that affect my decision-making.”

When we take a secular-based teaching of math, science, or English into our homeschool and place religious education around it, we present education and faith as unrelated. We’re still giving our children a secular education by acknowledging a disconnect between faith and learning.

Worldview Connection

The connection between faith and homeschooling comes from a strong biblical worldview. The basis of any worldview is a big narrative that answers crucial life questions such as “Who am I?” and “Where did I come from?”

The Bible gives us the narrative of Creation, Fall, Redemption. Understanding this story and its implications for homeschooling enables us to connect faith and learning. Let’s look at how each part of this narrative connects faith and learning.

1. Creation Connection

God created humans in His own image and blessed them with stewardship over all the rest of His other creation. These truths from the creation account enable us to make the first and foundational connection to learning. We learn because God blessed us with His image and gave us a job. Our learning reflects God’s glory and it is a powerful tool for fulfilling His command to exercise rule over creation.

2. Fallen Disruption

When Adam sinned, his heart became fallen. It loves wrongly and so thinks wrongly. The account of the fall points to a second, deeper connection between faith and learning. As we learn, we must be vigilant of wrong thoughts based on wrong loves. That doesn’t frighten us from education. Instead we should use the Bible as a corrective lens in all that we’re learning so that we can evaluate the ideas within any subject and reject the false ones.

3. Redemption Connection

God’s plan for redemption is as sweeping as the fall. It can straighten out all of those twisted thoughts we encounter in science, literature, and history. As believers, we’re obligated to bring every thought into obedience to Christ. This is the final, deepest connection between our faith and learning. When we evaluate an erroneous idea in a subject, we cannot simply identify it as false and move on. We must press it back toward God’s creational design.

Let’s take math and see how a biblical worldview enables us to connect faith and learning. Notice how each step makes a deeper connection.

  1. Creation: Since we’re made in God’s image, we can use math as a powerful tool. So we use it to rule over God’s creation and serve others to bring Him glory.
  2. Fall: God’s lordship over all creation disproves secularists’ claim that “math is neutral.”
  3. Redemption: Math must be governed by the Christian ethic laid out in Scripture. It should only be used to love my neighbor and never used to do my neighbor harm.

You and I know the account of Creation, Fall, and Redemption. But how are we doing bringing these big-story implications for learning to our children’s homeschooling? Take time to determine if your homeschooling is presenting faith and learning as unconnected or if it is reaching the kind of connection that a biblical worldview demands. At BJU Press, we’re committed to providing resources and curriculum that assist homeschool families in creating those connections between faith and learning. Each post below provides an in-depth look at the three connections—Creation, Fall, and Redemption.

Redemptive Homeschooling

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“Daddy!” My five-year-old will routinely exclaim before telling me about something her little sister has broken. I explain that toddlers break things. Then I try to fix whatever toy or block creation has been destroyed. When I do, my five-year-old expects the restoration to match the pre-broken condition. I wish I could do that for her every time, but I can’t.

Recently, I wrote on how the fall twists education in ways that we as Christian homeschool parents need to be aware of. But that raises two questions for us: Can it be straightened out? Do we as parents have a role in straightening it out? We find answers to these questions in the story of redemption and its implications for Christian homeschooling.

God’s Plan for Redemption

Immediately after Adam’s reluctant disclosure of sin, God began the work of redemption. He told Satan: “I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel” (Genesis 3:15).

In this first promise of redemption (sometimes called the protoevangelium), a promised seed defeats the evil seed. Let’s explore three aspects of this redemptive plan that can shape the way we view our children’s education.

Redemption Involves Conflict

There is enmity between Satan and Christ. Throughout redemptive history, Satan attacked God’s people in an attempt to stop the coming Messiah. When Christ came, the devil tried to take His life and was able to “bruise his heel.” But the cross inflicted the mortal wound, and ultimately Christ will cast the evil one into the lake of fire (Revelation 20:10).

All of life is a series of skirmishes in this cosmic battle. Satan cannot create anything, so he takes God’s good creation and twists it into weapons against its Maker. So math, reading, science, and history aren’t creations of the devil, but he will seek to use them against the Lord.

Redemption Leads to Restoration

Even though our sinful hearts are eager to cooperate with the evil one in twisting every good part of creation, God intends to straighten it out. Take cities as an example. We’re tempted to think cities are evil at the core. The first city was built by a murderer (Genesis 4:17), and throughout history cities have been centers of all kinds of vice.

But cities were part of God’s creational plan; it was sin that twisted them for evil purposes. In the original creation, God gave humans a mandate to rule over creation and filled the Garden of Eden with all the raw materials needed to develop cities.

In the final chapters of the Bible,  we see the culmination of redemption coming in a city. God’s work of redemption pushes cities to their creational purpose.

God created an order for all things. The Fall pushes everything away from that creational purpose, and redemption pushes it toward its creational design.

Redemption Is Comprehensive

Sometimes we’re guilty of thinking redemption only applies to individuals, but it’s as comprehensive as the Fall. Scripture promises a new heaven and a new earth where lions return to their creational design and eat straw like oxen (Isaiah 65:25). Even human use of metals is redeemed as the people of the nations beat their swords into plows (Isaiah 2:4).

Much of this comprehensive redemptive work comes after a final judgement of evil. As long as there is sin, things will be twisted.

Our Role in God’s Plan for Redemption

God’s plan for redemption is confrontational and restorative. It is as comprehensive as the Fall. So what role does homeschooling our children play in His plan?

Redemption in Our Minds

There is a New Testament expectation that we engage in this redemptive confrontation in our minds. Paul instructs us that “the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds [and] casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:4–5).

A critical part of redemption is waged in our minds. Every thought must be pushed back to its created order—obedience to Christ. That includes thoughts about math, science, literature, and history. Wherever we encounter thinking that is contrary to Scripture, we must refute it and then replace it with redemptive thinking.

Redemption in Our Homeschooling

As parents, we play a critical role in shaping our children’s thinking in all areas of life including when we’re teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic. Deuteronomy 6:7 tells us to diligently teach them God’s ways on every subject in every circumstance all the time. We shouldn’t be surprised to find that evil twists every part of our lives, but we must prepare ourselves to confront disobedient thoughts in the subjects we’re teaching. And we should respond by pushing that thinking toward Christ.

Read about how a biblical worldview shapes Christian homeschooling on our blog.