BJU Press Blog

Christian Homeschooling

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.

Fallen Hearts Twisting Education

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As a child, I enjoyed visiting the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, with my family. With its historic airplanes and artifacts from the space race, the Air and Space Museum was my favorite. One of my most vivid memories from our trip was what my dad said as we walked toward the Museum of Natural History. “Much of what we’ll see in this museum rejects the Bible,” he warned. “We need to remember that what God said in Genesis is true and what we’ll see today is merely what man thinks.”

I remember thinking that some of the displays promoting evolution were silly as I tried to reconcile the assertions of the evolutionary view with the incredible technological advances of our age. How could so many people with so much education and so much money be wrong about this? How could the generation of scientists that produced the marvels I saw in that museum be mistaken about the origins of mankind? The answer lies in what went wrong.

In Genesis 3, we learn that humans sinned and sin broke everything. Now creation groans, conflict spreads, and death reigns. But of all sin’s consequences, it is the condition of our hearts that is most frightful. In a previous post, we looked at how creation shapes education. In this post, let’s examine how the human heart was twisted in every way in the Fall and how, as a result, we twist every part of God’s creation including science, history, and the rest of education.

The Connection of Loving and Thinking

Romans 3:10 teaches us the pervasiveness of sin’s effects on mankind. “There is none righteous, no, not one.” Then in the next verse, Paul quotes a psalm placing what we love and what we think right next to each other: “There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God” (Romans 3:11). But what is the link between seeking God and understanding?

Proverbs 1:7 makes the connection between right affections for God and right thinking when it says: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.” The most important part of gaining right knowledge is a right relationship with the Lord. And the Lord puts His finger on this relationship because if we cannot love the one being in the universe who is most worthy of our love, then we cannot come to correct conclusions about His universe.

That’s the reason brilliant scientists don’t want to acknowledge that God created them. Their distaste for Him leads them to devise alternative explanations for our origins. This is also why historians believe that man created civilizations that invented gods rather than that God created humanity to develop civilization.

Intelligent, educated people come to wrong conclusions not because their minds are incapable of thinking correctly but because—due to the Fall—their hearts are incapable of loving God as they should.

Educating Hearts and Minds

When mankind sinned, the human heart fell. That fallen heart leads the mind to think incorrectly. Given the nature of learning, broken hearts and minds affect every aspect of our children’s education.

When anyone teaches children, he isn’t relaying only facts and skills to the next generation. He’s passing on personal values (what he loves). Neil Postman, in his 1996 book The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School, observed that education is worship: “For school to make sense, the young, their parents, and their teachers must have a god to serve, or even better, several gods.” He argues that US public schools are dedicated to serving, among others, the god of consumerism. Worshipers of consumerism learn so that they can get jobs and buy the best cars, houses, and vacations.

If Postman, who was a secular humanist, saw the religious nature of education, we as Christian parents need to think through the worship implications of the educational choices we make for our children—especially if we’ve dedicated our homes as Joshua did when he said: “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15).

The Smithsonian not only presents secular society’s view of the past, it demonstrates secularists’ pride in America’s great accomplishments. That’s why the artifacts in the Air and Space Museum represent man’s hope in continual technological advances. You won’t find a Smithsonian museum dedicated to the hope of the gospel. Our hope of redemption is what we want to share with our children through our homeschooling. In the next post, we’ll look at how that hope transforms education.

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Creation and education: Who am I and why am I here?

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As homeschool parents, God has given us a special job to do—to give our children a thoroughly Christian education. I know from experience that making education Christian can become superficial. But the good thing is that the Bible’s story of creation, fall, and redemption can transform our teaching.

Let’s take some time to meditate on the first part of that story, the creation account. There is so much relevant truth in the first two chapters of Genesis. But our focus today will be on how this account changes our Christian homeschooling. So while the record of the first five days of creation tells us a great deal about God and His Word’s power and faithfulness, we’re going to move quickly to the sixth day and the creation of man.

The Image of God in Man

Understanding the image of God in man is critical to our children’s education. They must know that they are special because they bear the image of God. Even after the fall we continue to bear His image (Genesis 9:6).

As a mirror reflects the image of its subject, so we finite beings can reflect God’s infinite glory in our lives. We might have been cracked by the fall, but we still reflect God’s attributes—though imperfectly.

This view of our humanity should alter the way we look at the academic subjects we’re teaching in our homeschools. For example:

  • In science, humans are not a part of the kingdom Animalia. In fact, we rule over the animals.
  • In history, all people groups are made in God’s image. That should shape the way we view institutions such as slavery.
  • In writing, human communication is significant because communicating with another image-bearer always reflects on God the Master Communicator.

The Creation Blessing

In Genesis 1:28, God blessed humans by calling us to fill the earth and to rule over it. God restated this blessing after the Flood (Genesis 9:1-7). This makes sense for God’s image-bearers. We should multiply so that we can reflect His glory all over His creation.

And as God’s special creation, we should have dominion. Dominion came before the fall, so we don’t need to associate it with cruelty. Rather, exercising dominion over God’s creation means wisely making the earth useful for people to live in.

The two aspects of this double blessing (filling and ruling over the earth) are inseparable. We cannot care for our growing families without pressing God’s creation towards its most useful state.

This blessing is so important in educating our children. How can we care for our families without mastering math? How can we interact with our neighbors without mastering language arts? When our children realize that all the effort they put into mastering science and math or studying literature and history is to fulfill God’s place for them in life, it won’t be a bore; it will be the blessing God intended it to be. That also means that we as parents need to show them the usefulness of this education with real-life learning.

Learning has meaning when we know who we are and why we’re here. God gave us a precious answer to these questions when He said, “Let us make man in our image” (Genesis 1:26).

The sad fact is that humans sinned. Even though we still possess the image of God and we’re still blessed to fill and rule the earth, things in this world are broken. The fall also changes the way we teach our children. But that’s for another post.