Homeschool News: Maintaining Full Control of Your Home-Schooled Child's Education
By Mimi Rothschild
When a parent first makes the decision to home-school their child, it may seem all too tempting to rely on other professionals to help educate their child. Current teachers, former teachers and the like are more than willing to educate your home-schooler—but for a big price. Such a price is not necessarily paid in monetary terms. Instead, the very thing that home-schooling parents do not want to happen does happen: parents take away the control from the public school to educate their child, only to hand the control right back over to a teacher that has been educated to teach a public school curriculum.
Let's face it, in public schools children become nothing more than a number: a statistic that is counted toward the yearly funding a school receives. Children in public schools are herded into the classroom to learn and many sheep get lost among the rest. With not enough herders to bring the sheep back into the flock—such sheep, or children, remain forever lost as they flail around helplessly in the school system. Home-schooling parents are struggling against the grain, to bring their children and their education back into focus where it belongs. Therefore, to put someone else in charge of a home-schooled child's education is a major and regressive step.
The act of handing over power to another individual can be extremely detrimental to the parent that wants to incorporate faith teaching into the teachings offered to the home-schooler. The teacher that is hired to educate the home-schooler may not have the same faith system or may not incorporate faith teaching in the lessons offered to the home-schooler at all. After all, that is what they are trained to do, to separate church and state. Thus, if the parent wants to ensure that their child is educated according to Biblical scripture, it is far better if they remain at the helm of their child's education at all times. The decision to home-school is a big one and once made, parents should be more than ready to take on full responsibility for their home-schooled child's education.
In the end, to home-school a child is indeed an incredible responsibility; one that a home-schooling parent should not willingly pass off to another. A home-schooling parent should be a powerful force in their child's life. In remaining close to their child, the home-schooler and the parent will bond in a way never imaginable. Moreover, faith can be incorporated into the teachings and the home-schooler can then learn to live their life the way that God truly intended.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mimi Rothschild is a homeschooling parent, children's rights activist, author, and Founder and C.E.O. of online education company Learning by Grace, Inc. Rothschild and her husband of twenty-eight years reside in suburban Philadelphia with their eight children.
Feeling that “our current system of education has broken its promise,” Rothschild co-founded Learning By Grace, Inc. to provide families with Internet-based multimedia education to PreK-12 children all over the world.
In addition to her twenty years of experience as a homeschool mother, Rothschild has written a number of books dealing with education published by McGraw Hill and others. Her Home Education Websites Blog consists of helpful online content and activities for Christian homeschooling families.
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