The narrow gate or the wide way?
Noted public figures such as former Sen. Frist keep trying to fix the factory school using worn-out tools: Tighter testing, better surveillance, centralization, narrowed goals and downwardly revised meanings of success. Can we benefit by learning from their labors?
It is generally recognized that home educated students compare favorably academically to both public and privately schooled students. As homeschoolers we observe with interest public school reform proposals intended to enable students in the state’s care to find educational success. But we are skeptical of efforts to improve the state school monopoly because they involve secularized goals pursued by the coercive power of the state to achieve them. 
Government schooling is one of the biggest businesses in our state with lots of money and power at stake. Allowing the state authority over the education of our children opens the door to our family, and can lead to immense abuse of state power and abridgement of individual and family liberties. An educational emergency can be used to justify increased educational budgets, higher taxes and increased government power.
On Oct. 22 a group of public school devotees, the State Collaborative on Reforming Education, led by former U.S. Sen. Bill Frist released a 33-page state report proposing ways to make state government’s school system among the best in the Southeast within five years http://www.tennesseescore.org.
Before we are tempted to applaud the well-intended efforts of this group, it is important to examine some of its premises. SCORE seeks to improve schooling based on a secular, state-centered definition of success that is intended to reinforce and increase state authority over parents and responsibility for children.
Moral ambiguity as an educational hindrance
Government can only define educational success in the area of academics because of limited ability to produce growth in other essential areas of life. When children are confined in age-segregated classrooms for the majority of their first 18 years, they cannot learn character skills, domestic skills and vocational skills that require family and community involvement in a real-world setting. Modern government education seeks to achieve success by replacing the family with government agents and programs conducted in classrooms in the company of student peers. The state program assumes human nature is not flawed, and that students will exhibit good behavior and will want to succeed if given the right information and environment.
Discussions of God are seen as an impediment to this process and He is not acknowledged or valued. Because government officials and educators are morally confused, discussion of God and the spiritual aspects of human nature are confusing to the student. Schools and educators are unable (legally prohibited) to embrace the One, true God or to acknowledge absolute truth. Moral and ethical training is muddled, which impacts student behavior, relationships, the safety of students and faculty, classroom environment and academic success. Moral ambiguity makes state schoolteachers unable to define a healthy family and encourage a family environment that aids learning.
Christian home education rests on different premises. We contend that parents, dependent upon and honoring God, can successfully educate their children in the context of the family with support of a community of believers. Our goal as homeschoolers is to obey God in raising each child to love God and others and to equip each child to be a healthy, responsible adult able to function in the context of the family, a body of believers and the local community. This goal involves character training, religious education, academic education, training in family and domestic skills and training in basic vocational skills. Isolating and focusing on academic skills to the exclusion of the other objectives result in immature, ill-equipped adults. The Christian approach recognizes that human nature is flawed. Students and parents need God to experience and express forgiveness, best learned in the context of the family and the real world.
The Consequences of Wrongly Defining Educational Success
Paul Harvey has been quoted as saying “Education without religion produces clever devils.” As a Christian, he meant Christianity when he used the word “religion.” There is plenty of religion in modern schools of the humanist and materialist sort, but little biblical Christianity to offer clear moral guidance for students, families, teachers, and schools. Is it any wonder that we are suffering under the schemes and actions of clever devils? An ignorant robber can steal your wallet and the $100 it contains. A clever devil can bilk individuals, families and corporations out of billions of dollars. Education without effective religious and moral training has resulted in a well-educated criminal and political class.
The solution is to produce healthy families that are the foundation of any society. It can be argued that extensive time away from parents and family reduces the ability of students to learn necessary relational and family skills. Such deprivation results in multiple generations of dysfunctional families, dysfunctional students, a dysfunctional classroom environment, reduced academic success and a declining culture. Government schools cannot even agree on the definition of a healthy family and must therefore diminish or limit family involvement to that which meets politically correct standards. Because government education by nature can only focus on academics, efforts to improve its system will result in “raising academic standards” and increasing the length of school days and years so that these raised goals can be reached. One result is that healthy family life and other key elements of education will be further neglected and academic efforts will fall short.
Public education families have made a commitment to school systems that, with the help of the ACLU and other policy groups, are bringing more consistency to the system. In its latest suit Nov. 16, that group is suing Cheatham County administrators for allowing Bible distribution and prayers in schools. Nearer to Chattanooga, the ACLU is harassing Rhea County over Internet filtering by public schools, concerned students can’t obtain access to homosexual materials. The drive to make public schools entirely atheistic and materialistic is not over, but much progress has been made to eliminate any reference to God and Christendom and its principles for civilization.
Keeping Our Eyes on the Prize
Public school families that believe its members can spend extra time on family life, Bible study and spiritual matters to counter the strident agnosticism of state schools are taking a gamble with the souls of their children and assuming on God’s mercy. Private schools that absorb so much of the students’ day and interests that they turn parents into mere appendages and monitors of schooling machinery are making a similar mistake, though the Christian “veneer” may have some value in keeping young people in the faith and not abandoning it as weak and phony on graduation.
In the sense that the SCORE report might induce the General Assembly to restrict our liberties, we should follow the development of this story and be ready to act.
But in another sense, home educators should pay a slight attention to Sen. Frist and his group’s doings. The work of his group should not impress, nor the woes he seeks to address in the statist system intimidate the faithful home educating mom and dad. Yes, the public system is having a crisis, but one it deserves, for which there is no remedy. There is one temptation Christians outside of public education’s “2012” must avoid. That is the idea that because we are no longer in educational Egypt we are absolved of our sins and stand in favor with God for our deeds. Instead, we must repent of our sins, love God earnestly and study his word, and help our children develop a relationship with God and a character that honors him. We are proving that our children can achieve academically; we must be careful to see that they grow into godly adults
Highly touted, expensive educational studies and plans may look attractive as we read about them in the Times Free Press or hear about them on Channel 9, but we must remember that most education failure can be traced back to a failure in the parents and the family. No government program can compensate for failure in family life.
Cory Bennett is president of Foundation for Educational Leadership in Knoxville. Its website is http://www.ffel.org/.