What We Must Teach

This morning I was thinking about an e-mail exchange I had recently with one of my state legislators. I was asking him about his views concerning homeschoolers' accountability to the government. He said,

"Since our constitution says that education of vermont's kids is a state obligation, I believe their needs to be some oversight over homeschoolers but I am not in favor of tight restrictions. Most of the home schoolers we dealt with had christian backgrounds and they wanted to teach their kids according to their beliefs - and that's ok as long as their curriculum touches on those subjects deemed important by the State Board."

For the record, our state constitution says that the state must provide schools or other provisions for education, not that it must oversee any other option a parent chooses.

The bigger red flag here is the Christian comment. Is this legislator hinting that the state must make sure that Christians don't teach their kids creation - or at least that they do teach evolution?

I might be reading too much into this, but that's the attitude of many lawmakers and I think that is a problem.

I fully believe that parents have the right to teach their kids whatever they want and the state should not intervene. I know that sounds a little extreme, but once you start dictating what parents can teach, or must teach, where do you draw the line? Not only that, but how to do make sure the kids are learning it? How would that be measured? That would give the state too much power over homeschooling (as I believe my state already does).

In my case, there is not anything under the sun that the state can do to stop my kids from learning that God is the Creator of the universe because they also know about evolution. I fully meet the requirements of the state - and then some.

They know more about evolution than any children their age in the public school system. I'm just too lazy to screen everything they read or watch, since they take out science books, DVDs, and videos from the library every week. They devour them so fast, I couldn't possibly filter out the evolution. My kids love science.

And they have amazed me. Often times, they are the ones who point out to me the weaknesses in the arguments put before them. In fact, I was planning on waiting until they got a little older to have those analytical discussions reconciling faith and science. Then one day, they stopped me from reading from a book that was written with an evolutionary perspective and asked, "Why do people believe evolution?"

I explained to them that science deals with things you can see, touch, and measure. Since we can't see, touch, or measure God, science has to look at the world as if God doesn't exist.

The benefit of homeschooling is not that I can keep knowledge from my kids; it's that I can give knowledge to my kids.

I don't need to keep them from learning things that they will learn when they go out into the world because I am here to help them with their conflicts and tough questions as they come up.

They will not deal with any big surprises when they go off into the world, but they will be equipped with the ability to think for themselves and reason through it when faced with challenges to their world view. At least, I hope so.