I was interested to see the homeschool/public school debate flair up again last week. TGC is doing those “Good Faith” debates, none of which I have watched, and as far as I can tell they have excited almost no drama. But then Jen Wilkin used Philippians 2:4—the bit about not looking only to your own interests but also to the interests of others—and I was piqued enough to actually click on and watch the offending clip, and then go and read a lot of Twitter comments on both sides. Here’s the clip I first saw, though a lot of people have tweeted it:
In the interest of fairness and equity, here is the link to the whole video. I watched about thirty seconds and then skimmed the transcript because I literally have to go yell at my kids to do their work.
As I’m looking at it, I must admit that the TGC Good Faith set is sort of astonishing to me. We are still, it seems, in the Land of Beige, and I am interested to observe that there is nothing visual to indicate the fact that three Christians are talking to each other. I’d even sort of welcome some cheezy banner with a Bible verse or something, if an understated cross is too offensive. Kon Mari is on her way out, ya’ll. Maximalism is on its way in. Get some hot pink beanbag chairs in there and some lava lamps or something.
Sorry—that was a digression. The point of this post is, how should a person educate her children? Wait—one more point about optics. It would have been a lot more exciting to put a fierce homeschooling mom up against Wilkin who is clearly (at least from the transcript) a fierce public school mom. Why bring a man to apologize and demure? Make it a fair fight, is what I’m saying.
Ok so, onto the substance of the thing. I’m not going to work through their whole conversation because it follows in the path of all of these sorts of things—as it should because, as you may have already noticed, the Bible makes no law concerning the logistics of schooling your children. It nowhere says, “Thou Shalt Homeschool Thy Children Lest God Judge Thee.” Of course, there are a lot of commands that do inform how Christian people ought to raise their children, but the practicalities are going to vary wildly depending on the geographical location and the temperament of the parents, and so on. In other words, you will not have your mind blown if you watch the whole thing (or read it). They basically say all the things they should say.
Rather, I want to cut in Wilkin’s long opening salvo because it provides some good context for the clip above. It lets you know where she’s coming from and her working assumptions. I’m going to bold the lines I find most illuminating. Here it is:
Our kids did go to public school. And not only that, but my family is filled with public educators. My mother taught in the public school system at all levels of her career. My father served on the school board in Our Hometown. My siblings and I were all public school educated. I have a brother who is an assistant principal at a public high school, I have a brother who was in the inaugural class of Teach for America. He taught a year in Bedford Stein in New York City and a year and rural Arkansas and ended up with a teaching career in rural Arkansas. Yeah, my sister in law teaches at the middle school in my district right now, my mother in law is a retired teacher, my daughter is a chemistry teacher who’s taught in public schools. And I have a nephew who’s gonna be a history teacher. So they’re we’re we’re all in on the public schools in our family. And you can imagine that as someone who was in full time outward facing ministry, that was met with a lot of raised eyebrows through the years, especially when you have a larger than average number of kids, people immediately assume that if you were a person of strong religious convictions with a large family, you are either homeschooling or doing private school. And we didn’t, and we did choose public school out of conviction. But I always like to make clear upfront that we did not have any special considerations and that our kids did not have learning disabilities, there were no special concerns that might have played into that decision for us. And I’m very sensitive to that. Not only that we always lived near excellent schools. So I would never say everyone should choose public school. But I would say that we should try really hard to if at all possible, because we believe in the public school ideal. We believe that education is a right, it’s necessary for human flourishing, it’s good for society. It’s a mark of civilization, that you have an educated citizenry. And so if that is something that you can see, then you would value that you would have quality education for everyone, if at all possible. And we believed that our participation in the public school system was directly related to loving our neighbors. And so if we could opt in at all, than we absolutely wanted to. So we did We opted in. And I would say that one of the big things that helped us to be able to say yes to the public schools was that we believed that worldview came from your home, your worldview, and your values came from your home. And I think that that’s what everyone believes in the education debate. But I don’t know that the public school parent always gets credit for that perspective. We did not think that it was a simple matter of just sending them off to get educated, and then everything would sort of fall into place, the church would pick up the slack on whatever they needed to get for their Christian worldview. Jeff and I are nerdy people who like to learn. And so our children’s love of learning in all likelihood are in fact, I hope came from the ethos that was in our home. And we knew that that would be a factor in the way that they inhabited a public school space that if they were in a classroom where that love of learning was not being particularly amplified, that we could pick up the slack at home. We definitely had lots of conversations about everything that they were learning and the social elements as well. But because the education the quality of education piece was not a question for us, we knew they would get an excellent learning experience. And we welcomed the social aspect of MIT, the public schools were an easy yes for us in this space that we were in. So the kids went all the way through public school. Some of the issues that are now more emerged in those spaces were already emerging at that time. And so some of the things that we felt were beneficial was that we knew we had to have conversations early. We did not delay on talking about difficult or controversial subjects. And we knew what was going on with the curriculum as well, we had first hand knowledge of what was going on in those spaces. And we worked hard to make sure that we were up to speed on that it helps that we had a family member who’s in the district who could help us sort through what is fact and what was fiction when everything was blowing up, like a Facebook discussion group in the community to sort of sort out what was really going on. But one of the big benefits that came from having children in the public school system, from our perspective was, they had an exposure to such a broad array of kinds of people. So that when we had conversations about something that was going on in the culture, or even the the hot button issues right now, like like sexual orientation, gender, identity, all of that, those were not just categories that we talked about, those were people, those were friends, that was an embodied truth, that was someone who sat next to them in class, or it was a teacher. And so we were able to humanize those conversations. And and that was really a gift. Not only that, they were around children from different socio economic levels, they were around children from different racial communities, they were around special needs children. That’s one of my favorite things about the public schools is that children with special needs are actually in in with the other children, they have a buddy system to help these kids. And they’re, they’re visible in the lives of these kids every day. So they also had exposure to kids whose home situations were very different than theirs. And one of the things about a public school experience is no one is really pretending. It’s all right out there. And so our kids knew very early what it meant to be aliens and strangers. And that was something that we’re able to say to them was something a feeling to welcome not a feeling to push away, that the more different you feel from the people around you. Assuming that those differences are rooted in a Christian conviction, then the more you can know that you are probably being conformed to the image of Christ. And that means being a soft presence not being necessarily even allowed presence. I do think one of the misconceptions about Christian parents who send children to public school is that we’ve sent them there to be missionaries to be salt and light. And I crack up about that, because the kids were actually involved in a Bible study at the school there in high school that was called salt and light. And it was like, shoot, but but the reality was, we sent them there for an education. And we knew that we would have a role as their parents probably in being salt enlightened, we assumed that if they grew into their faith, and did, in fact, you know, become believers and then mature into that, that there would be that influence. But we were not trying to send a second grader into a secular space to share the good news. We we wanted to train our kids into that so that anywhere they went, that became something that was intuitive, but we didn’t we weren’t not on mission in that sense. In the local school, yeah, they all graduated from the public school system with an overwhelmingly positive experience and with with a world class education, and they went on to go to pub to a large public university as well after that.
Just to sum up what I’m hearing Wilkin say, first, she has very positive personal experience with her local public schools. Second, this experience shaped her moral vision of the importance of public education. Third, that moral conviction included not only a desire for her children’s academic excellence, but for them to understand and be comfortable around a lot of different kinds of people. We live in a pluralist society, with no one particular cultural worldview holding sway, and her kids were able to become familiar with the theological tension of being “aliens and strangers” in a world of many different kinds of people. And finally, this worked really well for their family.
At the outset, I must say that, fifteen or whatever years as I am in my homeschooling “journey,” I’m super jealous. I didn’t want to embark on any such sojourn. I would have loved to live in a place with an affordable school I could have felt comfortable, as a Christian, sending my children to. I’m glad that such places still exist.
I think a lot of the pushback Wilkin is getting comes from a place (at least for people like me) of disappointment and sadness (lament, if you’re searching for a trendy word). At the very moment we all wanted to send our kids to school, the schools turned out not to be that great. We didn’t get an awful education, but it wasn’t one that equipped us to literally educate our own children. We grew up in the dying embers of a neutral world where reading and writing were basically at least as important as tolerance and inclusivity. But it’s not like we learned everything we needed to even begin to recover the loss of wisdom and knowledge we suffered. When we had children, we didn’t do it thinking we’d have to teach them everything. Or maybe I should only speak for myself—I didn’t want to homeschool, but I’m doing it because I read the scriptures and then looked at the neighborhood school and then bit the bullet and stopped complaining about how unfair the breakdown of civilization has been for me.
Where I live, just one town over, the schools are still pretty decent and Christians do send their kids to them. We have teachers at those schools in our church and they’re wonderful people and committed to their jobs. The Christians who survive in the public schools in my own town tend, like Wilkin, to have a lot of extra resources to make it ok. They can fully commit themselves to filling in the gaps and protecting their children from the darker side of this increasingly poor and troubled community.
I don’t live in Texas. I live in post-Christian New York. And the way you can know what time it is up here is that my dear friend, who said all the same things about public education that Wilkin says—only probably even more so—pulled her kids out of public school and put them in private school and now is homeschooling. I mean, when you’ve lost the people who are so committed to the love of their communities, you really have lost something precious—at least that's what it sounds like Wilkin is saying.
But my friend and I haven’t lost or left behind the love of our community. Not for a minute. We love our neighbors, though our neighbors increasingly decline to accept our love. In fact, we live in a “negative world.” Surely you’ve heard the term. Christians are the baddies here. It’s very hard to continue in a career in certain sectors if you are pro-life or believe in a transcendent divine Being (God). My children do have to go out into this world as Christians. They have to fulfill the command of love, to look to the interests of others and not themselves. How are they going to do that?
Well, we’re doing that by homeschooling them on one hand and praying for them on the other. My particular prayer comes from the Great Litany by way of the Bible:
To send forth laborers into your harvest; to proper their work by your Holy Spirit; to make your saving health known until all nations; to hasten the coming of your kingdom.
I pray that every day for each child, intermingling practical requests for their peculiar trials. I already have evidence that God is answering my request. Notice, though, that I’m not praying for anyone—not even my children—to “flourish.” Rather, I’m asking God to use them to advance his purposes in the world. We want the kingdom of God to come, not the kingdom of Binghamton to keep trying to solve its intractable problems with all our poor and pathetic efforts. I imagine that if I lived in a rich place I wouldn’t have this distinction quite so firmly lodged in my disappointed mind and heart.
And now, though I haven’t said nearly all I wanted to, I have to go school my kids. Have a nice day if you’re into that sort of thing.
Thank you. Reading your column often feels like finding an island of refuge in the midst of a tumultuous sea. It is truly a pleasure to read something that is (usually🙂) sane, calm, and pointing to Jesus and His Kingdom as the answer. Being a refugee from Binghamton (for which I still care deeply) and its sometimes seemingly-endless dreary weather--as well as from the NYS political and cultural milieu--I probably glean more from the references than most, so that adds much to my appreciation. Daily prayers for you, Matt, your church, your family, the ACNA, and Binghamton & its environs.