Making the Decision to Homeschool: What Is Education, Anyway?! Questions to Ask Yourself if You are Considering Homeschooling (Part Two)

         Here is my answer to question number one, “What is education? ”

Dictionary Definitions : 

American Dictionary of the English Language, Noah Webster, 1828:  Educate:  The bringing up, as of a child; instruction and discipline which is intended to enlighten the understanding, correct the temper, form the manners and habits of youth, and fit them for usefulness in their future stations.  To give children a good education in manners, arts and science is important; to give them religious education is indispensable; and an immense responsibility rests on parents and guardians who neglect these duties.

Thorndike and Barnhart Junior Dictionary, 1965:
Educate:  Teach, to send to school.  Education:  Schooling, teaching; changing a person’s nature.

Grosset Webster Dictionary, 1974:  Educate: To instruct; inform and enlighten; indoctrinate.

Webster’s Encyclopedia of Dictionaries, 1978:
Educate:  To cultivate and discipline the mind and other faculties by teaching; send to school.

Webster’s New World Dictionary, 1988:  Educate: To train or develop knowledge, skill, mind, or character of, esp. by formal schooling or study; teach; instruct.

What a difference there is between the earliest and latest definitions!  In 1828, education included discipline, academics, manners, habit development, and religious instruction; you should also note that the responsibility for education clearly rested on the parents. Later definitions leave out the discipline, manners, habit development, religious instruction and the parents! Education has been turned over to the government.  Furthermore, later definitions reveal a bit about modern education’s true intentions: Changing a person’s nature, and indoctrination.  Standards for education nowadays often include more than just academic standards; current educational goals now include the areas of mental health, attitude, personality development, “societal values” and
sexual identity (Outcome Based Education, or Anti-Bias Curriculum, it is called).  Mass produced education seeks to produce a certain “product”; a person who acts and thinks in a certain way.  Need more proof?  Check this out:

From the Encyclopedia Britannica, online version:

Education can be thought of as the transmission of the values and accumulated knowledge of a society. In this sense, it is equivalent to what social scientists term socialization or enculturation. Children…are born without culture. Education is designed to guide them in learning a culture, molding their behaviour in the ways of adulthood, and directing them toward their eventual role in society.

Parents should also be aware that government-provided education is never religiously neutral, even if it claims to be.  Every curriculum/philosophy flouts its own worldview, as does every teacher.  A worldview devoid of God is called humanism—a religion unto itself.  I always tell my children that “everything is
religious, and everything is political.”

Ask yourself: Whose values are being transmitted to my children?

Important Quotes About Education

Noah Webster:  “An education without the Bible is useless.”

From Humanist Magazine:  “I am convinced that the battle for humankind must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith:  a religion of humanity that recognizes and respects the spark of what theologians call divinity in every human being.  These teachers must embody the same selfless dedication as the most rabid fundamentalist preachers, for they will be ministers of another sort, utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to convey humanist values in preschool, daycare, or large university.  The classroom must, and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new—the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with all its old adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of humanism.”

In Wisdom’s Children by Blair Adams and Joel Stein:  “For Christian parents to deliberately send their children to such schools makes no more sense than sending them to Buddhist monasteries or Shiite Muslim academies, or more to the point, Nazi schools. Christian children did not become “witnesses” when they donned the brown shirt and joined the Hitler Youth Movement and attended Nazi schools:  The Nazis brainwashed and converted them by sending them to the seminaries of rival religious creeds.  We do not strengthen their beliefs by indoctrinating them during the most impressionable years of their lives in the values of the religious system antagonistic to Christianity.”

John Taylor Gatto, Teacher of the Year, 1990: “It is absurd and anti-life to move from cell to cell at the sound of a gong for every day of your natural youth in an institution that allows you no privacy and even follows you into the sanctuary of your home demanding that you do its
“homework.” “How will they learn to read?!” you say, and my answer is, “Remember the lessons of Massachusetts.” When children are given whole live instead of age-graded ones in cellblocks, they learn to read, write, and do arithmetic with ease if those things make sense in the kind of life that unfolds around them…FAMILY is the main engine of education. If we use schooling to break children away from parents, we’re going to continue to have the horror show we have right now. The curriculum of FAMILY is at the heart of any good life; we’ve gotten away from the curriculum—time to return to it. Experts in education have never been right. Their “solutions” are expensive, self-serving, and always involve further centralization. Enough … time for a return to democracy, individuality, and family.”

Brad Heath states in the book, Millstones and Stumbling Blocks:  “Some parents are worried about the public school environment, but concern over the somewhat unlikely chance of our children being physically assaulted should pale in comparison to the absolute certainty of assault on their Christian faith and beliefs. It is not the improbable violence to their body but the assured violence to their mind and spirit that constitutes the clear and present danger of public schooling. Few Christian parents have lost their children to public school violence, but multitudes have lost their kids spiritually, intellectually, and philosophically by ignoring the real threats these schools pose.”

Martin Luther said of schools: “I am much afraid that the schools will prove to be the gates of hell, unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures and engraving them in the hearts of youth.  I advise no one to place his child where the Scriptures do not reign paramount.  Every institution in which men are not unceasingly occupied with the Word of God must be corrupt.”

Dr. Cornelius Van Til wrote:  “If you say you are involved in the struggle between Christ and Satan in the area of family and in the church, but not in the school, you are deceiving yourself….You cannot expect to train intelligent, well-informed soldiers of the cross of Christ unless the Christ is held up before men as the Lord of culture as well as the Lord of religion.  It is the nature of the conflict between Christ and Satan to be all-comprehensive.”

 

        So, what is education? The best definition of education I’ve ever seen is the first:

Education is ANYTHING that: Corrects the temper Enlightens the understanding Forms the manners and habits of youth. Prepares them for usefulness in their future stations. -Webster’s 1828 Dictionary

I think we can  agree that education, as we’ve come to know it today, encompasses certain skills—such as a proficiency in mathematics, reading, writing and speaking as well as base of knowledge in various disciplines including literature, history, science, geography and the arts that (I would hope) most adults have mastered or at least been exposed to. I would add thinking skills and research skills to the list, so that my children will know how to “look up” topics that were skipped and/or not mastered; social skills, which can be systematically taught (manners and the Golden rule); and life skills, which the government schools seem to ignore altogether. Most important to me, however, is religious teaching and training and the development of a Christian worldview  (seeing things the way the LORD would see them; thinking HIS thoughts after HIM).

In contrast, the government schools teach the religion of humanism (that man is the all in all, and has no need of God for salvation; man can ‘save’ himself through his own accomplishments; that “religion” is a private, separate, compartmentalized part of life, but not all of life).  Schools also teach moral relativism (there are no real moral absolutes; what is right for you is ok, as long as you don’t ‘hurt’ anyone else), and that science and religion are self-exclusive (they don’t mix, and don’t need to be rectified to each other.) But I want my children to know absolute truth, and how to discern it.  Truth is a relative term to many, but I want my children to know that there is absolute truth!

What is your definition of “education”?  

~Susan  

© 2010, 2011 Susan Lemons all rights reserved. Portions of this post are exerpted from Homepreschool and Beyond and are used with permission. Copyrighted materials may not be re-distributed or re-posted without express permission from the author.