An Inheritance We Must Not Forget

How many of you are home-educated? And how many of you have parents who were also home-educated?

The modern home-education movement was pioneered in New Zealand in the 1980s by the Smith family. In the USA, Michael and Debi Pearl decided to train their children at home in the 1970's. So the movement hasn't been going for more than four decades.

homeschool table by Jimmie / CC BY 2.0

And now a new generation is rising up - men and women who are blessed in that they have never darkened the door of a public school. They have been faithfully trained by Christian parents, learning alongside each other. These families are often not just home-educators - they are Biblical Christians changing their lives in other ways, seeking to conform to the whole counsel of God.

However, as the Botkin family explain in their documentary "Homeschool Dropouts," there are some very specific sins that we, the second generation, can fall into. I won't go into much detail here: you need to purchase your own copy of the movie!

But we can be too proud of our upbringing, thinking that we now know it all; that we don't necessarily need to keep our own children home; that school might not be quite so bad as we imagined it; that it really doesn't matter what we believe.

We are ignoring our inheritance!

We're not remembering the right things! We think that our parents did what was right at the time, and were simply trying to give us the best education available. And so we run the risk of ignoring our inheritance.

Our inheritance is this: that we are serving the Lord as whole households. Not as age-segregated groups learning either what we already know or do not need to learn, but learning through living a normal family life. It is a lifestyle of change, of casting off worldly presuppositions and turning to God's will in order to seek out the truth.

We must not forget the ways of our fore-fathers. That they have sought God's will and found the truth.

What more do we need?

-Rhoda