Positively Homeschooling
Monthly Column by Tina James

I am embarking on my eighth year of homeschooling. When I began, I had a third grader that we had pulled out of public school and a kindergartner just starting school (oh, and a new baby). I remember feeling so intimidated about our decision to homeschool. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was doing something wrong – my goodness, people can’t just go around pulling their kids out of school. Can’t you get in trouble for doing that? Some would have us think that we shouldn’t have any control over our children’s educations because, after all, we’re not really educators. Professionals have written standards to measure student knowledge by. Don’t these professionals know what is best for our kids?

Deuteronomy 4:9 admonishes parents to “only be careful, and watch yourselves closely so that you do not forget the things your eyes have seen or let them slip from your heart as long as you live. Teach them to your children and to their children after them." This verse doesn’t say anything about needing to entrust my children’s educations to well-meaning teaching professionals. Nor does it even say anything about math, science, or social studies. What this says to me is that I should teach my children about what I have seen and learned during my life. And these lessons are to be passed down from one generation to the next generation.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t need to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. What I think this means is that I should impart to my children information that will be useful in their lives. I am to instruct my children out of my own wisdom, experience, and storehouse of knowledge. Over my homeschooling years, I’ve come to realize that it is a parent’s charge to equip and prepare her own children to be successful adults. Sometimes I must find someone other than myself to teach my child how to play a musical instrument or how to speak a foreign language. But even then I am equipping my child for his own life. Having a well-educated child means that I have shared with him whatever wisdom I have gleaned from my life, that I have sparked in him a lifelong desire to learn, and that he knows how to locate information beyond what he has within himself – beginning with God’s Holy Word.

I am no longer that anxious young mother who feared being judged as an inadequate teacher for my children. I’m no longer intimidated by other homeschooling moms who appear to have everything all together. And I am not moved by being told, “That’s not the way Mrs. So-n-so said to do that.” I stand firm in the knowledge that God called ME to teach my children, no matter what anyone else thinks or says or does and that He has equipped me with everything I need to handle this enormous task. If only I had been able to have this kind of confidence from the very beginning, I think I might not have felt that I needed to keep a constant watch over my shoulder. Every year of homeschooling I have grown more secure and more relaxed – as it happens with most things. My greatest realization has been that I am not in this endeavor alone; God is my source of strength and my refuge. In Him will I trust.

About the Author: Tina James resides with her husband Steve and 4 children in Evans, GA. The James family has homeschooled for the past 7 years. Tina and her husband founded the Ogeechee Area Christian Home Education Association in 2004 in Bulloch County, GA (their previous home); and they have worked in children's ministry and middle school ministry for the past 12 years. They are members of West Town Community Church in Evans, GA where they lead the middle school ministry, Club Medio. Visit her blog at www.homeschoolblogger.com/jamesfamilymom.