It has been a difficult year for fans of the TLC’s celebrity Duggar family. The show “19 Kids and Counting” reaches a lot of constituencies. Quiverfull fecundity fans, conservative Evangelicals, Arkansans, debt-avoiding coupon-clippers, and hash-brown casserole fans all alike can find something entertaining in the show. Alongside all of these, the show also has a strong following among homeschoolers—particularly those who reside in the general neighborhood of Tier 2. For the people in this last category (and perhaps no less to the others), the scandals surrounding Josh Duggar can evoke more emotion than just the tsk-tsk of a casual bystander.
As a homeschooling father and a man who has consumed untold hours of the Duggars via Amazon Prime, would you permit me a moment to reflect upon these shameful revelations?
Josh Duggar’s public fall confronts homeschooling parents not only with someone’s bad behavior but also with some good theology that we should all take to heart. If your purpose for homeschooling is to protect your child from the sinful environment of the world, you’ve missed something important. Sin is not an “out there” problem; it’s an “in here” problem. Homeschooling as a strategy to reduce the surface area of temptation for your child ought not to be equated with discipleship. If you think that in homeschooling you have found a solution to the sin problem, then Jesus went to an awful lot of needless trouble. But He didn’t, because homeschooling can never accomplish the inoculation of children against temptation.
Judas Iscariot, after all, was likely the product of homeschooling and private religious schooling. It doesn’t always work.
I think there’s one good reason to homeschool: It’s a way to invest more of yourself into your children. That investment can pay off academically (and usually does). It can also pay off in character, not because you prevented your children from being tempted, but because you invested yourself in training them in good ways to deal with temptation. But it will never wield a scalpel sharp enough to excise the sinful nature out of our children or to hold at bay temptation forever. Homeschooling becomes more or less valuable to the degree that you invest more or less of yourself into your kids.
Truly, for all of us parents (homeschooling or otherwise), we do well to remember that there is such a thing as discipleship, that it is a matter distinct from (although related to) Bible classes or worldview training or MPAA-rating limits. Discipleship is personal, and it must include character formation and training for spiritual warfare (which is what temptation is), or else it is not discipleship.
Perhaps our God, who works even the worst things together into His plan for good, will use this tragic story to remind homeschoolers not to depend upon a false panacea. Perhaps we will all rededicate ourselves anew to the task of discipling our sons and daughters.
Bart, spot on in the final conclusion! I must admit that home schooling is the best thing we ever did for our son, but was also was a tremendous amount of work when compared to his sister who went to a local public HS. My daughter did great in the public school, but the six years in between her and my son, the public school went straight downhill academically and became a very dangerous place. Homeschooling is fairly mature in Tennessee (probably because the public schools are so bad as a whole), so finding a great HS organization was not… Read more »
Good word, Bart. Very true.
I’m thinking we are a Tier 4+ family as our children attended public school once they reached high school age. Currently have two in college (public high school graduates), two in public high school, two elementary age at home. We are considered oddballs (or heretics) by everyone. In the last year, I have noticed quite a bit of push back on home schooling, particularly that of the Tier 1 / 2 variety. People are sharing their pain of raising little Pharisees that have wildly different personas away from the public eye. As a public school graduate myself, I saw this… Read more »
I wish this place had an uber like button – I would press it a million times for your post, Bart!
Great word!
“Discipleship is personal, and it must include character formation and training for spiritual warfare (which is what temptation is), or else it is not discipleship.” A good word Bart. We should never leave our children solely to the mercy of a discipleship curriculum, as good as some of them may be. As parents, we should never abandon personal mentoring in favor of church curriculum. Training children in the way they should go is our direct responsibility, not only as fathers but as spiritual fathers. Discipleship curriculum should only be used as a supplement to personal spiritual mentoring, parents-to-children. And, indeed,… Read more »
Here’s another lesson: Homeschooling your children to protect them from the evils of the world while simultaneously allowing them to become television celebrities may not be an effective strategy.
There are a lot of great nuggets in there, Bart. And here I thought you were going to talk about the Duggars. In many ways, we all are like the Duggars, and their biggest critics are like them in ways that they won’t often admit.
I feel badly for the Duggar family. The humiliation must be unbearable. I have never watched an episode of the show, but from what I am told and the show’s general premise, the entire enterprise seems very unhealthy. I really have no problem at all with people who want to live the way the Duggars purport to live. If friends of mine want to pursue a large family, then I will support them as friends. I also have no problem with the concept of homeschooling. From a legal standpoint, I am a huge fan. Parents have the right to school… Read more »
I recently finished a 17 week study on “Growing Kids God’s Way.” Even though I am well past that part of my life, I found it to be both practical and biblical. The things that it suggests are things that most of us can readily do.
Thanks Bennett, Like you, I am past that stage, but I’m in the grandparent stage and it sounds like this would be useful.