Sometimes, one begins to look longingly at the public school as an escape from the current trials caused by homeschooling in your home. But why is this not a good place to go in your thinking? The issue is not how wonderful the school is, or how academically strong, or how fine the teachers are, or what an outstanding curriculum it has. The issue is the peers. Peers don't have enough of an experience base to mentor another peer. And that is what will be going on. The peers mentor and influence each other far more thoroughly than the textbooks or the teacher. So let's look at that influence. Statistically, at least 60% of those other students come from broken homes—which means they have seen a great deal of fighting, yelling, and screaming and addictive behaviors of all sorts and shades behind their front doors in their most formative years. Those young children have learned socialization from their dysfunctional homes—and they will smear that "language" all over your child. And 100% of them will have been raised on television—whether the home is parented by believers or not.
What's the matter with all that TV-watching or time on the laptop? No matter how wholesome the program is, or how much the good guy wins, it is the secondary messages in the stories that devastate. The children learn rebellion and all its ways from this relentless foul programming. They observe how pouting and sass operate, and find out just how to "do it". And at the presupposition level they absorb subtle occultism and anti-God brainwashing through all of its programming. Like a fish in a filthy fishbowl, the children grow up thinking this is normal air. Your child, so influenced/trained, grows up rubber-stamped with the culture, just like everyone else. If you want an unusual child, a unique child, a highly creative child, a truly holy child, he or she must grow up and thrive under the private, superior, mature tutelage of a wise, loving adult, and optimally that adult is the parent.
Basically, you can teach a child with any book. The mother is the key, not the book. Specifically, the mother's exhaustion factor is the supportable or insupportable variable to all that even happening, much less continuing. A mother called me the other day saying that after 11 years of homeschooling she was burned out. We hear it countless times through tears, after only one year. Mothers secretly want to put their children back in public school—why?—not because it is better for the child, but because the mother is worn-out and can't cope any more. The public school option is a temptation for the sake of expediency, not for ideological reasons. The single biggest cause of burnout is the wrong curriculum: is it mother-taxing, or mother-friendly? If interested, contact us for advice about what we have found to be the easiest curriculum to administer that eliminates this problem entirely.
Just keep your children out of the government's schools. If you don’t, you will trade your current lesser nightmare for the greater nightmare of a thorough and complete brainwashing. Your child will emerge a child of the secular pop culture and you will not like living with those results for the rest of your life.
