To home school or not to home school

I haven't blogged for ages and ages - excuses being lack of time and too busy and also that they decded to put me on the Baptist Times website which made me feel kinda vulnerable ....anyway, the real truth was I just haven't felt in the right state of mind to "spill my thoughts out!"
Okay, excuses done, here's some thoughts that have been on my mind for a while that I thought would be provocative for blogging on. We don't home school, and to be honest I don't think that Claire and I would feel that its the ever the right thing to do, given our Christian principles! That said, if we were missionaries overseas where there was no english speaking schools then we might, but its certainly not something that we would find easy. Some people home-school because they can - and choose to do so. Parents are trained teachers and maybe they feel they can do a better job than their local school. But some Christian parents choose to do so because they fear their children being infected by other religious traditions, secularism, and multi-culturalism. Taking the Old Testament principles of teaching your own children up in the law of Yahweh and ensuring that the principles of God are held dear to the heart and taught with a clarity and fundamentalism of there being no doubt or room to ponder, alongside teaching maths, english, science and history etc, this is often the style of many (but perhaps not all) home schoolers within the Christian setting. The advantages of this are all too obvious. All of this happens within the Christian Community - often Christian home schoolers will share skills across several families within that community. This is ironic and arguably where home-schooling ceases to be home-schooling and more akin to creating your own Christian school. The settings are safe, and the curriculum set and sealed. Creationism taught and assumed in subject areas. Common to all home-schooling - whether Christian or not is that children with specific gifting and skills areas can be focussed upon in a strong contrast to the more general teaching of a school, and of course, the teacher to student ration is exceptionally and desirably win-win!
The disadvantages however are more than obvious. The lack of connection with other children from all kinds of backgrounds and experiences, religious groupings and cultures, colours and creeds, would almost certaintly lead to an extremely insular life, in fact protected. Because of this, the freedom to think and decide for yourself - and be given licence to do so and not feel that this was wrong or shameful are generally not present in the home school setting. Interestingly enough, this is where my Christian baptistic thinking finds good soil. As Christians of a baptist flavour, we see in the scriptures the principle not to christen, but to baptise in believers baptism. Unpacking this, we choose not to say over a baby "we believe on your behalf", but that, growing up within the love of God and the love of parents, and of the Christian community, that child should decide for him or herself as to whether they should want to follow Jesus and become a Christian. When they do, only then does Believers Baptism take place. And that is not age dependent in any way. That means to say that our children need to be given the freedom to know and experience the love of God in regular Sunday worship and any other mid week setting, but that they also be fully open to the sights, smells and sounds (so to speak) of what is going on around them in a state school where their friends think and act differently. We think that giving them freedom to decide for themselves, is the biblical pattern, rather than it be forced upon them. Which creates the stronger more considered and throught through faith? I'lll leave you to decide that for yourself. But that is in essence why I/we don't home school, apart from the truth that we'd be rubbish at it too.
There is a middle ground to be pondered here though. Why then, does it feel right for some parents to ensure that their children go to a Christian school? Isn't that merely the half way compromise that is there for parents like us who can't home school to save our lives, but want the safety of the Christian culture and setting? Well certainly in the UK the Christian schools that provide that kind of setting are seemingly mostly private fee paying types. And in any case, I wonder sometimes what is so specific about such places? Is it that the staff are all Christians? Clearly not - in many cases merely signed up very distant members of the CofE. But they get to have a daily act of worship! Oh yes .... and mostly sing traditonal hymns from the 1940's....ugh! So probably, the difference is not huge, except that you get to part with your money and feel that you are investing into your children's lives. That may salve your concsience of course.
So, to home school or not? Isn't this me just finding a set of doctrines to match what we want to do? Perhaps - as I said, we couldn't home school to save our lives.But we both have some very free thinking discussions with all our children along the lines of "it's not quite as black and white as that actually ..." We do so because we want our kids to think and decide for themselves, within the love of God. I think ...no I hope that they will one day thank us for that. Or is that just a hoped for dream!!