Salt of the Earth

This is a comment I get tired of hearing from other christian families when it comes to my choice to homeschool (whether directly or from reading what they say about schooling, and why I should send my children to school).

Here is an article that does a great job articulating this idea: Homeschooling and Christian Duty

Check this out:

A child in the grammar stage, a third-grader, say, is developmentally geared toward the acquisition of basic facts, memorizing Bible verses or the Corporal Works of Mercy. Even a bright third-grader lacks the powers of higher reasoning necessary to discern the truth amid conflicting messages.

Middle-schoolers, in the dialectical stage, are ready to learn to
argue—learn to argue. As anyone with a middle-schooler knows, this dovetails
nicely with certain natural inclinations of the age, but the average eighth-grader is hardly prepared to play C.S. Lewis in social studies class.

Even high-schoolers are still in the process of acquiring the rhetorical sophistication they will need in college to defend their faith to others and to themselves. Consider how many college freshmen allow themselves to be talked out of Christianity during the fall semester, in the course of Intro to World Religions. If college freshmen can’t cope, it seems unrealistic to expect third-graders to bear the burden of evangelizing their schools. What seems far more likely is that, to one degree or another, the schools will end up evangelizing these children.

The idea of sending a child daily into a hostile environment—if not actively hostile, as in bullying, then certainly philosophically hostile—expecting him not only to withstand assaults on everything his parents have told him is true but also to transform the entire system by his presence, seems sadly misguided to me. There may be many valid arguments for sending a child to school, but that one doesn’t wash.

Common sense, people! Here is something else she points out in the article that I totally agree with:

If we urge our children to integrate into the secular mainstream, and it turns out instead that the secular mainstream is integrated into them, then what we end up with is, well, what we largely have: a generation that believes that Christianity is only about not being judgmental.

That's not what Christianity is about at all! I, of course have to add this quote... seeings how this has in fact happened:

People often say to me that bringing up children is a thankless job. They intimate that there’s something wrong—saintly, maybe, but wrong—with somebody who chooses to bring up children in the 24/7 style that my husband and I have chosen. While there are plenty of days when I wonder what else I might be doing other than saying “Don’t lick your sister” for the four-hundred-and-seventy-third time, I can’t believe that this project is any more thankless than that of trying to nurture the local public schools.

So you see, it is not my duty or my children's duty to fix the system or be the so called salt!