Thousands of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are choosing to educate their children at home.  The list of home educators includes many Church and government leaders and public school teachers.

The Church maintains an official position of neutrality, supporting public education, private education (BYU is the largest church affiliated private school in the country), and home education.  Parents are encouraged to make their own prayerful choices. 

Nothing in the doctrine of the Church is in opposition to home education.  When there is criticism, it is often the result of misunderstanding and is culturally based rather than doctrinally based.

Latter-day Saints home school for many reasons:

For academic advantages
Families can accomplish far more in a daily hour or two at home than can be accomplished in a whole school day in an over-crowded, out-of-control classroom.

It seems obvious that young children had computer training before they came here; the home computer makes most classroom learning obsolete.  Children were also ordained to perform an earthly mission, and  home school gives them time and opportunity to discover and develop the talents they will need.    Home school empowers students to take responsibility for their own education.   Employers and  colleges have come to appreciate this; they welcome, and often recruit, home schoolers.

For safety reasons
Schools are so burdened with remedial programs, school-based health/contraceptive clinics, and school-to-work programs and teachers are so burdened with environmentalism, revisionist history, deviant lifestyles, political correctness, and anti-family curriculum that the best of them can neither teach basic skills nor protect children from grave danger.  Most students are physically,  emotionally, socially, morally, and spiritually  "at risk" in the public school system.

For social advantages
All parents want their children to have strong moral values and mature social skills, but charitable behavior, principled relationship skills, and good manners are seldom modeled in our failing society.  Children left to peer groups without mature leadership often adopt the degenerative values of the group.  Children raised in healthy, uplifting atmospheres where their social development is fostered by direct teaching and by the good example of family members and carefully chosen friends tend to remain strong when they do leave home for social contact.

Some feel that children need to be in the public school system to be examples, or missionaries, and to experience the "real world."  Yet, these same parents often want their children to attend BYU because they value a religious education and a like-minded peer group.  The best preparation for a BYU education is a religious high school education.  (BYU would not recruit for its football team players who had never played football.)  Children who attend public schools are being  influenced far more than they are able to influence; often they are being sacrificed.  LDS children should have LDS educations, either in private or home schools.

Author Tony Robbins said, "I used to think the best way to help poor people was to become one of them.  I found out the opposite may be true.   The best way to help poor people is to be a model of other possibilities, to let them know there is another set of choices available..."  Families who set out to become the best possible example of gospel principles will find many ways to be an influence for good.

Home school families tend to be close-knit, and the children tend to be sweet-spirited, obedient, and best friends.

To preserve our heritage
The Founders taught that an educated populace was the best protection of our Constitutional freedoms.  They were deeply religious men who believed that every school should have a Bible-based, moral curriculum.   Today our schools have become agents for social change instead of stewards of our legacy.  Through forced attendance, forced curriculum, and "cradle to grave" monitoring of the entire family, the schools are actually working models of the very principles against which the Constitution stands.

Sensing that the day is fast approaching when the  Latter-day Saints will be held responsible to help rescue the Constitution from peril, and that the plagues and pestilence will get much worse before they get better, some parents are bringing their children home for family remedial work in the Constitution and the Book of Mormon.

For religious and family reasons
An artist goes to art school; a truck driver goes to trucking school, a Latter-day Saint goes to. . . .  certainly not to a Protestant school where he might be taught false doctrines about baptism.  Why, then, an atheistic school? 

The fact that the Church saw the need to issue the Proclamation on the Family tells us where Satan is concentrating his evil forces and where we'd better build our trenches and strengthen our forces. 

Brigham Young and other Church leaders of his day warned against adoption of tax-supported schools, and now we are reaping the harvest that they predicted.   Since home education will be the way of Zion societies, it makes sense for us to make course corrections now.

For the vast majority of families, homeschooling brings greater academic and personal growth and welcomed family peace.  Sure, there are some limitations and some failures; but the rate and height and breadth of homeschooling's successes make it a far better option than taking the risks associated with forced government schooling. 

To preserve our political and religious heritage and build close families with faith sufficient to meet the challenges of the last days, many families are deciding that there's just

no place like home!