Actually,
with a little imagination, parents of kindergarten-age children can compete with
the hoopla because five-year-olds are so malleable.
Anyone who has access has influence (as Satan well knows). You can start early with your own campaign — taking your own bus trips,
planning field trips, setting up a schoolroom, arranging spectacular first-day
activities, feeling sorry for children who have to leave their mothers (yes, we
play the emotional cards too).
As
the children get older, though, it becomes more and more difficult to compete
with the enticings of the peer group.
The social life is alluring.
And that is the
whole allurement — the social life.
Ask any young child what he likes best about school and he’ll tell you: RECESS!
The
last one I asked went on to say the rest of the day was “dumb.”
And
it’s no different in high school. Your
teen will seldom be coaxed by his peers to come experiment in the cool science
lab or to come listen to a great English teacher recite Shakespeare.
It’s still about RECESS!
Little
children are being fooled; they long to go to school not knowing that
RECESS! is the punctuation between endless hours of tedium.
Older students know full well; they’re just willing to pay a terrific
price — boredom, fear, humiliation — for the thrill of RECESS! The more
social the child, the deeper the longing may be.
So
what’s a parent to do? Force him
to stay home? Let
him go? Who decides?
Who decides?
Recently I was a guest on the radio show of
my good friend, Gayle Ruzicka, who is president of Utah’s Eagle Forum.
A caller said her home-schooled 8-year-old wanted to go to school to have
more friends. The mother told the
daughter to pray about it and make her own decision.
Gayle suggested that it would be more
appropriate for the parents to make the decision and for the daughter to pray
for confirmation. I couldn’t agree
more.
The Kingdom operates on the principle of
stewardship. Parents are stewards
over their children and over the family resources.
They have authority to set family behavior standards and to decide how
family resources will be spent and/or used.
Parents are responsible for the education of their children.
School is not an entitlement, but an expenditure of family resources.
Parents pay the tuition (or the taxes), provide the clothing,
transportation, school supplies, etc. So, the decision must be made by the parents.
Children should not be told to pray for
direction in things that are not in their stewardships.
How can they get a proper answer to a prayer outside of their
stewardships? This is the same
principle we teach in Sunday School lessons:
only the Prophet can receive revelation for the Church.
Members don’t dictate to the Prophet, the Stake President, the Bishop.
Often I’ve heard parents lament that they
must give in to return-to-school pressure because their children “have their
free agency.” Only within
its proper sphere! Children have
agency to obey or not to obey; they do not have agency to control what is
outside of their stewardship — again, family resources, family rules.
(The Father did not grant us agency because life is an amusement
park and He wanted us to “do it all.” It’s
much more serious than that. He gave
us agency because He had to, so we could
willingly choose to follow him, or not. The
danger of agency is that we might miss its purpose and see is as “license.”
“My agency is God’s permission to do whatever I want” instead of
“My agency is God’s recognition of the eternal truth that I must be
free to willingly obey.” President
McKay, quoting someone else, said, “Even God could not make men like himself
without making them free.”)
The TV news did a back-to-school report
featuring mothers shopping with their teenage daughters.
The issue was bare midriff styles, with which the stores were well
stocked and which the teenage sub-culture is demanding.
Daughters were dictating to
mothers what the family dress standards would be and how the family resources
would be spent, and the mothers were caving, because
they were misunderstanding
their responsibility.
When parents choose not to expend resources
on a particular activity, such as enrollment in the government welfare school
program, a child’s agency allows him to decide how to respond.
He may choose to honor his parents and be willingly obedient; he may
choose to be rebellious, refusing to learn; or if he thinks his parents are in
error, he may go “upline” to his grandparents, the bishop, or even directly
to the Lord.
Certainly good parents are going to listen to
their children’s feelings and act in kindness and love.
Certainly parents are obligated to make the same decision the Lord would
make and confirm it through prayer, but they must make the decision.
“Rule gently, but rule.”
The cart before the horse?
In writing this essay, I am assuming that you do not want your child to attend
the anti-God, a-moral, government welfare school system; but I realize this is
not always the case. Many parents
look forward to their children being involved in school sports, cheerleading,
drama, dating, and other RECESS! activities.
I certainly did. But I am
older and wiser now, and the schools are so much worse.
Our
oldest daughter was the first dual-enrolled student in the state, and the four
behind her also attended the high school, some a little, some a lot.
The three youngest wouldn’t have any part of it.
Now that my children are all grown (my “baby” is 18) I see that those
who spent their teenage years at home with an “ignorant but pure-minded
teacher” were, in the long run, so much better off.
There
will be exceptions, of course, and we don’t argue with anyone else’s
personal revelation. But in
principle, I believe our children don’t belong in public schools.
In the next issue I will attempt to persuade you with a dozen reasons why
your children shouldn’t go back to public school or be dual-enrolled in high
school. For now, please think in
terms of what you would do now to prepare for a future decision not to send your children to
school -- just in case.
Some suggestions:
Here are four ways in which we might beautify the family garden so our
“flowers” will not want to leave for greener pastures fraught with danger.
1.
The family comes first.
We have a mistaken
cultural assumption that children need the peer group for proper socialization.
This notion is so strong that people — even parents — will actually
be fearful if children do not have many opportunities for peer association or if
they spend too much time with each other. Yet,
God has organized the entire world into families, not peer groups.
We need to look to the family first for friendship and social activities.
In his book, The Holy Temple, President Boyd K. Packer told of a young man who asked him to
perform a double temple marriage ceremony for himself and his best friend.
President Packer declined. What
if they had the sealings separately, one right after the other?
Still no. President Packer
wrote, “I pointed out that, while they were very close now, in the years ahead
the two young men would find their separate ways as they went to seek their
fortunes. They would keep in touch
for the first few years, but as the children came and they became turned to
normal life activities it was quite likely that their lives would find separate
paths. I told them that in looking
back on their wedding day they would want to remember it as a very personal and
a very private matter. It should be
shared only by the intimate family members and friends.”
After the family is
securely bonded, then we might look for outside social activities.
Home school support groups may help.
Also important are friendships with people of different ages, interests,
and backgrounds.
I do have a hope for the near future:
In the church we have many “empty nesters” who may not yet have
reached retirement age but whose children have gone.
Some of these people could mentor small groups of teens, meeting together
a few times a week to share wisdom with them, to introduce them to other people
of wisdom, and to hold book discussions.
2. Have a family mission — something in which you are engaged together: a service
project, a family business, a political cause, a remodel-the-house project, a
worthy hobby.
In Elder Condie’s excellent article in the August 2001 ENSIGN,
he talks about spending time on more worthy pursuits.
There is a time to sit down together to a good movie and a bowl of
popcorn; there is also a time to be busily engaged in a unifying cause.
Noting how adversity can unite a family,
someone said, “If you don’t have a wolf at the door, hire one.”
But why let adversity act upon you? Why
not find your own adventures in the spirit of Alma 32:14-15?
Home-schooled children are mature.
When they’re still too young for college and employment, they
nevertheless need activities of substance for mind, heart, and hands.
The family can’t always all go in the same direction, but maybe we can
do better than we’ve done.
3. Know The Lord’s Plan and teach it to your children.
At the April 2001 Primary Open House, President Coleen Menlove said,
“Within the Church, only a minority of active families hold daily family
prayer, scripture study, and weekly home evening.”
How sobering.
When Brother Benson talked at our LDS-HEA
conference about his wife’s reading the Lord’s Library at 17, and then
Sister Packer talked that Sunday at our Area Conference about going to the
teachings of the prophets for help in rearing her children, I saw a standard of
gospel scholarship we should strive for. Our
children need far more “meat” than they’ve been given.
They need to know how the Church fits into history, what their own
personal mission is, and what it means to be a peculiar people. Then they’ll
have no desire for less.
In the same book mentioned earlier, President
Packer tells about explaining to a military chaplain about our temple garments.
He spoke of how the man’s clerical robes identify him and set him apart
as a servant of the Lord. He
explained that since we are a lay church, the man who leads the congregation on
Sunday as the bishop must go to work on Monday.
“By our standard he is as much an ordained minister as you are by your
standard. He is recognized as such
by most governments. We draw
something of the same benefits from this special clothing as you would draw from
your clerical vestments. The
difference is that we wear ours under our clothing instead of outside, for we
are employed in various occupations in addition to our service in the Church.”
Our children must learn to think of
themselves as a set–apart generation, as clergy/missionaries, not mall rats.
4. Know Satan’s plan
and teach it to your children.
If they understand who Satan’s leaders are and what their game plan is,
they will understand why he wants them under his control and what will happen to
them there. Read THE UNDERGROUND HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION
by John Taylor
Gatto and share it with your children, even just in bits and pieces over the
years, so they can see plainly what is going on.
Did you ever wonder what the angel said to
Alma the Younger? He could not have
taken away his agency, so he must have taught him something.
Perhaps he said, “Alma, this is what the Lord has done, what he is
doing now, and what he will be doing in the future.
This is what Satan is doing to destroy the work.
This is your part.” Would
Alma need to know more?
Stay strong
Don’t settle for the easy solution, the quick fix.
Don’t “wimp out” and think the government school is the answer just
because it’s there. Wishing
something is so does not make it so. Your child’s hunger for a social life is
not necessarily going to be well satisfied there, and much harm may be done.
If you compromise to satisfy social needs, what have you really taught?
My daughter, Millie, pleads, “Tell them not
to take chances with their children, especially when they are just young.”
When President Packer spoke at our Area
Conference, he said “We’re losing a lot. . .” Then he stopped and started
over. “[Our children] can’t wait to look like the world.”
I thought that was a strange way to put things until I happened to read
D&C 1:16 and compared it with Alma 5:14&19.
What a blessing to be homeschooling and to be
able to build strong, bonded families!
