The modern life is remarkably compartmentalized. We are members of the family at home, but all our other roles take us elsewhere, and we must perform them only in strictly designated spaces.
Nowhere is that this more obvious than in how we handle children and profession. We live in a society that’s family unfriendly and built on the religion of “workism,” which places work first and family a distant (and optional) second. These priorities require compartmentalization: Kids must go to designated places for youths so adults can go to designated places for work. The result’s a grueling and isolating schedule for all, especially children.
A baby who takes the bus to highschool might should be up before 6 a.m. to be on time. A full day follows, ever more of it involving screens. After school, extracurricular activities can keep kids away from home until dinner—which members of the family could eat apart—and after dinner comes homework. There’s little room for quality family time, actually not throughout the week. The closest some families come is time spent within the automobile, rushing from school to activities to home, rinse and repeat.
For adults, in fact, work happens at work, ideally an acceptable commuting distance from home. Particularly for those with skilled careers, work and residential life might be so separate that our own spouses don’t know our “work selves,” as some couples suddenly realized within the early days of the pandemic. The growth of distant work has blurred this line, but, even there, our ideal is a dedicated home office with a closed door.
Such a neatly organized system sounds grand in theory—if you happen to’re a robot. But this compartmentalization isn’t working thoroughly for us humans. The results speak for themselves: Families are more stressed than ever, more overscheduled, more overwhelmed, less connected. Anxiety for people of all ages is thru the roof—and it is particularly harmful for our youngsters, as Jonathan Haidt and Abigail Shrier have shown of their respective recent books.
But then, the compartmentalized life was never suited to human flourishing. We take this lifestyle with no consideration as a obligatory byproduct of the trendy age, but Christians—called to integrate our whole lives to the worship and repair of God—ought to be particularly well-equipped to see that our lifestyle has gone very fallacious.
My family has also come to see that our lives would not have to be so compartmentalized. For most of world history, family life was much more integrated, and members of the family spent more time together every day. They worked together, read together, ate meals together, prayed together.
Most of us can’t replicate that historical model, because most of us aren’t running a farm or a small family business based in the house. But we are able to regain some integration by educating our youngsters at home, and, in my house, we do exactly that.
Homeschooling families like mine wish to mix learning with family life to advertise not only individual growth but family flourishing, with spiritual advantages. Of course, homeschooling isn’t the one method to get better an integrated life and to place family flourishing first. I do know families who’ve children in private and non-private schools who achieve such flourishing with significant conscious effort. But homeschooling is actually one method to pursue this goal, and I’d like to offer you a glimpse of what it looks like within the twenty first century.
I even have been homeschooling for 14 years now, and my children have never been to public school, although we’ve attended various homeschool co-ops through the years. My oldest graduated highschool a yr ago. Also a yr ago, I left my academic profession as a professor of history and classics.
These days, throughout the school yr, my children have a leisurely breakfast in pajamas, then start doing something creative—drawing or coloring, reading, listening to an audiobook, or putting together a puzzle. Once I’m sufficiently caffeinated, we work on the few formal subjects for which we use a curriculum. Lately that’s math and Koine Greek for my son, who just finished fourth grade, and math and letters for my daughter, who has just finished pre-K.
Over the remaining of the day, we read aloud—lots. This includes family Bible reading, but many other books too. We also read quietly on our own. We go to the library multiple times each week for each books and activities. We commonly take field trips and spend hours every day outside, sometimes with friends. We go to the playground, take walks, ride bikes, and create ephemeral chalk masterpieces on our driveway, fueled by homemade snacks and baked goods.
Most of all, we concentrate on living life together as a family, chores and all. School is fully integrated into family life. My husband Dan and I are parents, yet we’re also teachers to our youngsters—a convention that harkens back to Moses, as we see articulated powerfully within the Shema (Deut. 6:4–9; 11:13–21). The line between the 2 titles (parent and teacher) is blurred or erased altogether in the house, Deuteronomy reminds us. God calls us to show our youngsters about him every waking moment, to not outsource all learning to “professionals.”
One of our goals in starting to homeschool was to significantly reduce family stress for all of us. And this past yr, even amid a cross-country move, I believe we’ve largely succeeded. Reducing our stress over the minutiae of education—over stuff that might be scientifically measured by the standardized tests that modern education idolizes—has given us extra space to take into consideration more necessary learning outcomes, about raising kids who will love God with all their hearts, minds, and souls and love their neighbors as themselves.
Children are little for merely a blink of an eye fixed, the cliché goes. Except, it’s true. We only have a couple of years to show them these greater lessons, to introduce day by day practices to cultivate a life that places others ahead of 1’s self. Such practices make our house right into a “(home)school of democracy,” where, alongside reading and arithmetic, we teach our youngsters how one can communicate and collaborate across differences while we grow together in patience, love, temperance, prudence, charity, and justice.
In her recent book, Becoming Homeschoolers, Monica Swanson writes that crucial advantage of homeschooling for her family was its effect on the bonds of oldsters with children and siblings with one another as they grew together not only academically but spiritually. More than a decade of teaching undergraduate and graduate students with various educational histories convinced me of homeschooling’s practical and pedagogical benefits. But after homeschooling myself, I believe Swanson is true. Homeschooling’s chief virtue is the way it integrates and strengthens our relationships—inside our family and, most of all, with God.
Nadya Williams is the writer of Cultural Christians within the Early Church (Zondervan Academic, 2023) and the forthcoming Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity (IVP Academic, 2024).
