I’m an educator. I think in the nice of education for everybody and that public schools needs to be amply funded and resourced. I think in contributing to the common good even when it doesn’t directly profit me. And in the summertime of 2020, my wife and I discovered ourselves in what I’d once have called a most improbable situation: We became homeschool parents.
Let me explain.
One of the attractive parts about moving to Abilene, Texas, five years prior was the well-loved public school system. We bought our house near one in all the numerous excellent elementary schools and expected an odd educational path for our two children. We’ve long known public school teachers, happily paid taxes for schools our kids didn’t attend, and looked back fondly on our own days of bus rides, locker conversations, and faculty cafeterias.
Then COVID-19 got here. Suddenly, we realized our our oldest could be going to kindergarten masked, unable to see his teacher’s face, distanced from other children—or else gazing a screen for hours a day in virtual kindergarten. Guidance from the varsity board was minimal, and the deadline to register our child for COVID kindergarten ticked ever closer.
We couldn’t do it—but we realized we could handle homeschooling, not less than for some time. Both my wife and I could do a few of our work remotely, and we could convert a part of our front room right into a classroom. It could be hard, but we could make it work.
“One yr,” we said. “We can do one yr.”
Let me say, now, that making this decision was not a brave one. It was simply the just one we felt was available to us. Had COVID not forced our hand, I’m undecided we’d ever have gone the direction we did. That first yr required an upheaval in our lives, and never only due to COVID. We never thought we’d be teaching someone the right way to read and do basic math without help.
But step by step, we quit making jokes about homeschoolers and dropped our unease over being the one homeschool family we knew. We began to embrace the liberty to take long weekends for camping. We found we enjoyed introducing our youngsters to literature, music, history, and philosophy. We found a rhythm of labor and instruction that meshed with our family’s goals. When probably the most intense COVID era eased, we began to attach with other homeschool families. We enrolled our kids in a three-day-a-week co-op run by licensed educators. We even attended a homeschool convention.
Many times, I’ve wondered who we have gotten. But one yr changed into two, and, 4 years later, I can’t see us turning back.
Still, the one lingering query for me is that of the common good. Here in Texas, property taxes are used, partly, to fund the colleges, but each school’s enrollment also affects its funding. The lower enrollment drops, the less funding a faculty gets. By selecting to not enroll our kids in the general public school across the corner, in other words, we’ve taken money out of that faculty’s coffers—more cash than my school supply donations will ever replace.
By homeschooling, then, perhaps I’ve taken away from the common good. But money shouldn’t be the one measure, and never all of what public schools offer as common is necessarily good.
As an educator, I feel standardized testing is a nasty strategy to organize instruction. As a parent, I even have concerns with how much time my kids are away from home, what number of hours rote homework takes from play and individual interests.
One needn’t be a Christian to share these concerns. But as a theologian and ethicist, I even have other questions too: Is participating in common rites like voting and public education the one or best way for a Christian to contribute to the nice of society? And is it possible that in saying no to the concrete, flawed version of a public good, we may say yes to the common good it goals to serve?
In the primary century, Justin Martyr offered this account of Christian participation within the common good:
And greater than all other men are we your helpers and allies in promoting peace, seeing that we hold this view, that it’s alike not possible for the wicked, the covetous, the conspirator, and for the virtuous, to flee the notice of God, and that every man goes to everlasting punishment or salvation in line with the worth of his actions.
Justin is one in a protracted line of Christians taking this approach, a line that runs through Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, the Reformation, and into the current. To support the peace of the town shouldn’t be, Justin argued, similar to using the technique of the town: By pursuing the common good in a uniquely Christian way, he said, Christians bear witness to what cities are supposed to be.
Today, we are able to hold with the apostle Paul that it’s good to live at peace with all people so far as we’re able (Rom. 12:18), and with Jeremiah that we should always seek the welfare of the town (29:7). But that doesn’t require us to pursue these ends only through the means provided by the state. It doesn’t mean people of fine will can’t disagree in regards to the type of the common good while agreeing on its value.
At its best, homeschooling orders education across the common lifetime of the family first and, from there, the lifetime of the world. For Christians, it brings education, vocation, family, and spiritual formation into an integrated whole.
Homeschooling definitely will be—and sometimes is—done in a spirit of resentment, as its detractors are inclined to charge. But it may even be a possibility for Christians to assist children pursue a vision of wisdom, citizenship, and goodness in a different way.
What if homeschooling offered an alternate vision of education that may even have resonance in the general public school system?
What if homeschooling illuminates what Christians should desire for all families: time to coach, freedom to make selections about what is sweet for our kids, and civic resources that help our residents grow in charity and goodness?
What if, as my family has found, it is feasible to homeschool for the common good?
Myles Werntz is creator of From Isolation to Community: A Renewed Vision of Christian Life Together. He writes at Christian Ethics within the Wild and teaches at Abilene Christian University.
