Rediscovering the Heart of Homeschooling With Israel Wayne

And

so when I step back and look at this from a kingdom of God perspective, And I ask myself, like, you know, you think about those passages like Matthew 6, 33, seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and then all these other things will be added unto you.

I believe that's why homeschooling has had such great academic and social success, why we've had studies that show that homeschoolers are successful.

more socially well-rounded than public schoolers and do better academically and all that.

It's because we've aligned ourselves with seeking first the kingdom of God.

And these other things have been the fruit of obedience.

And what I see now is that we're seeking after the fruit, right? We're seeking after the good results, right? but we're laying aside what I think is the most important thing, which is what is Jesus doing and what is Jesus about? And what Jesus has always been about is about his kingdom.

That's his priority, right? He's not excited about educational choice.

That's not what Jesus is really invested in.

What Jesus is invested in is discipleship.

And so as we shift off of his goal and his mission and his vision, and we start moving into just an alternative educational empire, I'm going to suggest that we're losing some things very substantially.

And I think the primary thing that we risk losing is the Holy Spirit.

And we really risk losing the blessing of God, which has been on the homeschooling movement for 40 plus years.

And can we afford to do that in the name of academic choice? And this is what I just feel like even so many of the Christian homeschoolers don't really recognize.

When I look at the Facebook groups and I listen to the people who are talking about home education and even so many of the vendors and just the whole homeschool community, it feels like there's just way less talk about and emphasis on Jesus and so much more on creating this kind of academic smorgasbord of of all the different varieties of of you know hybridization i guess of educational choice things like learning pods and hybrid organizations and you know these neighborhood schools and and university model schools and so many of these things that aren't even really legally homeschooling but a lot of them are Public school partnerships and so on.

And they're springing up because a lot of people see the money that can be made, but they don't want to pay for and have to jump through the hoops of creating and structuring what they're doing as a private school.

under like the private school code.

So what they're doing is to stay deregulated.

They're calling it homeschooling.

And

there's just a lot of things that I think we need to be concerned with that.

One of which is we can very easily lose our freedoms as people are labeling things that they're doing as homeschooling that are completely outside of the state statutes and how homeschooling is defined in states.

So just in this clamor to try to make as much money and capitalize on this homeschool boom, if you will, we're not only at risk of losing the spiritual roots of our movement, but also, I think, in fighting a lot of government oversight and intrusion by creating whole categories of learning that really don't fall under homeschooling at all.

And, you know, that could be a whole other podcast for the future, but I'm not saying I don't I don't think that those things should be allowed to exist.

You know, a neighborhood pod, for example, with 10 students.