Lately, I have been listening to a few of Andrew Pudewa's talks that he gave at a homeschooling conference. By the say, by starting out that previous sentence with the adverb "Lately", I just used one of his tips for "instantly improving your writing"! :-) Andrew heads up the Institute for Excellence in Writing. I must say, I feel encouraged and inspired by some of his information and ideas about homeschooling! Thus, I am spurred on to type out more of my thoughts on homeschooling. If my thoughts here seem scattered and unorganized, it's because they are! Sorry, Andrew! :-)
As I had mentioned in Part 1, in our 2nd year of marriage I decided to attend university to study education and become an elementary/middle years teacher. Why did I decide to attend university after I had pretty much decided that all I wanted to be was a stay-at-home wife and mom? To be honest, I am not exactly sure. Partly I think it was because I was worrying about the future and the "what-ifs" of life as in...what if my husband lost his job or couldn't work anymore, and then I would have to provide for the family with no university degree to fall back on. Instead of trusting the Lord about circumstances I would have no control over, I was trying to take things into my own hands, which was (and always is) wrong. I also mistakenly thought that having a university degree would better equip me to home school our children since we had recently started thinking about that. A university degree is definitely not needed in order to home school :-). Also, I probably was seeking more acceptance from the world, which places such a high emphasis on education and career-minded women. The original plan was that I would get my degree in education and then teach for a couple years to pay off student loans, and then we would start our family and I would be a full time stay-at-home-mom. At this point, we were seriously considering homeschooling our children, and we thought this was a reasonable and well-thought-out plan. It made perfect sense in our human minds, but as we know, the Lord's thoughts and ways are higher than ours, thankfully!
My 2 years in university showed me that I really did not want to teach in the public school system. I was taking "pre-education" classes, and my teaching areas were Social Studies and English. I could hardly believe some of the things we future teachers were being "taught to teach".
In my 2nd year of university, I was starting to feel increasingly uneasy about continuing my education. Some of the things we future teachers were being taught really disturbed me. (Here comes an incomplete mess-of-a-non-sentence. Oops!) Evolution in bio class, feminism ideals and tolerance for the practice of homose-uality in History class, appreciation for all religions (as in, each to his "own" truth) in Anthropology class, meditation, earth worship, and New Age spirituality in Health Science class, globalization (thinking of ourselves as "global citizens) and socialist ideology in Human Geography and Political Studies. I could go on and on...
The general undertone of every class was "tolerance" as in there are no absolute truths. This reminds me of what I heard Andrew Pudewa speak about in one of his lectures. He explained how there is NOT a separation of church and state. The state (government) teaches its religion of relativism through its temples a.k.a the public schools. The religion of relativism teaches there are no absolute truths and we need to be "tolerant" of everything and not claim that we hold the answers to the important questions of life. Hmm...religion of relativism, aren't you being intolerant of my intolerance. Get what I mean?
In late spring of 2007, the Lord suddenly spoke to me and my husband's hearts that I was to discontinue my university education. In some ways it felt like a huge step of faith, but in other ways, it was one of the easiest decisions we ever made because we had such peace about it. Without a doubt, this was one of the best decisions we ever made.
I will pause for now. Part 3 is coming soon. In fact, I am already working on it :-) Who knows? It may even be up in the next day or two.
**For Part 3, click here. **
