i agree - i wasn't trying to condemn all home-schooling as being a bad thing. i was speaking from my personal experience: pretty much all the homeschooling situations i am personally familiar with fall into the latter category of being done because of control issues with disastrous long-term results. i'm sure there are people out there who do it for better reasons and in more healthy ways. i wanted rebekah to know that, as a fellow assembly kid, and for what its worth, i think there are definite benefits to sending kids to public school. even in a small private christian school i felt the impact of being overly sheltered. it wasn't easy transitioning to public school but it would only have been more difficult if i had been older, i think.
brian
Thanks, Brian. I understand better your point and you are certainly right about that.
I listened to some talks by a conference of the so-called "Emergent church". One speaker questioned the Christian movement of pulling their kids out of school to protect them from the world. He gave an example of a church whose members intentionally volunteered to help the local school. Can you imagine the impact if 50-100 members of a local church volunteered to help at an elementary school? I don't mean to bang around quoting Scripture and carrying Bibles. I mean just to be a support, to help the teacher with their mission, and fill in the gaps where money can't hire someone.