Okay Mums, buckle up, it's time to punk your classical Christian education. 2024 and beyond is going to be radically different. The education metrics we've been using need re-calibrating.
What is the big E on the eye chart for the average homeschooling family, for this generation?
(I am thinking “average” is probably: one income, first generation homeschoolers, unsupportive extended family, and if you’re radical enough to object to the status quo, then you may have also lost your church through Covid as a bonus!)
In 2023 your kid can't use the degenerate library to research the honeybee and you can't ask your Mum and Dad to babysit while you plan a schedule because they are touring New Zealand in a campervan.
You are hiding your unvaxxed unchipped kids from the gubmint while you try to do Latin and make it fun! You don't live on a farm, you live in a house built for a cat and a spinster, with five children in bunks on one wall.
When you take your kids to the park to stretch their legs you have to explain why there are double mastectomy scars on the sunbathers. None of this is hyperbole.
What is the mission!? Is it still enviable penmanship and two languages and Cello? Advanced math? Or are things so radically different, is the cancer in the culture so aggressive that something else entirely is required?
In ten years when your kids are grown, they are going to have a lot on their plate. Their peers are going to be very broken people: detransitioners, surrogate orphans of divorced man couples, used women, used men, abused and abusive. They will have terrible associations with sex. They will have post traumatic Stockholm syndrome toward the welfare state.
Your well-loved kids will have a lot of work to do and will need a unique set of tools which may or may not include incredible cursive penmanship.
OKAY, rough draft of the mission:
1. Keep your children alive and intact, safe from the death cult. This is not as obvious as it sounds. This probably means an exponentially low-tech approach in your homeschool. Your child may not look at other people’s screens. Your children may not assume the good intentions of the neighbours.
2. The skills 80s babies were raised to acquire through university helped us become SSRI dependent office workers. Your child needs something entirely different. Favour everything that bumps up against reality: dirt, wood, food, cloth, nails, hammers, plumbing, beekeeping, conversations with the elderly.
3. Your child needs to be physically strong and resilient - do not coddle your toddlers. Train very small children to stop wailing as soon as they have alerted you to their injury. “As soon as Mamma knows you are hurt the siren gets switched off”. Being outside for the day is an unquantifiable good. Expect more perseverance from everybody and demonstrate it.
4. You need to defrock the Board of Education in your head. They don’t believe in biological sex, but you want them to approve of your math curriculum choice?
4.1 No copying public school, for anything. It should be beyond clear that they cribbed the “early learning” standard from healthy hetero households and then corrupted it. Numeracy and literacy are the byproducts of a functioning home with a loving mother and father, and this was always the case. DON’T give their standards a second thought - their programs and timetables are about babysitting and crowd control; DO ask your husband what he wants your 6 year old to be reading.
5. That said, the more disciplined you are as a household, the more time and space there is for creativity and dominion. Scheduling and housekeeping are your servants and not your tyrannical master.
6. Your kids don’t have goats to milk or stables to muck so put them to work everywhere else you can - they need to see their value to the mission of your household. Equip them to be well rounded caretakers of whatever God has given you. Cathy McKay has an excellent episode on “making” work for your children.
https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/light-duties/id1567448098?i=1000619853024
7. Consume Classical Christian Ed resources like you eat nutritious food, stock your library like your fridge, and encourage snacking. You don’t need to put it on a schedule if it is in the fruit bowl ready to pick up. If there isn’t any junk food available, the Odyssey will be read. We are after palate-formation and nourishment, not drills and box ticking.
8. Use every opportunity you can to galvanise sibling loyalty. Your children need to be like the mafia. Board game sibling conflicts are the forum for future adult-world resilience, not an inconvenience to your schedule. If you catapult your kids into the future as a band of brothers (and sisters) you have blessed them in a way that a trust fund cannot.
9. Your kids need to have permission to be disagreeable (while respectful). They do not need to smile affirmingly at the creepy man in a dress. All of them can roll their eyes in unison when the cashier asks you “don’t you have a TV?” They do not need random dog moms’ approval. Neither do you!
10. Catechise them to be radical, not nominal, Christian disciples who outstrip you in the terror they pose to the regime and in their allegiance to the Lord.
Your kids need to be so well versed in the narrative arc of scripture that they scoff at Sunday School Noah’s ark pictures and tell neighbours without flinching that God is perfectly just to wipe out the Amalekites.
“Christ is talking about AD70 in Matthew 24 and he is reigning presently and putting all his enemies under his feet, Mom! Fret not thyself because of wicked men! Where is the big black Sharpie? I have to write Psalm 2 over some Covid propaganda in the park but I will be back before dinner.”