Christian home education under threat

#Education
Christian home education under threat

Loveworld / 7 hours

April 15, 2024

2 min read

In the United Kingdom, more and more Christian parents are deciding to educate their children at home rather than sending them to secular schools. They see the increased sexualisation and indoctrination of children in local schoolsand rightly want to protect their children. They see that home education provides a wonderful opportunity to provide a wholeheartedly Christian education that explicitly sees all of life, and all learning as an opportunity to glorify God. But the right to this sort of education is under threat.
The UK government has proposed new guidance on elective home education that would enable invasive monitoring of home educators and empower local authorities to force secular values into home education. Parents have the prime responsibility for educating their children and should have the freedom to decide not to send them to state schools. The word of God is very clear that parents must be free to ‘Train up a child in the way they should go, so that when they are old they will not turn from it.’
Imagine a state where Local Authority officers had the right to come knocking on your door to check on the moral thinking and practice of the parents in regard to what they were teaching their children. The latest proposed changes take the UK closer to this kind of close monitoring system. The proposed guidelines also make the assumption that a benign and supportive influence of the ‘neutral’ state can be better exerted through increased intervention.
I will address the myth of religious neutrality in education later in the program. For now I want us to focus on the negative effects of the proposed guidelines for homeschooling. The UK government’s efforts to regulate, register and monitor ALL children means that the rights of many Christian parents who home educate will be contravened. For example, Local Authority officers are already, on safeguarding grounds, indicating children should be removed from parents who will not affirm their child’s ‘gender identity’. You would think that the United Kingdom is learning from the United States which is already reaping the fruits of that disastrous policy.