A homeschool advocate acquainted with an IFI staff member recently answered over 150 Facebook messages about homeschooling. 

“It’s just blowing up!” the advocate said. “Lots and lots of parents from central and southern IL wanting out.”

Homeschooling has been around for a few decades now, and it has made significant advances in quality and acceptability over the years, but it usually seems to have been relegated to the academic fringes. 

However, as Covid lockdowns, perverse sex-ed curriculums, and public school underperformance have been prompting multitudes to retreat from the mainstream educational system, homeschooling is quickly becoming a more appealing option.

There are good reasons for this. As a homeschool graduate myself, I recently wrote a three-part series on its blessings: homeschooling can provide an education tailored to your children, in an environment where Christ is Lord, and taught by teachers who model the person you want your child to become. 

Yet, even if you come to agree on the overall advantages of homeschooling over the public school arrangement, there may still be one more question ringing around in your mind: Can I really do it? Homeschooling may sound great in theory, but is it realistic for me and my family?

That’s a great question. It’s easy to theoretically grasp the benefits. But it takes many late nights, tears, and broken pencils to turn the theory into reality. 

So I won’t take this question lightly; I’ll address homeschooling’s feasibility just as seriously as I addressed its benefits. Can you really do it? Here’s my humble attempt at an answer: No, you can’t. You heard me correctly—you cannot successfully homeschool. 

Educating your child is a weighty responsibility that you cannot properly fulfill. And I’m not being flippant.

Just think about the gravity of the task, starting with the gravity of who your child is. As C.S. Lewis famously observed,

“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.” 

Sitting across the kitchen table from you is a little soul who will live forever. This little soul is created in the image of the Almighty God and is the pinnacle of God’s creation. This little soul could one day impact millions of people for good or for ill. Indeed, Lord providing, this little soul will one day be the kind of person who will judge angels (1 Corinthians 6:3). And this little soul is starting his first two decades in your home.

Now think about the gravity of education itself.

There’s a reason the Bible warns us that not many should presume to teach (James 3:1). When you educate your child, you are shaping this little immortal life. Especially in the early years, most everything you say will be absorbed wholesale and influence the trajectory of your child’s impressionable mind. Children are massively influenced by their training when they are young (Proverbs 22:6), and much of it will never be erased.

Educating a child is like drawing on a whiteboard with Sharpies.

This extends not only to academics, but to character. Let’s face it—students become like their teachers (Luke 6:40). You, a broken and finite human who is (if we’re being honest) still figuring out what kind of person to be, are now teaching another little human who to be.

What’s more, in whatever you teach your child, you are bound to be teaching him about God. This is because there are two categories of things—God, and things God has made (John 1:3). If you’re teaching your child Bible or theology, you’re teaching him about God.

If you’re teaching him biology, language arts, music, or P.E., you’re teaching him about things God made. God takes it very seriously when we teach little ones incorrectly about Him (Deuteronomy 18:20, Matthew 18:6).

When educating your child, you have to get it right.

The gravity of homeschooling is staggering. It is, in a sense, a supernatural task. You cannot do all of this successfully. Combining all this with the necessary academic know-how, the discernment to apply effective discipline, and the time required to grade all the kids’ homework, I stand by my claim that you cannot homeschool. 

On your own power.

Again, I’m not being flippant. Christ tells us that, apart from Him, we can do nothing (John 15:5). God’s servants freely confessed their inability to do the supernatural tasks set before them (Genesis 41:16, Daniel 2:27). But I believe that it is precisely here that God begins to work, for His power is perfected in our weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9). 

The moment when we admit that—on our own power—we cannot successfully homeschool may very well be the point at which God calls us to do so. We cannot shape immortal souls into the kind of God-honoring beings they should be, but God can. And God can do it through us.

Consider this: In the very same passage that tells us we can do nothing apart from Christ, Christ tells us that if we abide in Him, we will bear much fruit (John 15:5). Christ gives us the ability to perform supernatural tasks that we ourselves cannot do. He even expects it. 

After all, God calls fathers to bring up their children in His training and instruction (Ephesians 6:4). God commanded the Israelites to teach their children diligently the truths of His word (Deuteronomy 6:7). Education is a task specifically given to parents, and while this doesn’t mean that no one else can do it too, it does mean that parents can’t avoid it.

To be sure, some parents are called to bring up their children in the moral training of the Lord and send their kids off to a Christian school where they are brought up in the training of Latin and physics.

But other parents are called to bring up their children in the training of the Lord, of Latin, and of physics all at once. 

If you are called to this, remember that the same God who gives all Christian parents the ability to fulfill His basic requirement of moral education will give you the ability to teach the additional subjects on top of that.

You may not have the qualifications that “professional teachers” have. Yet, doing it by God’s power, you will not fail. God doesn’t need anyone’s qualifications to accomplish His purposes. And when He calls you to something, He often provides you with a strong network of people on the same mission as you. As someone who grew up in the homeschooling community, I can personally attest to that. 

You will not be alone.

So you can homeschool, if you realize that—as in all things—it will be a work of God through you. As the son of a homeschooling mother, I know there has been many a morning when my mother did not feel like starting up yet another school day with the kids.

It’s hard work. Impossible work, if you look at it that way. There have even been some August afternoons when, preparing for the school year ahead, she didn’t have confidence it would work out well that year. 

But by God’s power, she and many other homeschooling parents have stuck with it. And their children arise and call them blessed (Proverbs 31:28).