Homeschool education has been on a sharp rise over the past four years—ever since dads and moms had a front-row seat in their children’s classrooms through the remote Zoom session during the prolonged school closures.
According to recently released survey data from the National Center for Education Statistics, 5.2% of children ages five to seventeen “received instruction at home” during the 2022-2023 academic year. During 2018-2019, that percentage was only 3.7.
Survey data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that almost 6% of children were homeschooled during 2022-2023, up from an estimated 2.8% in 2019.
One of the reasons a growing number of parents have made the move to homeschooling is to ensure their children are not placed under the authority of a teacher during the school day who is teaching a worldview in hostile conflict with what they are teaching their children.
When a child is sent to school and told, “Listen to your teacher,” yet the teacher’s message is at odds with what their parents are teaching them at home, it places the child in tremendous conflict by having to choose between parents and teachers.
Ideas matter. As Voddie T. Baucham Jr. notes, “We cannot continue to send our children to Caesar for their education and be surprised when they come home as Romans.”
Post-pandemic, it is a new day in education, and parents want to be more involved. As evidenced by the growing number of parents opting for their children to learn from home instead of being taught by someone else during the school day, parents want a larger role in their children’s education.
Parents are no longer willing to accept the idea that the public school and their employees are the experts in their children’s education. Instead, parents are recognizing that they are their children’s primary educators and have what it takes to homeschool.
It is dads and moms who have known their children since birth and will be with their children long past the school year. Parents are the experts of their children, and they can figure out how to provide academic learning while protecting their hearts and minds from worldviews at odds with their best interests.
Click HERE to listen to Dr. Keri D. Ingraham’s interview on This Golden Hour Podcast.