By Mimi Rothschild

Lets take a look at the central objectives of an outstanding Christian homeschooling program.

The central objectives of any good homeschooling program should be:

1) to assist students in the understanding and development of their own strengths and weaknesses,

2) To perceive, respond to and participate in God’s continuing activity and revelation in the human and Christian communities. If they deal with their continual life involvements of becoming an independent adult,

3) to provide a wide range of stimulating resources and tools that will enable students and parents to fully explore the world God has created,

4) to assist members of the Christian community to learn how to become change agents in the world, and

5) to explore ways in which homeschooling students can become social activists.

It is crucial to exist within a supportive believing community for the support necessary to become a change agent in society. The central objective of a good homeschool plan starts with the assumption that believers within the Christian community can become change agent much as Jesus commands us to be salt and light in the world

One temptation when developing the Christian homeschool curriculum is to try to copy the same educational system that most of us grew up with. Many homeschoolers set up desks and blackboards in their kitchens and tried to duplicate the educational process that exists in most public and private schools. I would like to propose that homeschooling does not have to replicate the traditional learning process and can and should in many cases reinvent the process so that more appropriately adapt to the needs of the individual learners.

In a traditional school system, students are grouped together by their chronological age. Every student that was born in a specific year is put in that grade level. Your respective of their intelligence and their mastery of the material. This alone create enormous problems for the teachers. The fact that everyone in the classroom was born in the same year means that both the curriculum and the teaching processes is usually dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. In other words, the teacher is often forced to teach to the slowest child in the classroom. What happens to the rest of the children in this scenario? It has been said that a one size fits all education, it’s no one. This is where we, as homeschoolers, have tremendous freedom.

One of the central objectives in creating a reinvented homeschool program is to forgo the notion that just because children were born in a certain year. That means they should have acquired certain skills and should be learning from certain books. That’s completely rethink the idea that children need to be at a specific place at specific times. It’s learning a race? Who determines when and why might eight-year-old has to learn XYZ. Exactly when he’s eight? This basic philosophy stems from the need in an institutional setting to herd large groups of children from one task to the other at the same time. In a great homeschooling program, we can jettison this notion altogether and concentrate our efforts on meeting the individual needs of our children.