Be nice to homeschoolers
Imagine if you could travel through time back to the dark ages. Most people were illiterate then (only priests were educated enough to read), and those who could read a book as we do would have to be extremely privileged or lucky to actually find a book to read. Now punch the fast-foward button and come to the 20th century. Books are everywhere. Even the smallest town has a small collection of books in what we call a library. Almost every house is graced with the presence of the Holy Bible.
On top of that, more than half of the United States is literate, and is priviliged enough to be able to read a book at any time they wish to by simply visiting a local library. But….do they? Now they have little time to read books. Kids have school, and homework after school, so they have no time. Teenagers just out of school are either too busy with college or too busy flipping hamburgers, so they have no time. Even adults must eke out some sort of life for theirselves or their off-spring, so they have no time either. It’s ironic.
Here we are presented with an absolute wealth of knowledge, but most people simply don’t have the time to take it, or are simply un-interested. Un-interested, you say? How could someone be simply ‘un-interested’ in the pasttime of reading, of gaining knowledge, of learning new things? I’m sorry, but it’s really happenned. The biggest detriment to this is public school, because it knocks an individual over the head and says,
“Read this, pal, and memorize it, or you’ll be stuck here in this prison for an extra year.”
After being forced to read and memorize something for year after year I’ll bet you wouldn’t read much either, except the token amount that you could get by with. I know very few public-schooled bookworms. I asked my neighbor once if she read much.
“Just average,” she answered. ”How much is average?” I asked. ”Maybe two or three books a year.” She shrugged. I was appalled. I read two or three books a week, if I could manage to squeeze them in. I figured she meant real books, something by Toklien, Stephenson, or any other classical author. But, no, she meant those little dinky “Baby-Sitter’s Club” books. I rather doubt you could even learn a token amount of baby-sitting from these books – much less anything else! It reminds me (yes, he’s going to scripture!…) of Hosea 4:6, “My people die for lack of knowledge.” Of course, that means both spiritual and physical. But it’s the physical knowledge that I’m focusing on now. There are whole chapters in Proverbs devoted to the art of gaining knowledge (Proverbs 3:20). Society will not going to gain much from the ”Baby-Sitter’s Club”, or the multiple parties and sleep-overs that they manage to attend. If the average public schooler reads only two or three books per year (compared to the average 6 hours of television per day) then we’re in one serious bit o’trouble.
But you and I are homeschoolers. We have plenty of time granted to us to read, and if your parents are like mine, you’ve got a gazillion books to feed the reading frenzy for your education. Like Proverbs 4:5 says, “Get wisdom, get understanding, and forget it not;”. Worshipping God is the first step, and if you’ve got that, the most important part, going, then time for the second! I know quite a few homeschoolers who really aren’t reading much – mostly those with TV’s, computers, or live in those weird places called ”suburbs”. That’s primarly to whom this is directed – those homeschoolers who either don’t realize how important reading is, or take it for granted. You an Mr. or Mrs. I-Just-Don’t-Have-The-Time are presented with the oppurtunity that is singular to now, unavailable in past centuries; you are presented with a wealth of knowledge and learning that only takes your participation to begin. So go read a book!