Spend enough time paying attention to what is happening in public schools and it becomes difficult to dismiss the violence as a collection of unrelated incidents. Videos of students beating one another in hallways circulate almost daily. Teachers are punched, kicked, threatened, and sometimes sent to the hospital by their own students. Children bring knives and guns to school. Students stab one another with scissors and pencils, destroy classrooms, threaten classmates, and behave in ways that would have been almost unthinkable in an elementary school not very long ago. School shootings represent the most horrific extreme, but beneath those national tragedies exists a much larger and more ordinary problem with aggression, disrespect, disorder, and a startling lack of self-control among children.
Public discussion following these incidents usually focuses on the institution. More security is proposed. Better locks are installed. Teachers receive additional training. New behavior programs are purchased. Discipline policies are rewritten. Counselors are added when budgets allow. Responsibility somehow continues moving toward the school, as though schools possess some mysterious ability to correct every problem a child brings through the front door. Years spent working as a public school teacher convinced me that this assumption is not only wrong, but deeply unfair to the people working inside our schools.
Teaching elementary art gave me a perspective somewhat different from that of a traditional classroom teacher because I saw roughly 1,000 students every week. Wonderful children came through my classroom, and many came from wonderful families. Excellent teachers worked in those buildings too, including teachers who poured an extraordinary amount of themselves into children who needed them. None of that changes what was increasingly obvious: schools were being asked to manage behaviors that schools did not create and could not possibly solve. Enormous amounts of instructional time disappeared because teachers were dealing with children who could not accept correction, tolerate frustration, respect authority, or control themselves when they became angry.
Modern educational language has become remarkably sophisticated at describing bad behavior while becoming increasingly reluctant to call it what it is. Every behavior requires an explanation, an intervention, a strategy, a plan, a meeting, a chart, or a new acronym. Certainly some children need specialized support, and legitimate developmental and emotional difficulties should never be dismissed. Compassion, however, does not require pretending that ordinary disobedience no longer exists. Children can be selfish. Children can be cruel. Children can manipulate adults. Children can learn very quickly that screaming, threatening, hitting, or destroying something will cause the adults around them to retreat. Refusing to acknowledge those realities does children no favors.
Much of what schools now struggle to correct should have been addressed long before a teacher encountered it. Self-control begins at home. Respect begins at home. Understanding that another person's body cannot be punched because you are angry begins at home. Accepting the word no begins at home. Learning that frustration must sometimes simply be endured begins at home. Schools can reinforce these lessons, but they were never designed to be the primary place where children first encounter them.
Parental responsibility has become strangely difficult to discuss in modern culture. Fear of judging parents has gradually produced a reluctance to hold parents responsible for much of anything their children do. Nobody reasonable believes parents can control every choice made by a child, particularly as children grow older. Good parents sometimes have children who make terrible decisions, just as children from difficult homes sometimes become remarkable adults. Exceptions do not erase the ordinary relationship between formation and behavior. Parents remain responsible for forming the habits, character, expectations, and moral framework of the children entrusted to them.
Shepherding children requires considerably more than loving them. Love without authority quickly becomes indulgence. Parenting requires correction when correction is inconvenient, consequences when consequences create conflict, and enough involvement in a child's life to recognize what kind of person that child is becoming. Children need adults willing to disappoint them. Children need limits that do not disappear after enough complaining. Children need to understand that membership in a family carries obligations to people other than themselves. None of these ideas are particularly revolutionary. Most would have been considered common sense within living memory.
Breakdown of the family inevitably reaches the classroom because children do not leave their formation at the schoolhouse door. Weak families produce consequences that institutions are eventually expected to absorb. Schools now carry responsibilities for feeding children, counseling children, disciplining children, teaching social behavior, resolving conflicts, monitoring emotional health, providing before- and after-school supervision, and performing countless other functions beyond academic instruction. Teachers consequently find themselves standing at the end of a long chain of cultural failures and being asked to repair all of them before lunch.
More programs will not solve a problem that is fundamentally human. Better security may prevent certain acts of violence, and schools have an obvious responsibility to protect students. Appropriate mental-health services have an important place as well. Neither changes the fact that no institution can manufacture, through policy, what families have historically produced through daily formation. Character develops through thousands of small encounters with authority, responsibility, disappointment, work, correction, forgiveness, obligation, and love. No assembly can reproduce that process, and no behavior-management system can replace it.
Homeschooling changed my understanding of this more than teaching ever did. Education once seemed naturally divided from the rest of family life because our culture has trained us to think that way. School happened during school hours, while parenting happened around it. Bringing my children home erased much of that artificial distinction. Math matters. Reading matters. History, science, art, grammar, and literature matter tremendously. Formation, however, is happening during all of it. Character is being shaped while children work beside us, argue with siblings, complete chores, read Scripture, make mistakes, apologize, encounter consequences, struggle with difficult work, and learn that the world does not reorganize itself around their immediate desires.
Homeschool children remain children, of course. They argue, disobey, complain, lose their tempers, test boundaries, and occasionally make their parents wonder whether any lesson has ever penetrated their skulls. Homeschooling offers no magical cure for human nature. Its great advantage is something far less glamorous: proximity. Parents have time to observe, correct, teach, and shepherd because education and family life are no longer operating in separate worlds.
Growing numbers of parents seem to be recognizing the value of that proximity. Dissatisfaction with conventional schooling cannot be reduced to curriculum disputes or political disagreements, although both certainly play a role. Something deeper is occurring. Parents are reconsidering an arrangement that asks them to surrender most of their children's waking hours during most of their childhood and then somehow remain the dominant influence in their formation. Families are beginning to recognize how strange it is that direct parental involvement in education has come to be viewed as unusual while outsourcing nearly every aspect of childhood is considered normal.
Much of the current homeschool movement makes more sense when understood in this context. Parents are not merely changing educational methods. Many are reclaiming responsibilities that modern life gradually convinced them belonged to professionals. Education is coming home, but so are discipline, formation, family culture, faith, responsibility, and time together. Such families are not necessarily running away from the world. Many are trying to prepare their children to live responsibly within it.
Violence in schools deserves serious attention, but treating each violent incident as an isolated failure of school policy allows the larger cultural problem to remain comfortably unnamed. Schools reflect the society that fills them. Disorder within families, the erosion of parental authority, reluctance to impose consequences, weakening community standards, and the steady transfer of parental responsibilities to institutions will eventually manifest themselves in children's behavior. Expecting teachers to compensate indefinitely for those losses is neither realistic nor humane.
Something significant is happening among parents who have decided they are no longer comfortable with that arrangement. Homeschooling is growing not simply because parents want different textbooks or smaller class sizes, but because many have rediscovered an older understanding of education itself. Raising and educating children were never meant to be completely separate enterprises. Both belong to the larger work of forming human beings capable of governing themselves, loving their families, serving their neighbors, recognizing truth, and accepting responsibility for their actions.
Public schools cannot repair the family, because no institution can perform the work of a family. Teachers cannot shepherd thirty children in the manner parents can shepherd their own. Government cannot write a policy capable of producing character. Communities concerned about violence among children would do well to invest less faith in institutional solutions and considerably more confidence in the institution that existed long before the modern school system: the family.
For many of us who have chosen homeschooling, that realization has become impossible to ignore. Bringing our children home has not meant withdrawing from the responsibility of educating them. It has meant accepting more of it. Growing numbers of parents appear ready to do the same, and that may prove to be one of the most consequential educational movements of our time.
