After Leeper v. Arlington Victory Prosecutions of Homeschoolers Ceased

From Gary North:

"R. J. Rushdoony became one of the major spokesmen of the homeschooling movement in the mid-1980s. He testified repeatedly in court cases where the state had brought charges against homeschooling families.

In 1987, he testified in the case of Leeper v. Arlington. A group of homeschooling families sued the city of Arlington, Texas. There were over 1,000 districts in Texas. They won. Their attorney said in 2011, "After the victory that God gave us in that case, the prosecutions [of homeschoolers] stopped in all the other forty-nine states."

Sharpe brought in Rushdoony as an expert witness. "His testimony was way beyond anything I'd hoped for. It was one of the few times in my career that I ever saw a witness destroy the attorney who was trying to examine him..." Continue reading

Joe Morecraft's Letter Exhorting Homeschooling Families

 I want you to know about several authors whose writings are infecting homeschools with their false teaching.

The first is a brilliant woman named  Susan Wise Bauer, an evolutionist, a revisionist of church history, with a less than biblical worldview, who is hostile toward the Reformed Faith. She has even written a novel criticizing and characterizing the distinctives of our denomination, the RPCUS, calling people who share our views “Christian Nazis.”

Mary-Elaine Swanson, author of John Locke: Philosopher of American Liberty. She attempts to make Locke’s political philosophy biblical and Christian...His philosophy was rationalistic, based on human reason rather than the word of God. When the West adopted his philosophy, it began its radical rejection of the historical Christian approach to politics that had marked it for hundreds of years.

Michael Farris, founder of Patrick Henry College. Farris paints Calvin and the Calvinists as the culprits throughout the centuries, the betrayers of true liberty. The opposite is true, however; they were instead the great defenders of liberty and justice for all. 

Michael Horton's view of the relation of church and state, called the “two kingdom view,” is especially poisonous and flawed. This view says that the Bible governs the church, but human reason, unaided by the Bible, governs the state. [He also said, "I could approve of domestic partnerships.] 

Read More:

A Letter Exhorting Homeschooling Families

Eden Restored

Eternal wealth isn’t land, houses, cars and money; rather large families led by a father & mother dedicated to the kingdom and covenant of Christ. This battle determines the future. To see God’s heart here, read Psalm 78 especially 1-11.

True wealth is not vast numbers of ducks or even getting your ducks in duck houses. True wealth is ducklings raised with a Godly spirit of “Go-for-it!”  Every couple years you don’t invest, you lose the one you could have had.  ~David

Bringing Up Teenage Boys

Straight Talk to Moms and Dads

by Geoffrey Botkin

According to acclaimed American schoolteacher John Taylor Gatto, school harms boys far more than it helps them because it takes from boys the tools they need for critical thinking in the real world.

Says Gatto in his book Dumbing Us Down (1992; reprinted, New Society Publishers, 2005):

Around the year 1850 all the free-form, casual schooling that made our nation of farmers far and away the best-educated the world had ever seen was done away with in a series of strokes of the legislative pen.

In the 1860s, Herbert Spencer . . . pronounced government schooling a preposterous endeavor doomed to failure. He said that this would happen because it deprived children of raw experience and responsibility precisely at the moment their natural development demanded it, and that this experience and responsibility could not be made up for later.

“I feel ashamed,” states Gatto, “that so many of us cannot imagine a better way to do things than locking children up all day in cells instead of letting them grow up knowing their families, mingling with the world, assuming real obligations, striving to be independent and self-reliant and free.”

My purpose here is to help us imagine and pursue a better way.

Read the rest here:

http://www.homeschooltoday.com/news/175/23/Bringing-Up-Teenage-Boys.htm

Photo: Homeschooling Today Magazine

Childish Homeschooler Syndrome, Part Two

Is growing up in a Christian home an advantage to us, or a disadvantage?

First posted last December, this article by Elizabeth Botkin is a must read.

http://visionarydaughters.com/2008/12/childish-homeschooler-syndrome-part-two

Where have the boys gone?

According to USA Today per a study conducted by the Dept. of Education:
Homeschooling has doubled in the a decade.
What else has shifted?
It is the percentage of girls to boys. In 1999, it was 49% boys to 51% girls.
Now 42% are boys and 58% are girls.

God is Turning the Hearts of Fathers to The Children

My parents were both credential Public School teachers when they married. They began to read together for an hour each morning before going to work. The first revolutionary thing they saw, starting in Genesis, is that God saw children as a BLESSING. After reading together for about five months, they got the point and stopped birth control. So I was born as a result of my parents reading the scripture. Then they started reading about education from College president, Raymond Moore and his wife Dorothy. And my parents decided to home educate us.

I am awed watching my younger siblings love people whether on an airplane on the streets of San Francisco.

God is using our generation "to turn the hearts of fathers to the children and the hearts of children to their fathers lest He smite our land with a curse."

Darkness is sadly normal. But our job is to light candles. God is the One who builds His kingdom.

We cannot know everything because we are not God. But God rewards even the most stumbling obedience. And He blesses the man who fears the LORD (Psalm 112) -- not the man who knows everything about fearing the LORD.

Homeschool Graduation

Preparing Lunch with Charissa

The girls sewed their own dresses

Mom and Mrs. Maurer who just returened
from her mother's passing and funeral

The guys: Adam, Lance, Victor, Andrew and Warren
Warren just accepted a full-time pastorate there.

Rachael and her Grandpa

Mell's dad's blessing made us cry.

Timothy and Katie spoke