I watched this video by Prager Univeristy, and I couldn’t help but to realize that he was doing a pretty good job of describing the Wright Family Acadamy:
I love Dennis Prager, and I think his Prager Univeristy videos are excellent, and that they’re making a little bit of a difference. But, there’s a “but”, when it comes to the topic of education. So I’m going to pick this apart just a bit, but please don’t let that be an insinuation that I don’t like the video or Prager Univeristy.
He starts out by saying this:
If every high school principal gave the following speech, America would be a much better place.
I disagree strongly with this statement because I think it’s false. America wouldn’t be a much better place. It’d be the same place, and here’s why. I’ll call it the “make bad and fix” solution rather than the “make good” solution. This statement ignores and underestimates 8 years of education that took place with formative children. You can try to teach high schoolers new things, but they rightly have minds of their owns. They can and will balk at your “fix”, because they are not children. They are adults. And to call 14-year-olds children may seem like an innocuous “problem”, but it’s not. In reality, it’s a major problem, and Prager highlights why in this first statement. He’s using a “make bad and fix” approach assuming that the bad is still fixable. But these young adults are well on their way to being what they’re going to be. There is a proverb in Prager’s Bible that explains this. It says, “teach a CHILD in the way he should go, and he will not depart from it”. In other words, don’t make bad and fix, but rather, make good.
I do have to appreciate one thing in this statement, however. He is at least backing out of college and looking at high school. Most conservative pundits look only at college as if the first 8 years of making bad never happened. He needs to back up another 8 or so years.
The second problem I’ll talk about is the top-down, external-in approach. The homeschooling model is a bottom-up, internal-out approach. It doesn’t try to fix our social problems by the “top” making better laws for people to break, or forcing externals. As the old saying goes, “those who are forced against their will are of the same opinion still”. No, for one, making America a better place is not my motivation for homeschooling, although I realize that home education will do just that. But it’s a byproduct of my efforts, not the reason for them. I do it because I love my children and I want their beliefs to be consistent with reality. But I also want my children’s hearts to be right. And if I can, by God’s grace, do that, then external forces won’t be required. And these heart changes, for the most part, happen early in life, long before the children get to high school.
So, dear parent, this is so very important. Keep your children at home, and teach them when they are open to your teaching. Teach them in the way they should go early. Make them good. Don’t let the institution make them bad and then try to fix it. It is difficult at best to do that, and more likely to be impossible.