The modern life is remarkably compartmentalized. We are family members at home, but all our other roles take us elsewhere, and we must perform them only in strictly designated spaces.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in how we handle children and career. We live in a society that is family unfriendly and built on the religion of “workism,” which places work first and family a distant (and optional) second. These priorities require compartmentalization: Kids must go to designated places for kids so adults can go to designated places for work. The result is a grueling and isolating schedule for all, especially children.
A child who takes the bus to school might need to be up before 6 a.m. to be on time. A full day follows, ever more of it involving screens. After school, extracurricular activities can keep kids away from home until dinner—which family members may well eat apart—and after dinner comes homework. There’s little room for quality family time, certainly not during the week. The closest some families come is time spent in the car, rushing from school to activities to home, rinse and repeat.
For adults, of course, work happens at work, ideally a suitable commuting distance from home. Particularly for those with professional careers, work and home life can be so separate that our own spouses don’t know our “work selves,” as some couples suddenly realized in the early days of the pandemic. The growth of remote work has blurred this line, but, even there, our ideal is a dedicated home office with a closed door.
Such a neatly organized system sounds grand in theory—if you’re a robot. But this compartmentalization isn’t working very well for us humans. The results speak for themselves: Families are more stressed than ever, more overscheduled, more overwhelmed, less connected. Anxiety for people of all ages is through the roof—and it is especially harmful for our kids, as Jonathan Haidt and Abigail Shrier have shown in their respective recent books.
But then, the compartmentalized life was never suited to human flourishing. We take this lifestyle for granted as a necessary byproduct of the modern age, but Christians—called to integrate our whole lives to the worship and service of God—should be particularly well-equipped to see that our lifestyle has gone very wrong.
My family has also come to see that our lives do not have to be so compartmentalized. For most of world history, family life was far more integrated, and family members spent more time together each day. They worked together, read together, ate meals together, prayed together.
Most of us can’t replicate that historical model, because most of us aren’t running a farm or a small family business based in the home. But we can regain some integration by educating our children at home, and, in my house, we do just that.
Homeschooling families like mine want to combine learning with family life to promote not just individual growth but family flourishing, with spiritual benefits. Of course, homeschooling isn’t the only way to recover an integrated life and to put family flourishing first. I know families who have children in public and private schools who achieve such flourishing with significant conscious effort. But homeschooling is certainly one way to pursue this goal, and I’d like to give you a glimpse of what it looks like in the 21st century.
I have been homeschooling for 14 years now, and my children have never been to public school, although we have attended a number of homeschool co-ops over the years. My oldest graduated high school a year ago. Also a year ago, I left my academic career as a professor of history and classics.
These days, during the school year, my children have a leisurely breakfast in pajamas, then start doing something creative—drawing or coloring, reading, listening to an audiobook, or putting together a puzzle. Once I am sufficiently caffeinated, we work on the few formal subjects for which we use a curriculum. Lately that’s math and Koine Greek for my son, who just finished fourth grade, and math and letters for my daughter, who has just finished pre-K.
Over the rest of the day, we read aloud—a lot. This includes family Bible reading, but many other books too. We also read quietly on our own. We go to the library multiple times each week for both books and activities. We regularly take field trips and spend hours each day outside, sometimes with friends. We go to the playground, take walks, ride bikes, and create ephemeral chalk masterpieces on our driveway, fueled by homemade snacks and baked goods.
Most of all, we focus on living life together as a family, chores and all. School is fully integrated into family life. My husband Dan and I are parents, yet we are also teachers to our kids—a tradition that harkens back to Moses, as we see articulated powerfully in the Shema (Deut. 6:4–9; 11:13–21). The line between the two titles (parent and teacher) is blurred or erased altogether in the home, Deuteronomy reminds us. God calls us to teach our children about him every waking moment, not to outsource all learning to “professionals.”
One of our goals in beginning to homeschool was to significantly reduce family stress for all of us. And this past year, even amid a cross-country move, I think we’ve largely succeeded. Reducing our stress over the minutiae of education—over stuff that can be scientifically measured by the standardized tests that modern schooling idolizes—has given us more space to think about more important learning outcomes, about raising kids who will love God with all their hearts, minds, and souls and love their neighbors as themselves.
Children are little for merely a blink of an eye, the cliché goes. Except, it’s true. We only have a few years to teach them these greater lessons, to introduce daily practices to cultivate a life that places others ahead of one’s self. Such practices make our house into a “(home)school of democracy,” where, alongside reading and arithmetic, we teach our children how to communicate and collaborate across differences while we grow together in patience, love, temperance, prudence, charity, and justice.
In her recent book, Becoming Homeschoolers, Monica Swanson writes that the most important benefit of homeschooling for her family was its effect on the bonds of parents with children and siblings with each other as they grew together not only academically but spiritually. More than a decade of teaching undergraduate and graduate students with various educational histories convinced me of homeschooling’s practical and pedagogical advantages. But after homeschooling myself, I think Swanson is right. Homeschooling’s chief virtue is how it integrates and strengthens our relationships—within our family and, most of all, with God.
Nadya Williams is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church (Zondervan Academic, 2023) and the forthcoming Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity (IVP Academic, 2024).
