Grassroots Homeschooling

The term “grassroots” refers to the most basic level of an activity or entity.

Every morning on Pecan Grove Farm, our small homestead, our children awake and complete their morning routines. The two boys feed our dairy goats, laying hens, quail, ducks, rabbits, pigs, and our livestock guardian dog named Boone. Two of our younger girls are tasked with collecting eggs for breakfast and watering our kitchen garden. The two oldest girls prepare our meals and help look after our youngest daughter while I organize our daily tasks and bookwork. We all meet back inside for breakfast and our morning Bible study.

As the kids start their bookwork, I prepare for the farm classes that we teach in our little one-room schoolhouse twice a week. After the formal school work is done, the kids work on life skills and special interest projects. At the end of the school day, we do household and farm chores, including cleaning and preparing our guest house for the next guest to enjoy.

Between homeschooling, homesteading, and running two small businesses, our family is busy, but we spend all day together in a group effort to do our schooling, run our farm, and meet the needs of our family.

For fifteen years now our family has been taking a grassroots approach to homeschooling our children. With seven children, this is truly a mutual effort between my husband and myself to meet their educational needs. I organize our days, months, and years, and he oversees the spiritual development of our children, which we prioritize above academics. We work together to admonish the kids to be diligent in their schedules, faithful with their time, and mindful of the overarching reason behind why we homeschool them: to prepare them for life as adults.

We see their education as returning to the absolute basic building blocks of society, and more importantly, the building blocks of the kingdom of God here on earth, which is His church. We are pouring into these young men and women to equip them to lead and serve within the church and to be the next generation of the body to proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord. We want them to be equipped to hold out the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ as our only hope for this world much more than we want them to receive an A in calculus.

We love them enough to pause their academics to address their hearts when necessary, to watch for indicators during the day that they might be struggling or needing encouragement, or to admonish them to repent of a sin that so easily entangles. We know them better than anyone else, and our compassion as well as our concern for them motivate us like no other to train them up in the way they should go.

Taking a grassroots approach to homeschooling means we look at how children were historically educated. We place a heavy emphasis on life skills in the way that we educate our children and in how we schedule our time. For thousands of years before us, children were raised working alongside their parents during the day and pursuing classical academics secondarily. They were trained in the trades or in traditional homemaking, which was also healthcare. They did manual labor with their fathers, kept kitchen gardens with their mothers, and cooked three meals a day doing housework with their parents. Everyone was a jack of all trades because most households were fairly self-sufficient. Childhood was a time of on-the-job training that carried them over into their adult life, where they passed their skills onto the next generation.

Families kept livestock together, witnessing firsthand the cycle of life in their animals, which helped them understand the cycle of their own lives in a very real way. They witnessed their birth, youth, maturity, fruitfulness as they gave birth to offspring, and eventually their death. They cared for them and met their most basic needs by providing food, water, and shelter. They made adjustments according to the weather and seasons in a way that trained them to one day care for their own family and to take variables outside of their control into consideration. Meeting the needs of their animals every day of their childhood equipped them in a unique way to care for the needs of others above themselves.

Children learned to read and write, to know history, and to understand science in a very real and practical way. These subjects were motivated by real needs in life rather than a score on a test. They used math in a number of real-life scenarios including keeping books for their household and farm, as well as tracking investments and profits. Precise measurements were used in building projects, cooking, and sewing. If some children showed a special aptitude or talent for specific subjects, they would seek mentors or apprenticeships to build on those skills. If they had a genuine passion to know and study the Word of God and to care for others, they might start taking seminary classes at a young age to prepare them for the ministry.

Boys would grow up hunting, fishing, and processing livestock with their own hands to provide food for their families. Fathers would let young men struggle to build strength and fortitude. Mothers would let their daughters multitask, sometimes with a heavy weight of responsibility to learn time management and patience. They would serve those in need alongside one another or open their homes to show hospitality to the community in order to build compassion and genuine care for others into their children. A family unit was a team and the first line of defense for survival.

We do not merely look to general approaches to education throughout history, but we look specifically to church history and the way in which the saints of old raised and educated their children. Everything they learned was to enrich their life, to support the survival of their family and community, and ultimately to bring glory to God.

They prayed together and worshiped together more than with anyone else, knowing intimately the needs of one another. They knew how to pray for one another as well as the many specific ways that the Lord had provided for them as a family, resulting in praise, glory, and honor to the Lord.

Contrast all of this with what modern education has become. Children are now separated from their families at a young age. They teach groupthink in a way that benefits the system and not the individual. Children are subject to social manipulation and groomed from a young age to give a desired response and to yield to the authority established within the system without question. Learning environments are sterile, food is historically unrecognizable, and physical movement is prohibited for long periods of time beyond what is reasonable for a small child.

An education like this is quite new in the scope of history. Children who spend their formative years in government institutions like these are part of a social and political experiment that is less than a century and a half old.

The observable result of this experiment is that thousands of years worth of life skills have nearly been lost in the scope of just a few generations. The outcome is so severe that the majority of people who are products of government education lack the confidence that they could survive apart from the system that has been created.

Their parents, who are meant to care for them more than any other person alive, play nothing more than a secondary role in their lives, dropping them off at school and escorting them to sports practices and extracurricular activities with the little free time that they have left for their family to spend together. This leaves teachers and coaches in a position to play the primary adult influence in the lives of their children, and when the family is finally back together at home, they are occupied by screens that consume their last remaining moments of the day.

The modern approach to education prepares children to only be able to survive within the system that education was created to support. The historical approach to education teaches children to survive in the natural world that the Lord created and provided for us. The modern approach minimizes the family unit and makes them so busy that they struggle to prioritize church as the preeminent institution in this world. The historical approach leaves children embedded within their families through their most formative years and prepares them to serve within the local church.

By taking a grassroots approach to education, we are also taking a grassroots approach to ending the social experiment that is plaguing society. As parents, we want to play the God-given role that we are called to play in the lives of our children. We have been entrusted to teach them to meet their most basic needs for survival, to mirror for them caring for others and raising a family, to teach them to discern their own hearts, helping them discern their sinful depravity and motivations, to recognize their need for a Savior, and ultimately to build up the kingdom of God here on earth, which is the church.

NICOLE ANGELES
1689 Covenantalism | Historic Premillennialism | General Equity Theonomist
Nicole Angeles has been married to her husband Jeremy for nineteen years, and they have seven children whom they homeschool on their little farm in East Texas. Together, they run One Room Schoolhouse in the Piney Woods, an enrichment program where the children learn farm skills, creation science, church and Christian worldview history, entrepreneurialism, art, and various other subjects.

They also operate a farm-stay guest house that offers families an immersive homesteading experience. Their farm hosts numerous adult classes on topics like homeschooling, homesteading, and agro-tourism. Nicole organizes an annual Discipleship Homeschooling Conference in Marshall, TX.

Additionally, Jeremy and Nicole host the Dwell in the House of the Lord podcast, and they are working on an upcoming book titled Discipleship Homeschooling.