“The wrong people are homeschooling!”—These were the words of a somewhat frustrated schoolteacher. “It seems that all the kids that are homeschooling are ‘good kids’. It’s the bad kids that should be at home homeschooling!”

Actually, she is not far off at all, but let’s take a look at the root of the problem. More often than not, these ‘really bad’ children are sent off to school and the parents are glad to get them out, because they can’t handle them—or maybe they’re not even there to start. And then, the teachers get frustrated and suspend these kids for bad behavior. And where do they go? Do they have a home to go back to? Do they have parents to take over? Do they have a functional family to take care of them?

Read this from the USA Today:

“I think there’s been an increasing understanding that suspending kids from school is a bit like giving them what they want,” says Kathy Christie of the Education Commission of the States, a non-partisan policy group. And with more parents working, she says, “many times the kids don’t have a safe place to go if they are suspended.”

Here we’re dealing with the bad kids, the ones that get suspended, and what are we seeing? They don’t really have a home to go to! Could we argue that if they did have a home to go to, they wouldn’t have been suspended in the first place? Possibly. But this provides a problem—if the suggestion is that the bad kids homeschool as a [perceived] ‘cure’, how can they if they don’t have a home?

We see the root of many of these problems lies deeper than at first appears. Statistics and news reports on homeschooling and homeschoolers often puts us in a light of smart, well behaved, etc. So to the bystander it appears that something we’re doing is right. And it’s very true. But it’s not a magic cloud of character quality that just lands on anybody who homeschools. It is the home that makes the difference.

“Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home, your house is on fire and your kids all alone.” Unfortunately, more mothers need to hear this nowadays than ladybugs. What can you expect of a child that leaves a ‘burning home’ every morning to go to school and comes back to a place where no mother is there to welcome her? Is it plausible then to say that such a child should homeschool?

If you’re reading this, and the Lord has blessed you with a good home and parents who cared, be glad. Stop right now and thank God for it. Many (and fast becoming more) children today never had the opportunity to experience it.

Behind every good homeschooler is a good home. Yes, I totally agree that these kids should be homeschooling, but what has to happen first is too great for any teacher, principle, or social worker to bring about. The entire worldview of the parents and home needs to change first, and a government program will never change that.

This will only change as more people begin to grasp the message that is being sent out so clearly by homeschoolers. But for now, homeschooling cannot be a prescription.

It’s an infection that must be caught.