Faith-Based Versus Secular Homeschooling
More families are choosing to homeschool their children these days. There are two different routes that you can base your homeschooling curriculum on – faith-based and secular homeschooling.
Deciding which route to go is an important decision for your child, but it will also affect you, as the parent leading a double role as a teacher inside the home. Part of it depends on the reason that you’re homeschooling in the first place.
Many moms and dads simply don’t like the fact that the word of God is no longer allowed in the public school system. They want the Bible taught right alongside reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Others choose to homeschool because they feel the public school system is failing their child by not providing a safe environment or one where learning is the focus instead of socialization.
Secular homeschooling is for parents who want to their children in the role of traditional education, with a focus on the fundamentals that keeps education and religion separate.
Most homeschool curriculums you’ll find for sale are not for secular use. But it is possible to find a lesson plan from an accredited school that maintains a secular approach. One such example is the Texas Tech University Distance Education program, that’s suitable for a child in grades K-12.
Faith-based homeschooling teaches the fundamentals of education but weaves religious principles into each lesson plan. Christian based teaching is the more popular type of homeschooling approach, but there are families with different religions that add their own values to their child’s education.
Some of the other faith-based teachings come from the Jewish community, Buddhism, and the Muslim religion. Families who teach using faith-based homeschooling do so to instill their religious values into their children.
They believe that secular teachings take out the most important part of a child’s existence, which is spiritual. By teaching faith-based education at home, they believe the child will receive a higher education based on a combination of intellectual and spiritual beliefs.
Christianity offers more options for faith-based curriculums, while other religions have little or no curriculum to work with based on their religions, requiring the parents to develop one of their own.
In these cases, the families can choose to homeschool their children using secular lesson plans and supplement them with their specific religious beliefs or develop a single class reserved for the teaching of their religious values.
