Home School Heartbeat Radio Program

Mike Smith:
Let’s celebrate teachers this week! October 5 is World Teacher’s Day. Let’s take a look at how homeschooling fits into the teaching tradition.

Let’s start with the Old Testament Hebrew culture, where training children in morals was very important. The parents taught their children at home; fathers gave their children moral and religious training through the oral tradition. Once the alphabet came over from Phoenicia, scribes became very important in both religious and government roles. They copied, read, taught, and generally handled everything having to do with the Law, which was found in the primary Jewish text for instruction, the Torah.

Teachers were very highly respected in the Jewish community because they had to know the Torah backwards and forwards. Because of that, education was very strongly rooted in religious tradition.

Like the ancient Hebrews, a lot of us homeschool to anchor our children in Biblical principles. Building our children’s characters and morals is just as important as teaching them their numbers and letters. Homeschooling parents take the biblical mandate to “train up a child in the way he should go” very seriously, and that is part of our heritage from biblical times!

Join us next time for a discussion of the Greeks. And until then, I’m Mike Smith.