Homeschooling, parenthood and differentiated responsibilities

Prison Fellowship President Mark Earley writes of one of the advantages of homeschooling, which is a growing phenomenon south of the border:

Activities like homeschooling can help us to see being a wife and mother as what is: a calling, not a dead end. Our efforts yield tangible, as well as intangible, results. This is part of the reason that, as of 2003, more than 1.1 million children were being educated at home—an increase of 30 percent in only four years. Homeschoolers score higher on tests, and they take academic honors—like the Patrick Henry College students, all homeschooled, who recently beat a team from Oxford University in an international debate competition.

To which I say, yes, but. . . .

Where do the fathers fit in? It is certainly true that motherhood requires more hands-on care of children, especially in the early years. Yet fatherhood is also a calling which needs to be cultivated in deliberate fashion. Fathers need to be involved in their children's, and especially their sons', education. To be sure, it may not be possible, because of work responsibilities, for fathers to play as large a role as mothers in this, but they should be involved somehow and to as great an extent as possible.

Furthermore, one ought not assume that being a wife and mother exhaustively defines a woman's responsibilities in God's world. Here is James W. Skillen from his recent In Pursuit of Justice:

One of the important fruits of social differentiation and public-legal integration is that people can exercise many different resonsibilities all at the same time. Less differentiated societies often have fixed and relatively few roles for individuals. It has been possible in different societies at different points in history to think in terms of permanent classes and gender roles. Yet even with a high view of marriage as a life-long, intimate bond and of family as the most fundamental of social relationships, one can see that the marital and family roles do not exhaustively define women any more than they exhaustively define men. With changes in employment patterns, social attitudes, and public laws, it becomes possible within relatively well-balanced, differentiated societies for women as well as men to enter into marriage and build strong families while also developing a diverse range of talents and fulfilling diverse responsibilities outside the home (pp. 39-40).

If Earley were to recognize this, he might take a somewhat different approach to the larger issue of women's roles in and out of the home.