Deuteronomy 6:7
7 And you shall repeat them diligently to your sons and speak of them when you sit in your house, when you walk on the road, when you lie down, and when you get up.
As much as I'd love to tell you this is a post about how everyone should be homeschoolers, it's not, though I bet there are more than a few who passed over this because they thought it was.
This is a reminder to you that God's design for the instruction of children, particularly in maters of spiritual education and discipleship, was always placed within the context of the family. Parents were always a part of His plan, and your children were given to YOU for a reason. Even those kids by adoption are brought into our lives by God directly, and as such, we are responsible for them.
The modern worldly philosophy tell you that, "it takes a village to raise a child," and there is a modicum of truth to that. Yet what the world calls a village and what the Bible describes as the village are two different things.
The world sees the village as a bunch of people from different beliefs and backgrounds all rallying together in their humanness to raise a child to become the best version of their humanness.
The Bible sets the believing child in a loving body of believers who all work together to keep the faith, as taught by the parents, and live their faith in a world that often derides it. In this the child find belonging, purpose, and a broader understanding of the world that just that of selfish self-fulfillment.
More importantly, however, unlike the world's belief, the Bible does not put the education of the child on the village, it puts it on the family. That is probably the biggest difference between the two philosophies.
In the world, it is each of these "different" people exposing a child to a multitude of philosophies that educates them. In the Biblical view, it is the parents who lead the child in matters of faith and morality, and the the broader body of believers in their Church family wrap around them to help reinforce the parental teaching.
That is not to say that we should shelter them from the philosophies of the world, but as parents, it is our responsibility to prevent them from being harmed by the sinful and self driven agenda that the world wants them to embrace. That understanding comes as we teach and guide them along, and as a Church, we then help to undergird that understanding.
If you have farmed out the didactic education of your children to the public school, and the spiritual education of your children to the Sunday school, then you cannot be surprised when your child shows up with values wildly different from yours and beliefs that are wrong and universalistic. It literally happened on your watch.
As believers, our responsibility is to teach, train, and discipline our children into being strong men and women of character. That is the greatest legacy we can leave behind, and it is often one of the singularly most overlooked in today's society.
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