The Principal

When I was a kid there was nothing that brought more terror to my heart than the thought of having to go to the principal’s office. If that happened I knew I was in trouble and something terrible was going to happen to me. In my eyes the principal was the enforcer, the cop, judge, and jury, the end-of–the-line. Believe it or not, this was not the principal’s primary role in the school. The principal was the leader. His job was to provide the vision of what the school was trying to achieve and then to ensure that everything that happened within the walls of the school worked toward those goals. But we homeschool. We don’t have a principal, or do we?

Dads, we are called by God to be the leaders of our home, and, therefore, our homeschool. In other words, we are called to be the principal. We are the ones that are to decide what the goal of our homeschool is. What end are we trying to accomplish through our children’s instruction? What do we want our children to become? In a word, what is our vision? Our wonderful wives labor hour after hour, day after day, but to what end? What is the final product that we are trying to achieve through our school? Our job as the leader of our home is to provide this vision, God’s vision for our children.

We must provide a clear picture of what our homeschool is for, of what God is wanting our children to become. Is the goal having well-informed, godly children that will impact the world for the kingdom of Christ? Is the goal to equip our children with the tools they need to enter the mission field? Or maybe it is teaching how to love God, how to love their neighbors as themselves, and how to keep themselves pure and undefiled from the world. Whatever the vision is, you and I must grab hold of the vision that we believe God has for our children and communicate it to them and to our wives. They must know where they are going if they are ever going to get there. We all must have a goal in sight to know if what we are doing is moving us toward the goal or away from it.

How do we do this? We get on our faces before God and pray and read His Word, and ask Him for vision. He might lead some of us to a particular verse, and for others He might cause a purpose statement to pop into our heads. It is different for all of us, but what we have in common is that God wants us to know and to communicate this vision to our families. Catch the vision, unite your home around it and watch the mighty work that God does!