Lisa Barry: How many of you have ever considered home schooling? To be honest, whenever the thought crossed my mind, my thoughts would quickly race to imagine nightmares like this: It's graduation time, but my children are still reading Dr. Seuss. Or what if I forget to teach them science altogether and they grow up thinking the moon is made of Swiss cheese? Well, now maybe your thoughts aren't quite as outlandish as mine, but the thought of home schooling might just seem as remote a possibility for you.

Today on Gateway To Joy, Valerie Shepard takes us on an interesting tour through home schooling from her own experience. But first, here's Elisabeth Elliot to get us started.

Elisabeth Elliot: "You are loved with an everlasting love." That's what the Bible says. "And underneath are the everlasting arms." This is your friend Elisabeth Elliot, talking with my daughter, Valerie Shepard. I think you want to talk today about home schooling. Is that right, Val?

Valerie Shepard: Yes, I would.

Elisabeth Elliot: Tell us why you do it and how and all that.

Valerie Shepard: We've been home schooling for twelve years. When we were first led into it by the Lord, we simply saw that our child, our oldest child, was withdrawing from us. We didn't like that. It wasn't that the school was bad, but it was simply that the amount of time that he was away from us caused him to not be able to share all that was going on in the six or seven hours that he was gone.

We wanted to draw him back home. We wanted to be closer to him. Over the years, I think I've become more and more solidified in my desire to teach godly character to my children. So the main reason we home school is to pass on godly values and godly character to our children. You have to spend a lot of time with your children in order to pass that on.

The basic education, reading, writing and arithmetic, is important. But we are not saying, Walt and I as Christians, are not saying that all Christian parents should home school their children. We believe God led us into it and we're thankful. We are grateful. Over the years, there have been different challenges, but we have definitely seen godly character being built up through the grace of God, through their being at home for the majority of their time.

I would like to just tell where each of them is right now, what ages they are, so that people know what has happened with the older two. Our son Walter we started home schooling in the second grade. We home schooled him up to the fifth grade, put him in private school for one year in the fifth grade, then decided to home school him again sixth, seventh and eighth grade. After the eighth grade, we put him in two years of public school, thinking that he needed that in order to go to the Air Force Academy, which is something he had wanted to do since he was in fifth grade.

After two years of public school, he stopped and went to the local community college. The last year, he has made two major trips. After his two years of community college, he went for six months to Peru to live with my uncle and aunt, who have been missionaries there for over 45 years. Then for six or seven weeks this summer, he was in Africa with a missions team. Now he is in Morocco with a missionary family, living again for six months to help them out in whatever way they need help. They need help mostly in home schooling their four children. He is very happy where he is. When he comes back home, he would like to finish his next two years of college.

Our second child, our daughter Elisabeth, is now 17 and is in a boarding school in Canada named Grenville Christian College. We home schooled her through her junior year, but I didn't specifically teach her through her junior year. She was on an independent study program through the high school.

Elisabeth Elliot: I think we should clarify that in Canada, the word "college" has a different meaning than it does here.

Valerie Shepard: College means it's preparing for university.

Elisabeth Elliot: But they have five years, do they, of high school?

Valerie Shepard: Yes. They have a thirteenth grade. They also call it the "O.A." year. In Ontario, that's required for the universities. Anyway, Elisabeth is a senior there. Of course we miss her, but we're very thankful for this opportunity for her.

We are home schooling all the rest of them. Christiana is fourteen. Jim is twelve. Colleen is ten. Evangeline is seven, and Theo and Sarah are four and three. I plan, God helping me and God willing, for us to home school all the rest of them through high school. I feel that my first two were kind of experiments through high school. I didn't feel adequate at all to teach them anything or to keep them at home through high school. So God has been gracious to get them through to what they have been through and to where they are now.

But home schooling is a place or a training ground for character qualities that you don't really have that much time to work on. Some parents do. I should say that no parents have any time if their children are in regular school to be able to work on godly characteristics. Of course that's what they want to do, if they're Christian parents. But I feel that the extra time that we've had with our children because they've been at home has been a blessing and a gift from the Lord.

Elisabeth Elliot: Isn't it true-I've heard it said by some authority that children are much more likely to absorb the values of their parents in the first eight or ten years of their lives than the values of their peers?

Valerie Shepard: If they're spending the majority of the time with their parents.

Elisabeth Elliot: I mean, that's the time at which they would be much more open to what their parents have to teach them. So if they go off to school, then they're sort of canceling out the opportunity to absorb the values of their parents and are much more prone to take the values of their peers, which is not always to be desired by any manner or means.

Valerie Shepard: I think we as home schoolers, though, need to be careful that we're not keeping them at home because of fear that they will get the world's values and be ruined forever. We saw in those two years that Walter was in public school, even though he took on some worldly-type thinking, we felt that it was right for him to be independent of us because he was a young man. We have seen some home schoolers who have kept their boys at home through high school. It has even caused dependence on the parents. It doesn't seem healthy to us. So I think we have to be careful as parents that we're raising our children in faith that the Lord is going to help them to become independent and mature and grown up and away from their parents and strong in the Lord.

So we still wonder whether Jim, when he gets to the age of high school, whether we would actually put him in, because we don't want him to be too dependent on us. Yet his personality already shows us that he is not going to be dependent on us. So we need to be careful that it's not fear that's ruling our reasoning for home schooling, but that it's faith in that this is the way God wants to lead us.

I've been so grateful for the way the Lord has worked in my older children over the past few years. I just can't get over how far beyond what I imagined or dreamt the Lord has done in their hearts and lives to give them a desire to serve Him, to give them a desire to do what He wants them to do. We've certainly made lots of mistakes. We've neglected a lot of areas that we should have spent more time in, and yet the Lord's grace is always good. It always works better than our own ideas of how to make perfect children.

Elisabeth Elliot: I think you've done a very good job in teaching them responsibility. I think that's another area that they don't have enough time to learn if they go away to school, because you just don't have the number of hours in the day to teach them responsibility. It's always a delight to me to see how mature your children seem to be when it comes to taking responsibilities in the home.

Valerie Shepard: Let me say just with lightheartedness there that I've always felt like I needed all the help I could get, so I had to teach them to do things to help me because in no way could I get done what I see some mothers doing for their children. I see some mothers working from morning till night, just doing everything for their children and being absolutely exhausted and resentful that their children were not doing anything for themselves. But it's because they took on the whole responsibility of doing everything for them themselves and kind of being a martyr.

I've told my children-and even when people come into our home for a meal and they offer to help afterwards, I always say, "I can always use all the help that I can get." My children have helped me all along the way. They've helped to keep the house clean. They need to take on responsibilities. That's the way the team works.

Elisabeth Elliot: Yes. They've got to learn those lessons, which are not likely to be learned if there's not much time spent at home. Having lived with Indians, you and I both had the opportunity to observe and to learn from the way they raise their children. Their children are expected to take very heavy responsibility quite early. A four-year-old would often have a baby tied onto her back. It was her job to take care of that baby for maybe hours while the mother was out planting. The boys, by the time they were eight or ten years old, were expected to take full responsibility in going out to hunt because it was a case of survival. It wasn't really optional. Everybody had to participate in order to survive.

Valerie Shepard: That's the way I felt. I needed it to survive. I needed everybody's help.

Elisabeth Elliot: But I was very amazed to see how responsible those little children were. I don't think I ever heard a lecture from any of the parents. It was just visible signs of what they were supposed to be doing and they did it. They seemed to be very peaceful, happy children, as you were. You were a peaceful, happy child because you grew up with these Indian children. I would like to take credit for you being such a happy, peaceful child, but I realize in retrospect I had nothing to do with it. You were living with jungle Indians who don't complain and who shoulder responsibility with great delight. You'd go off for a whole day in the canoe with the Indians and maybe come back with a little bunch of bananas tied to a vine. The vine was over the top of your head. Or you'd have some fish or something.

Valerie Shepard: If children grow up with an expectation to become more mature-an expectation from their parents that their children will become independent and will become mature and will grow out of being tied to their mother's apron strings, they will grow up. It's sad when you see parents hanging and overprotecting their children because they're so worried and fearful that the child won't become mature. I think we can assume and expect God to help our children become independent of us. We are growing them up, training them to live on their own. We're not to train them to hang onto us forever.

Elisabeth Elliot: Well, we could go on much longer, but there's one verse that I'd like to leave with you parents. This is a good one for your children to memorize. 1 Thessalonians 4:11: "Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands."

Valerie Shepard: Thank you, Mama, for letting me come and be on your program.

Elisabeth Elliot: It's been a pleasure.

Valerie Shepard: Thank you.

Lisa Barry: If you'd like to receive Val's letter on home schooling, we would be happy to mail one to you free of charge when you ask for it. You also have a chance to purchase our brand-new 1998 calendar, which is just beautiful. The cost for that is $7. Here's the address to write to: Gateway To Joy, Box 82500, Lincoln, Nebraska, 68501. Or call toll-free: 1-800-759-4JOY. That's 1-800-759-4569. Our redesigned Web page is up and ready for your inspection, so I hope you'll have a chance to give it a look soon at www.gatewaytojoy.org. Gateway To Joy has been a production of Back to the Bible.

Next week Elisabeth gives us a few ideas on how we can renew our minds in the midst of a mixed-up world, so be sure and join us Monday for another Gateway To Joy.