Many of my grandchildren are being homeschooled at this time. I say “at this time” because the mix changes from year to year as babies grow up and become old enough for structured teaching via textbooks, worksheets, lesson plans, etc. and because a child who is homeschooled this year might have been in a preschool last year. Education is a dynamic, hands-on process, and parents who are on their game will adapt their children’s education for the good of the child and using the available resources, yet without sacrificing the continuity of the education.

A few weeks ago a friend commented something like, “Homeschooling is all well and good, but sooner or later those kids will need to come out and face reality.” I have heard this kind of thing before, but never from anyone who actively home-schooled their children. I wonder, though, what reality they have in mind.

Is it the reality of the teacher who told me that my daughters did not really need to study math or science, since girls were unlikely to need that knowledge?

Is it the reality of the high school teacher who did not know anything about trigonometry, but was teaching my daughter’s trig class anyway? Is it the reality of the teachers union protecting that teacher from reassignment without regard for the education of our children?

Is it the reality of certain parts of the public school campus being perpetually contaminated by marijuana smoke? The reality of bullies given protected status to bully others?

Don’t get me wrong. I am a product of public school education all the way from elementary school through post graduate work, and the educational system served me well. And my children were blessed with a large number of simply superb teachers in the Lutheran school and public schools they attended, notwithstanding the occasional issues mentioned above.

But other than the occasional incompetent teacher, self-serving teachers union, or pockets of bullying culture, what reality do they need to encounter that they are not already facing? From what I have seen, my grandkids receive an education tailored to their needs, learn at a pace that challenges rather than overwhelms or bores them, and maintain their curiosity, creativity, and interest for critical thinking all the while. But what about their supposed insulation from reality?

Their reality includes group excursions, field trips, and specialty classes with a couple dozen other home-schooled kids, exposing them to a range of personalities and levels of capability.

Their reality includes soccer teams, swimming lessons, horsemanship, and other kinds of enrichment, and some of these activities lead into league competition requiring teamwork, interpersonal skills, and leadership development.

Their reality includes community service, both formally (e.g., in local park districts) and informally (e.g., serving a shut-in neighbor or at church).

Their reality includes grocery shopping, visits to repair shops, trips to the library, trips to the parks, sight-seeing, and travel by car and by air, all of which are permeated with interactions with real people in real communities. Do they live a sheltered experience? No way!

A few weeks ago a friend commented something like, “Homeschooling is all well and good, but sooner or later those kids will need to come out and face reality.” I have heard this kind of thing before, and have heard it said of Christian schools, private schools, and the advanced placement programs and special needs programs in public schools. So what is the common denominator, other than maybe thinking that the grass is greener somewhere else? I am not sure, but rather than dwelling on the grumbling, let’s focus on the children.

Over the years a lot of my friends and co-workers have complained about their children, and our society as a whole often seems to see them as either a burden to be carried or as property to be managed. It is more important, and certainly more comforting, to see them as gifts that God gives to parents; gifts that God expects us to steward, protect, and nurture. We all fall short in this; none of us are perfect parents. Regardless, by the grace of God we do the best we can. I remember my parents teaching me about God, helping me learn the Lord’s prayer, and giving me the best education they could with the best available resources (time, treasure, and opportunities). We tried to do the same with our children, and now they are more than paying it forward with how they are raising our grandchildren. And homeschooling meeting reality is a big part of this.

A few days ago I was perusing Facebook and noticed a photo of two bears on a road through a beautiful forest. It was a nice photo, and, judging by the reactions, a lot of people appreciated it. A couple days went by, and I noticed what looked like the same photo, but there were four, five, or even a half dozen bears standing or lounging on the road. I was suspicious because bears can be a bit turfy, and it is unusual to see very many bears willingly stay that close to each other. Time went by, and a new photo turned up on Facebook. It was the same view, but this time there were at least 20 bears on the road! That confirmed my suspicion of a faked photo, but the artist was not done. A day or two went by, and the photo below turned up on Facebook:

So if you saw a series of photos like I described, at what point would you realize that the photos are fake? At what point would they lose their credibility? And how would you know?

In the case of bears, we know that cubs stay with their mothers until old enough to strike out on their own, but otherwise it is unusual to see very many bears together in one place. I have seen as many as seven grizzly bears at a time eating in a farmer’s field, but they all kept their distance from each other. And you have probably seen photos of bears fishing for salmon in Alaska, but they fight for the best fishing spots, and they are certainly not relaxed and lounging next to each other. So our understanding of bear behavior tells us when a photo of bears starts to reach the edge of credibility and when is is clearly a fake.

We need to bring the same sense of reality and experiential understanding into play when we read or hear the news. Sadly, much of the journalism in the US has been moving past the edge of credibility for years. As an editorial by Gerard Baker in the March 3 Wall Street Journal describes it, most of the media has become like a cult religion, saying whatever their customer base wants to believe, and without much regard for objective truth (my paraphrase). I detect this when I see the media asserting things that I can see with my own eyes, or know from personal experience, are not true. You have eyes and experience, so you can detect it, too.

One of our presidents once said, “trust but verify.” Good advice. We really need an honest, objective press, but in these times we need to verify what we read and hear now more than ever. Time to sharpen up our critical thinking skills, ask good questions, check multiple sources, and measure what we hear against what we know. And don’t fall into the trap of thinking, “who can know?” It may take time, but, as they say, the truth will out. Otherwise, if we give up on the truth, we may foolishly believe things as incredible as a hundred bears lounging on a highway.

A few days ago one of my Facebook friends posted, “Falling like a rock! Have you looked at your retirement funds lately?” So I looked at our retirement funds, and saw that they are doing quite well. In fact, they grew by better than 7% in the three months since Trump was elected last November. In fairness, they were doing well before Trump was elected, too.

A day or even a week of “falling like a rock” can mislead us, and maybe three months of good performance can mislead us, too. It takes a long view to really understand the performance of retirement funds. We lost about 50% of our retirement funds in 2008 when the dot-com bubble burst, but we took a long view, and the funds grew back within two or three years. We lost about 30-40% again in 2022 when government shut down the economy because of Covid, but they grew back again, and then some. Our retirement funds have done quite well over the long haul, averaging 10-12% growth per year despite pandemics, presidents, and the occasionally chaotic market ups and downs. Taking a long view is the prudent approach.

Taking a long view is also prudent when we consider how the meeting between Zelensky and Trump blew up yesterday (February 28). You probably saw selected snippets of it on broadcast news or in social media. If you have time and interest, it would be worth your while to find and watch the entire meeting, which started out well enough but then devolved into an argument in its last few minutes. Why were we shown “selected snippets?” Because the anti-Trump people and the pro-Trump people immediately went into knee-jerk reaction mode about how the meeting was a disaster for Trump or a disaster for Zelensky, complete with cherry-picked video snippets to prove their points. The real questions, of course, are not who started or won the argument, but what is the strategic meaning and future of Ukraine’s war of self-defense against Putin’s Russia, and what should the US do with the situation? If we want the truth, we need to seek it out, but we will not find answers overnight. Alexa, Siri, and talking heads on screens notwithstanding, we need to take a long view to discern how we got here and where we may be going.

The argument yesterday brought some uncomfortable questions into the open. For example, words were exchanged over whether the US or Europe has given more money to Ukraine for supporting their war effort. But how are we supposed to know who has paid what without any audits or accounting, and how do we know how much money went for useful purposes and how much simply disappeared? The press makes much of the idea that Zelensky is the elected president of Ukraine just as Trump is the elected president of the US, suggesting that it was an argument between equals. But what does it mean to call Zelensky an elected president when he canceled elections? Zelensky and his allies claim to be defenders of democracy, and assert that Ukraine is the front line defending democracy, but what has he done to protect freedom of speech, religious freedom, or freedom of the press in Ukraine? Maybe Zelensky is better than Putin on some of these points, but the US press has shed so much dark on the situation that it is often hard to tell.

We need to see the war between Ukraine and Russia as part of a multidimensional contest of geopolitics. The human impacts are awful when you consider the people maimed, kidnapped, or killed, and the carnage continues. Think then on a wider level of economic, agricultural, and infrastructure disruptions, and their consequent humanitarian effects. Then on an even wider level we have Putin’s speeches about how the dissolution of the USSR was the greatest disaster ever to befall Russia, and his apparent desire to rebuild the empire. And we have the mixed history of US involvement with Ukraine over several presidential administrations. All of this leads to near-term and long-term questions for the US, Europe, and NATO.

Only time will tell if my friend’s concern about retirement funds falling like a rock was just an isolated data point or an emerging trend, and only time will tell if the Zelensky-Trump argument yesterday holds real strategic significance. The loud hue and cry from the press will not give us answers, at least in part because it has such a strong flavor of immediate political gratification rather than fact-finding and insight. Instead, we need to take a long view to understand the times. We can take comfort, though, that our welfare and our times are in God’s hands, even if we do not have the whole picture.