Home school or public school?

My kids are 10 months old so this isn't really a pressing question. However, it's something we'll have to figure out at some point. (I'm intentionally leaving out private school for a number of reasons, costs included.)

I was home schooled while my wife is a product of Minnesota and Wisconsin public schools. (In a bit of a twist, I went to a public university while she went to a private Christian university.) We're both positive about our experiences and aren't resolved on what we'll do with our kids. We take sort of a "live life as it comes" approach. We try not to plan too far into the future knowing that circumstances often change.

Still, we've started giving it some thought. I recently read 2 posts from Tim Challies that has brought a new perspective to my thoughts on the subject. His posts were titled "Why I Do Not Homeschool (Part 1 & Part 2). I'm not always on board with Challies and don't agree with everything he says in these two articles. However, he does a good job of stating his case.

Challies prefaces his thoughts with this great piece:

There is one more thing I would like to say before I get too much further into this article. Homeschooling parents are easily offended (See? I offended you just by saying that!). Some may consider this a rash generalization, but in my experience it is true. Homeschoolers are often on the defensive, though certainly this is changing as homeschooling becomes a more widely accepted option in the church and in the wider culture. For many years homeschoolers have had to defend their choice in education and they have grown weary of defending against misunderstandings and strawman arguments. I am not going to argue that, if we homeschool, our children will end up having no social skills, we will have to move to the country to raise our own beef, I’ll have to throw away my deodorant and my wife will have to grow her hair past her waist and begin making all of our clothes. I hope not to fall into caricatures of homeschooling. Feel free to correct me if I do. There is much I admire about those who choose to homeschool. Honest. At the same time, please do not use caricatures to describe public schools as being always boring, filled with disinterested Wiccan teachers or serving as training grounds for automatons who are being trained only to work in factories.

From there, Challies launches into his 2-part explanation of where he stands.

Here are some excerpts that stood out to me.

Douglas Wilson differentiates between homeschoolers and what he called “Homers” in an article he wrote for Credenda Agenda. Homeschoolers, he says, are “people who have carefully considered all the options available to them in the education of their children, have prayerfully weighed them, and have decided to provide their children with an education at home.” Homers are extremists who “have a completely different attitude toward the process of homeschooling. No longer an instrument or means of educating their children, homeschooling has become, in their hands, a very modern manifestation of home as ideology. In this thinking, home is a defining principle to which everything else must conform. Even the church is brought into the service of the home. Father is no longer a father; he is a prophet, priest and king. Any home is capable of doing anything that is worth doing. A radical home-centeredness takes over, insisting that the home can not only replace the school, but also the church and the civil magistrate, not to mention Safeway and General Motors.”

I am not sure the distinction between these two groups is always perfectly clear, but do think Wilson makes a distinction worth noting. What makes both groups similar, though, is that the decision to homeschool cannot be removed from other beliefs and ideologies. At the risk of belaboring the point, let me state this once more: homeschooling is rarely a decision that is completely independent of other beliefs. The beliefs that impact educational choice are, in my experience, related to the understanding of how we, as Christians, are to relate to the people and to the culture around us. It is related to how we are to be in the world but not of the world.
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Trusting that my children will grow up to be believers, I am convicted that it is my duty as a parent, and as a Christian parent, to prepare my children to fulfill that calling in their lives. I believe they can best heed this call by being in the culture in which God has seen fit to place them. I want them to be with kids who are not Christians, to be friends with them and to love them, to learn what separates them from their friends, and to begin to understand how their convictions make them different from others.
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I find it difficult and painful to imagine a public school system devoid of Christians. Imagine, if you will, that every Christian pulls their children from the public schools. There will be no more Christian clubs in junior high schools; there will be no more prayer meetings or Bible studies at high schools; there will be no witnessing, no conversions. Christians will have removed the best indigenous missionaries from their natural mission field.
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We genuinely love the people around us and want to know them, both so we can relate to them as friends and so we can, with God’s help, witness to them of His love and grace. Our children build bridges to the neighborhood. In sending our children to public school, we are building these bridges with our neighbors as our children are building friendships with their children. We are building friendships on the basis of our kids’ friendships. This is not to say, of course, that we only relate to our neighbors because we hope to convert them. We relate to them because we genuinely love them, care for them, and seek to know them both for what they can offer us and what we can offer them. We seek to love our neighbors as ourselves. We have credibility as neighbors and as members of this community by having our children attend the same schools as the other children. This weekend we are having a neighborhood-wide event in our home and every family who has accepted our invitation is a family whose children go to school with our children.
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My wife and I feel called to reach out to the people in our neighborhood and our community. We simply do not feel we could honor God in this way and be as effective in doing it if we kept our children home. We would lose credibility, we would lose friendships, and we would lose access to the hearts of both children and their parents.
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[W]e do not avoid worldliness by secluding ourselves from the world. The key to escaping worldliness is not to avoid the world, but to avoid acting like the world and thinking like the world. To do this we do not escape the world, but allow ourselves to apprehend the allure of the world so it might lose its glow.
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To think that we can keep our children from being worldly by sheltering them from the world is false. Sooner or later children will want to see what the world has to offer.
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I believe it is easier for children to avoid worldliness when they are exposed to the world. This may sound strange, so allow me to explain. I want my children to see what the world has to offer before they are old enough to explore it on their own, without parental guidance. I want my children to see and experience families where God is not at the center.
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I am not afraid of the world and what it may do to my children. There is nothing the world can offer that is greater or stronger than God’s grace. I am sure that my children, at one time or another, will encounter teachings that run contrary to our convictions. They will learn about evolution and will hear that all religions are the same. I know that this is coming and am already working with them to know how to think about these things and to know how to respond.

I can't say this has made me automatically decide to send my kids to public school, partly because I'm not sure that all of my reasons for making that decision are the same as Challies'. Still, I think Challies provides some great insight that the Christian community is missing when we talk about this subject.