I am an educator. I believe in the good of education for all and that public schools should be adequately funded and resourced. I believe in contributing to the common good, even if I don’t directly benefit from it. And in the summer of 2020, my wife and I found ourselves in what I once would have described as a highly unlikely situation: we became homeschooling parents.

Let me explain.

One of the attractive aspects of our move to Abilene, Texas, five years ago was the popular public school system. We bought our home near one of the many excellent elementary schools and expected a normal education for our two children. We had long known the public school teachers, were happy to pay taxes for schools our children did not attend, and fondly remembered our own days of bus rides, locker conversations, and school cafeterias.

Then COVID-19 came along. Suddenly we realized our oldest would be going to kindergarten wearing a mask, not being able to see his teacher’s face, keeping his distance from other children – or staring at a screen for hours in virtual kindergarten. The instructions from the school board were minimal and the deadline to register our child for COVID kindergarten was fast approaching.

We didn’t make it, but we realized that we could manage to homeschool our kids, at least for a while. Both my wife and I could do some of our work remotely and convert part of our living room into a classroom. It would be difficult, but we could do it.

“One year,” we said. “We can manage one year.”

Let me say now that it was not a brave decision to make this choice. It was simply the only one available to us. Had COVID not forced us to do this, I’m not sure we would have ever taken this path. That first year required an upheaval in our lives, and not just because of COVID. We never imagined we would be teaching someone to read and do basic math without help.

But gradually we stopped making jokes about homeschoolers and moved past our discomfort at being the only homeschooling family we knew. We began to enjoy the freedom of using long weekends to go camping. We discovered that we enjoyed introducing our children to literature, music, history, and philosophy. We found a rhythm of work and classes that worked with our family’s goals. As the worst of COVID subsided, we began to connect with other homeschooling families. We enrolled our children in a three-day-a-week co-op run by licensed educators. We even attended a homeschooling convention.

I often wondered what would become of us. But one year turned into two, and four years later I don’t see any turning back.

Still, the question of public welfare remains for me. Here in Texas, schools are partially funded by property taxes, but a school’s enrollment also affects its funding. The lower the enrollment, the less money a school receives. So by choosing not to enroll our children in the public school down the street, we have taken money out of that school’s coffers – more money than my school supply donations will ever replace.

So by homeschooling, I may have harmed the common good. But money is not the only criterion, and not everything that public schools offer as a common good is necessarily good.

As an educator, I think standardized testing is a poor way to organize instruction. As a parent, I worry about how much time my children spend away from home and how many hours of memorized homework distract them from play and their individual interests.

You don’t have to be a Christian to share these concerns. But as a theologian and ethicist, I have other questions too: Is participation in common rituals like voting and public education the only or best way for a Christian to contribute to the good of society? And is it possible that by saying no to the concrete, flawed version of a public good, we are saying yes to the common good it is intended to serve?

In the first century, Justin Martyr described Christian participation in the common good as follows:

And more than any other people, we are your helpers and allies in promoting peace, since we hold that it is impossible for the wicked, the covetous, the conspirators, and the virtuous alike to escape the notice of God, and that each man will experience eternal punishment or salvation according to the value of his deeds.

Justin is one in a long line of Christians who take this approach, a lineage that stretches through Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, the Reformation, and into the present. Supporting peace in the city is not the same, Justin argued, as using the city’s resources: by pursuing the common good in a specifically Christian way, he said, Christians bear witness to what cities are meant to be.

Today we can agree with the Apostle Paul that it is good to live at peace with all men, as far as we can (Rom. 12:18), and with Jeremiah that we should seek the good of the city (29:7). But that does not mean that we can only pursue these goals with the means provided by the state. It does not mean that people of good will cannot disagree about the form of the common good while agreeing about its value.

At its best, homeschooling places education first in the family’s shared life and then in the world. For Christians, it combines education, vocation, family and spiritual formation into an integrated whole.

Homeschooling can certainly be—and often is—done in a spirit of rejection, as its critics like to claim. But it can also be an opportunity for Christians to help children pursue a vision of wisdom, citizenship, and goodness in other ways.

What if homeschooling offered an alternative vision of education that might even resonate with the public school system?

What if homeschooling illustrates what Christians should want for all families: time to educate, freedom to make choices about what is good for our children, and societal resources to help our citizens grow in love and kindness?

What if, as my family has discovered, it were possible to homeschool children for the common good?

Myles Werntz is the author of From isolation to community: a renewed vision of Christian coexistenceHe writes to Christian ethics in the wilderness and teaches at Abilene Christian University.