Back to School
Fall, my friend, has arrived! I love the fall. I love coziness, apples, colorful leaves, the brisk air, fires, and school. Yep, I love school! We’ve started year 4 of our home-school. Years 1-3 were probably mostly my education. Year 4 looks promising that perhaps the girls are learning more than I am. We had a blast at the annual “Back to School Breakfast” that a friend puts on. It’s good to kick off the year surrounded by people with a shared vision and goal.
The breakfast also got me thinking… “The Christian faith is not a condiment to be used to flavor the neutral substance of secular knowledge.” (Wilson, The Case for Classical Christian Education) For a generation that has been mostly educated by the State, the decision to home-school is usually accompanied by a thorough deconstruction process of worldview. What I am hoping continues in that process for myself and others, is a reconstructed, robust theology of education. In other words, pulling our kids out of public school and then trying to do just enough to keep the state off our back is not the point of education. Our view of education should be so rich and thorough and exciting that our standards should far surpass the world’s anyway! One more Wilson quote:
“The ancient Greek notion is that mankind should be defined and understood as homo sapiens, with humans defined by their ability to think. But in the Christian view, man is homo adorans, worshiping man. What men and women are in the presence of God defines them; in the light of this, they learn to think, love ,walk, emote, and sing in a certain way.”
To unfold a robust theology of education is beyond the scope of a blog post, to be sure. But I encourage you, busy, hard-working parents, it is worth learning! Without it, you will lack motivation, you will grow careless with your standards, you will stunt your children, you will not pass on a Christian culture to the next generations. I’ll leave you with Berkhof and Van Til from their book Foundations of Christian Education:
“What then do we mean by education? Education is implication into God’s interpretation. No narrow intellectualism is implied in this definition. To think God’s thoughts after him, to dedicate the universe to its Maker, and to be the vicegerent of the Ruler of all things: this is man’s task.”
Talking Wall 