One shelf up

I don't remember learning to read or a time when I could not. I think I have always loved to read, and yet I have a memory of my exasperated mother shoving a book into my hands and saying, "Try it!" It was a time when the work of picking out a book was so intimidating and the possibility of dissapointment too great that I fell into this lazy inertia. I obediently read the book offered to me (though I couldn't tell you what it was) and began stumbling into a habit of reading. My literature curriculum gradually started coinciding with my interests more and as a selection caught my imagination I would raid the local library for every work by that author, filling every spare minute immersed in other worlds. Off the top of my head I remember such incongruities as Edna Ferber, Homer, Elswyth Thane, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Katherine Mansfield, Jack London, Elizabeth George Speare, Shakespeare and George Eliot. (An odd, incomplete sampling, I agree!) I devoured author after author as I muddled through junior-high and high-school. College was like a reward of sorts, getting to devote so much of my serious school time to what had only been a hobby and, to a degree, even choosing a substantial portion of the required reading. I read and interacted with the text at hand, my friends read and we discussed it, lived, breathed and argued it. I thought I would always go on like that, reveling in and wrestling with the thoughts of others. But sometime after the birth of our daughter I revisited that sad pre-teen funk of not knowing what I was in the mood for, yearning to read and being frustrated by every book I opened. I missed the stimulation and interaction, the opening and sorting of my mind. Recently I have been challenged and inspired by the example of two close friends of mine who have not let reading fall by the wayside as their own lives are complicated - one with two children, the other with her work. I am re-acquiring the habit of reading and hope to review some of what I read here. I hope you polished lit. types will bear with my terrible punctuation and distracted editing. I will try to get my act together as I go along (and as I someday find my favorite reference books).

This summer I slowly worked through Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning by Douglas Wilson. It is an excellent book that I would have liked to "review" more thoroughly here but as I have been reading other things since then I cannot do it justice without devoting more time to the effort than I have readily available. I would highly recommend it to anyone considering homeschooling or anyone who is feeling hesitant about enrolling their child in public school. It isn't a hyperventilated attack on the public school for teaching evolution or ending school prayer. It isn't an argument for using the Bible as your only textbook, either. I saw two main points to the book:
1. Give your child a classical education. This seems to me a fancy way of saying that we equip our children to learn rather than give them mere "mental dexterity (page 63)" or facts. I like the quote on page 106, "There is a difference between being equipped to do well in Trivial Pursuit and being educated."
2. Give your child a Christian education. Not, as I said above, in the sense that we use the Bible as our only textbook.

The Christian educator's job is not to require the students to spend all their time gazing at the sun. Rather, we want them to examine everything else in the light the sun provides. It would be utmost folly to try to blacken the sun in order to be able to study the world around us "objectively." Because all truth comes from God, the universe is coherent. Without God, particulars have no relationship to other particulars. Each subject has no relationship to any other subject. Christian educators must reject this understanding of the universe as a multiverse; the world is more than an infinite array of absurd facts. The fragmentation of knowledge must therefore be avoided. (page 63)