Mother Culture: Christian Education

Well, it has taken me a good week to get caught up on the day to day happens: my husband and I were blessed to have our first weekend away without children in several years.  After Thursday evening’s {most excellent} Charlotte Mason meeting here at my home we trundled off to bed so that early the next morning we could head out.  I think it was more difficult for me to leave my technology behind than my children as I knew that they were in good hands.  Because of this though, I blissfully spent many hours just resting and reading and enjoying the company of my hubby – without a computer on hand and am only just now reaching the summit of mount o’launder-us and taking a few minutes to reflect.

As I look back over the reading and discussion that we did, I think that there was far too much that we covered to get it all on one blog posting…  So I am going to try to pick out a few highlights and then post again soon. 

Please feel free to enter the discussion by posting a comment orquestion and become a part of our virtual support group.  If you have the book then read along with us, this past week we read and discussed chapters 1, 2, and 10 of Educating the Whole Hearted Child by Clay and Sally Clarkson. (If you’d still like to join the discussion and would like a copy of the book, I do have a couple of extra copies available.) 

The underlying theme of these chapters and the book is that real education does not start with an academic paste that is adhered to our students.  Instead the foundation of a Christian education truly is relationship with Christ.  All of our efforts and teaching should grow up out of this goal.  As we have always said, “It is far more important to us that our children grow up knowing and loving Jesus and striving to be the women that he individually designed them to be than that they ever learn to read….  And they WILL learn to read.”

Key to the discussion is the realization that having a Christian home or a Christian education really involves much more than adding Bible verses to the subjects that we study, reading Christian books, attending Christian activities or even making sure that we have a daily Bible reading time.  True Christian education comes out of a lifestyle of living daily in relationship with Christ.  We realize that it is only by modeling for our children the Christian life, including how we deal with our own failings, that we can lead them to go beyond an academic study of God and on to a true lifestyle of faith.

One of the core ways that we do this is by making education a day by day and side by side activity, not one where the teacher stands as the bearer of all truth and must disseminate their knowledge by lecturing and testing.  Instead, when we realize that our children are just as valuable and able as we are, though less grown and knowledgeable, then we acknowledge that we are on a journey with them rather than acting as a polished tour guide for them.

As such, our job is more hefty than simply being the bearer of knowledge.  Our job is to instill in our kids our values, to give them a sense of their heritage, their lineage both in a general sense as the Church of God but also in a personal sense as we share with them the value of who they uniquely have been made by the power of the Creator God.  We need to teach them to serve, to love others, to understand how to learn, to have a passion for learning and for God, his people and his creation.

These are some of the foundational principles in Christian education.  Please enter the discussion.  Next, I will post some of the more practical ideas that we chatted about with regards to teaching the Bible to our children.

Talk soon,

Cori