More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
This book sprang from an insatiable thirst for the unshakable peace that God promises those who follow Him. I long to live from a place of rest, to teach and mother from peace rather than anxiety. I’m quite certain that God desires that for all of us—His beloved daughters called to the educating and raising up of little hearts and minds.
. He meant that we ought to enter into God’s rest and then serve Him wholeheartedly—not out of anxiety, but out of love and trust.
We’ve got to drop the self-inflated view that we are the be-all and end-all of whether the education we are offering our children is going to be as successful as we hope it is.
The true aim of education is to order a child’s affections—to teach him to love what he ought and hate what he ought. Our greatest task, then, is to put living ideas in front of our children like a feast. We have been charged to cultivate the souls of our children, to nourish them in truth, goodness, and beauty, to raise them up in wisdom and eloquence. It is to those ends that we labor.
God Rest begins with acceptance. Or, perhaps more accurately, with surrender. There will always be more you can do. You will never complete your tasks entirely, because just on the horizon is tomorrow, and tomorrow the to-do list starts anew. It is so exhausting—sometimes even demoralizing—to realize that our work in raising up and teaching our children is never really done. But we must remember that we were never intended to finish it.
This is the first lesson for the Christian wife and mother today: to let go of what may once have been—and under other circumstances might now be—a recollected self, and take on, with both hands, the plan of God.”2
The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s “own,” or “real” life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life—the life God is sending one day by day; what one calls one’s “real life” is a phantom of one’s own imagination.4
Don’t aim for a rigorous education, Kern and Perrin both told me. If we are aiming to order our children’s affections, learn to love what is lovely, join in the great conversation, and cultivate a soul so that the person is ready in every sense of the word to take on the challenges around the corner and on the other side of the college entrance exams; work toward “diligence” instead.
“Diligence” comes from the Latin diligere, which means to “single out, value highly, esteem, prize, love; aspire to, take delight in, appreciate.” What we are really aiming for in giving our children a rigorous education is not just doing hard things, but cultivating a habit of focused attention. The word “student” comes from the Latin studium, meaning “zeal, affection, eagerness.” A diligent student, then, takes delight, eagerly and with great zeal, in what he loves.
When my child does not understand a math lesson, it should not disturb my state of peace. After all, God intends that study and work involve challenges that we face and overcome, so we expect difficulties from time to time when teaching our children. Now it’s time to troubleshoot, problem-solve, and come alongside her. When she doesn’t understand the day’s lesson, it isn’t a setback; it’s just God showing us our marching orders for the day. My child doesn’t need me to fret and fear; she needs me to love and guide her with grace.
I failed to build a bridge at all between the child in front of me and the man God intended him to become.
Much of our anxiety in homeschooling could be sidestepped by simply acknowledging who we are trying to please. It sounds simplistic, but consider that your day—what you prioritize, what you don’t—will likely look different depending on whether you are doing it all for His pleasure, or doing it all (or only some of it) to please Grandma, the neighbor, or anyone else.
Faithfulness is showing up every day to do the work He has called us to. Whether or not things turn out in the end as I’m hoping they will (for my children to have a strong faith, humble and compassionate hearts, a love for learning, and an academic skill set that helps them seek out knowledge and truth every day and everywhere) is not actually within my span of control. It’s not my assigned task. He isn’t asking me to succeed on the world’s terms. He’s asking me to faithfully do the work.
But He never demands that we produce prodigies or achieve what the world would recognize as excellence. Rather, He asks us to live excellently—that is, to live in simple, obedient faith and trust. He asks us to faithfully commit every day to Him and then to do that day’s tasks well. He’s in charge of the results.
That writing assignment on the plan today? Do it well. That math lesson that your child struggles over? Sit down next to him, and do one problem at a time, slowly and carefully. Smile a lot. Lavish him with love. Because whether or not he becomes an excellent writer or a proficient mathematician is not your business to worry over. Your business is that single assignment today and loving him through it.
It is easy to forget that teaching is holy work. The building up of the intellect—teaching children to really think—does not happen by the might of human reason, but rather by the grace of God. On an ordinary day, you and I likely have a set of tasks we’ve scheduled for our kids. But it’s more than math. It’s more than history. It is the building up of our children’s minds and hearts, and we can only do that if we realize that this is how we thank Him for the graces He so lavishly pours upon us.
Did we use these gifts to teach our children to lift their eyes heavenward?
Remember your place, then. You cannot make the plants grow or bear fruit. You can only plant the seeds. You can water them, and steward them. You can cultivate the soil (education is an atmosphere!), thin them (a discipline!), and water them (a life!). It is only by our cooperation with the grace of God and the laws of nature that the seed becomes a plant and bears fruit.
Remember your true task. Surrender everything. Bring your loaves and your fish, even if you think them completely insufficient.
I suspect that all of our attempts to teach from a state of rest are futile unless prayer is the cornerstone.
Never be in a hurry; do everything quietly and in a calm spirit. Do not lose your inner peace for anything
If we started thinking about “school” in terms of encountering certain ideas and mastering certain skills rather than finishing a particular book or “covering” material, we would free ourselves to learn far more than we can by binding ourselves to a set published resource. Of course we will use such resources to reach our goals, but the resource will be our servant, not our master.
Our published resources help us cultivate wisdom, virtue, and eloquence in our students. If our books are beautiful and carefully chosen, then they will assist us in teaching our children to love that which is lovely. They will go a long way toward forming our students’ affections and orienting them toward the good, true, and beautiful.
However, how we interact with our children while using the material matters far more than whether or not we get through it.
Some of the best learning happens when a child encounters an idea for himself. We are responsible for presenting the feast, but we can’t always predict when or how that encounter will happen. It likely won’t be as tidy and quantifiable as we think it should be.
the trouble arises when we value the timeline over the child God gave us to teach.
The quality of study matters far more than the mere quantity of learning.
You are teaching your living, breathing, made-in-the-image-of-God students. The resources are there to help you do that. It’s that simple—we just forget when we get all wrapped up in “getting through” all the math lessons before the end of May, or finishing every science experiment in the book before we call it good and move on. Remember, how far we progress in a book does not matter nearly as much as what happens in the mind and heart of our student, and for that matter, in ourselves. In fact, if a student grows to truly love an art (such as math), he is more likely to continue his study of
...more
To sit alongside them and model how one might go about dipping into the feast. We share a giant meal of ideas—contemplating, beholding, loving. We allow ourselves to be transformed by what we come in contact with.
A child who loves and hates what he ought is a truly educated child—and
They tell me to focus on relationships, to help my children preserve wonder and perceive truth, and to do each day’s work as diligently as I can.
Then, live your life. Do it in front of and with your kids. Plant a garden, keep house, learn to knit, cook, listen to audio books, visit new places, take factory tours, go to parks, sing, watch a play, go to museums, make music, take walks, care for pets, build things, watch films, listen to the stories of grandparents and elderly neighbors, go to church, celebrate the seasons, decorate the house for the holidays, create family traditions, play with art, visit the library and learn how to use it, go to the farmer’s market, pick berries, read poetry and commit some to memory. Remember that
...more
You can’t base your family budget on your desire to spend Christmas in the Bahamas, and you can’t base your homeschool schedule on your desire to do hands-on history, grow an organic vegetable garden, take weekly field trips, and study a new composer and artist every week of the year. We have to consider reality, and usually it’s helpful to start there.
If anyone can be sure that “unanticipated situations” will arise, it is a homeschooling mother. It’s helpful to allow room for them, even if we can’t necessarily see them coming.
What I find so helpful about Morning Time is that it places first things first—it’s a liturgy of love. When you are trying to teach from a state of rest, employing a Morning Time routine helps you place the emphasis on loving, going deep, and relishing rather than on “getting through.” Nothing stirs up a mom’s anxiety more than pressure to “get through.”
way to work. By definition, to be efficient is to achieve maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense. But relationships don’t flourish or grow that way. Relationships need time, spent lavishly. Homeschooling is all about relationships, and relationships just aren’t efficient.
We’ve all heard of folks at the end of their lives, looking back and wishing they had spent more time with the people they loved. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard someone wish they had spent more time getting things done.
we want to love what we ought to love, and shun what we ought to shun.
Choosing excellent materials is important, of course. Establishing a healthy daily routine is enormously helpful. Developing an active social life is essential. We can read up on every curriculum on the market, listen to podcasts, devour articles, attend conferences, participate in co-ops or support groups, but none of this will have the same impact on the life of a homeschooling family as a peaceful and happy mother.
We must look ourselves squarely in the eye and decide what is true about how we operate best, then base our homeschools on those truths, playing to our strengths and providing for our weaknesses. The result? The children benefit tremendously, regardless of their unique learning styles.
What you must do, however, is find a way to relish this ordinary Wednesday. Do whatever you need in order to behold the face of God in your children and to delight in them.
If we would like our children to practice deep thinking, contemplate big ideas, and relish truth and beauty as they go about their learning, perhaps we should make that a habit ourselves.
Why, come a damp and gloomy day in March, do we yell over a math lesson or lose our temper over a writing assignment? Why do we see the lessons left to finish and get lost in an anxiety-ridden haze? We forget that we are dealing with a soul, a precious child bearing the image of God, and all we can see is that there are only a few months left to the school year and we are still only halfway through the math book. C.S. Lewis tells us in The Weight of Glory: It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses to remember that the dullest, most uninteresting person you talk
...more
In her book A Philosophy of Education, the great educator Charlotte Mason said that when we put children in direct contact with great ideas, “Teachers shall teach less and scholars shall learn more.”26 Any homeschooling parent who has observed her own children for any length of time will know this to be true. Meaningful learning happens when our children wrestle directly with great ideas—not as a result of our repackaging those great ideas, but when they interact with the ideas themselves.
C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Elizabeth Goudge, Flannery O’Connor, Wendell Barry, P.D. Wodehouse, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charlotte Mason, Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, Alfred Tennyson, Anthony Esolen, James Sire, Dorothy Sayers, T.S. Eliot—just pick one author, steep yourself in his or her writing, and see what impact that has on your reading and on your living.
I wonder how good a job we can do at nurturing the beautiful humanity in our children if we are disengaged so thoroughly from our own.
You are where you are (which is likely to be exactly where God wants you). So work hard every day. Value academic work because nurturing the intellect is part of what makes us fully human, but don’t elevate it beyond its place. There are relationships to cultivate, books to read, oceans to swim in, forts to build, toilets to scrub, bills to pay, paintings to create, dinners to make. This is why we homeschool—because we want to engage in a full-to-bursting life.
