I am currently re-reading this book.  It's a goody.  It's one of the books I will be giving out when my sisters start having children of their own.  I had a few more a while back I wanted to share when that time came, but I can not remember what they were. oops.

I am reading chapter 5 and a few things stand out to me.

Children born to a Christ-Following mom and/or dad belong to the LORD and with that they deserve a royal education as they are children of the KING.

"Is it or is it not the case that every human being exists for the joy of eternal fellowship with YHWH and must face the possibility of missing that mark, forfeiting that prize?  If it is the case, it ought to be part of the core curriculum in every school." -- Lesslie Newbigin

 ***updated 7/15/07 to type up some more notes****

p96 - A Christian worldview does not somehow automatically "sanitize" the world so that we can all go watch any R-rated movie we want now, for any reason we want, because "we have a Christian worldview."  Put bluntly, a Christian worldview is not an excuse for compromised sinning.  A Christian worldview is not an all purpose disinfectant.

p97 - We do not need any more born-again Christian souls thinking pagan thoughts, locked away in inside pagan bodies, jobs, hands, clothes, cars and houses.  The Word of God is not chained.  The Gospel transforms everything it touches, and the fact that so little in our modern evangelical circles is transformed means simply that the Gospel hasn't touched those circles yet.  -- OUCH!

God does not depend upon us for HIS existance.

p99 - We must be people of the BOOK, knowing it top to bottom, front to back.  And we must resolve, before the fact, to have absolutely no problem with any passage of Scripture once the meaning of that passage has been ascertained through honest exegesis.  This means among other things, that Christians must be prepared to condemn sodomy, embrace the doctrine of creation, say that husbands are the heads of their wives, believe in giants and dragons, and believe in Noah's ark right down to, if necessary, the giraffe's head sticking out the window.  God's Word is pure.

p118 - Prior to the exile, education among the Jews tended to the informaility natural to an agrarian society.  There were schools for prophets, but general education was connected to the home and involved all of life, crafts, and music.

p119 - formal education among the Jews was rare before the exile but was common afterward....after the return of Ezra and building the 2nd Temple, other synagogues were originally not places of worship, but of religious instruction.  By the time of Yeshua, boys aged 6-10 attended basic grammar school in these synagogues.  After this they would study the oral law to become a son of the law.  After this, gifted boys from wealthy families went onto school of scribes, where advanced teachers such as Gamaliel, Hillel, or Shammai taught.  Paul was the most famous student of Gamaliel...{yet John the Baptist was told to head for the desert not these "religious" institutions....that speaks to me...Oh and I learned this from John Bevere in A Heart Ablaze - good DVD series btw}

the Talmud categorizes 4 types of students :
sponge - absorbs everything
funnel - absorbs nothing
sieve - catches illustration but misses the point
winnow - blows away the illustration but gets the point

p147 - Women are designed by God to nurture and sustain life, not to be death-dealers or kinky warriorettes (Deuteronomy 22:5).

If we love God, if we love our children, if we love our own souls, we must consider our ways and live.  A good teacher is one who loves God, loves her students, loves her subject matter, and who communicates all three loves effectively to those students.  An essential part of good teaching is loving the material in the presence of others whome you also love.

This book brought something scary to my mind...Mortimer Adler (Ambleside Online advocates reading his How to Read a Book in 7th and 8th grades...) but he was on the same side as people like Horace Mann and John Dewey - who we homeschoolers know is to blame for the prussian model of public schools being made a reality here in the USA....I would swap the recommended book for those 2 grades with Well-Educated Mind...but I read a review once of her Story of the World books and the author doesn't seem pure Christian to me....

p214-220  Books the author recommends to use {may include my thoughts on the matter also}

KJV - I don't believe a classical Christian education should revolve around the "skateboarder's study bible"

Iliad - written about 750 BC

Odyssey -

Oresteia - written 458 BC

History of the Persian Wars -

Oedipus Rex - springboard for discussion of fate and free will

the Republic- important in the history of ideas - not that we want to implement it.

Nicomachean Ethics - had a major influence on western moral philosophy - problematic for the Christian

Aeneid - trojans into romans

On the Incarnation -

Confession of St. Augustine - protestant father

Beowulf - Christian poet wrote this

the Divine Comedy- (is this dante's inferno?  because it says he goes thru hell, purgatory and heaven to come to a beatific vision - and if so, when I was in 11th grade for 2 weeks or so at a local public high school, I only remember them putting his hell account in the textbook, not the rest of the story and so my view on this writing has always been one of disgust.)

the Canterbury Tales -tensions and contradictions of medieval life - some the author admits were quite lewd and he was sorry for getting carried away - so SCREEN before letting a child read

Shakespeare - this author says  these are plays meant to be seen and not read - either watch a live production or a taped one.  - I like this idea!  also read Joseph Sobran's book Alias Shakespear - maybe it's not who we think...?  intriguing

Institutes of the Christian Religion - by calvin - I have a huge disagreement with this....{link to debate}

Vindicae Contra Tyrannos - influential to America prior to our War for Independence - medieval thoughts on political civil order

the Temple - poems

Paradise Lost - use companion volumes to understand while reading

Pilgrim's Progress -recommended everywhere

Pensees - try to turn church of rome back to it's augustinian (protestant) roots {really, the catholic church was once protestant in nature?  anyone know more?}

Pride and Prejudice - comedy of manners

Faust - Marlowe's play version ends with the magician losing his soul to satan..but in this version by Goethe not salvation by grace but for free {has anyone read this? would you recommend this?  I've never even heard of either of these or the legends}

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn-  1885  Hemingway said all modenr literature descends from this work

Brothers Karamazov - Christian imagination {Christian like supposedly the Narnia books?  if you read TOS magazine's article with the step son of cs lewis you saw lewis was not a Christian when he wrote those and they were never meant to be Christian....btw thanks for getting thetruth out there}

Tolkien's trilogy - again , this guy may have become a Christian at some time in his life, but not when these were written.

Bondage of the Will - by Martin Luther

Method for Prayer - Matthew Henry

Book of Common Prayer - Thomas Cranmer

Treasury of David - Charles Spurgeon

Orthodoxy - GK Chesterton

Mencken Chrestomathy - HL Mencken

World of Mulliner -PG Wodehouse

Oxford Book of English Verse - Arthur Quiller-Couch

American Heritage Dictionary

Forgive me if I am :-( ~ I really believed DS would have some siblingS by now.