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.

I have been reading one book- rather long but I have so many notes from it.  The Right Choice (amazon has the author listed wrong) and the other book I read in less than a day was Homeschooling All the Way Through High School- which I also had some fave things I found in there.

Been reading in Ezekiel and Hebrews.  Before I read the Bible today, I just asked the Lord to speak to me.

Ezekiel 24:16 KJV

Son of man, behold, I take away from thee the desire of thine eyes with a stroke: yet neither shalt thou mourn nor weep, neither shall thy tears run down.

I thought hmmm does this mean the Lord will finally grant my request to take the desire to have more children away from me, after all HE gave me the desire to want a Quiverfull and yet HE also gave me this disfunctional body.  UGH.....

Hebrews 10:36-37 KJV

For ye have need of patience, that, after ye have done the will of God, ye might receive the promise.

For yet a little while, and he that shall come will come, and will not tarry

But these two made me think, maybe HE is wanting me to endure something...what I don't know.  My son is already 5 and has no siblings.  I feel so very sorry for him.  He has no playmates and yes friends would be nice but they can't be there 24/7 like siblings would.  And yes I am well aware these verses are also telling us the LORD will come back.

My friend was telling me that maybe the Lord wanted me to quit my outside the home job and be faithful to being a wife/mom for a while and then HE would bless me with more children...but I have been strictly a wife/mom w/no outside the home job, for 3 years straight and there was no new blessing during that time.  I know I may sound like such a whino but for people who ovulate every month and conceive w/o trying, they just wouldn't understand the deep desire to have another child. I just feel that if I didn't have the problem I have, the rest of my life would be better because this problem affects every area of my life.  I am sad a lot of the time and being sad boils down to a not all there wife/mom, someone who is not in the "mood" to be "happy go lucky"...life has dealt me a crummy hand and I for one am sick of it.

So I did tell my boss on the 6th that I wanted to quit...do you know he is still in the getting resume stage because he is afraid he'll hire someone but someone better will apply later...totally dragging this out. 

So the same day that I said I wanted to quit, like 7 hours later DH calls to say he wrecked the truck ($500 deductible to fix) and then 2 days later DH broke a crown and filling out/off of tooth and that's another $227...I knew it was just a test to see if I really meant that Yes I was willing to come home from my outside the home job.  I replied Yes I mean it and no backing out...and since then no major financial things have popped up.

But I am not sure how we will make it on $1200 a month.  Rent (which does include utilities) is $650 and that had to have but didn't need truck payment is $215 (it was 250).  that alone is $865, and we haven't factored in auto insurance, not to mention FOOD and fuel for that truck.  And yes we have a home phone, and DH has a credit card balance and student loan balance.  So hmmm....frightening much.

What would really stink is putting ourselves in this dire straights based on a hunch that the Lord wants to prove/obey the Titus 2:4-5 command....and to do it and not be blessed.  I so don't understand why the Lord hasn't given us more children.  I am more than willing and I don't think it's because HE doesn't think we make enough money, after all I know HE would supply and take care of those blessings.

I hate my not normal body.  the insides not just the outsides.

Preliminary section Q & A 1-5

1. Show that children are a public trust. What follows?

Make the very most of them for good of society.  Strike that answer....upon reading the forward to Government Nannies  I see that by exploiting Children and using them as the reason to get tax payers money to "better the children"  by having programs from Parents as Teachers, preschools, kindergarten, and institutional schools,  they are really covering up their true agenda...My son is not a public trust.  The Lord gave him to us to raise, not the city/state I live in.

2. What questions does Pestalozzi put to mothers?

How shall this heart, this head, these hands, be employed? to whose service shall they be dedicated?

3. What is Mr Herbert Spencer's argument for the study of education?

The development of children follows certain laws and parents should know them: physical, moral, and intellectual laws.

4. How do parents usually proceed?

Either as a pitcher to pour knowledge into or just let him be assuming over time he'll learn all he needs to - or in other words either too much or too little educating

5. What is the strenuous part of a parent's work?

This question stumped me.  I was thinking maybe it should be answered that we should avoid a systematical approach to learning and opt for a method which can be tailored to the individual child as a whole.  The system say do these steps in this order and you should get this result.  But the method is not so rigid.

I saw this book at the library on 9/14/06 and thought it looked interesting so I checked it out.  I ruffled through it today looking at the chapters that pertained to our family.  I look in the Daily Schedules chapter and saw on page 61 that during the full day program for grade level K here in MO they have a "special class" once a week called counseling.  My question is just what are they counseling 5 year olds on?  That seems absurd to me.  I would think that if a child did need counseling it should be up to the parents to decide that, not a mandetory everyone must take part of the week.

In the chapter on homeschooling she says the actual and correct number of homeschoolers in our country can not be known because they are not all required to register since some states allow them the freedom to not have to.  She made this sound like it was a bad idea.  I for one and extremely thankful that registration is not required in my state. 

The author went on to say in that chapter that many homeschoolers start sending their kids to schools in jr/sr high for better experiences.  ....Yeah I had that reaction too, "Say what?"

So that is the second book that has caught my eye as seeming to be homeschool friendly, but is not.