A Few Friendly Links

Here's the homeschool blog carnival, good stuff!

Naomi Joy has two little bitty ones in diapers and she's expecting her third.  I love what she writes here about "Good (enough) Housekeeping."

Sprittibee took some adorable pictures of her littlest cutie pie and tied them all together with a sweet, sweet story.  Or three.  Loved the one about the Vietnamese man.

Cindy has two meaty posts worth reading.  In one she explains the importance of ideas over 'what you did,' and lays out her plan for reading certain excellent books in preparation for the school year. This is SO important.  It's also very interesting in an exciting sort of  "HEY!  Me, too!" kind of way that I had exactly the same sort of experience with books and moms.  Years and years ago- back when I was more naive and in my mid twenties, I noticed how poorly read most of my peers, and their children, were.  I started a children's story hour in my home for the Moms and kids in my church (we  were living overseas and our library did not then have one- I worked with that program later, with not much better results).
My idea was to have moms and kids over, to read a couple of interesting and perhaps lesser known but still excellent children's books, have a light snack and discuss them together, offer a craft or activity because that seemed to be expected, and introduce others to better things.  Exactly as Cindy did, I sprinkled my living room with books for Moms, too- Honey for a Child's Heart, For the Children's Sake, Popcorn Kites and Mistletoe (a book about families enjoying one another that my grandfather had given my mother when we kids were young), and others I don't recall now.  Nobody picked up a book. 

Well, my story is a little different because, in fact, no moms stayed.  My Mommy and Me story hour turned into Everybody Else's Kids and Me, as mom after mom dropped the kids off and quickly said, "I hope you don't mind, but I scheduled a doctor appointment/this is my only chance to go grocery shopping without the kids/I have to go to the post office/I'm going out to coffee with..." and vamoosed out the door, leaving me alone with their children and my stunned expression. I don't remember how long I did that.  It wasn't long, but it was too long, if you know what I mean.  It might have been  one, three or even six months before I stopped it, but I should have stopped it the very first time.  But enough about me. You need to read Cindy.


In this one she discusses the prologue to one of my favorite books, Norms and Nobility.  My copy was destroyed by an accident outside my control, and it is curling and mildewed in the edges, but I cannot bear to get rid of it, so there it is in all its ugly physical condition sitting on my shelf because of the deeply thoughtful ideas within.  But which shelf?  I may have to pay somebody around here fifty cents to dig it up for me.  This is the problem with more books than I can read.
Anyway, Cindy notes:

In this section we begin to get the first glimmer that maybe we have the wrong goals for our children and maybe it is a serious mistake. In III we begin to get nervous. But before we move to III, what do you think when Hicks says that the Ideal Type's ancient, prescriptive pattern of truth served Greeks, Romans, Jews and Christians?

This is important for a number of reasons.  One of them is that there is a popular line of thought in the homeschooling movement that Greek education had nothing to do with character, and Hebrew education was all about character.  This is, to be as kind as I possibly can, utter rubbish and a complete fiction.  Greek education, however pagan it was,  was also ALL about character, and anybody who tells you otherwise knows nothing at all about ancient history, literature, philosophy or Greek civilisation, and their prescriptive advice is based in ignorance and should be looked at askance for that reason.  When they are correct it is by accident.
More significantly, we have, culturally, abandoned that Ideal Type's ancient prescriptive pattern of truth, and it is does not produce a lovely thing in education, or anywhere else, for that matter.

For something lighter, I nearly died of suffocation on my own laughter from reading  "I'm sorry, but I cannot give out recipes while wearing a paper gown."  Naturally, if a mom is laughing out loud at the computer, nosy people in the house all want to know why, and all the people in my house are nosy, most of all me.  And three of the people here are little boys who really do not want to know why in this case, but they are not yet wise enough in the ways of the world to know that they really, really, truly do not want to know. If I explained it to them, then there would be the immensely gratifying experience of having them acknowledge that I was right, they did not want to know this, and it is always music to my ears to hear "you are right' from the lips of, well, anybody.  But then, of course, they would know more than they ever wanted to know about things about which they really do not want to know.  And that is why Lady Why at Where the Kudzu Grows nearly killed me as I choked back my irrepressible laughter.  Because I wanted to save the children.

Pin It

Pin It