One Year of Christian Nurture

This blog started out with a bang.

Apparently, writing about common misunderstandings of homeschooling is taboo in some circles. But I persevered.

I first started with a five part mini-series on the history of Christian education.
I also researched the surprising conclusions of homeschooling statistics, summarized here.  The claims of revival among homeschooling by radical homeschoolers was challenged as well.

Much of this site is historical. The early 1800s understanding of home education was summarized here. What early American presbyterian thought about private schooling and Sunday schools was explored as well. The irony of the revival of Rouseau still stands as a challenging article.

I explained how I was homeschooled. I looked at questions such as: what if everyone homeschooled?  I even defended homeschooling.

A Christian manifesto was analyzed as well. I countered Gary North's diatribe against classical education here. Another historical error was brought out in Selling Webster's Dictionary.

Over all, I was quite busy. And I hope, dear reader, these articles will change the way you view education.

Aasen's Homeschooling Summary & Analysis

Here is an interesting article:

"Aasen, veteran homeschooling mother of five in Washington State, here summarizes the basics of homeschooling research.  She leads off with the 2007 NCES data that estimated there to be around 1.5 million homeschoolers in the U.S.  She describes the diversity of motives, pedagogies, and types of people who homeschool.  She cites Brian Ray’s NHERI research to show that..." 

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Growing up environmental and Christian

I grew up environmentally active.  And never knew it.

I was taught to pick up trash. My parents even warned me they would stop the car and make me walk back to pick up any defenestrated trash (it never happened, because I believed them.).

I also walked everywhere.

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Free Music...for Education

That's right--I like free as much as the next guy.
[And I added "education" just to put it on this blog :-)  Well, Christian nurture certainly involves various forms of relaxation and even play. And for me, music can be both.]

But I like free things that are also useful and high quality (such demands!).

And by God's grace, I have found two sources of free stuff that's useful and high quality.

For myself, I like good background music when I write. I could use my CD player in my computer but I like mixing things up (multi-CD player anyone?). So, for a while, I ripped most of my old tapes and a few CDs. But that takes time. Then you have to pick a number of MP3s for the mediaplayer to rotate through.

Ha! Why even do that much work when Pandora or Slacker Radio does it for free!

Slacker radio is streaming music based upon genre selection. All you need is a free account (give 'em your junk email address--you do have one, right? Use hotmail for that). And then you pick a station (based upon genre) or look up a song or artist and turn it into a "station". The songs will flow from similar artists and songs.

You are able to pause or skip the current song. You are given so many "skips" before you run out. You can also tag favorite songs or reject the bad ones. It has some visual ads and occasional audio ads too. [A PR from Slacker reminded me, "Once you have created a great station, you can share it via email, Facebook, or even embed the station on your website or blog."]

I ran across Pandora two years ago. And I have never looked back. It is based upon a Music Genome Project that organizes songs by 40 different characteristics. This means that its stations are not so much genre centered as organized by the greatest number of similar characteristics as defined by the Project.

Even so, I prefer Pandora over Slacker. It has fewer ads (I think) and you not only get to skip songs (a limited number of times of course!) you can bookmark the better ones, use them to create a new station or order them.

You can also mix stations (can't in Slacker). Or mix by genre. Or individually chose stations within a genre mix. You can delete stations if they start mixing in songs that detract from your original intent.

And as an added bonus...if you have Firefox you can add the Prism app.  This wonderfully amazing app (yes, I like it) can convert any website into an independent web-browser, with a desktop icon. I just double-click the shortcut on my desktop in Windows and up pops Pandora without having to open a new tab in Firefox. (It's also good for email or google calendar).

I think even non technophiles will enjoy these goodies.

The Necessity of the Christian School

"The Christian school is to be favored for two reasons. In the first place, it is important for American liberty; in the second place, it is important for the propagation of the Christian religion. These two reasons are not equally important; indeed, the latter includes the former as it includes every other legitimate human interest. But I want to speak of these two reasons in turn."

J. Gresham Machen

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Is the Shorter Catechism Worth While?

The Shorter Catechism is, perhaps, not very easy to learn. And very certainly it will not teach itself. Its framers were less careful to make it easy than to make it good. As one of them, Lazarus Seaman, explained, they sought to set down in it not the knowledge the child has, but the knowledge the child ought to have. And they did not dream that anyone could expect it to teach itself. They committed it rather to faithful men who were zealous teachers of the truth, ‘to be,’ as the Scottish General Assembly puts it in the Act approving it, ‘a Directory for catechizing such as are of a weaker capacity,’ as they sent out the Larger Catechism ‘to be a Directory for catechizing such as have made some proficiency in the knowledge of the grounds of religion.’

No doubt it requires some effort whether to teach or to learn the Shorter Catechism. It requires some effort whether to teach or to learn the grounds of any department of knowledge. Our children — some of them at least — groan over even the primary arithmetic and find sentence-analysis a burden. Even the conquest of the art of reading has proved such a task that ‘reading without tears’ is deemed an achievement. We think, nevertheless, that the acquisition of arithmetic, grammar and reading is worth the pains it costs the teacher to teach, and the pain it costs the learner to learn them. Do we not think the acquisition of the grounds of religion worth some effort, and even, if need be, some tears?

For, the grounds of religion must be taught and learned as truly as the grounds of anything else. Let us make no mistake here. Religion does not come of itself: it is always a matter of instruction. The emotions of the heart, in which many seem to think religion too exclusively to consist, ever follow the movements of the thought. Passion for service cannot take the place of passion for truth, or safely outrun the acquisition of truth; for it is dreadfully possible to compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, to find we have made him only a ‘son of hell.’ This is why God establishes and extends his Church by the ordinance of preaching; it is why we have Sunday schools and Bible classes. Nay, this is why God has grounded his Church in revelation. He does not content himself with sending his Spirit into the world to turn men to him. He sends his Word into the world as well. Because, it is from knowledge of the truth, and only from the knowledge of the truth, that under the quickening influence of the Spirit true religion can be born. Is it not worth the pains of the teacher to communicate, the pain of the scholar to acquire this knowledge of the truth? How unhappy the expedient to withhold the truth — that truth under the guidance of which the religious nature must function if it is to function aright — that we may save ourselves these pains, our pupils this pain!

An anecdote told of Dwight L. Moody will illustrate the value to the religious life of having been taught these forms of truth. He was staying with a Scottish friend in London, but suppose we let the narrator tell the story. ‘A young man had come to speak to Mr. Moody about religious things. He was in difficulty about a number of points, among the rest about prayer and natural laws. ‘What is prayer?,’ he said, ‘I can’t tell what you mean by it!’ They were in the hall of a large London house. Before Moody could answer, a child’s voice was heard singing on the stairs. It was that of a little girl of nine or ten, the daughter of their host. She came running down the stairs and paused as she saw strangers sitting in the hall. ‘Come here, Jenny,’ her father said, ‘and tell this gentleman ‘What is prayer.’ ’ Jenny did not know what had been going on, but she quite understood that she was now called upon to say her Catechism. So she drew herself up, and folded her hands in front of her, like a good little girl who was going to ‘say her questions,’ and she said in her clear childish voice: ‘Prayer is an offering up of our desires unto God for things agreeable to his will, in the name of Christ, with confession of our sins and thankful acknowledgment of his mercies.’ ‘Ah! That’s the Catechism!’ Moody said, ‘thank God for that Catechism.’ ’

How many have had occasion to ‘thank God for that Catechism!’ Did anyone ever know a really devout man who regretted having been taught the Shorter Catechism — even with tears — in his youth? How its forms of sound words come reverberating back into the memory, in moments of trial and suffering, of doubt and temptation, giving direction to religious aspirations, firmness to hesitating thought, guidance to stumbling feet: and adding to our religious meditations an ever-increasing richness and depth. ‘The older I grow,’ said Thomas Carlyle in his old age, ‘and now I stand on the brink of eternity, the more comes back to me the first sentence in the Catechism, which I learned when a child, and the fuller and deeper its meaning becomes: ‘What is the chief end of man? To glorify God and to enjoy him forever.’ Robert Louis Stevenson, too, had learned this Catechism when a child; and though he wandered far from the faith in which it would guide his feet, he could never escape from its influence, and he never lost his admiration (may we not even say, his reverence) for it. Mrs. Sellars, a shrewd, if kindly, observer, tells us in her delightful ‘Recollections’ that Stevenson bore with him to his dying day what she calls ‘the indelible mark of the Shorter Catechism’; and he himself shows how he esteemed it when he set over against one another what he calls the ‘English’ and the ‘Scottish’ Catechisms — the former, as he says, beginning by ‘tritely inquiring ‘What is your name?,’ ’ the latter by ‘striking at the very roots of life with ‘What is the chief end of man?’ and answering nobly, if obscurely, ‘To glorify God and to enjoy him forever.’ ’

What is ‘the indelible mark of the Shorter Catechism’? We have the following bit of personal experience from a general officer of the United States army. He was in a great western city at a time of intense excitement and violent rioting. The streets were over-run daily by a dangerous crowd. One day he observed approaching him a man of singularly combined calmness and firmness of mien, whose very demeanor inspired confidence. So impressed was he with his bearing amid the surrounding uproar that when he had passed he turned to look back at him, only to find that the stranger had done the same. On observing his turning the stranger at once came back to him, and touching his chest with his forefinger, demanded without preface: ‘What is the chief end of man?’ On receiving the countersign, ‘Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever’ — ‘Ah!’ said he, ‘I knew you were a Shorter Catechism boy by your looks!’ ‘Why, that was just what I was thinking of you,’ was the rejoinder.

It is worth while to be a Shorter Catechism boy. They grow to be men. And better than that, they are exceedingly apt to grow to be men of God. So apt, that we cannot afford to have them miss the chance of it. ‘Train up a child in the way he should go, and even when he is old he will not depart from it.’

From The Westminster Teacher, April, 1909.

The Reformed View of Education

"The Reformed community, we conclude, must follow its own educational program. Much as it appreciates what is done by brethren of non-Reformed Christian persuasion, it is on the Reformed basis alone that a comprehensive Christian view of life can be set over against the world of unbelief. Only the Reformed view shows the full power of Christianity in meeting the challenge of the wisdom of the world and in offering men, with the pleading voice of the Christ who wept over the multitudes of Jerusalem, the reward of their labor for this life and the life to come. The Reformed community takes no delight in building alone. It takes no delight in living in ecclesiastical isolation. But if there is reason for it to live and to work alone ecclesiastically then there is the same reason for working alone educationally. And yet our hope is not to work alone forever. Our aim is the ultimate good of all who love the gospel and all those who should love the truth."


Cornelius Van Til

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