I've been wanting to create a blog about my adventures in educating my children and our life as a homeschooling family, but have been waiting for the right title to come to mind. (A good blog title is half the battle, right?) Charlotte Mason is my education guru. I find myself writing reams of notes and copying quote after quote while reading her Original Homeschooling Series. The quote above comes from Volume 3: School Education that I just finished reading. On the same page she writes "...he [the child] cannot think without an abundant, varied, and regular supply of the material of knowledge...which is as the air, and the food, and the exercise, the whole life of the mind of man" (241). She concludes by saying "of all the joyous motives of the school life, the love of knowledge is the only abiding one" (246).
Love of knowledge. This is what prompted my husband and I to pursue home education for our children. We wanted them to maintain their natural curiosity and joy for life. Those things are so often drilled out of children by our modern educational system by practices that focus on test scores and conformity over actual knowledge acquisition. Education is something that happens within and cannot be forced from without. "Knowledge, on the other hand, that is, the product of the vital action of the mind on the material presented to is, is power; as it implies an increase of intellectual aptitude in new directions and an always new point of departure" (224). Knowledge is gained and the mind grows.
So we don't test (in the traditional sense). We provide the children with an abundant variety of materials from literature, poetry, Shakespeare, to science and nature study and handicrafts along with an abundance of free time (and encouragement) to explore their own interests. We are by no means perfect and neither are our children. We strive for authenticity, love, and the pursuit of knowledge each day. As CM says, "Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life." This blog will be about each of those things and more. Stay tuned.
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