“However, the biblical story is pretty unwieldy and remains storylike despite our best efforts. But over the course of the last 350 years, we have risen to the occasion and have trained ourselves to think of the story as just so much external baggage carrying around the internal, timeless truths. Depending on how the story …
Mystical Ratios
“There are many cultural reasons why we fall into this confusion about grading, many of them having to do with the lust for scientific precision that came out of the Enlightenment. Now it makes sense, for example, if the children are taking a vocabulary test of 100 words, and one of the kids misses thirteen …
Not Eating Gravel
“I have no problem with high standards or tight rules — but the rules are for the children; the children are not there to give the rules something to work upon. There is nothing wrong with hard work in a rigorous school, but there is something wrong with work that is hard for all the …
Love in the Presence of Others
“An essential part of good teaching is loving the material in these presence of others, whom you also love. If anything less than this is happening in the classroom, the students are being cooked rather than being fed” (The Case for Classical Christian Education, p. 147).
Being Cooked At Home
“And the home is an example. There is a vast differencce between home cooking and being cooked at home. What are some of the things that cause the sweet nourishment of a home to be turned into a cauldron of death? The list is clearly not exhaustive, but consider just a few: displays of temper, …
Boiled In Low-Fat Milk
“The milk was for the kid, not the kid for the milk. Think for a moment, the Word tells us. The classroom is for the child; the child is not for the classroom. The Sabbath is a feast, not a fast (Lev. 23:2-3). The Lord’s day is a feast, not a fast (Jude 12). We …
Death By Sabbath
“But the first principle is given clearly by Isaiah: Call the Sabbath a delight (Is. 58:13). And even this verse is abused whenever truncated, narrow, and parsimonious Sabbath observance is substituted for the real thing. The cranky Sabbatarian, who ‘cooks kids in their Sabbath milk,’ does not limit this destructive behavior to one day in …
And They Make the Classroom A Cauldron
“Moses required that the Israelites refrain from seething or boiling a kid in its mother’s milk (Deut. 14:21). The placement of this law in Deuteronomy is right at the beginning of Moses’ exposition of the fourth commandment, the Sabbath law. This insignificant law has many applications, which ostensible friends of the Sabbath need to learn. …
The Central Problem With Pragmatism
“We do not want to live in accordance with the dictates of pragmatism, which can be hung with its own rope. Pragmatism doesn’t work. At the same time, commitment to something more important than immediate success often as the side benefit of immediate success” (The Case for Classical Christian Education, p. 142).
Our Minds Are Not Shoeboxes
“We tend to think of our students’ minds as finite shoeboxes, and we then think we must take special care not to put anything in there if we do not want it to remain there for life. But the brain is more like a muscle. A student who learns one language, such as Latin, is …