A Picture From Our First Day of School

Back to School... Back to School... Back to School...

It's the buzz I've been hearing for about a month now. Big sales, new backpacks, clothes, lunch boxes, books, curriculum, lesson plans... Today, being the day after Labor Day, is the traditional first day back to school, and it is an exciting time for many. I also see our first day of school as being exciting, but the picture is a little different than most.

Preacher Man and I have a philosophy of education that is very unlike what is going on in public and private schools. We are excited about home schooling. We are both natural teachers and we live a learning lifestyle ourselves. I feel like my real education was just beginning as my formal schooling ended. Once I learned how to learn, it became my habit to passionately research, satisfying my desire for wisdom and knowledge. It is the way I live my life and this is the way we teach our Littles.

Children are born persons. They are persons even in the womb where they begin to learn the sounds and sensations of the world they will soon enter. Each child is a unique individual and is a gift and a blessing from God Himself, made in the very image of The Creator.

The first definition listed in the dictionary for the word school reads, "an institution for educating children." This would make the institution of the family the first "school" for a child, and the mother and father the very first teachers. Unlike the situation in most public and private schools, Mama and Daddy are the child's teacher year after year, and really, this is true whether you send your child to public school or teach them at home. A child's parents are his most important teachers.

For us, all of life is school. The most important thing that we teach is to "Fear God and keep His commandments" and we use Deuteronomy 6:4-9 as our model for how to do it -

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.

You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

When does this teaching begin?

On the first day of school.

Isaiah 28:9-10 - To whom will he teach knowledge, and to whom will he explain the message? Those who are weaned from the milk, those taken from the breast? For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little.