I acknowledge that homeschooling mothers may be among the most insecure adults in the country. I do not mock them, surely not! as I myself have suffered from every one of the common doubts I hear expressed over and over and over again. Teaching is a bit of a mystery, teaching your own children is more than a bit of responsibility.

“I really need help with language arts,” is probably at the top of requests when mothers ask us for consultation about their homeschooling plans. It’s a broad subject area. When you consider the competing curriculum companies and multitudinous voices clamoring from scores of websites, promoting the merits of this and that program, it is certainly understandable why there is perplexity, feelings of frustration and helplessness trying to sort out the jumble of “must do” subjects. When and how do you tackle an assortment like this:

grammar
spelling
handwriting/penmanship
copy work
composition
creative writing
written narration
public speaking
vocabulary building
reading comprehension
oral narration
research papers
transcription
drawn narration
reading
dictation
memorization
recitation
essays
poetry
plays
Shakespeare
living literture
conversation
literary analysis
phonics
foreign language
Latin
Bible
mythology
fables and fairy tales
biography
rhetoric

All of these and more can be considered part of that wide, wide world of “language arts.” It is my experience that trained educators are not exempt from similar bewilderment, finding themselves just as tossed too and fro by ideas and opinions on which method or program is best. For years I have attempted to help mothers get some stability in their approach to homeschooling by explaining how important a philosophy of education is before grasping at every wind of curriculum that blows their way. I once had a friend say that beginning to homeschool was akin to being set to sea in the Atlantic in a rowboat without a compass. To extend the simile, choosing curriculum without knowing why you need it is like begging for oars to direct that boat when you don’t even know where you’re going.

I tease Emily when she tells people very bluntly, “There are just two approaches to education: Charlotte Mason, and, everything else.” One of the arguments she has to support this is that Ms. Mason believed that knowledge of God was supreme and the ultimate aim of education; in fact, I believe Mason said that to leave God out of the education made education a sham. Not only do we need to be grounded in God’s word and measure all philosophies to that standard of truth, not only do we need to bring our children up in the fear and admonition of the Lord, but we also need to humbly accept the fact, with all faith and trust in believing in His goodness, that the Holy Spirit has been given us as a guide and teacher and, most incredibly, He works in our children also. The education is not all up to us. The One who made them is intimately involved in their education.

Am I drifting from the point here, you wonder? Not at all. Bear with me. Before we decide “what” to teach it is important to know who we are teaching. When Charlotte Mason proposed that “children are born persons,” as her first principle, she was stating a simple and profound core value about an approach to education, as well as about the nature of the children whom we are to educate. She was on Jesus side when he said, “Let the children come to me…forbid them not,” and “hinder them not,” and “despise them not.” Our children are born in God’s image with all the spiritual, physical, and intellectual needs and capacities of any of us who are also born in His image. Our children don’t magically arrive at a certain level of learning, a milestone, when they are capable of understanding, of knowing, but begin the moment they are born – even before they are born – and continue to grow and develop forever. They are not neat packages with tidy compartments to sort out, nor are there tidy packets of knowledge to insert. Truly persons are a mystery and so is their education.

What does this all have to do with the teaching of that labyrinthine field of “language arts?” We must come to terms with the fact that all those curriculum choices and methods will not ease our burden, but may very well serve that lamentable consequence of “hindering,” or even “despising,” our children.

Please do not dismiss my counsel as naive or simplistic when I remind you that by the time your child reaches school age the supremely difficult part of “language arts,” has already been mastered and that you had a significant role in that skill acquisition. Talking is the most challenging task your brain ever masters. Language, as I mentioned in my last post, is part of our God-given nature because language is how He has chosen to communicate with us. Language is what defines our nature as human beings, distinguishes us from the animal
kingdom. It is critical to life, as well as essential for every school subject from science and math to drawing and physical exercise.