Teaching HomeSchoolers About How Jesus was Educated Part 2 of 2
Neither directly nor indirectly. then did any element of Greek culture reach Jesus. He knew nothing beyond Judaism; his mind preserved that free innocence which an extended and varied culture always weakens. In the very bosom of Judaism, he remained a stranger to many efforts often parallel to his own. On the one hand, the asceticism of the Essenes or the Therapeutoe; on the other, the fine efforts of religious philosophy put forth by the Jewish school of Alexandria, and of which Philo, his contemporary, was the ingenious interpreter, were unknown to him. The frequent resemblances which we find between him and Philo, those excellent maxims about the love of God, charity, rest in God, which are like an echo between the Gospel and the writings of the illustrious Alexandrian thinker, proceed from the common tendencies which the wants of the time inspired in all elevated minds.
Happily for him, he was also ignorant of the strange scholasticism which was taught at Jerusalem, and which was soon to constitute the Talmud. If some Pharisees had already brought it into Galilee, he did not associate with them, and when, later, he encountered this silly casuistry, in it only inspired him with disgust. We may suppose, however, that the principles of Hillel were not unknown to him. Hillel, fifty years before him, had given utterance to aphorisms very analogous to his own. By his poverty, so meekly endured, by the sweetness of his character, by his opposition to priests and hypocrites, Hillel was the true master of Jesus, if, indeed, it may be permitted to speak of a master in connection with so high an originality as his.
The perusal Of the books of the Old Testament made much impression upon him. The canon of the holy books was compose of two principal parts: the Law — that is to say, the Pentateuch — and the Prophets, such as we now possess them. An extensive allegorical exegesis was applied to all these books; and it was sought to draw from them something that was not in them, but which responded to the aspirations of the age. The Law, which represented not the ancient laws of the country, but Utopias, the factitious laws and pious frauds of the time of the pietistic kings, had become, since the nation had ceased to govern itself, an inexhaustible theme of subtle interpretations. As to the Prophets and the Psalms, the popular persuasion was that almost all the somewhat mysterious traits that were in these books had reference to the Messiah, and it was sought to find there the type of him who should realize the hopes of the nation. Jesus participated in the taste which everyone had for these allegorical interpretations. But the true poetry of the Bible, which escaped the puerile exegetists of Jerusalem, was fully revealed to his grand genius. The Law does not appear to have had much charm for him; he thought that he could do something better. But the religious lyrics of the Psalms were in marvelous accordance with his poetic soul; they were, all his life, his food and sustenance. The prophets — Isaiah in particular, and his successor in the record of the time of the captivity — with their brilliant dreams of the future, their impetuous eloquence, and their invectives mingled with enchanting pictures, were his true teachers. He read also. no doubt, many apocryphal works — i.e. writings somewhat modern — the authors of which, for the sake of an authority only granted to very ancient writings, had clothed themselves with the names of prophets and patriarchs, One of these books especially struck him — namely, the book of Daniel. This book, composed by an enthusiastic Jew of the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, under the name of an ancient sage, was the resume of the spirit of those later times. Its author, a true creator of the philosophy of history, had for the first time dared to see in the march of the world and the succession of empires only a purpose subordinate to the destinies of the Jewish people. Jesus was early penetrated by these high hopes. Perhaps, also, he had read the books of Enoch, then revered equally with the holy books, and the other writings of the same class, which kept up so much excitement in the popular imagination. The advent of the Messiah, with his glories and his terrors — the nations falling down one after another, the cataclysm of heaven and earth — were the familiar food of his imagination; and, as these revolutions were reputed near, and a great number of persons sought to calculate the time when they should happen, the supernatural state of things into which such visions transport us appeared to him from the first perfectly natural and simple.
That he had no knowledge of the general state of the world is apparent from each feature of his most authentic discourses. The earth appeared to him still divided into kingdoms warring with one another; he seemed to ignore the “Roman peace,” and the new state of society which its age inaugurated. He had no precise idea of the Roman power; the name of “Caesar” alone reached him. He saw building, in Galilee or its environs, Tiberias, Julias, Diocaesarea, Caesarea, gorgeous works of the Herods, who sought, by these magnificent structures, to prove their admiration for Roman civilization, and their devotion towards the members of the family of Augustus — structures whose names, by a caprice of fate, now serve, though strangely altered, to designate miserable hamlets of Bedouins. He also probably saw Sebaste, a work of Herod the Great, a showy city, whose ruins would lead to the belief that it had been carried there ready made, like a machine which had only to be put up in its place. This ostentatious piece of architecture arrived in Judea by cargoes; these hundreds of columns, all of the same diameter, the ornament of some insipid Rue de Rivoli — these were what he called “the kingdoms of the world and all their glory.” But this luxury of power, this administrative and official art, displeased him. What he loved were his Galilean villages, confused mixtures of huts, of nests and holes cut in the rocks, of wells, of tombs, of fig-trees, and of olives. He always clung close to nature. The courts of kings appeared to him as places where men wear fine clothe. The charming impossibilities with which his parables abound, when he brings kings and the mighty ones on the stage, prove that he never conceived of aristocratic society but as a young villager who sees the world through the prism of his simplicity.
Still less was he acquainted with the new idea, created by Grecian science, which was the basis of all philosophy, and which modern science has greatly confirmed — to wit, the exclusion of capricious gods, to whom the simple belief of ancient ages attributed the government of the universe, Almost a century before him Lucretius had expressed, in an admirable manner, the unchangeableness of the general system of nature. The negation of miracle — the idea that everything in the world happens by laws in which the personal intervention of superior beings has no share — was universally admitted in the great schools of all the countries which had accepted Grecian science. Perhaps even Babylon and Persia were not strangers to it. Jesus knew nothing of this progress. Although born at a time when the principle of positive science was already proclaimed, he lived entirely in the supernatural. Never, perhaps, had the Jews been more possessed with the thirst for the marvelous. Philo, who lived in a great intellectual center, and who had received a very complete education, possessed only a chimerical and inferior knowledge of science.
Jesus on this point differed in no respect from his companions. He believed in the devil, whom he regarded as a kind of evil genius, and he imagined, like all the world, that nervous maladies were produced by demons who possessed the patient and agitated him. The marvelous was not the exceptional for him; it was his normal state. The notion of the supernatural, with its impossibilities, is coincident with the birth of experimental science. The man who is strange to all ideas of physical laws, who believes that by praying he can change the path of the clouds, arrest disease, and even death, finds nothing extraordinary in miracle, inasmuch as the entire course of things is to him the result of the free will of the Divinity. This intellectual state was constantly that of Jesus. But in his great soul such a belief produced effects quite opposed to those produced on the vulgar. Among the latter the belief in the special action of God led to a foolish credulity, and the deceptions of charlatans. With him it led to a profound idea of the familiar relations of man with God, and an exaggerated belief in the power of man — beautiful errors, which were the secret of his power; for if they were the means of one day showing his deficiencies in the eyes of the physicist and the chemist, they gave him a power over his own age of which no individual had been possessed before his time, or has been since.
His distinctive character very early revealed itself. Legend delights to show him even from his infancy in revolt against paternal authority, and departing from the common way to fulfil his vocation. It is certain, at least, that he cared little for the relations of kinship. His family do not seem to have loved him, and at times he seems to have been hard towards them. Jesus, like all men exclusively preoccupied by an idea, came to think little of the ties of blood. The bond of thought is the only one that natures of this kind recognize. “Behold my mother and my brethren,” said he, in extending his hand towards his disciples; “he who does the will of my Father, he is my brother and my sister.” The simple people did not understand the matter thus, and one day a woman passing near him cried out, “Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which gave thee suck!” But he said, “Yea, rather blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.” Soon, in his bold revolt against nature, he went still further, and we shall see him trampling under foot everything that is human — blood, love, and country — and only keeping soul and heart for the idea which presented itself to him as the absolute form of goodness and truth.
Teachng High School HomeSchoolers about Creation:The Day Age Theory
The Beginning – When?
According to the opening chapter of Genesis, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” When exactly was “the beginning”? We are frequently told that everything began some four and a half billion years ago. Some books suggest six billion years, and a few articles would even urge a span of 30 billion years. There seems to be a contradiction between the statements of Genesis and the premises of people who accept the evolutionary hypothesis. How does one blend four and a half billion evolutionary years with 6000 years (as determined from the genealogies in Genesis 5 and 11 and by Bishop Ussher)?
Some scholars have attempted to merge Biblical with evolutionary thinking, accounting for differences by making the days of creation long periods of time or by placing a gap between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2. In this chapter we will discuss these two theories as well as analyzing theories concerning the age of the earth itself.
THE DAY-AGE THEORY
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” The nature of “the beginning” is clarified to an extent in Genesis 1:31, “And God saw everything that He had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.” Chapter 2:1-2 continues, “Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made: and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.” God completed His work on the seventh day. Exodus 20:11 concurs with the Genesis account: “For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested on the seventh day.” God seems to have ended His creative activity on the seventh day, which would place the beginning of His creative acts exactly six days before their completion.
If the beginning was six days before the completion, we must next ask, How long was “the day”? God defines the Hebrew word for day the first time He uses it. According to Genesis 1:5, “And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.” The light period of time is clearly labeled “day,” the dark period designated “night.” In addition, God uses two phrases which indicate the length of a day. “And the evening and the morning were the first day.”Every time the Hebrew words for evening and morning are used in the Old Testament, they refer to a literal day. The Hebrew concept of “day” begins in the evening, continues through the night, and terminates the following afternoon. Thus “evening and morning” are expressions used to define a literal day.
Every time the Hebrew word yom (singular) is used in the Old Testament with a numerical adjective – first day, fifth day, tenth day, 100th day – it refers to a literal solar day. Likewise, each time yamim (plural) is used, literal days must be specified. Compare, for instance, the double usage of yamim in Exodus 20, the passage which contains the Ten Commandments. In verses 8-10, obviously speaking of a literal seven-day week, God enjoins us to work only six days (yamim), retaining the Sabbath as a day of rest. Why should man rest one day in seven? Because, according to verse 11, which relates back to the Genesis account of creation, God created everything in six days (yamim) and rested on the seventh.
A consistent interpretation of Scripture must find that “day” or “days” when used in a clearly literal context, as in Exodus 20:9, will likewise require actual solar days in Genesis 1 or Exodus 20:11, referring to days of creation. No exception may be allowed.
If one attempts to extend the days of creation into long periods of time, strange things happen. For instance, an effort to correlate the days of creation with the evolutionary geologic column produces at least twenty-one major discrepancies. According to the evolutionists, several things are wrong with the Biblical account. For one thing, plant life, the first life to appear in Genesis, comes rather late in evolutionary development. There are also some problems with differences between fish and fowl. In Genesis fowl are created on the same day as fish. When God created life. He started with whales, sea creatures, and fowl (Genesis 1:21). But according to evolution, fish gave rise to reptiles, which developed into mammals and birds. Again, the sun, moon and stars in the Genesis account were made on the fourth day, whereas these are the evolutionary essentials for bringing life into being. If life were to come about by microbiology, by some simple chemicals coming together to form amino acids, later becoming more complex protein molecules and ultimately the first cell, then radiant energy or sunlight would be needed. Finally, if one tries to stretch creation days into long periods of time. Plant life, created on the third day, would have to live without the light of the sun for however long your day was – 1000 years, one million years – because the light from the sun did not reach here until it was created on the fourth day. The third day brought forth plants, but insects which are necessary for the pollinization of many flowering plants are not created until the sixth day.
With reference again to consistent Biblical interpretation, if one insists that days are long periods of time in Genesis, he will have to say that they are long periods of time in other places of Scripture, such as Jonah’s three days in the whale or Nehemiah’s three days spent in the city. How long is a day? God says He began His creative activity six days before He completed it. The Bible is consistent, and therefore these days must be literal days.
Mimi Rothschild Brings You “Homeschooling – Bringing Balance Between Real Life Learning and Curriculum”
Mimi Rothschild Brings You “Homeschooling – Bringing Balance Between Real Life Learning and Curriculum“
Homeschoolers can roughly be divided into two groups – “unschoolers” and “those who use some form of curriculum”. There is a whole spectrum of homeschoolers in between using different philosophies to drive their homeschool vision.
No matter where you are in your homeschool journey, a homeschooling mom needs to make sure that a homeschool curriculum stays in its place. If it becomes the master which dictates to a parent and thus forces real life learning out, it needs to be brought under strict control.
Homeschool curriculums used for Math, Science, Language and other difficult subjects are often very welcome in a homeschooling home where moms, like me, are not strong in those subjects. This is the beauty of using a curriculum as it relieves a burden from the homeschooling mom’s shoulders.
For subjects that lend themselves to a more relaxed learning style – those like history, geography and life orientation – as much real life should be used. Using literature to study history and geography is so much better than memorizing dry dates and facts. It allows a child to “be at home in a single region – seeing the people at work, the flowers and fruits in their season, the animal in its habitat…” Charlotte Mason. History and geography chronicles, or living books, “nourish the mind with ideas, and to furnish the imagination with pictures” Charlotte Mason.
Real life has a way of stretching our children to think beyond themselves, to care for the needs of others, to serve in their homes and to learn all the valuable life skills that they need for the rest of their lives. Our homes have all that our children need to teach them how to care for themselves and others. Equipping them in how to work in their own home, equips them for a career one day – either for an employer or as a self employed individual. “The attitudes and attributes that make a good employee are the same attitudes and attributes that make a good kid.” Christine Fields, Life Skills for Kids.
As you come alongside your children and train them to do their chores they learn how to complete a task they begin. Chores teach our children problem solving, paid chores teach financial management and getting older children to help younger children helps them to learn patience.
Meal preparation is a wonderful platform to teach home economics which is an asset to both boys and girls. As you plan your weeks meals, plan for some of your children to be your helpers. As you bake your snacks and treats, draw your youngest children in to help. These casual times of being together are when you can impart your own kernels of knowledge to your children. These times also are valuable for drawing your children close to you in amongst the busyness of your days as a homeschooling mom.
Relevant Outings provide a wonderful way for your children to learn things by seeing and doing. Outings to historical, geographical and scientific places of interest can be journalled and photographed and notebooked so that you can keep records of what your children are learning. Just a warning – overdoing outings can become tiring to a mom; make sure they are planned carefully.
Ultimately a wise homeschool moms plans a balance between curriculum and real life learning, incorporating good literature, work and service at home, outings and homeschool curriculum.
Wendy Young is a homeschooling mom to 4 children aged 14 – 7 years. They have always been at home with her. She has been married for 19 years. Her homeschooling website, Homeschool-Curriculum-For-Life.com, is dedicated to helping homeschooling moms get organized, enjoy the journey and live life to its fullest.
Mimi Rothschild brings you “An Experience In Homeschooling (Or How I Snuffed The Fun Out Of Learning)”
Mimi Rothschild brings you “An Experience In Homeschooling (Or How I Snuffed The Fun Out Of Learning)“
Okay. Slowly, and with feigned difficulty, she makes the partial circle that is a ‘c’.
Good, now can you make an uppercase ‘C’?
C says ‘kuh’…like cat…I want a cat. Can I get one when I’m six? Some cats are nice, some cats are mean. I want a nice cat.
Kassia…please get off the table and sit in your chair. You haven’t done your uppercase ‘C’.
I don’t know how to make a ‘C’…and besides, I’m hungry.
Homeschooling was never the plan. Just one of those things that evolved out of circumstance and chance. We spent Kassia’s first five years of life on a 400 acre ranch in Southern New Mexico. The natural world had been her teacher.
Concepts of wind and physics explained themselves in dust devils that move eerily across the plains. By the age of three, she knew the word erosion, fascinated by the intricate labyrinth of sand formations left behind in the dry arroyos that finger out from the Pecos River. She knows that where the wash appears sandy, a small pick and shovel can find red and green stones of jasper, Pecos diamonds, quartz, and yes, once, an arrowhead.
And perhaps the greatest educators of all, the animals that share her world, both wild and domestic. The geometry in the formations of Sandhill Cranes that fly over the ranch every morning and every evening in late fall and into winter. The early lessons on lifecycles and reproduction taught by the goats, chickens, donkeys and cows (“Mama, what is he doing?) We watched the barn swallows that nest under the eaves, steadfastly making trip after trip from food source to baby. Teaching that when something is dependent on you, you work your tail off to care for it. Then there are the rattlesnakes and scorpions. A lesson in reverence? Or at least caution. Not everyone in this world is your friend.
Trying to grow flowers and vegetables in the dry, nutrient depleted desert earth, Kassia learned tenacity, and in turn, the agony of defeat.
And not to be overlooked, the New Mexico sky. Perhaps worthy of “teacher of the year”. An expanse of space so consuming you want to hold your breath. In the afternoon, lofty cumulus clouds pile on top of one another over the mesa, and after dark, it all turns blue black in preparation for the show. The constellations.
Then Kassia turned five. It was time to start formal school. The kind with yellow buses and lunchboxes and people who are paid to impart information to her brain. The problem…the recession had stalled our out of state move. We were stuck for a time in a place you don’t want to send your kid to public school. Or any school.
And so it was that I found myself undertaking the strange new task of homeschooling our kindergartner. She had insatiable curiosity and I had taught remedial reading. How hard could it be?
I turned to my cousin who had homeschooled three children. Very much against public schools, where “your kid will be a robot”, she touted all the benefits of teaching your child yourself. What I really aspired to were the claims of the Montessori philosophy. Provide a child with the right materials and adequate time to explore those materials, and she will almost spontaneously teach herself to read and do geometry.
Feeling ill equipped to go that route, I purchased a basic phonics book and some math workbooks. Kassia was excited initially by all the new notebooks, pencils, ladybug erasers. She dressed up for “class”, filled her backpack and asked “so, where’s my cubby?”
Things went okay at first. Until the novelty wore off. I tried to keep it dynamic with things like a reading lesson in our “spaceship” with a flashlight. A scavenger hunt to find new words. But before long our reading lessons were met with the kind of dread usually reserved for well child boosters. Kassia could no longer sit still. Not for five minutes. She dutifully read what I asked her to while she hopped on one foot, hung upside down on my lap, set a record for the number of ways a human being can (literally) fall out of a chair. After every sentence… “are we done yet?” And one time, “am I free now?” as if her learning experience were a prison. I was frustrated. I didn’t want to have to construct a spaceship every morning for a thirty minute reading session. And I wanted Kassia to develop some measure of self discipline so she could integrate into school when the time came. So I forced her to sit.
“Don’t worry”, my cousin assured me, “Nathan didn’t sit down until the third grade. He would stand at the kitchen table to do his math and take a book up into a tree. Now he’s a computer whiz”.
I did, I think, get a few things right. When Kassia had questions (Why are people different from each other? How do mosquitoes suck blood? Before they were extinct, did saber tooth tigers swim?) I wrote them down. Then, on our weekly trip to the local library we would check out books we thought might hold the answers. She liked that. And my big score – a huge coffee table book on China, with photographs so beautiful we were both lost in the book for hours. It was this book that sparked her interest in calligraphy.
But I always brought her back to the phonics. To the worksheets. To the prison. Honestly, I’m not quite sure of the process. I still don’t know how a child learns that ‘s-h’ makes a ‘ssshhhh’ sound, unless you tell them. Directly.
One particularly rough morning I managed to get my daughter in tears. “No baby, you’re making your ‘2’ backwards”
“That’s how I like to make it!” she told me, and from there we engaged in a battle of wills that I assure you I did not win. Time for a break.
We walked out into the New Mexico sun; the brightest, purest, most unobscured anywhere. When you live in the desert you learn to appreciate the many shades of brown, as it is the variations in this color that mark the seasons. Honey, pale saffron, wheat, espresso. A Meadowlark called and Kassia answered. Under the cottonwood trees the leaves were dry. The color of adobe bricks. Kassia kneeled to inspect something. “Look Mama!” A baby grasshopper resting on its mother’s back? Both of them the color of the dead leaves. How she spotted them I can’t imagine. It took me a few seconds to find them when they were pointed out.
“They’re camouflaged”, she told me. She stayed to examine them for a long time. She was very still (hadn’t fallen once) and I realized that maybe for that day it didn’t matter what her ‘2’ looked like. Probably it still wouldn’t matter tomorrow. I was reminded of author Anna Quindlen and her observation that “people don’t talk about the soul very much anymore. It’s so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit”. And maybe sometimes, even with my own child, I emphasize the former to the detriment of the latter.
Kelli lives on a ranch with her husband and five year old daughter. Aside from homeschooling, she spends her time teaching at the local college, raising miniature donkeys, and writing.
Mimi Rothschild Brings You “Top 12 Reasons to Just Ditch Homeschooling Altogether”
Mimi Rothschild Brings You “Top 12 Reasons to Just Ditch Homeschooling Altogether“
1.) You can blame your child’s behavior and bad habits on his peers: they’re not his siblings.
2.) You can blame his teacher when your child is “behind:” you’re not the teacher.
3.) You would not have to grade papers or keep track of important educational documents or create a transcript.
4.) You would suddenly find yourself having more in common with the people you meet.
5.) You would be relieved of the responsibility to choose the best curriculum for your child.
6.) You could focus on your own personal hobbies or begin to work outside the home.
7.) You would substantially increase the likelihood of having a clean home if no one was in it all day.
8.) You could just complain about your child’s environment, teacher, peers, and curriculum instead of being personally responsible for changing or repairing it.
9.) Your public school tax dollars would finally be at work for your family.
10.) You could stop having to justify or prove that your educational choices could be at least as productive as the public alternative.
11.) You could read books that don’t use the word “education,” “Charlotte Mason,” “Trivium,” or “self-discipline” in them.
12.) You never again have to answer the question “What about socialization?”
Teresa Dear is a homeschooling mother of four. She and her husband do not worry about socialization. You can follow the blog exploration of Classical Christian Education in general and their homeschool lifestyle in particular at http://highereducation-mama4x.blogspot.com. Teresa divides her time between education, the home, shopping for curriculum, and stocking her www.mama4x.etsy.com storefront where you can find handmade cards and vintage photos.