Missing education

Recently an acquaintance of mine made the comment of how a fellow coworker didn’t know how to multiply anything over 9 without a calculator.  School had not required her to know it or memorize it.  Therefore she was technology dependent.

A child entering the sixth grade struggled with a few basic division problems and admitted that he didn’t know how to divide. A skill that should have been learned in third or fourth grade.  Yet, the child was just pushed through.

These are only a sliver of children who even though may have excelled in school lacked the basic knowledge of memorized multiplication.  This skill isn’t the only thing that is being left behind.  Remember being in second grade and having an entire teaching on penmanship?  The correct ways to write cursive? Now our kids can do quickies with a touch of a button, ready?

idk

lol

Are you impressed?

I know that change is good, but what if we have taken away the foundation of our children’s education by trying to make them smarter quicker?  What are our schools lacking?  What is the biggest challenge?

Without a stable foundation, all that has been learned and built upon will fall.  What is the foundation?  The whole idea of education was God’s to begin with.  In Matthew 22:37 Jesus was asked what is the greatest commandment of the law.  His reply? “‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.”

We are meant to discover God through education so that we can love Him with all our mind.  To know God and make Him known.  Remembering that all things point back to Him, he is at the center of everything.  He is the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End.  It seems that somewhere along the way we have lost the tools necessary to discover Him in our education.

So, who is your child’s greatest teacher?  I rejoice in being able to tell you that just over these past three years I have seen the Lord weave into the tapestry of my life and that of my families the importance of home schooling.  I have heard many parents say that they can’t teach their children because they don’t feel smart enough.  I was one of those parents.  I didn’t think that I had what it took.  I’m discovering now that I’m just what my children need, they were put into my care for a reason.  I can teach them and at the same time, I too will learn.  Learning isn’t’ something that is over once you graduate from high school.  It is something that is pursued until our time on this earth is over.

I took a deep breath when I entered into the Thomas Jefferson memorial.  Along the inside, top most circumference of this great building, was a quote that he spoke.  The engraving read,  ” I have sworn on the alter of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

Tell me, what does that mean to you?