"An idea fitly put is taken in without effort, and, once in, ideas behave like living creatures––they feed, grow, and multiply." Charlotte Mason, Vol. 2 pg 77 of Charlotte Mason's Original Homeschooling Series
Atheistic, secular humanists have taken over public education and they have won the hearts and minds of the youth in our country. They have removed any ability for a public school educator to teach the Bible as God’s truth. Children are treated like they are computers, a product of their mechanistic biology. The goal of the public school education is to have an equal output for all. The way this is done is to give every child the same input, so that every child will have an equal output. It is measured mechanistically by testing. The result is generations of children leaving school uneducated and indoctrinated. They can reproduce the propaganda, facts, or information poured into them to regurgitate on a test and then to be quickly forgotten. They can repeat what they were taught to think in short pithy sound bites, but they have not been educated on how to think critically for themselves. This has been disastrous for our country and a recipe for the masses to be controlled by its rulers.
In the middle ages, the Christian church opened schools and began to educate the people. The concept of the university was a Christian one. The impact it had on western civilization was transformative.
What if the Christian churches in America or around the world offered a free education to their church member’s children and to the public? Give the parents in this country a viable alternative. The teachers in the Church schools would not be muzzled like they are in public schools. Children would learn God’s truth.
“What about the cost?” you ask. Who would fund this endeavor? The church would. Think for a moment how much money is sent by the church for overseas missions every year. The amount of money is in the billions. What if some of that money was invested in the missionary outreach in our own communities to reach the hearts and minds of the youth for Christ? Do you think that it would be possible? I do.
As thousands of homeschooling families already know, a quality education does not have to be costly. With a free online curriculum like Ambleside Online, www.amblesideonline.org, that offer’s a guideline for a quality education following the educational philosophy of Charlotte Mason, it would be affordable. Most of the high quality books needed are already available as free ebooks and audiobooks in the public domain. For the books that needed to be purchased, they can be purchased as used at a fraction of the cost of a new book.
A Charlotte Mason education starts with God as the creator and children as persons, made in the image of God and capable of intelligent, independent thought. From birth they have all the faculties they need to learn and build relationships with everything and everyone in the world around them. With an insatiable desire for knowledge, the mind of the child grows and thrives on ideas. Provide their minds with a feast of the best ideas from the best minds throughout mankind’s history and include a wide subject areas and the child will learn and grow. Study the works of the best poets, writers of literature, composers, artists, historians, as well as language, geographies with history taught from the begin, “God created the heavens and the earth” to present times as a proper context for the ideas. History taught rightly as the story of the relationship between God and his creation, our story, the story of mankind. With the aide of the Holy Spirit and God’s truth from the Bible, student’s world view will connect them to reality as it really is in Truth.
Can you just imagine how that kind of education of millions of children would impact our world? The church providing an education for all and winning the hearts and minds of our youth for Christ. Its revolutionary!
