What can Mary teach us about the purpose of education?

Barna Group president David Kinnaman wrote a new book titled You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving Church...and Rethinking Faith. They're not just leaving church; they are abandoning their already shallow Evangelical values.

70 percent of them now believe fornication is morally ok. In fact, they are as sexually active as non-Christians. Over 60 percent suport same-sex marriage (thanks to the "values clarification" process taught in American schools since the early 1980s. A good book on the subject is Child Abuse in the Classroom from 1985).

"They value the sense of community provided by their church, but are tired of being told how they should live their life," writes Kinnaman.

Oh, it's way more than that, my friend. They've been indoctrinated in values clarification since elementary school. It's like a dormant bomb designed to explode with their hormones. An example from Laura Stepp, the CNN editorialist who also opines on the book:

Brittany, a 24-year-old veterinary technician, is an example of the newly disaffected. In high school, she attended a conservative Episcopal church in northern Virginia. She enrolled in college thinking of herself as a conservative and not wanting to have sex until she was married. Her views changed when she met her boyfriend. She began to question the theology of her home church on a number of social issues.

This anectode leaves a lot out. Let's give it some flesh.

Brittany said she believed in biblical values until she got alone with her boyfriend for the first time, got passionately aroused, had no accountability, and had sex. Then she needed a new values system to justify her desire to continue premarital sex and help her not feel guilty.

How's that sound? Read the last sentence again because that's the crux of the matter.

This is why we homeschool. Not because we parents are the better teachers, but because the public school system has let us down. In fact, it has become the most powerful indoctrination tool bent on reshaping the values of the masses from a very early age, when it's easier to mold their worldview. As humanist Charles Francis Potter wrote in 1930:

Education is thus a most powerful ally of humanism, and every American school is a school of humanism. What can a theistic Sunday school’s meeting for an hour once a week and teaching only a fraction of the children do to stem the tide of the five-day program of humanistic teaching?

Exactly. Humanist have mastered the art of having parents finance the spiritual destruction of their own children, in the name of education.

But what is education, anyway? And what does Mary, the mother of Jesus, have to do with it?

Everything.

Education (from the Latin "e ducere" to lead out) is a holistic process meant to mold the formation of the child as a whole: a sort of Jedi knight, a soldier of the body, of the mind, and of the spirit. A person trained in the classics, yes, but also on compassion, self-sacrifice, and spiritual warfare against the principalities that rule this groaning world.

Children belong not to the state, as Hegel believed, and not to the parents, as some Christians believe. Children belong to God, who entrusts the parents with their education.

This is true today, as was true at the time of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Her parents could also have entrusted her education to the "state," the scholarly doctrines of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, and of the Romans. How cool would she have been when reciting the verses of Catullus in the Synagogue.

Odi et amo; quare id faciam fortasse requiris. Nescio, sed fieri sentio, et excrucior.

Alas, her parents knew better.

They forgot to fill her head with the humanistic knowledge of the time, and taught her the Scriptures instead; and when she was chosen by God to give birth to the Savior, upon being praised by her cousin Elizabeth for her faith, responded by singing the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55), a song that quotes 17 Old Testament passages and puts praise Where it belongs. Not a small feast, considering she she did it on the spot, with no concordance, and was only 13 to 17 years old.

Notice the maturity, the humility, the knowledge of her traditions, the memorization skills, all combined in a stunning whole that would make every parent proud.

Now, this is education.

The best financial advice you can give your kids

I went to school in Europe. I had an excellent classical education, but an area that was sorely lacking was personal finance, or money management. I had to learn the ropes all by myself, through trial and error.

That's a mistake I won't make with my kids. My wife and I are already  teaching them about money matters, and will do so through their school life, with books and real-life lessons.

The most important piece of advice about money, however, is not about money. It's about time. If you waste money, you can get it back. If you waste time, you won't. Time is your most precious resource.

Nobody expressed it better than entrepreneur and best-selling author Jeff Gitomer: "Don't spend your time, invest it."

The Boston Globe ran a good article on the topic. The main suggestions were, of course, to cut back on the great time-wasters: TV, commuting, sleeping, shopping, traveling, and investing time in reading, exercising, building relationships, time with family, and thinking.

You can be smart about it. If you cannot cut back on commuting, at least for a while, invest the time listening to audiobooks. Teach your kids to turn off the TV (or sell it on eBay) and read biographies of great men, classic works of literature, help older relatives, practice with a favorite musical instrument.

Time is the only resource that does not come back.

What to do? Keep a daily time sheet for a couple of weeks. Write down what you do daily, in 30-minute chunks. You will get a good idea of where your time goes.

It takes honesty to do this. It's like a diet. You have to know where your time goes before you can allocate it with wisdom.

Maybe a joint effort with your children would help. You become an example to them.

As you should.

Watercolors in the Sun

For the past week or so, the girls have been fighting a bad cold. So I jump at any opportunity to get them out into the warm sunshine. My girls, and probably every other child under six, just LOVE to paint! When one of my daughters asked if she could paint yesterday, I enthusiastically shouted "YES"! She must have thought I had gone a bit nuts, and maybe she was right.  :-)

So I got out every watercolors pallet that we owned and told them to have at it!

Love these little faces.

We only had one paintbrush for some reason. Thankfully, World War III didn't break out over who got to use it. Giada was quite content using her little fingers. This activity proved to be very exciting for Giada as she is currently working on her colors in school.

She thought it would be fun to put a little bit of paint on each over her fingers.

Angela much preferred to use the paintbrush.

Painting was also such a fun way to talk about how God created so many AMAZING colors!  We tried to blend paints together to come up with our own special colors...but, most of them came out to be a grody shade of brown. :-)
This also sparked a fun "color finding scavenger hunt" around the yard.

This activity was such a blast! The girls loved it! They got some much needed sunshine and it was a great learning experience both spiritually and mentally. We need to break out these paint pallets a little more often. The finished product was promptly hung on the laundry room wall so that "Mamma can look at it while she does laundry!" Oh, the joys of being a mom!

Top 10 food shockers

"Mens sana in corpore sano," as the Romans would say; "A healthy mind in a healthy body." You cannot have your children perform optimally in school if their body is not healthy; neither can you as the teacher. It then behooves us to eat reasonably healthy to keep our mind focused.

Here are ten things you should know about the food you find at your local grocery store:

1. Your food has bugs. Buggy foods include pasta, nuts, peanut butter, dried beans, grains, coffee beans, even chocolate. Also canned tomatoes, and some fish. What to do? Return the product and check your shelves. If you find bugs in your pantry, empty your cupboards and vacuum the shelves. Use sealed glass containers, not cardboard, plastic wrap, or foil. Store the containers in the fridge when possible.
2. That meat is not that fresh. You can't judge by its color anymore. Meat may be packaged with carbon monoxide that keeps it looking fresh and red for over a month. Also dyes like Yellow No. 5 and other preservatives can cause allergies and have been linked to tumors. What to do? Read the ingredients, stay away from preservatives, sodas, processed foods, and shop at your local health store.
3. Processed meat off the menu. Stay away from chicken nuggets and the associated pink slime. It's mixed with ammonia, sodium, preservatives, flavorings. What to do? Again, scan the ingredients, stay away from mechanically separated meat.
4. Watch out for BPA. Most people have Bisphenol A (BPA) in their urine. BPA is contained in plastic bottles, cans of food, and other plastic containers. It is a neurotoxin and also affects the prostate gland in fetuses, infants, and children. What to do? Stay away from canned foods, use plastic containers with recycle codes 2, 4, or 5.
5. Stay away from cloned food. The FDA, bless their heart, storms raw milk dairy farms every other day, but does not require disclosing cloned food on labels. Genetically modified (GMO) versions of foods like corn, soybeans, canola, and cotton are widely sold in the US. What to do? Buy organic, from companies that you know are not using GMOs. We purchase our milk from Organic Pastures and stay away from soy and canola anyway.
6. Watch out for fortified foods and vitamins. Vitamins are good, but the cheap synthetic vitamins you find added to your cereals and bottled up on the store shelf are controversial. What to do? Stick to healthy, organic foods. If you want to get those multivitamins, look for raw ones from whole foods. We get the Garden of Life Raw One. 
7. What did that steak eat? When it was a cow, of course. Livestock feed can include like cow meat and bones, fed to chickens, pigs, and farmed fish. Cows might be fed processed feathers and waste from the floors of chicken coops. What to do? Stick with organic meat. Claims about lack of additives, hormones, steroids are less reliable because they cannot be verified.
8. Labels lie. Just because your cereal box says "natural" or "no trans fats" and "whole grain," that does not mean what you think it means. It might just contain a smidgen of that "good ingredient" or it might have .5 grams of trans fats, which is a lot if you eat several servings of your cereal (who eats only one serving when, according to the box, it's the size of an ant?). What to do? Stay away from processed foods. Stick with God-made ones, possibly organic.
9. Artificial dyes are everywhere, from petroleum-based synthetic dyel Red 40 and Blue 1, found in cereals and blueberry bars, as well as strawberry shakes at major fast food chain stores. What to do? Are you still buying processed junk food?
10. Is that fake food? Cheese crackers anyone? Or blackberry pomegranate-flavor multigrain fiber crisps? Riiight. No real food there. Maybe not dangerous, but definitely lacking in the nutrients you think you are getting. What to do? Stick with God-made, real food

The best way for your children to learn software

If your local library has copies of CD- or DVD-based software tutorials, great. If not, a great tool is the Lynda web site. for $25 a month, your kids - third grade and older - can access hundreds of professional video tutorials on hundreds of different software programs on several subjects, from business (MS Office, Google Apps) to design, photography, video editing, 3D, web design, art, and more.

The videos range from 1 hour up to 23+ hour long, and go from basic to intermediate and advanced, broken down in chapters and segments. Each segment is a manageable few minutes long.

Most of the presenters are engaging and knowledgeable. I've watched five or more different courses, from Google Apps to Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver, even an Apple Server Implementation course. They were all great, much better than reading even the best book on the same topic.

If your children start watching three courses a year in third grade, by the time they finish high school, they will have gained mastery of many of the best software programs on the planet.

Great resource for fertility, pregnancy, and after birth

Making Babies by Shoshanna Easling is a great book for women that want to have children.

It takes women step by step all the way through the whole process, from the pre-pregnancy advice on how to prepare your body with healthy nutrients, to the pregnancy stage with herbs, tinctures, smoothies, salads, all kinds of recipes using organic, healthy, whole, possibly raw foods.

Shoshanna was pregnant while writing this book and making the excellent DVD set that can be purchased along with the book. I watched the DVDs. She's great, fun, very spontaneous and energetic, and loves working on all these delicious recipes.

Highly recommended if you want to have a very healthy pregnancy.

More Starfall, a great learning web site for chrildren

More Starfall is the premium version of the free Starfall.com web site. While the free version is a great resource for children 3 to 6 years old to learn their ABC and first reading lessons, More Starfall adds much more and is definitely worth the $35 a year they charge for it.

What do you get for $35 a year? A lot; you get a whole math section, with math songs, numbers, geometry and measurements, as well as lessons on addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

You also get the full phonics and reading section available on the free version of Starfall, plus lessons on vowels, colors, more phonics lessons, word machines, a talking library with a great selection of books read by an adult while the books highlights the words being read.

For the older children who already know how to read, there's an "I'm Reading" section with a selection of books with rich graphics with reading exercises and hearing aid tools to confirm your reading skills.

Finally there's a Songs and Rhymes section with popular and richly-animated songs like "Head, shoulders, knees, and toes,""If you are happy and you know it," and many others that blend fun and learning in a smart way.

The beauty of the site is that it does not sacrifice education for fun. It does not distract the child with overly entertaining material (unlike the Sesame Street web site), but keeps her focused on the lesson at hand.

Once you purchase the premium version, you can authorize it on up to three computers.

Highly recommended.

If you want your kids to excel

Talent is overrated. What you need is hard work and dedication. At least this is the conclusion reached by Geoff Colvin in Talent is Overrated and by Malcom Gladwell in Outliers: The Story of Success. Both authors reach the counter-cultural conclusion that success, even for über-talents like Mozart or Tiger Woods was not just the result of genetic lottery or divine inspiration, but hard work for many, many years. Most people that master their field started at a very young age, between 3 and 6 years old.

If you want your kids to excel at a subject they like, dabbling with it is just not enough. They have to practice hard.

Signing Time: A great learning tool for toddlers

The Signing Time DVDs are great for children of any age; even our six-year old enjoys them; they are especially good for toddlers, however, because they don't go over their head and are fun to follow as toddlers learn to communicate what food they want or what toy they want to play with, and they do so by using simple signs in American Sign Language. These DVDs are very well done, with music, fun, adults and kids alike showing the signs in a way that makes them fun and easy to learn. Highly recommended.

Signinig Time