Declaration of Independence

I handed out some free copies of The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution this week to 4th grade and up. To teachers, I stressed the importance of the Declaration as something we need to hold onto and cherish. With reflection and further study, I now lean towards characterizing the Declaration of Independence as at once the most precious and most dangerous of documents in our American heritage.

No doubt that the Declaration has suffered seriously from attacks of all kinds from many sources over the years. The whole idea of ‘natural rights’ and the relevance or existence of a creator have either been seriously questioned or totally debunked. While I am uncomfortable with defining just what are the “laws of nature,” certainly our society is treading on thin ice in trying to posit any secure grounds for the dignity and freedom of man other than our Western tradition of European Christianity. Evolution tells us we are a freak accident of nature and a predatory menace threatening the whole world’s ecosystem. That is hardly a comforting starting point in arguing for the inalienable rights of men to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. One of nature’s laws is the principal of survival of the fittest. That is a totally abhorrent basis for founding a social system that protects the weak and insures their survival. It is only our Christian tradition that tells us that man is the crown jewel of creation, made in the very image of God, and standing apart from all the rest of creation.

The basis of our Constitutional law is the Declaration of Independence. The hinge pin of the Declaration is that our dignity and rights come from our Creator who sits above governments and kings. Government then must be subservient to greater truths and not the source of truth. Our Protestant tradition of the priesthood of the believer is the pure gold standard in enunciating the value and dignity of each human individual as they stand equal before God. To try to build a base for either liberty or equality apart from this is an exercise of the most arduous and difficult kind. We, as Christians, stand firmly in the tradition of these bridge builders to the American concepts of liberty and equality. No other philosophy or methodology has been to this point able to bear that weight.

Yet these unquestioned values of liberty and equality are also very dangerous concepts that, if allowed to run unchecked, will feed upon themselves until they descend into total chaos and destruction. These high flown words served well in inspiring a revolution but were ill defined and vague at best. Jefferson, himself, was a slave owner and could not see the implications of his own writing. Our idea of liberty finally evolved to the point of ridding us of slavery, but it continues to morph into further and further notions of radical individualism free of all social, moral, and religious constraints. Unchecked, liberty seeks to knock down all the walls of restraint upon personal freedom until society’s ceiling finally crashes down around it in swirling winds of chaos. Egalitarianism, likewise, is an animal that will grow and grow if left unchecked until it eats us out of house and home. Economic disparity is now characterized as inherently unfair and unjust pushing us towards socialism. Hierarchies are ridiculed. Age is grounds for suspicion. Representation must be engineered to insure ‘fairness.’ The only power capable of insuring this is that of government which must become more and more intrusive at the behest of elites who understand correctly the goals of a “just” society.

The Declaration of Independence: a dangerous and precious document. Handle with care.

CFC anew

I was just recently asked why someone would choose CFC as their schooling choice. Nearly four years now as your administrator have given me some perspective on how to answer this. I know I am preaching to the choir here, but please allow me to refresh your memory and strengthen your prejudices. I am not listing these in any particular order of importance as they are different for each family. But taken together, I just want to restate our reason for existence as a school.

As an alternative to pure home schooling, CFC removes much of the tribulation that accompanies the go-it-alone option. We offer a proven track record of curriculum selection that cuts through the hundreds of choices that can easily overwhelm any new home school family. Plus, we lead the teaching parent step by step in gradual immersion into the home school concept with lesson plans and a lead teacher who carries much of the burden. We also offer an instant network of parents along with trained teachers who are experienced both with the program and the materials. CFC, therefore, holds the hand of parents who would like to have something of the home school experience but who would otherwise be overwhelmed by the demands or decisions of pure home schooling.

We give the home school parent three mornings a week where they are free to devote some time to younger siblings or to run those many errands necessary to keep a home operating. The CFC option also affords three days a week for your children to socialize with peers which is a critical and very real need for some students. Not every child is content to spend each school day at home with mom. Through this socialization, mutually beneficial friendships develop that can span many years. We like to think that these are the friends that will prove to be encouraging to your student’s development both academically and spiritually. CFC has proved also to be a haven for many from the bullying that goes on in 5 day schools, both public and private. Such behavior is unacceptable at CFC, and I believe we have made remarkable progress in reducing conflict and ridicule to an absolute minimum over these past few years.

CFC also provides a platform for educational activities that are difficult to realize on one’s own. Daily P.E. games, field trips, spelling bees, art fairs, science and history fairs, talent shows: these are all great educational experiences that are difficult or near impossible to simulate apart from a school environment.

We offer a Christian education that says that all our subject matter should be infused with a different perspective because it begins with a distinctly different starting point. We do not define ourselves as a Christian school simply because we share a statement of faith or have devotions and chapel at regular intervals. All of our core curriculum originates from a Christian world view and therefore should have a different motivation, look, and feel than a curriculum beginning from a secular basis. We teach reading so that our students can read the Word of God for themselves along with other uplifting literature. We read for a purpose and that is to magnify everything that is pure, good, gracious, noble, and true into our souls and leave that same legacy to others through our writing.

CFC offers much greater involvement with your child’s education that the traditional day school. Students learn to depend upon their parents as they learn together. I believe that parents who are involved will communicate a whole different attitude towards learning. When children see that their parents get excited about learning, it can impart values that will serve a lifetime. I see also children bonding more closely with their parents through this shared experience. Instead of coming to see their parents as a public embarrassment, they have learned to see them as valuable coaches and mentors who are genuinely on their side.

I hope this confirms your commitment to CFC and gives you a clear focus for our raison d’etre, our reason for being.

CFC is a good deal.

Childhood Revived

It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter. Proverbs 25:2 KJV

I promised last week that I would review a book that I awarded my “Stocking Stuffer of the Year Award” as my pick for “best gift of Christmas, 2008.” It is The Daring Book for Girls by Andrea J. Buchanan and Miriam Peskowitz.* It is an all encompassing book of everything you ever wanted to know about as a pre-teen girl but didn’t know how to ask. In one volume, your young ladies can find out about pressing flowers, how to whistle with two fingers, double Dutch jump rope (complete with rhymes), how to negotiate a salary, bird watching, how to make a stink bomb, reading tide charts, snowballs, and Abigail Adams’ letters to John Adams. I was fascinated with the wealth of eye-opening information it contained about both the off-beat and the profound.

It took me back to my childhood when, as a boy of 8 & 9, my family lived in one of those old two-story, four bedroom homes that, to my delight, had a full basement and a full standup, walk-in attic. It was the basement and attic that drew me like a magnet on Saturdays and summer days as I indulged a strong sense of curiosity. The basement contained my brother’s hamster cages and my dad’s workshop where I made my first woodworking project, a small boat modeled after the large iron ore cruisers on the Great Lakes. I still have it.

The attic was where I discovered a fully illustrated, hard-bound edition of Gulliver’s Travels, a ready adventure for any slow afternoon. There was also a box of old National Geographics that took me around the world. But ever fascinating was the old, stand-up radio that stood facing the top of the stairs. It had a large, green eye at the top of the circular dial which lit up whenever the set was turned on. There, at the turn of a knob, were various wavelengths that advertised such exotic locations as Moscow, London, and Tokyo. I would spend hours scanning the airwaves and reading into even the most obscure static evidence of life on other continents. Those were magical days spent in stuffy attics or cruising the neighborhood on a beat up wagon, conquering the kingdoms of vacant lots, building clubhouses, or taking off on 2-3 mile walks downtown with my buddies to cruise the pet shop, model store, and ride the elevator at the five & dime.

I identify completely with the following introduction to the Daring book:

We were girls in the days before the Web, cell phones, or even voicemail. Telephones had cords and were dialed by, well, actually dialing. We listened to
records and cassette tapes—we were practically grown-ups before CDs came to pass—and more often than not, we did daring things like walk to school by ourselves. Ride our banana-seat bikes to the local store. Babysit when we were still young enough to be babysat ourselves. Spent hours on our own, playing hopscotch or tetherball, building a fort in our rooms, or turning our suburban neighborhood into the perfect setting for covert ops, impromptu ball games, and imaginary medieval kingdoms.

Girls today are girls of the twenty-first century, with email accounts, digital cable, iPods, and complex video games. Their childhood is in many ways much cooler than ours—what we would have given for a remote control, a rock-climbing wall, or video chatting! In other ways, though, girlhood today has become high-pressured and competitive, and girls are inducted into grownup-hood sooner, becoming tweens and teens and adult women before their time.

In the face of all this pressure, we present stories and projects galore, drawn from the vastness of history, the wealth of girl knowledge, the breadth of sport, and the great outdoors. Consider the Daring Book for Girls a book of possibilities and ideas for filling a day with adventure, imagination—and fun. The world is bigger than you can imagine, and its yours for the exploring—if you dare. Bon voyage.

Yes, thankfully, there is The Dangerous Book for Boys which is the male equivalent. I have not seen it, but the introduction promises much the same from authors Conn and Hal Iggulden:

Boyhood is all about curiosity, and men and boys can enjoy stories of Scott of the Antarctic and Joe Simpson in “Touching the Void” as much as they can raid a shed for the bits to make an electromagnet, or grow a crystal, build a go-cart, and learn how to find north in the dark. You'll find famous battles in these pages, insects and dinosaurs—as well as essential Shakespeare quotes, how to cut flint heads for a bow and arrow, and instructions on making the best paper airplane in the world. How do latitude and longitude work? How do you make secret ink, or send the cipher that Julius Caesar used with his generals?

You'll find the answers inside. It was written by two men who would have given away the cat to get this book when they were young. It wasn't a particularly nice cat. Why did we write it now? Because these things are important still and we wished we knew them better. There are few things as satisfying as tying a decent bowline knot when someone needs a loop, or simply knowing what happened at Gettysburg and the Aamo. The tales must be told and retold, or the memories slowly die.

There are a couple of pages you will probably wish to excise with a razor blade before giving them into the hands of your children. Palm reading and Yoga are not something we wish to perpetuate, but the overwhelming majority is wholesome and exciting. You will need to read through yourself to check for content, but that will not be a hard job as you will find it telling all the stuff you wish you had known in 3rd grade. You can learn more about these books at http://www.daringbookforgirls.com/ and http://www.dangerousbookforboys.com/. The Walters family already has both books and Vashti adds:

"The Daring Book will make you long for rainy days! It was a birthday gift to our third grade daughter, Amelia, last year, and it instantly became a treasured resource. Together we've learned how to make the 'Coolest Paper Airplane Ever,' tried one of 'Three Silly Pranks,' and are longing to soon put the chapter on 'Snowballs' to good use! When asked what her favorite part of the book was, Amelia told me about a 'very pretty poem' and showed me the page. I read with new eyes, 'A Bird Came Down the Walk' by Emily Dickinson. It is such an unusual wealth of information all in one very nice hard-bound book. We gave our son the companion book for boys this Christmas and although we have not finished reading the entire book, it promises to be just as wholesome and enjoyable."

*Harper Collins, 2007, sell for @ $18.00 each on Amazon.com

Christmas Past

Blow the trumpet at the new moon, At the full moon, on our feast-day. For it is a statute for Israel, An ordinance of the God of Jacob. - Psalms 81:3-4 ASV

And the days of feasting were accomplished, that many were delivered unto much food and merriment and found themselves wrapped in self-satisfaction and lying upon the sofas. Now that the holidays are over, here is some reflection upon our Christmas past from my sofa.

Feasting is Biblical. We regularly remind ourselves of this in the Nordmoe household at such times as Christmas when we sit before a rich and sumptuous table lest we be accosted with guilt by our enemy. In Exodus 23, the children of Israel were commanded to keep a feast unto the Lord three times a year: the feast of unleavened bread, the feast of the harvest, and the Passover supper. What a God we serve that calls us to enjoy times of feasting before Him as well as times of fasting and penance. He is the Lord of the banquet and His table must be filled. What better way to celebrate the birth of Jesus than with gift giving and feasting. It is entirely appropriate.

The giving of gifts is always a challenge for me personally as I am rather feckless at finding some imaginative gift, especially for those closest to me. I have a bent for the unconventional, but that demands creative thinking. Work! Shopping would be far easier if I could just conform and bring home the usual perfume and slippers. But gift giving in general is a challenge for us simply because we are Americans. We are awash in stuff as it is and have need of little. But we nevertheless manage to find something to buy and lavish on one another in ever-increasing quantities. The monkish, spoil-sport part of me wants to say, “Enough! We are surfeited to the point of bloat.” But the party-side of me wants to say, “Let there be joy, blessing, and even excess if it celebrates the greatest gift of all.” God was lavish beyond measure and to nit-pick puts me squarely with those naysayers who pointed out with scorn the woman pouring the expensive ointment on the head of the prophet from Nazareth.

All that said, I noted a few gifts this season that I thought were special. One was a card telling me that a gift had been given to a worthy charity in my honor. That is a blessing we could all celebrate. I could have had a gift card to Starbucks or something, but instead I had the knowledge that my name followed a gift to someone truly in need. That may not work for everyone on your list, but I liked it.

Another family I heard about was very creative even though they were very affluent. Every Christmas, the family adopted a particular goal that emphasized individual originality for parent and child alike. One Christmas, each person had to give one gift that was hand-made. Another year, each person had to put on a performance of some sort. This, to me, was a tremendous example of de-emphasizing the material and emphasizing the personal. I only wish we had done more of that when my children were small.

I had hoped to next review a book given to my grand-daughter, Taylor, this Christmas. I want to give it my Stocking Stuffer of the Year Award, but to try to do so here would not do it justice. You will just have to tune in next week. I am a hopeless romantic when it comes to childhood play, and this particular book awakened in me a desire to be a child all over again. It takes a lot to do that when I think of all the teen-age trauma I had to endure, but I was almost ready to endure it again just to transport back to age 8. To be continued.