A Christian Response to Earth Day as Written by Doug Phillips

I read this article this morning, written by Doug Phillips, and have to share.  This is taken from his blog...Doug's Blog Vision Forum.  I hear many Christians talk about Earth Day and acknowledge it wholeheartedly, probably not knowing any better.  Yes, in the past, I was "taken in" by the whole Earth Day thing but then realized, as Doug points out, that it's a worship of Mother Earth.  So happens that this years' Earth Day falls on Good Friday and I hear more talk about Earth Day rather than Good Friday.  Are we too consumed with Mother Earth than the Christ that was crucified to cover our sins of yesterday, today and forever?  Sure seems that way this year.  Don't get me wrong here, I care about the earth that God created but not as the
Radical Environmentalists do...I worship the God who created our Earth...Tammy

Understanding the four lies of the Radical Environmental Movement

For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse. (Romans 1:20)

A Christian Response to Earth Day

All men are religious because all men have an object of worship. All men have faith in something. In the end, men will either worship and serve the creature, or they will worship and serve the Creator. But they will worship something.

In the 18th century, many began to worship the mind. The religion of that day was rationalism. In the 19th century, this god morphed into scientism. But science failed to provide the answers to ultimate questions. The men of the 20th century looked for a more immediate solution to the problems of humanity — they chose to worship the State. This failed. Statism proved to be a harsh taskmaster. In the absence of any real solutions from rationalism, scientism, and statism, men fixed their attention on a new god — or rather, an ancient God that just needed a new facelift.

That god is the earth.

21st-century men are earth worshippers. They are sanitized pantheists. Of course, they don’t call themselves pantheists or earth worshippers, but religious devotion to the material world is the essence of this modern faith.

This religious devotion to the material world as god comes in many shapes and sizes, but it has become ubiquitous in our culture. The new pantheism is at the heart of the green movement. It is reflected in the priorities of Hollywood, in the agenda of politicians, and in the curriculums of the government schools. It is found in the marketing campaign of Madison Avenue, in the reality TV shows of cable television, and sadly, even in pulpits across the nation. The worship of the creation has become a defining undercurrent in our culture, even as it is reshaping many of the cultures of the modern world.

And this is one reason why this Friday, April 22, millions of people (perhaps billions) representing the countries of the United Nations will stop to celebrate the high holy day of this religion as they pay homage to the earth God. Of Earth Day, evolutionary anthropologist Margaret Meade once explained that:

EARTH DAY is the first holy day which transcends all national borders, yet preserves all geographical integrities, spans mountains and oceans and time belts, and yet brings people all over the world into one resonating accord, is devoted to the preservation of the harmony in nature and yet draws upon the triumphs of technology, the measurement of time, and instantaneous communication through space. EARTH DAY draws on astronomical phenomena in a new way — which is also the most ancient way — by using the vernal Equinox, the time when the Sun crosses the equator making the length of night and day equal in all parts of the earth. To this point in the annual calendar, EARTH DAY attaches no local or divisive set of symbols, no statement of the truth or superiority of one way of life over another.

Should Christians care about the earth? Not only must we care about it, we have a holy duty to engage the earth. The difference between the objectives of biblical Christianity and radical environmentalism can be found in the religious assumptions of both groups.

Four Lies of the Radical Environmentalist Movement

With Earth Day comes billions of dollars worth of environmentalist propaganda driven by their religious worldview. Some of the themes you can expect to hear repeated this year include the following:

1. The Earth Is Our Mother: The very expression “Mother Earth” is popular parlance in our culture and reflects the old pagan longing to worship the physical world. Modern environmentalists, with their devotion to the idea that man is just another life-form to spring from the womb of the earth on the evolutionary journey of life, speak openly about earth being the mother of man.
2. Human Life Has No Greater Intrinsic Value Than Animal Life: The notion that man is an insignificant blip in the universe and that our planet is almost as insignificant as man is an oft-repeated concept of the modern environmentalist movement. Radical environmentalists complain about the carbon footprints of humans, and the sin of “Speciesism” — man discriminating against lower life-forms.
3. The Greatest Crisis Facing Humans is the Despoiling of the Earth: From the media campaigns of former Vice President Al Gore, to the film agenda of Avatar, radical environmentalists want you to believe that the single greatest problem facing humanity is the environmental destruction of earth.
4. Absent a Radical Shift in Private Practice and Public Policy, the Environmental Crisis Will Lead to the End of Life on Earth: Modern pantheists care deeply about the future. One thing is clear: Radical envioronmentalists have their own eschatology. They see the end of the world coming because of nuclear waste, global warming, the loss of rainforest in the Amazon, or any of a host of perceived environmental hazards.

Four Christian Assumptions About the Earth

1. The Earth is Witness to the Power and Authority of God the Creator Who Alone May Be Worshipped: The Bible teaches that the very existence of the earth is a reminder to all men of the eternal power and Godhood of Christ, so that they are without excuse (Romans 1:20). It reminds us that as long as the earth continues, the promises of God will remain faithful (Genesis 8:22; Deuteronomy 7:9). Significantly, the Bible warns us that the consequence for man rejecting the witness of creation is that he worships creation itself (Romans 1:22-25).
2. The Earth Was Made for the Glory of God and the Benefit of Man Who Was Made the Pinnacle of Creation and of Infinitely Greater Value than Animals or the Earth Itself: Man is the pinnacle of creation and has more eternal value than the earth or any of the creatures who live on it (Psalm 8:5). Man is not a carbon footprint; he is the image-bearer of God. This means that the most “insignificant” human life (insignificant only in the eyes of man) is of inestimably greater value than that of a blue whale, a snail darter, a spotted owl, a mountain, or a tree.
3. The Earth Has Been Placed under Man who Has a Moral Obligation to Subdue it and to Exercise Wise Stewardship over the Earth: Man is God’s appointed steward on earth, and his core mission is to be His agent of dominion over it. Toward this end, God has placed all things under man to be used for his benefit and to be carefully stewarded and cultivated for God’s glory. “Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet” (Psalm 8:6).
4. The Earth is Not the Problem: The reason why the earth suffers is because of man’s sin that has plunged the earth into judgment. Man brought death and judgment to earth. In fact, the whole creation is groaning and waiting redemption (Romans 8:22-23). Despite the righteous judgment of God on earth, He is merciful and promises the continuation of the seasons and the fundamental stability of the planet until the end of time (Genesis 8:22), at which there will be a new heaven and new earth (2 Peter 3:13).

Conclusion

All men are religious because all men have an object of worship. In the end, they will worship and serve the creature, or they will worship and serve the Creator. But they will worship something.

Earth Day, and the radical environmental movement that spawned this high holy day of pantheism, are at war with the Gospel because they perpetuate false worship. The Christian response to the idolatry of Earth Day might be reduced to this simple thought: Jesus Christ is the Creator, and He alone is to be worshipped. He created man as the pinnacle of creation and determined that humans would be the only part of creation to be made in the very image of God, and that man as the image-bearer of God would rule over the earth.

On a practical level, this means that Christians need to stop allowing the radical environmentalist movement to define the issue. We must cease from being the tail and become the head on the question of our duties, privileges, and responsibilities vis-a-vis creation. The Bible has a great deal to say about our use of the resources of the world and our relationship to the earth. Of all people, Christians who honor the Creator should have a passion for creation. We are losing the debate through subversion, silence, lack of vision, and because of the Christian community’s fear of the God-ordained, perpetually valid, creation precept called “The Dominion Mandate.” This mandate directs man is to rule over the earth, subduing it and taking dominion over it for his benefit and for God’s glory. Implicit to the Dominion Mandate is the duty of man to cultivate, wisely manage, and carefully steward the planet.

Finally, man’s problems will never be solved through the elevation of human reason, the power of science, or the interventions of the state. Nor will rescuing the biosphere of planet earth save man or ensure him a future on this planet. You cannot save the earth. But human beings can be saved. And the only hope of salvation is found in Jesus Christ — the Creator! It is this Creator through whom we live and breathe and who by the very power of His word holds the worlds together. He will someday establish a new heaven and a new earth and will bring all of His people into Glory.

Doug Phillips recently returned from an expedition to the Amazon where he produced Into the Amazon, a study course with 7-part television-style episodes on the battle between radical environmentalism and biblical Christianity. To sign up for Into the Amazon, his exciting online virtual tour and study click here. To see the episode trailers, click here.

John Taylor Gatto Speech accepting Teacher of the Year Award

This is the written form of John Gatto's speech given on January 31, 1990.  He was awarded New York City's Teacher of the Year.  Reprinted from Otherways: Home Education Network.  I enjoyed this, which was shared by a high school friend of mine, and wanted to share with you.




I accept this award on behalf of all the fine teachers I’ve known over the years who’ve struggled to make their transactions with children honourable ones, men and women who are never complacent, always questioning, always wrestling to define and redefine endlessly what the word “education” should mean. A Teacher of the Year is not the best teacher around, those people are too quiet to be easily uncovered, but he is a standard-bearer, symbolic of these private people who spend their lives gladly in the service of children. This is their award as well as mine.

We live in a time of great school crisis. We rank at the bottom of 19 industrial nations in reading, writing and arithmetic. At the very bottom. The world’s narcotic economy is based upon our own consumption of the commodity, if we didn’t buy so many powdered dreams the business would collapse — and schools are an important sales outlet. Our teenage suicide rate is the highest in the world and suicidal kids are rich kids for the most part, not the poor. In Manhattan 50% of all new marriages last less than five years. So something is wrong for sure.
This is a time of great school crisis and that crisis is interlinked with a greater social crisis in the general community. We seem to have lost our identity. Children and old people are penned up and locked away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent — nobody talks to them anymore and without children and old people mixing in daily life a community has no future and no past, only a continuous present. In fact, the name “community” hardly applies to the way we interact with each other. We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that. In some strange way school is a major actor in this tragedy just as it is a major actor in the widening guilt among social classes. Using school as a sorting mechanism we appear to be on the way to creating a caste system, complete with untouchables who wander through subway trains begging and sleep on the streets.
I’ve noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my 25 years of teaching — that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aids and administrators but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers do care and do work very hard the institution is psychopathic, it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to different cell where he must memorize that man and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.
Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the state of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted — sometimes with guns — by an estimated 80% of the Massachusetts population, the last outpost in Barnstable on Cape Cod not surrendering its children until the 1880′s when the area was seized by militia and children marched to school under guard.
Now here is a curious idea to ponder. Senator Ted Kennedy’s office released a paper not too long ago claiming that prior to compulsory education the state literacy rate was 98% and after it the figure never again reached above 91% where it stands in 1990. I hope that interests you.
Here is another curiosity to think about. The homeschooling movement has quietly grown to a size where one and a half million young people are being educated entirely by their own parents, last month the education press reported the amazing news that children schooled at home seem to be five or even 10 years ahead of their formally trained peers in their ability to think.
I don’t think we’ll get rid of schools anytime soon, certainly not in my lifetime, but if we’re going to change what’s rapidly becoming a disaster of ignorance we need to realize that the school institution “schools” very well, but it does not “educate” — that’s inherent in the design of the thing. It’s not the fault of bad teachers or too little money spent, it’s just impossible for education and schooling ever to be the same thing.
Schools were designed by Horace Mann and Barnard Sears and Harper of the University of Chicago and Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College and some other men to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce through the application of formulae, formulaic human beings whose behaviour can be predicted and controlled.
To a very great extent schools succeed in doing this, but in a national order increasingly disintegrated, in a national order in which only humanly successful people are independent, self-reliant, confident, and individualistic (because community life which protects the dependent and weak is dead and only networks remain), the products of schooling are, as I’ve said, irrelevant. Well-schooled people are irrelevant. They can sell film and razor blades, push paper and talk on the telephones, or sit mindlessly before a flickering computer terminal but as human beings they are useless. Useless to others and useless to themselves.
The daily misery around us is, I think in large measure caused by the fact that — as Paul Goodman put it 30 years ago — we force children to grow up absurd. Any reform in schooling has to deal with its absurdities.
It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety, indeed it cuts you off from your own part and future, scaling you to a continuous present much the same way television does.
It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.
It is absurd and anti-life to move from cell to cell at the sound of a gong for every day of your natural youth in an institution that allows you no privacy and even follows you into the sanctuary of your home demanding that you do its “homework”.
“How will they learn to read?!” you say and my answer is “Remember the lessons of Massachusetts.” When children are given whole lives instead of age-graded ones in cellblocks they learn to read, write, and do arithmetic with ease if those things make sense in the kind of life that unfolds around them.
But keep in mind that in the United States almost nobody who reads, writes or does arithmetic gets much respect. We are a land of talkers, we pay talkers the most and admire talkers the most and so our children talk constantly, following the public models of television and school teachers. It is very difficult to teach the “basics” anymore because they really aren’t basic to the society we’ve made.
Two institutions at present control our children’s lives — television and schooling, in that order. Both of these reduce the real world of wisdom, fortitude, temperance, and justice to a never-ending, non-stopping abstraction. In centuries past the time of a child and adolescent would be occupied in real work, real charity, real adventures, and the realistic search for mentors who might teach what you really wanted to learn. A great deal of time was spent in community pursuits, practicing affection, meeting and studying every level of the community, learning how to make a home, and dozens of other tasks necessary to become a whole man or woman.
But here is the calculus of time the children I teach must deal with:

• Out of 168 hours in each week my children sleep 56. That leaves them 112 hours a week out of which to fashion a self.
• My children watch 55 hours of television a week according to recent reports. That leaves them 57 hours a week in which to grow up.
• My children attend school 30 hours a week, use about 6 hours getting ready, going and coming home, and spend an average of 7 hours a week in homework, a total of 45 hours.

During that time they are under constant surveillance, have no private time or private space, and are disciplined if they try to assert individuality in the use of time or space. That leaves 12 hours a week out of which to create a unique consciousness. Of course, my kids eat, and that takes some time–not much because they’ve lost the tradition of family dining, but if we allot 3 hours a week to evening meals we arrive at a net amount of private time for each child of 9 hours.
It’s not enough. It’s not enough, is it? The richer the kid, or course, the less television he watches but the rich kid’s time is just as narrowly proscribed by a somewhat broader catalogue of commercial entertainments and his inevitable assignment to a series of private lessons in areas seldom of his actual choice.
And these things are oddly enough just a more cosmetic way to create dependent human beings, unable to fill their own hours, unable to initiate lines of meaning to give substance and pleasure to their existence. It’s a national disease, this dependency, and aimlessness, and I think schooling and television and lessons — the entire Chautauqua idea — has a lot to do with it.
Think of the things that are killing us as a nation — narcotic drugs, brainless competition, recreational sex, the pornography of violence, gambling, alcohol, and the worst pornography of all — lives devoted to buying things, accumulation as a philosophy, all of them are additions of dependent personalities and that is what our brand of schooling must inevitably produce.
I want to tell you what the effect is on children of taking all their time from them — time they need to grow up — and forcing them to spend it on abstractions. You need to hear this because no reform that doesn’t attack these specific pathologies will be anything more than a facade.

1. The children I teach are indifferent to the adult world. This defies the experience of thousands of years. A close study of what big people were up to was always the most exciting occupation of youth, but nobody wants to grow up these days and who can blame them? Toys are us.
2. The children I teach have almost no curiosity and what they do have is transitory; they cannot concentrate for very long, even on things they choose to do. Can you see a connection between the bells ringing again and again to change classes and this phenomenon of evanescent attention?
3. The children I teach have a poor sense of the future, of how tomorrow is inextricably linked to today. As I said before, they have a continuous present, the exact moment they are at is the boundary of their consciousness.
4. The children I teach are ahistorical, they have no sense of how past has predestined their own present, limiting their choices, shaping their values and lives.
5. The children I teach are cruel to each other, they lack compassion for misfortune, they laugh at weakness, they have contempt for people whose need for help shows too plainly.
6. The children I teach are uneasy with intimacy or candour. My guess is that they are like many adopted people I’ve known in this respect — they cannot deal with genuine intimacy because of a lifelong habit of preserving a secret inner self inside a larger outer personality made up of artificial bits and pieces of behaviour borrowed from television or acquired to manipulate teachers. Because they are not who they represent themselves to be the disguise wears thin in the presence of intimacy so intimate relationships have to be avoided.
7. The children I teach are materialistic, following the lead of school teachers who materialistically “grade” everything — and television mentors who offer everything in the world for free.
8. The children I teach are dependent, passive, and timid in the presence of new challenges. This is frequently masked by surface bravado, or by anger or aggressiveness but underneath is a vacuum without fortitude.

I could name a few other conditions that school reform would have to tackle if our national decline is to be arrested, but by now you will have grasped my thesis, whether you agree with it or not. Either schools have caused these pathologies or television or both. It’s a simple matter [of] arithmetic, between schooling and television all the time the children have is eaten away. That’s what has destroyed the American family, it is no longer a factor in the education of its own children. Television and schooling, in those things the fault must lie.
What can be done? First we need a ferocious national debate that doesn’t quit, day after day, year after year. We need to scream and argue about this school thing until it is fixed or broken beyond repair, one or the other. If we can fix it, fine; if we cannot then the success of homeschooling shows a different road to take that has great promise. Pouring the money we now pour into family education might kill two birds with one stone, repairing families as it repairs children.
Genuine reform is possible but it shouldn’t cost anything. We need to rethink the fundamental premises of schooling and decide what it is we want all children to learn and why. For 140 years this nation has tried to impose objectives downward from the lofty command centre made up of “experts”, a central elite of social engineers. It hasn’t worked. It won’t work. And it is a gross betrayal of the democratic promise that once made this nation a noble experiment. the Russian attempt to create Plato’s republic in Eastern Europe has exploded before [our] eyes, our own attempt to impose the same sort of central orthodoxy using the schools as an instrument is also coming apart at the seams, albeit more slowly and painfully. It doesn’t work because it’s fundamental premises are mechanical, anti-human, and hostile to family life. Lives can be controlled by machine education but they will always fight back with weapons of social pathology — drugs, violence, self-destruction, indifference, and the symptoms I see in the children I teach.
It’s high time we looked backwards to regain an educational philosophy that works. One I like particularly well has been a favourite of the ruling classes of Europe for thousands of years. I use as much of it as I can manage in my own teaching, as much, that is, as I can get away with given the present institution of compulsory schooling. I think it works just as well for poor children as for rich ones.
At the core of this elite system of education is the belief that self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge. Everywhere in this system, at every age, you will find arrangements to place the child alone in an unguided setting with a problem to solve. Sometimes the problem is fraught with great risks, such as the problem of galloping a horse or making it jump, but that, of course, is a problem successfully solved by thousands of elite children before the age of ten. Can you imagine anyone who had mastered such a challenge ever lacking confidence in his ability to do anything? Sometimes the problem is the problem of mastering solitude, as Thoreau did at Walden pond, or Einstein did in the Swiss customs house.
One of my former students, Roland Legiardi-Lura, though both his parents were dead and he had no inheritance, took a bicycle across the United States alone when he was hardly out of boyhood. Is it any wonder then that in manhood when he decided to make a film about Nicaragua, although he had no money and no prior experience with film-making, that it was an international award-winner — even though his regular work was as a carpenter.
Right now we are taking all the time from our children that they need to develop self-knowledge. That has to stop. We have to invent school experiences that give a lot of that time back, we need to trust children from a very early age with independent study, perhaps arranged in school but which takes place away from the institutional setting. We need to invent curriculum where each kid has a chance to develop private uniqueness and self-reliance.
A short time ago I took $70 and sent a 12-year-old girl from my class with her non-English speaking mother on a bus down the New Jersey coast to take the police chief of Sea Bright to lunch and apologize for polluting [his] beach with a discarded Gatorade bottle. In exchange for this public apology I had arranged with the police chief for the girl to have a one-day apprenticeship in a small town police procedures. A few days later two more of my 12-year-old kids traveled alone to West First Street from Harlem where they began an apprenticeship with a newspaper editor, next week three of my kids will find themselves in the middle of the Jersey swamps at 6 A.M. in the morning studying the mind of a trucking company president as he dispatches 18-wheelers to Dallas, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
Are these “special” children in a “special” program? Well, in one sense, yes, but nobody knows about this program but myself and the kids. They’re just nice kids from Central Harlem, bright and alert, but so badly schooled when they came to me that most of them can’t add or subtract with any fluency. And not a single one knew the population of New York City or how far it is from New York to California.
Does that worry me? Of course, but I am confident that as they gain self-knowledge they’ll also become self-teachers — and only self-teaching has any lasting value.
We’ve got to give kids independent time right away because that is the key to self-knowledge, and we must re-involve them with the real world as fast as possible so that the independent time can be spent on something other than more abstraction. This is an emergency, it requires drastic action to correct — our children are dying like flies in schooling, good schooling or bad schooling, it’s all the same. Irrelevant.
What else does a restructured school system need? It needs to stop being a parasite on the working community. Of all the pages in the human ledger, only our tortured entry has warehoused children and asked nothing of them in service to the general good. For a while I think we need to make community service a required part of schooling. Besides the experience in acting unselfishly that will teach, it is the quickest way to give young children real responsibility in the mainstream of life.
For five years I ran a guerrilla program where I had every kid, rich and poor, smart and dipsy, give 320 hours a year of hard community service. Dozens of those kids came back to me years later, grown up, and told me that one experience of helping someone else changed their lives. It taught them to see in new ways, to rethink goals and values. It happened when they were 13, in my Lab School program — only made possible because my rich school district was in chaos. When “stability” returned the Lab was closed. It was too successful with a wildly mixed group of kids, at too small of a cost, to be allowed to continue. We made the expensive elite programs look bad.
There is no shortage of real problems in the city. Kids can be asked to help solve them in exchange for the respect and attention of the total adult world. Good for kids, good for all the rest of us. That’s curriculum that teaches Justice, one of the four cardinal virtues in every system of elite education. What’s sauce for the rich and powerful is surely sauce for the rest of us — what is more, the idea is absolutely free as are all other genuine reform ideas in education. Extra money and extra people put into this sick institution will only make it sicker.
Independent study, community service, adventures in experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships, the one day variety or longer — these are all powerful, cheap and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling. But no large-scale reform is ever going to work to repair our damaged children and our damaged society until we force the idea of “school” open — to include FAMILY as the main engine of education. The Swedes realized that in 1976 when they effectively abandoned the system of adopting unwanted children and instead spent national time and treasure on reinforcing the original family so that children born to Swedes were wanted. They didn’t succeed completely but they did succeed in reducing the number of unwanted Swedish children from 6000 in l976 to 15 in 1986. So it can be done. The Swedes just got tired of paying for the social wreckage caused by children not raised by their natural parents so they did something about it. We can, too.
FAMILY is the main engine of education. If we use schooling to break children away from parents — and make no mistake, that has been the central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in 1650 and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools in 1850 — we’re going to continue to have the horror show we have right now. THE CURRICULUM OF FAMILY is at the heart of any good life, we’ve gotten away from that curriculum, time to return to it. The way to sanity in education is for our schools to take the lead in releasing the stranglehold of institutions on family life, to promote during school time confluences of parent and child that will strengthen family bonds. That was my real purpose in sending the girl and her mother down the Jersey coast to meet the police chief. I have many ideas to make a family curriculum and my guess is that a lot of you will have many ideas, too, once you begin to think about it. Our greatest problem in getting the kind of grass-roots thinking going that could reform schooling is that we have large vested interests pre-emptying all the air time and profiting from schooling just exactly as it is despite rhetoric to the contrary. We have to demand that new voices and new ideas get a hearing, my ideas and yours. We’ve all had a bellyful of authorized voices mediated by television and the press — a decade long free-for-all debate is what is called for now, not any more “expert” opinions. Experts in education have never been right, their “solutions” are expensive, self-serving, and always involve further centralization. Enough. Time for a return to Democracy, Individuality, and Family. I’ve said my piece. Thank you.
For further reading also by John Gatto

1. Dumbing us Down
2. Exhausted Schools
3. A Different Kind of Teacher

Or visit his website: www.johntaylorgatto.com

Weight a Minute

Some days we go on a tangent and do something "out of the book".  On this day we thought it would be fun to weigh things around the house.

I made my own worksheet listing the items, weight, tare and actual weight.

So the kids had to go through the house and they each gathered up their items and it was time to use the scale and see what weighs what.

Here's what they came up with...

A pencil weighs .2 oz
A salt shaker weighs  3.5 oz
A cellphone weighs 2.5 oz
One roll of toilet paper 2.2 oz
A shoe(don't remember who's) weighs 7.4 oz
A box of mac and cheese total weight is 8.80 oz minus the contents weight of 7.25 oz which leaves the box weight of 1.55
Can of veggies 1 lb .9oz minus net weight on can 14.5 oz and the can would weigh 2.4 oz
A Childcraft Book weighs in at 1lb 6.4 oz
Candle 2.5 oz
Drinking glass weighs 1lb 4.5 oz

Then at the bottom of my worksheet I wrote...

Tare the following using a salad plate:

                          salad plate    both       actual item weight

1. pencil holder                _______    ____      __________ 
2. candle holder               _______    ____      __________
3. Christmas figurine       _______    ____      __________
4. cereal box                   _______    _____     __________

I had them sit the salad plate on the scale and weigh that and they filled in the blanks.  They then put the item on the salad plate for that weight and then subtracted the plate weight from the total weight to get the actual item weight.  Not only did they have a blast, they learned how to weigh, tare and how to get the item weights through subtraction.

Now I do have a tare button on my scale but what fun would that be??  LOL
I make a lot of my own worksheets for the kids.  I make them on plain paper and then make 2 copies.  I keep one in my Teacher file for possible future use.

Why do I Homeschool.....Reason 1

God   

 Proverbs 22:6   Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.

 It's a calling...plain and simple...
I knew the moment I found out I was going to have my third child at this late stage in life that I was going to homeschool.  Oh the flack I took from family members, not only on my side but my husband's side.  Why would you do that, how could you NOT send him to a real school?? What about "socialization"? And of course there were other questions and, of course, I kept my mouth shut and asked myself...How could I possibly NOT homeschool this child?? 
God was talking to me, he's got my path all laid out and I've chosen to follow that path.

He leads our day and we Praise Him for it!

 

Laundry Detergent....Homemade

We love this recipe in our house.  Not only is it super reasonable to make but it's allergen-free, as well. 
I get all the items I need right in the laundry isle at my local grocery store.  Once you buy the items, a batch of laundry detergent is about $1.50 or so to make.  I found this recipe and also found that you can use different soaps to make your liquid with and I have tried others but do prefer the Fels Naptha.  Please note, too, that this can be made into just a powder by following the steps and not "cooking" the soap and water.  You would then have a powder and take up less space than a 5 gallon bucket would. 
If you make the powder make sure you get your soap ground up to almost to a powder.  
Use about a Tablespoon per load if you're using powder.  
For the liquid, use about 1/2 C per medium to large load and about 1/4 C for a small load.  Do also note that this WILL NOT give you suds so if you're a suds person this just might not do it for you!  LOL

Use 1/4 C for small loads
Use 1/2 C for medium to large loads

I also want to add that I got this cute little recipe card download at freeprintablesonline.com

The Story of Stone Soup...

...as told by our Lower Grammar children in our Tapestry of Grace co-op. With just a few "dry runs" I think they did an AMAZING job.





Wherefore comfort yourselves together and edify one another, even as also ye do. 1Thessalonians 5:11

Yes!!! Finally.....

Well, it's been a long time coming.  I've had this blog set up and prepped for months now and finally got my nerve up to follow through.  Typing thoughts, running through some pertinent parts of the day of homeschooling, posting pic's, sharing ideas, recipes, curriculum, commenting on books I've read or am reading....yeah, a bit unnerving for me but it's time to set the nerves aside and do this!

Philippians 4:13 NIV
I can do everything through him who gives me strength

Welcome to my home!  My name is Tammy and I'm so Blessed to have a most amazing husband named Ty and 4 truly amazing gifts named Miranda, Justin, Quintin and Tavin.  Miranda and Justin are all grown up and out on their own.  Now my 2 oldest were not homeschooled but my 2 little one's currently are.

I made the decision to homeschool before Quin was born over 8 years ago.  Wasn't a hard decision to make considering the way schools have been transforming.  I will get more in to my and my husband's reasons in later posts.

Let's see, I have 4 kids, a wonderful husband and let's not forget about our newest addition to our family....our 1 year old dog named Hunter!  What a great dog he is.  He's a Yellow Lab, we got him when he was about 11 months old and weighed 95 lbs. just before summertime and about 6 months later the brute weighs in at 125 lbs.  Yeah, he eats a lot!  

Besides staying at home and homeschooling, I design and sew boutique clothing for children, I love to bake, cook and garden.  In posts to come, I will share.  I love to read and read mostly about Christian homeschooling and other Christian books.  I will be offering my thoughts and insights on the various books I read...so stay tuned.  I use certain Christian curriculum and we are also involved in a weekly Christian homeschool co-op, which I must say is a true blessing to be able to be involved in.  Let's see, I love to decorate my house.  I've always been a stickler for a comfortable home, not just eye appealing but comfortable, too.  When people come to visit I want them to feel at home and be comfortable.  
As I do LOVE to entertain, I do most of the hosting of parties in my family, whether for special occasions, like birthday's, Super Bowl, or just a good barbeque by the pool.  I've been known to just come up with something to get the family together for!  LOL

Coffee....love me some coffee!  Doesn't really matter what brand of coffee, although the Dunkin' Donut coffee is yummy, I can drink almost any brand as long as I have my creamer....and it's got to be Vanilla Caramel.  Without that, coffee just isn't coffee! LOL
Sit back, don't forget YOUR coffee and enjoy!  Life is so much fun!