Hard Work and Dessert

As some of you know, Augustine Classical Preschool students have been learning about teeth and dentists this week.  Clyde, my three-year-old son, has taken to the subject admirably.

"This is junk food," he says contentedly, taking great bites out of a lollipop.

We teach our children the important habit of brushing their teeth regularly (circular motion, please), but at the same time it's a rare child who never has sweets.  That's because candy isn't exactly junk.  Used reasonably, it's more accurately a treat -- a gift -- for the special moments.  Sometimes, we tend to think of certain foods as "bad" (naughty food! moral failure!) and so campaigns are launched to kill them dead and blot their names from the Book of Life.  But "the earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof" (Ps. 24:1), and "for everything there is a season" (Eccl. 3:1).  We taste and see that the Lord is good, usually with the spinach, potatoes, and chicken, but sometimes with the sundaes.

Think of education the same way.  We don't ever want to use education to stomp students flat, as though they are insects to kill, and Scripture agrees: "You shall not boil a young goat in its mother's milk" (Deut. 14:21).  Education is food, not a cauldron.  It has life-giving beauty and should not be used as an instrument of death (like in a Dickens novel).  So education both in the classroom and at home needs an occasional dessert.

But this is a tough balance, and many schools with great mission statements serve up lamesauce standards in the actual classroom.  And in the home, some students do nothing but hammer the video games (after homework, of course), or perhaps worse, have no honest notion how to spend after-school time except by surfing their smartphones.  Bad, naughty video games?  Satan-spawned social media?  No, just too much dessert.

The good things of life are hard to master.  Great books, mathematics and science, logic, high music, abstract thinking, age-old stories -- these are the deep-magic gifts of God.  With faithful training comes love, and with love comes an appreciation of gifts in their unique places.  So have a lollipop.

Grace and Peace, Nate Ahern

Fighting Blindness

Little kids bring us back to basics.  My wife and I knew this was coming before we had children, and we haven't been disappointed.  Our Clyde and Haley love stuff.  They can't enough of it.  Every morning when they wake up, their over-sized grins (and body convulsions) shout one thing: let me see more stuff!  Except for them, it's not "stuff."

It's magic.

Toys, Mom's eyes, Dad's grab-able nose, a new book, sun making checkered patterns on the floor, fluttering pages, mallards on the frozen pond -- dreams come true.  And we've discovered that they are right.  Those things are magic, and we had only begun to slowly stop noticing them.  We had grown up.

In Orthodoxy, Chesterton (who loved kids) said this:

The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, "charm," "spell," "enchantment." They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is bewitched. 

Bewitched by the loving, adventurous hand of God.  Our children will grow and mature.  They will move from arithmetic to calculus and from dependence to independence.  But they must never lose their sense of wonder and observation that they first had as little children.  They will observe more somberly, more deeply -- but always with open eyes for God's countless gifts.

In the midst of grades, registration deadlines, homework, and extracurricular events, this is a fundamental mark of true education: fighting blindness.  Keeping eyes of wonder open.

Grace and Peace, Nate Ahern