In the course of life, it is inevitable that we will go through difficult times, transitional periods that are trying, tough patches. In encouraging one of my married children who is going through one of these testing times currently, I can sympathize because we have had our share of rough seasons in life. Now, fifteen years down the road, I reflect back to one such summer, and I have a different perspective on it. At the time, the trial seemed all consuming, but it isn’t the exhaustion and stress of that season that I look back on as important now, but rather, a particular radio interview I “happened” to hear while peeling potatoes for dinner one evening.

A mother and son were being interviewed about homeschooling and my ears tuned in because one of the concerns I had at the time was the swiftly approaching school year and my lack of preparation to start my then youngest child on the homeschool road. That radio program, as it turns out, would be pivotal, the lasting influence of that particular summer.

I was fascinated by their schooling approach. As I recall, the mother was explaining how their entire course of study for 12 years had been through the use of living literature. They had never formally studied science or math, yet her son had been accepted into an engineering program at a prestigious university. This was rather startling information to me at the time. His scores on college entrance exams were superb. How could a course of only studying literature prepare him for this, I wondered. The interview focused on how a life-long education through wide reading could equip someone for anything. I began to view my bright little five-year-old’s future with different eyes.

He got something out of this random reading, bits of history and bits of fable, real, both of them, out of which his mind got its necessary food. Now, here is a point worth attention. How seldom do we hear of a famous man who got that food for his mind which enabled him out of his school studies! And how often, on the other hand, do we read of those whose course of life has been determined by the random readings of boyhood! We go on blindly and stubbornly with our school curriculum, as if this were a fact of no significance, because, say we, the boy will have chances after his school-days to get such pabulum as he needs; but life is not long enough to afford the waste of some dozen years, its freshest and most intelligent period. And, what is more, the boy who has not formed the habit of getting nourishment out of his books in school-days does not, afterwards, see the good of reading. He has not acquired, in an intellectual sense, the art of reading, so he cannot be said to have lost it; and he goes through life an imperfect person, with the best and most delightful of his powers latent or maimed. Why in the world should we not give children, while they are at school, the sort of books they can live upon; books alive with thought and feeling, and delight in knowledge, instead of the miserable cram-books on which they are starved? (Formation of Character, pg. 291)

“Of all our sins of omission and commission, none perhaps are worse than the way we defraud children of those living ideas which are their right. (Formation of Character, Part II, pg. 283-284)