“A person with my blessings has a hard time imagining a home in which children do not hear reading and are not read to, even prenatally. The cadences of ordered meaning should be with
them, in them, and growing from their beginnings to a supernal End. The intuition of number, with which all are born, is, by education, not taught so much as recognized, named, and applied. Combine the intuition of number and the cadence of ordered meaning and one has music. A mother singing a melody to her unborn child is fitting him for greater glories, first perhaps of Mozart and Bach, and finally of heaven, whence all this comes and to which it returns.”
-S.M. Hutchens in Touchstone magazine
This is going beyond the simple yet natural idea of homeschooling, to something which seems (to me) just beyond my grasp of understanding. Something of mystery, something that seems wonderful.
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That’s how I feel about it, too ❤
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One of my earliest visual memories is of the large white rocking chair where we’d sit while my mother read to me. I was so young I had no memory of what she was reading, so a few decades ago I asked. She laughed, and said, “Anything at hand. Sometimes it was Shakespeare, sometimes it was the Ladies’ Home Journal. You didn’t seem to care.”
And don’t forget fathers. One of my cherished photos shows me in my dad’s lap when I was somewhat older. It was our evening practice to crawl up and ‘read’ the newspaper with him in the evening.
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I love to hear stories like that, Linda. I don’t think my father read to me, and sadly, I have no memory of being read to by anyone. But I like to think I might have crawled up on his or my grandfather’s lap to look at the newspaper…
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Well said! I read to both my children daily as soon as I found out that I was pregnant.
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I never thought of doing that, but there was always lots of reading aloud going on during my pregnancies, so I trust the children benefitted 🙂
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Love these thoughts…
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