Get to know The Children’s Tradition.
At Living Book Press, our mission is simple: to make homeschooling with great living books as easy and joyful as possible. How do we do that? One key way is by making it effortless to browse the books used in your favorite curricula.
Today, we’re putting the spotlight on one of those key programs: The Children’s Tradition. Here are their answers to a few quick questions so you can learn more about it.
1. What do you love most about Homeschooling?
I love that homeschooling is full of Reality. We are a Real Father and Mother with Real children, and we get to explore a Real world abounding in truth, goodness, and beauty together. That Reality also includes living with a profound awareness of our finitude– if we do this, we do not have time for that, energy ebbs and flows, and we cannot possibly “do it all.” In a utilitarian world dominated by the Machine, I don’t think it is an understatement to say that homeschooling is the means by which our family is learning, like Pinocchio, to be “real boys.”
2. What is your favourite book listed in your curriculum and why?
You must know what an impossible question this is for a Book Girl to answer, so I will just have to say a book we reread recently and adore: The Wind in the Willows. I love this story because it is humble. As the story opens you may notice the beautiful literary quality, but it may strike you as a simple story about simple creatures. But as the story goes on it takes on a mysterious quality (the kind of mystery that children just accept, but the adults in the room are left asking, “How? Why?”). You are led to wonder and just may find yourself thinking about the story days later.
Which leads to the final reason I will mention: I love this story because it is wise. As one example, Mr. Toad’s wild ride (what I spent much of my life thinking was just a ride at Disneyland!) is a powerful embodiment of how passions lead us astray, hurting us and our friends. Truly, I could go on and on. This book is full of manifold depth and richness! It is the kind of book that every time you read it, you are left wanting to read it again, because you know that with every time your participation in its wisdom will grow.
3. What are you hopes for The Children’s Tradition in the future?
My greatest hope is that The Children’s Tradition could be mainstreamed so that ordinary families around the globe can return to the humanizing power of the poetic mode of learning. Modern people are weary, fragmented, and hungry for something more, they often know not what. Poetic knowledge, the knowledge of the heart where one learns through loving attention and participation in Reality, is that something more that everyone is looking for. While I do not think you automatically need The Children’s Tradition to lead a humanizing life, I hope it serves as a beacon of light in the darkness of modernity for those who are looking for time-tested wisdom, not just in their children’s education, but really for all of life.
Browse some of the books used in The Children’s Tradition here.
