We are glad you are here
Welcome to the Cottage Press Common Room!
We are glad you are here. By way of introduction, you will find my official author bio on our site, updated fairly recently with my current studies and vocational pursuits. At The Reading Mother, a blog that I kept during my years of home education, you will find a little more personal information as well. You can also read some reflections on the early years of our home education journey here; if you read the Foundational Principles & Practices series, you will see how those experiences led me to begin writing the language arts and other curricula for home educators and co-ops featured here at Cottage Press.
Our educational philosophy is distinctly Christian and classical, with a healthy dose of Charlotte Mason’s principles and practices as a foundation. In fact, though it’s a bit of a controversial opinion, I would argue that Charlotte Mason and classical are complementary and even synonymous in some ways. Others have made that argument far more eloquently than I have space for here, but if you are interested, I’d recommend you begin with Consider This: Charlotte Mason and the Classical Tradition by Karen Glass. You can find an overview of how these principles are applied practically in the classical Progym in our language arts programs here. We hope to dive more deeply into some of these ideas in coming days here at the Cottage Press Common Room.
Classical education is enjoying a recovery and a reformation these days, and it’s exciting to be involved in the project as a teacher/professor, an administrator, and as a student myself. But, precisely what IS classical education? There seem to be any number of competing visions out there. I think we can find some common strands out there, but we also have to remember that any recovery project is necessarily messy and will involve some course correction along the way. My own elevator pitch definition of classical education is that we are preparing students and teachers alike for heaven. It’s not original to me -- educators going back to Plato expressed similar thoughts, though his understanding of heaven and God was incomplete. Early church fathers such as Clement, Augustine, and Basil considered education in the classical Greek and Roman tradition as preparatory for reception and for living out the gospel in everyday life. Classical principles were adopted and assimilated into Christendom and formed the basis of almost all education in the western tradition right up until the early twentieth century, when it was scrapped in favor of modern progressivism.
Does the goal of education as preparation for heaven sound too high-minded? Keep in mind that eternity begins now. This present age, made up in time of the past, present, and future, will be swallowed up into eternity (Re 10:6)—not destroyed, but incorporated into a glorious whole. So the aim of fitting us for heaven has everything to do with this life as well, for as Lewis also said, when you “aim at heaven, you will get earth ‘thrown’ in: [but if you] aim at earth you will get neither.”[1]
[1] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 1952), 134.