Leah Beecher's Reviews > For the Children's Sake: Foundations of Education for Home and School

What an unbelievable treasure finding this book was for me. Feeling that the reasons I was going to start homeschooling my two oldest daughters being, I did not like their current public school and we could not afford private education, were both negative reasons, and would make for a negative experience of home education, I agonized over what philosophy of home education I wanted to embrace. It is very important to grab hold of a positive reason to teach at home, for a happy home and happy children. This little book published first in the UK by the daughter of the very scholarly theologian Francis Schaeffer in 1984 is the perfect balanced approach of natural "unschooled" method, and the high literary standards of the classical method. Balanced in that it lets children be individuals without a heavy emphasis on state derived testing and "benchmark" requirements, yet puts an emphasis on the importance of disciple, good habits, and a parent's natural authority. The education philosophy here in this book relies almost exclusively on the education method developed by Charlotte Mason in Britain in the late 19th Century. Talk about obscure! Not so much a book about what to teach and how, but a book about what value and intelligence children already possess and the best, most practical, most gentle, most natural way to bring that out in any child.{For the more nuts and bolts of how to teach "the Charlotte way" I am currently reading The Charlotte Mason Companion and would highly suggest purchasing this book along with For the Children's Sake}. Absorbing and underlining passage after passage in this book changed me from viewing home education as "a last resort alternative to a bad situation" to genuine enthusiasm to get the chance to better my daughters, my home, myself.