(This article by Rea Berg, the founder of Beautiful Feet Books and a current SLOCA Parent, was originally printed in the May 2006 edition of our monthly newsletter, the SLOCA SCOOP.)

During the lifetimes of award-winning children’s authors, Ingri and Edgar Parin D’Aulaire, they built a home, a secluded retreat in the woods of Vermont.  Over this home a lintel was inscribed with the words, “This is the house that books built.”  These prolific and successful author/illustrators of children's books recognized that their wooded home was the tangible evidence of their life's work.

As I review the panorama of my life and the lives of many home schooling families around the country, a similar axiom comes to me.  “These are lives that books built.”  Indeed, if there is a single tangible and consistent quality of home schoolers it is that they love books.  We are collectively passionate about books and especially about good books.  We recognize their importance in nearly every aspect of our lives and in our pursuit of a certain quality of life for our children and ourselves.  Charles Tremendous Jones, a popular motivational speaker, is known to say, “There are only two things in life that will change you.  The people you meet and the books you read.”  We might even say, the people you meet through the books you read!

If we desire our young people to know the greats of the past, the wisdom of the ages, the price that was paid throughout history for freedom, then we must be very concerned with what they read.  We must exchange a surplus of mass mediocrity for excellence.
It was Ralph Waldo Emerson that said, “There is properly no history, only biography.”  One wonderful advantage we have in educating our children at home is the opportunity to select the books that form the basis of their education.  This is a golden opportunity!  In our history selections we can spare our children the tedium and boredom dry textbooks replaced by wonderful biographies and historical fiction.

In this process I like to think of providing our children with a "habitual vision of greatness."  Elton Trueblood who wrote a wonderful biography of Abraham Lincoln entitled, Abraham Lincoln, Theologian of American Anguish addresses this concept in the formation of Lincoln's character through the books he read:

“Lincoln’s schooling was negligible, the aggregate he said not amounting to one year.  In place of schooling, the boy had access to a few books, which he read so faithfully, they left a permanent mark upon his mind, and helped to create the final elegance of his style.  The chief books were the Bible, the plays of Shakespeare, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, John Bunyan's Pilgrims Progress, Aesop's Fables, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, and Weem’s Life of Washington, the experience of these books upon his later thought and style of expression being evident at many points.  When, for example, he spoke at Trenton, New Jersey on February 21, 1861, he referred to his boyhood reading of the Life of Washington and revealed how that experience had aroused in his young mind a sense of the nobility of the total movement of which he was a part.  “I recollect thinking then,” he said, “boy even though I was, that there must have been something more than common that those men struggled for.” 

We know part of the secret of Lincoln’s greatness when we notice that the books which formed his early taste for literature were, on the whole, far removed from the trivial.  Thereby, the lack of formal education was partly balanced by what Professor Whitehead has called, “the habitual vision of greatness.”

This vision of greatness will form their palate for truly fine literature, a love they will take into their adult lives.  In this way we help to create life long learners.  Additionally, reading together builds cultural, emotional, and spiritual bridges.   Through reading together we can understand the ravages of prejudice in a book like, To Kill a Mockingbird.  Or we can empathize with those under the bondage of slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  We can feel the anguish of physical challenges young Robin faces in medieval Europe during the plague in The Door in the Wall.  We can rejoice in the triumph over injustice with love and forgiveness of young Otto in Otto of the Silver Hand.  We can feel the wondrous sense of adventure as those did during the early days of exploration with Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho!   Through these varied experiences, young people can learn mercy, compassion and the love of justice.  They can break out of the narrowly defined confines of our modern world and have a truly broad worldview.  The power of literature can have a profound impact upon the people they become as we help to build their lives upon books.