About Ordo Amoris
Pursuing Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
May the word of Christ dwell in us richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in our hearts to the Lord.
Colossians 3:16
Beholding the Wonder of God
We believe dwelling on truth, goodness, and beauty leads to a deepened sense of wonder in God as Creator and Sovereign Lord over all. Our aim is to instill a sense of reverence in the hearts and minds of children so they may enjoy and glorify God.
Weekly Gathering
Our small community of families join together on Wednesday afternoons in Northwest Meridian to learn and grow together as moms lay the feast.
Ordo Amoris seeks to honor children by properly feeding their minds with truth, goodness and beauty. It is because our children are born persons that we use the educational tools available to us:
“We are limited to three educational instruments — the atmosphere of environment, the discipline of habit, and the presentation of living ideas. The P.N.E.U. Motto is: “Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life.”
-Charlotte Mason, Home Education
Children are Born Persons
With more than 40 years direct experience working with and observing children, Charlotte Mason truly revolutionized and created an educational model that exalts Christ as Supreme Educator and honors children as born persons. Her Twenty Principles which are thoroughly unpacked in 6 volumes of the Original Home Education Series, begins with one vital truth that has profound implications – “Children are born persons.” With such knowledge, children’s minds are not seen as blank slates to be written upon or buckets to be filled with facts and information, but rather as a child who is wonderfully and fearfully made with a curiosity to know and ability to think and wonder about the world around him. The mind of a child contains powers of both reason and imagination. Mason states in Home Education, “Reason is present in the infant as truly as imagination. As soon as he can speak he lets us know that he has pondered the ’cause why’ of things and perplexes us with a thousand questions. His ‘why?’ is ceaseless.”
Just as a body needs proper nourishment to grow healthy and strong, so does the mind. There is a way that honors and feeds their growing minds with great formative ideas and a way that famishes and dishonors their minds sacred personhood.
“The mind is capable of dealing with only one kind of food; it lives, grows and is nourished upon ideas only; mere information is to it as a meal of sawdust to the body; there are no organs for the assimilation of the one more than of the other.”
Charlotte Mason, Towards A Philosophy Of Education
Education is the Science of Relations
Another foundational and guiding principle of the Charlotte Mason philosophy is that “education is the science of relations.” From the time children are infants, they become intimately acquainted with the world through all their senses. Everything around them is a wonder and open invitation for exploration! As children grow older, their relationship with the world deepens. Exposure through literature, music, art, nature, history, science and more allows them to form more complex and enduring relationships with that knowledge. The more wide the feast, the more delectable the process of learning becomes and the more opportunities there are for nurturing relationships that lead to care, enchantment and delight.
“The question is not,––how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education––but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? and, therefore, how full is the life he has before him?” -Charlotte Mason, School Education
“Education is the science of relations” is a universal principle, which rests upon the foundation cleared by the “code of education” in the Gospels:
“Take heed that ye OFFEND not––DESPISE not–– HINDER not––one of these little ones.”
She goes on to say, these two vital principles – “children are born persons” and “education is the science of relations” are like two torches that light the way. When they are internalized, they will shape our educational decisions and behavior.
“Wisdom, the Recognition of Relations––…Now what is wisdom, philosophy? Is it not the recognition of relations? First, we have to understand relations of time and space and matter, the natural philosophy which made up so much of the wisdom of Solomon; then, by slow degrees, and more and more, we learn that moral philosophy which determines our relations of love and justice and duty to each other: later, perhaps, we investigate the profound and puzzling subject of the inter-relations of our own most composite being, mental philosophy. And in all these and beyond all these we apprehend, slowly and feebly, the highest relation of all, the relation to God…” -Charlotte Mason, Parents and Children
For further understanding of her views on her own educational model: A letter from 1894 by Charlotte Mason