Noise & Reflection
Tuesday 
in the late evening 
Mystie
This is why I read Cindy’s blog at Dominion Family:
This chapter is rich and deep but in a nutshell I took away from it the idea that in the noise and confusion of our times, while we are constantly being told what to think and what to want, we have lost the ability to reflect. This is something I am always fighting to provide in our home school, or should I just say home. True education is reflection. If we can regain that little tool we will have covered a multitude of sins.
I would like the same thing, though it has been through reading her blog — and a few other sundry education articles — that I have the idea put into words. Our modern American society is too noisy — every store has music in the background, every teenager has earbuds pasted to his head, and most homes run the television for background noise. It was in college — at Christ Church, not UI — that I first encountered the idea that we need periods of silence to be whole and really communicative and reflective. I didn’t like that thought at first, coming from a setting where I drowned out the large-family hubbub with my stereo, but a year in the quiet hall, years without a television, and periods at each house without speakers hooked up have helped cultivate my taste for silence. That might not be so great as the children and chaos are added to our household. :) But I do think that the constant noise our society pushes is an avoidance tactic to prevent contemplation — or even realization — of our plight of ignorance, apathy, and meaninglessness that our rejection of God in state and school has wrought. Noise is filling our void, or at least preventing us from thinking about it.
So I want to consciously make our home a place where everyone does have the time and space for quiet, for reflection, for contemplation.
[...] Mystie also has a post on her experience with the idea of reflection. [...]