MESSAGE tuesday

For those families new to ICA, this is the weekly connection between our office and your home.  It contains announcements that will keep you up-to-date on what is happening around the school.  Along with this email text, there is also an attached file that contains more specific details about events and announcements.  I hope you'll find it worth your time to read it each week.
This evening is Back-to-School night, (6:30 and/or 7:15)  is a chance for you to come and learn more about how your student’s classroom will operate this year including what you can do to help your student be successful in the classroom.  Beyond that, it’s a chance to get to know your student’s teacher better and strengthen the partnership that will continue throughout the year.  At ICA we feel parents have a key role in their student’s education, and we get to work alongside you to see your student develop a love for life-long learning.
Each classroom will have two sessions to accommodate families who have more than one student in the school, each session covering the same information. 
6:30 – 7:10 – first session
7:15-8:00 – second session
The JH/HS meeting will be in room 203 (Mrs. Justus’ room).
Two things to remember:  we prefer students do not attend this event, and it is not intended to be a time to connect with a teacher on the progress of individual students. 
Below I’ve included some information that is beneficial for you as a parent, so if you have a few extra moments in the ferry line or waiting for your child after a practice, I hope you’ll check it out and let me  know what you think.
Hope to see you tonight!
Brenda 
A Helpful resource for parents:   Here is a link to a surprising article about kids and screens:  http://nypost.com/2016/08/27/its-digital-heroin-how-screens-turn-kids-into-psychotic-junkies/
If you have a moment more…


Thoughts on Classical Education: 


Written by Chuck Colson, a leader in both the secular and Christian sectors, wrote the following concerning classical education. 


“Education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society…We must remember that intelligence is not enough.  Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.”  Martin Luther King, Jr.


[…These thoughts] raise a very profound question:  How, in today’s society, do we provide the kind of “true education” that King was talking about, that develops both character and intelligence? 


Never have we needed more urgently to find an answer to this question.  The modern secular university cannot cultivate character in a value-free environment, because if there is no truth, there is no standard of ethics by which we can measure character.  So the university has simply given up on it.


And not only are our schools and colleges not teaching character, but they’re increasingly abandoning academics as well.  The typical student at a great secular university will not learn much about the history of Western civilization.  My alma mater, Brown University, an Ivy League school with a great reputation, no longer has a core curriculum.  You can go through the school without ever knowing who Plato, Aristotle, Darwin, or Freud were.  In fact, you could major in African drum-beating.  So from my perspective, the modern secular university has abandoned both the pursuit of classical learning and the development of character.  That’s why they’re particularly dangerous places today, and its why Christian students must be well grounded before they go there.


And this is also why I so strongly support the Christian classical education movement that is beginning to spread across the country (he wrote this is 2005).  It combines, you see, the two historic goals of a liberal education:  the cultivation of knowledge and the cultivation of character.  It shows us the continuum in the intellectual history of the West that goes back to the Greco-Roman era and, therefore, enables us to better understand our own postmodern era.  It we cut ourselves off from the past, we can’t understand the present.  And it’s particularly critical, in my mind, for Christians to understand the philosophical and cultural currents that have shaped our society. 


Let me give you just one good example.  Galileo, as everyone knows, was thrown in jail for challenging Aristotle’s philosophical assumptions about an eternal universe.  But, as I mentioned in an earlier broadcast, Francis Bacon, sometimes called “the father of modern science,” was influenced by the Protestant Reformation, and he embraced Luther’s idea about abandoning the constraints of tradition and going back to the root: the Bible.  He applied this principle to freeing science from philosophical assumptions and instead looking at what God has made – go back to the root of things, as Luther did.  This allowed modern science to pursue truth uninhibited by philosophy.


Why is this relevant today?  Because we’re dealing with the same issue.  Naturalism is the philosophical assumption that binds modern science.  And this is at the heart of the intelligent design debate, but you only see this when you know your own history.


I believe that every serious Christian needs to be classically grounded, not only to understand the history of our own civilization, but also to contend for the truth in the marketplace.  So I hope that you will check for a classical Christian school in your area – as a place for your kids and as a cause to support.


Reprinted from “Breakpoint”, November 8th, 2005


Thanks for reading!