I named my blog Ordo Amoris. My husband tells me it is a bit ridiculous and sometimes when I find myself repeating the title to a stranger I see what he means. But I love the name anyway. Those two little words represent everything I believe about education and even when I am talking to a stranger it doesn’t take me too long to explain.
Ordo sounds like ‘order’ and Amoris comes from the Latin word for love therefore Ordo Amoris is the ordering of the loves or affections. But you already knew that.
I came to education through the door of love and it was a good door. All of those years homeschooling my older boys while pregnant, nursing, and farming; It was love that kept me sane. It was love which got me out of bed in the morning and it was love that guided my decisions. I threw love of reading and love of knowledge and love of wisdom at the children with abandon. I prayed for miracles and I got them. For many years sheer terror kept me from looking Ordo in the eye. I could love things but could I order them? Could I teach my children to order? There is no fear in love but I was afraid of order.
Not without reason.
Most of my ideas of order came from Christians who seemed to love order more than they loved God. I had heard the verse “God is a god of order” used to promote something more like control than self-government. Order seemed more akin to fascism than love to me. How could I love order? I came to order through the door of love. I loved to keep my home in order and I found the rules of phonics delightful.
I had a friend, Jennifer, who loved the order of grammar and another friend, Beth, who ordered Latin for the love of it. Because I loved and trusted my friends and they loved me I started to try a bit harder to order our family study of grammar and Latin. The trust and love I had in my friends and the patience and help they gave me paid off.
Today I also love grammar and Latin and my younger children are doing much better in those subjects than my older ones did. I confess, I still do not love logic but if you do maybe we could become friends.
