Here's my essay for the HSLDA contest that's due tomorrow. It's supposed to be no more than 700 words. It currently stands at 1279. So I'm preserving it in its orignal form here before I hack it down to 700.

“In the beginning was the word…” Humans are the only created beings on earth to have written language. Adam was the first to record and mankind hasn’t stopped since. We’ve found through experience that the best way to preserve a thought or event accurately is to write it down, preferably in more than one place. Because of society’s progress in printing, production of paper, and freedom, today’s students are heirs to the beauty and thought recorded in millions of books, rich beyond the dreams of the ancients. The sheer size of such wealth will sometimes overawe the student; so the question “What three pieces of literature would you deem necessary before one could consider his education ‘complete' and why?” is weighty. I would suggest the Bible because it is the infallible word of God to man, The Law for its basic principles of freedom, government, and economics, and The Lively Art of Writing so the student can record his own thoughts clearly. Let us examine each, with its credentials, in turn.

The Bible is the divinely-inspired manual for life. Man has three kinds of relationships in his lifetime: his relationship to God, to other people, and to nature. The Bible defines our relationship to God as that of creature to Creator, wayward sheep to patient Shepherd, guilty convict to merciful Saviour, child to Father and chicks to hen. Our relationship to God gives us meaning, hope, salvation, spiritual weapons with which to fight sin and Satan, and joy. Relationships with other people are numerous in variety and intrinsically more difficult than a relationship with God. All humans are fallen, selfish, and fallible; so not only does the Bible provide guidelines for successful relationships it lays out a framework for justice for when relationships sour. All successful societies and systems of justice have been based off the Bible. The two greatest laws are those declared by Jesus in Matthew 22:37-40, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” The Bible also shows us our place as stewards and guardians of nature and the earth and the fullness of it being for our pleasure and use. The Bible also tells why there’s disorder in the natural world. Romans 5:12 says “…sin entered into the world, and death by sin.” Romans 8:22 further states “For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together…”

Except perhaps for theology, few subjects seem to have so many books written about it than the subject of government. Most of these books tend to be long and require a great deal of effort to read. The Law, by Frederic Bastiat, is short, concise, and still covers thoroughly the underlying free principles of government and economics. It is not difficult to read, but it provokes just as much thought afterwards as Locke or Hobbes. Monsieur Bastiat starts by stating that mankind’s right to life, liberty, property, and the defense of such is a God given right to every soul. He then defines law as “the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protects persons, liberties, and properties; to main the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all.” He goes on to point out that unfortunately the law rarely stays in its designated place. “The law has been used to destroy its own objective…The law has been perverted by the influence of two...causes: stupid greed and false philanthropy.” Stupid greed is the desire to live and have pleasure at another’s expense arising from our fallen nature. False philanthropy is using the law to fix a person or person’s situation whether the fixing be through money, morals, or education. Both require legalized plunder: the law using its power to take from one and give to another. If a law does something which an individual can’t do legally it is legalized plunder. “If such a law… is not abolished immediately, it will spread, multiply, and develop into a system.” Society balks at abolishing such a law, Bastiat observes, because it only sees the benefit it gave to the recipient. People tend to be shortsighted; they don’t see beyond the immediate benefit to the one who was bereaved for the benefit and to the day when they will be forced to give up more and more for the betterment of another. With the base of the just law and the perversions of law Bastiat goes on to tear apart logically and systematically socialism, communism, and despotism. It is a brilliant defense of life, liberty, and private property.

The old adage says that you don’t know what you think until what you’ve written it down. All the great books in the world will do a student no good unless he can digest them, make them his own, and articulate his thoughts on them. Unless he can communicate his own thoughts on a subject he is merely a parrot. We take it as a given that a student will use more than just the written word to communicate his thoughts; but what is written down is easiest to preserve and is not dependent on how comely the speaker’s appearance is or how flashy the show is. The Lively Art of Writing by Lucile Vaughan Payne focuses on essay writing. Many writing books fall into two categories: ones that tell you to write whatever and then just re-write and re-write or ones that jump straight into the dry stuff of structure and grammar. Mrs. Payne strikes a lovely balance in that she values structure and grammar by relating it back to your actual writing; neither does she leave to write on anything which leaves you staring blankly at your assigned subject or the even more dreadful blank page. She defines an essay as the “written expression of the author’s opinion.” The subject must be one that the author is familiar enough with to form an opinion on and there must exist an opposing opinion for the essay to be interesting. Who would read an essay titled “Why I think grass is green.”? Mrs. Payne goes on to how to form a thesis (your opinion boiled down to one statement) and evaluating arguments for and against your thesis. From there, she guides you through the structure of your essay in an informative and conversational style. It never becomes tedious rules and details; it all comes back to communicating your opinion clearly and in an interesting and engaging way. A “good writer controls the reader’s imagination” and does not ever jolt him out of the world on the page with confusing sentences or wrong tenses.

These three books are a mere sampling of the great thoughts recorded for posterity in books. No education is complete without them, but neither are they an education in and of themselves. We would also point out that it is more important to have mastered and applied the concepts and principles of the books than to be able to answer any question on them or recite long portions of them. The written word is more than just the connection of words or the ink on a paper but the connection of the reader and the writer through the idea recorded. Just like with the Word in John 1 the relationship is more important than the rule.