OK, here's the final form of the essay standing at around 645 words.

Today’s students are rich beyond the dreams of the ancients, heirs to the beauty and thought recorded in millions of books. 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 difficult. 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.

There are questions that people all through time and the world over have always asked. “Where did I come from? Where am I going? Why is the middle part full of evil and pain? Is there anything bigger than me and the earth and what is it like? What’s right and what’s wrong?” Countless books and religions have been made to answer these questions. Out of all of them, the Bible has lasted the longest, inspired the most loyalty, and provided the most logical and satisfying answers. I will not attempt to explain the Bible’s answers here as they would be marred by brevity. Let it suffice to say that, life is completely meaningless and hopeless without the Bible being true. If you don’t have meaning or hope, education itself is vain.

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 (1801-1850), 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. The evils plaguing society in Bastiat’s day were numerous; many of them caused war(s) in the next 200 years: despotism, socialism, communism, slavery, and restriction of expression. Bastiat’s arguments against these, and his defense of man’s right to life, liberty, and property, are still a brilliant defense against the forms social bondage has taken today. Like America’s Founding Fathers, Bastiat had the Bible as his foundation of his concept of law and, therefore, his book still rings true and calls us to take up his zeal for freedom and personal responsibility.

The old adage says that you don’t know what you think until 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. Otherwise, he is merely a parrot. The Lively Art of Writing by Lucile Vaughan Payne focuses on essay writing. 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, and there must exist an opposing opinion for the essay to be interesting. She goes on with how to form a thesis and evaluating arguments for and against one’s thesis. From there, she guides you through the structure of an 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.

The parents of this generation of Joshuas and Calebs saw how their country’s Godly heritage was being forgotten and trampled; so they took it upon themselves to raise and educate their children at home in order to equip them to change their world someday. My generation has been given a strong and great heritage and an awesome responsibility. It is my belief that the Bible, The Law, and The Lively Art of Writing will be of invaluable help as we preserve our heritage of beautiful and brilliant thoughts.