WholeHearted Learning — Keeping the Home in Home Education

WholeHearted Learning was different. In the early 1990s, when the homeschooling movement was still in its infancy and a variety of pedagogies were vying for legitimacy, we offered WholeHearted Learning. It was, and still is, a different kind of homeschooling model. Rather than being an age-graded curriculum, it was a philosophical model without a curriculum. However, rather than being at the unschooling other end of the formal-informal education spectrum, it offered a guiding structure and learning goals, yet with freedom. Rather than being primarily about the mind and knowledge, it was first about the heart and spirit. Rather than creating dependence and trusting in an educational model and content, it promoted independence and trusting parental instinct and the Spirit. Rather than the classroom, it was about the home. It was a new model for biblical home education.

The WholeHearted Learning Project is simply a section of WholeHeart.org dedicated to defining, defending, and promoting "WholeHearted Learning" as an effective, comprehensive, and commonsense biblical approach to Christian home education. Rather than attempting to retrofit formal educational models into the home, we started with a biblical understanding of God's design for the family and built an educational model to fit the Christian home. WholeHearted Learning stands alone as an educational model, but it can also supplement other home education models. It is a one-size-fits-all Designer approach to homeschooling.

WholeHearted Learning is a biblical and commonsense approach to learning built on discipleship, whole books, and real-life learning. It is about living and learning naturally—in the place God designed us to live and in the way God designed us to learn. It's about creating a home where learning happens as naturally as living. WholeHearted Learning is just as much about Christian home education as it is about Christian home education. The WholeHearted Learning Project is simply a ministry commitment to keep the vision of the model alive for new generations of Christian parents to find and follow.

Our goal in this book is not complicated—it is to give you a larger vision for what God can do in your home and to provide a model of home education that gives you the freedom to follow the Holy Spirit for what your children need most. WholeHearted Learning is simply cooperation with God’s eternal design for your family, home and children. —Clay Clarkson (Educating the WholeHearted Child)

About WholeHearted Learning

Clay and Sally Clarkson came to marriage from traditional public school and state college backgrounds. However, they also came with the discipleship vision and training of Campus Crusade for Christ that would deeply influence their thoughts about parenting and education. Homeschooling was nowhere on their radar until one day in 1983 when Clay shared a Christianity Today article with Sally about the nascent Christian homeschooling movement. The pieces quickly began to fall into place and soon Sally was reading the books of early Christian homeschooling advocate Dr. Raymond Moore, and would teach women at their church about homeschooling before she was pregnant with Sarah. By the time they formally began to homeschool four-year-old Sarah in 1988 in southern California, their nonconformist model of “home-centered” homeschooling was beginning to take shape. For four years they navigated anti-homeschooling church attitudes and politics as staff at a large evangelical church, while becoming more actively involved in the SoCal homeschooling community. A move to Nashville in 1991 brought freedom and new opportunities—starting a homeschool support group, teaching and speaking at more homeschool events, and developing messages that would become the heart of their future ministry to Christian parents. In spring 1993 they moved to family property in central Texas, held their first “WholeHearted Child Home Education Workshop” a year later, released the first version of Educating the WholeHearted Child that fall, launched a homeschooling catalog, and started Whole Heart Ministries. Over the next twenty-five years, WholeHearted Learning would grow, expand, and fully mature into a recognized homeschooling model, and their four wholehearted children would go on to become testimonies of the validity and effectiveness of the model. Though it is unknown how many homeschooling families follow the actual model, the 100,000+ copies of the book that are in print have influenced countless families around the world with the principles and practices of WholeHearted Learning.

What I have tried to do in this book is acknowledge the burdens and difficulties of being a homeschooling mother, but even more to point you to what the Bible says about how to do God’s will with confidence and joy. That, to me, is the real challenge of the homeschooling lifestyle—to maintain a living and vibrant faith in the power of the Holy Spirit. —Sally Clarkson (Seasons of a Mother’s Heart)

WholeHearted Learning resources

Educating the WholeHearted Child — A Handbook for Christian Home Education
Clay Clarkson (with Sally Clarkson) (WH Press, 2019, 4th edition)

The book that would launch, define, and promote the WholeHearted Learning model of home education had very humble beginnings. Workshop notes for a dozen attendees became a gangly 196-page workbook with an unwieldy title: The WholeHearted Child Home Education Handbook. Two years later, that first effort was expanded into a 272-page second edition and aptly renamed Educating the WholeHearted Child. Fifteen years later, in 2011, the book was extensively revised and expanded again into a 384-page third edition with Apologia Press. In 2019 our first published book came back home to Whole Heart Press for a refreshed, and likely final, fourth edition. Educating the WholeHearted Child, continuously in print since 1994, is still helping Christian homeschoolers put the home back in their home education with the WholeHearted Learning model.

Seasons of a Mother’s Heart — Heart to Heart Encouragement for Homeschool Moms
Sally Clarkson (WH Press, 2021, 3rd edition)

The first few years of ministry with Whole Heart were a flurry of home education workshops to promote our WholeHearted Learning model. But what soon became apparent is that homeschooling moms needed more than just what to do and and how to do it—they needed biblical encouragement and support. Sally offered that at first in a quarterly WholeHearted Mother Journal. It lasted a year, but it gave birth to her first book, Seasons of a Mother’s Heart in 1998, released at her first WholeHearted Mother Conference. To our knowledge, it was the first book of biblical encouragement specifically written for Christian homeschooling mothers. It was filled with stories from Sally’s own life as a homeschool mom, offered spiritual wisdom and insight, and included discussion questions and Bible study verses with each chapter. On it’s tenth anniversary it was published in a new revised and expanded second edition with Apologia Press. For it’s twentieth anniversary it, too, is back home with Whole Heart Press for a refreshed, and final, third edition. This book launched twenty years of conferences for Christian mothers, Mom Heart Ministry, and untold numbers of small group book and Bible studies. It is a timeless classic for all homeschooling mothers.

The Awaking Wonder Experience — A Guided Companion
Sally Clarkson with Clay Clarkson (Bethany House, 2020)

This companion study guide was written by Clay to build on the concepts and ideas Sally expresses in Awaking Wonder. It does not follow her chapters, but provides a fresh and different perspective on the concept with thoughtful essays, scriptures, practical suggestions, and planning pages. He explores how to awake wonder in your children with insights on five key qualities for each of three lenses for bringing those qualities into focus — focusing on the heart, the mind, and the strength of your child. The back of the Guide is a 12-month personal planner to implement the ideas shared in the book.

Read for the Heart — Whole Books for WholeHearted Families
Sarah Clarkson (Apologia Press, 2009, Out of Print)

The heart of WholeHearted Learning has always been whole books and living books. That priority of reading for childhood learning was adopted from the writings and methods of Victorian era British educator Charlotte Mason. Sarah, our first child, began reading at an early age and never stopped. When we wrote Educating the WholeHearted Child, we included an extensive book list but we were not able to provide insights and backgrounds about those recommended books and their authors. Sarah, though, made classic childhood literature an area of personal study and expertise. Read for the Heart, her second book in 2011 (for Apologia Press), provided not only a philosophy of childhood learning that emphasized books, reading, story, and imagination, but also provided the insights and information about all the best books and authors for childhood reading that was missing in our book lists. Read for the Heart was the companion book to Educating the WholeHearted Child that was born out of WholeHearted Learning working in Sarah’s own life. In 2014, she would go on to launch the Storyformed website and write Caught Up in a Story. Now that Sarah’s book on books is also back home with Whole Heart Press, we hope to work with her to release a revised and expanded second edition in September 2020.

Experts have written many excellent books on the merits of great literature and useful guides to selecting worthy books. I am not an expert or a critic. My perspective comes from the other side—from a young heart, mind, and soul shaped by storybooks. Although this book is a handbook, with lists and tips galore to guide you into the world of children’s literature, I also consider it to be a story and an invitation not just to a reading list, but to a reading life. —Sarah Clarkson (Read for the Heart)