About six months ago I decided to let my son Joshua spend the year reading  and enjoying as many G.A. Henty historical fictions as he could stomach. Since then, and as of this moment (we are sitting at a coffee shop: he is reading and I am blogging), he has completed 24 Henty books.  Needless to say, our dinner table conversations have become quite interesting as Joshua nightly regales us with esoterica from the annals of Christendom as recorded by Henty.
 
In the evening, I like to follow the pattern established for me by my father by offering a Christian interpretation of the daily news to my children. Last week we discussed the trial of Saddam Hussein and compared the key issues to the trials of Louis XVI before Robespierre, of Charles I before Cromwell, of the Nuremberg defendants before an international tribunal,  and of Chief Justice Moore before Attorney General Bill Pryor. (The issue in each case involved a determination about jurisdiction and the rule of law.) Thanks to Henty, I now find myself in the humbling but glorious spot that all home educators eventually find themselves—-when your children know more historical trivia about a subject than do you. It was great, for example, to hear my son chime in with detail after detail about “that scoundrel” Robespierre.