Bob's Book

An Odyssey in Education

Born in 1923, Robert D. Love grew up ... as part of a Christian family ... that owned and operated a propserous, local business ... as part of a growing midwest community in Wichita KS ... that valued education ... as part of doing one's duty ... over a lifetime and across generations ... to self, family, community and God. Without consciously knowing it, he was immersed in a culture [nomos] which AN Whitehead described in 1926:

"When one considers in its length and in its breadth the importance of this question of the education of a nation's young, the broken lives, the defeated hopes, the national failures, which result from the frivolous inertia with which it is treated, it is difficult to restrain within oneself a savage rage. In the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute, the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed. Not all your heroism, not all your social charm, not all your wit, not all your victories on land or at sea, can move back the finger of fate. Today we maintain ourselves. Tomorrow science will have moved forward yet one more step, and there will be no appeal from the judgment which will then be pronounced on the uneducated.

"We can be content with no less than the old summary of educational ideal which has been current at any time from the dawn of our civilisation. The essence of education is that it be religious.

"Pray, what is religious education?

"A religious education is an education which inculcates duty and reverence. Duty arises from our potential control over the course of events. Where attainable knowledge could have changed the issue, ignorance has the guilt of vice. And the foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity." — Whitehead, The Aims of Education

And yet Bob Love never showed a strong interest in school. Perhaps, his real connection to education and schools began abruptly out of necessity when he left college around age 20 and entered basic training for mortal combat in the ETO of WWII.  For the first time, learning became a matter of life and death.

In 1946 after returning from the ETO  and marrying the love of his life [Lillian Thiessen, a red headed, piano playing, Hutchinson KS, Univ of Illinios history graduate who had joined the Red Cross and nursed him in a military field hospital in England after he was wounded in action in France], Bob entered the family business, started a family of his own and consciously experienced a tsunami of things he suddenly needed and now wanted to understand about the life that was unfolding around him.

By 1960 [age of 37] , Bob was successfully and busily participating in and learning about  economics and politics both locally and nationally, when his wife notified him that their oldest son [Randy, age 10] was having trouble at school and asked what Bob was going to do about it.  With the deep resevoir of confidence he had accumulated, Bob, without hesitation, identified then enrolled his family in a small, local private school. That was the beginning of a life-long passion in which he ceaselessly pondered and actively engaged with education generally and schools specifically in every facet of his life.

In 1973, in retrospect still early in his odyssey, Bob wrote a book recording and sharing what he believed he had learned about education and schools with a title that says it all: How To Start Your Own School.  It was revolutionary in its day when only those with access to accumulated wealth [through family inheritance, individual accomplishment or religious affiliation] attended private schools. As the years passed, Bob watched and encouraged

Until his death in 2004, Bob's love for and understanding of education and schools never stopped growing as evidenced in his personal conversations and letters over the years after his retirement from active public life due to Parkinson's. With the 2020 dislocations and discontent provoked by COVID, the starting of new schools by small groups of families and teachers once again became a cultural phenomenon making waves and headlines at many levels of society. So in 2023 [the 100th anniversary of his birth], it seemed appropriate to reissue a free, online 50th Anniversary Edition of Bob's Book. 

And, if Bob's story is not enough to interest you,  did you know, as James Tooley explains in his 2021 book, that Really Good Schools have been quietly starting and operating around the world with astounding results among the global poor ever since Bob discovered private education in 1960? Just a coincidence or is something greater in the history of human civilization at work in our day?

Why not GET A BOOK and READ ALL ABOUT IT YOURSELF ... connect the past, present and future in an act of duty with reverence which are the aims of all education.