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Bottom line is, I guess, that I agree with and respect a lot of the RU principles, especially in parenting.
They call it "mindful parenting" which to me is an evocative phrase and sums up a lot of what I am trying to do myself. I think it is very Catholic.
John Bosco says something a bit similar in his ideas on Preventive Discipline.
I actually get stuck more on the education part of it, and as I ponder that, I think it's because education is more artificial than parenting.
Chesterton says children aren't born with an innate desire or natural trigger to learn Greek verb forms or put their collars straight. At most, they are born with the capacity to develop these skills. In some cultures it may not be necessary to learn these things at all. They are only indirectly related to character or moral formation.
A huge percentage of parenting is about modelling (environment) and forming habits in the heart of the domestic church. It takes thought and care but it can happen in a very real and ordinary life. You can teach principles of hygiene, order and regularity, and the Ten Commandments, just by living and reflecting on living.
But "education" meaning enculturation-- it seems that it goes beyond just daily life to what you want to BRING to daily life. Especially in a culture like ours, where we as Christians are called to stand outside it a bit.
That makes no sense: probably I have to drag in Thomas Aquinas. He says that the most effective and "real" way to learn is by discovery, "inventio".
However, it would be difficult and a bit inefficient to learn EVERYTHING simply by discovery. So that's where teaching "disciplina" comes in.
However, teaching should as closely as possible imitate how people learn naturally. Which is what it sounds like you are doing gracefully and "naturally" in your own home, Molly.
Obviously we could easily live life and never learn Latin, and possibly function OK in today's world without it. However, Latin is good and noble to learn, but a mom can do a lot by environment and delightful habits and inspiring ideas to make the children ready to learn Latin and content to do so, and able to learn from it and not be harmed by the methods.
I see that once again, I'd have to write out a long LONG post to really make any sense -- but maybe you can read between the lines?
To say it another way -- in some ways I am trying to teach my children more than I learned myself when I was growing up. So I have to consciously bring things into my home that AREN'T part of my natural normal "default" life. Some of the best things in our home have come about by looking for MORE, that is beyond my own natural scope and beyond our modern-day culture's scope.
I have to think in terms specifically of Education, what I want education to be for my children, to actually reach beyond the ordinary day to day life.
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Pulling the thread off direction just a bit, but do any of you have trouble doing that "blending structure and freedom"? I think the reason I do sometimes is that so often, structure and freedom are seen as opposites. I liked Anne Lahrson Fisher's phrase "protecting play time" because it seemed to say HOW one could balance structure and freedom in order to make life richer for the children, and how the play was the key thing. She said that you can see the effectiveness of the balance in the richness of the childrens' "leisure time". This seemed to fit in with what Nancy Wallace describes and also a bit with how Charlotte Mason talks, as well.
I like the way you describe your homeschool, Leonie. This unschooler of a large family has a concept called "Collaborative Learning" that rings with me. It sounds a bit like the synergy you describe.
Maybe the (secular) radical focus is on the individual, where a Catholic focus is more on the FAMILY as the basic unit of society. Maybe you can have a Catholic radical unschooling if you concentrate on parenting and how that translates into a lifestyle of learning. Anyway, I explored radical unschooling during this spring and summer; what it ended up being was a deschooling time, and that was wonderful. I think we all needed it after the stressful weeks and months and years we had had recently. We did a LOT of talking and the conversation ended up being a great consolidation and reminder of all the children learn informally by strewing and just living.
However, the synergy started to not work as well, the boys were bored and I think my daughter felt a little unsupported in her educational ideals, and we moved away from a completely open-ended way of learning. We still don't do a LOT of sit-down work; I still think that informal learning sticks better than formal. I don't think that what we are doing now is what RUers would describe as truly radical, but it is working.
I truly think that my homeschool works best when I think of seasons and relationships and don't get stuck too much on one "mode" whether it is unschooling or CM or classical or whatever else. We seem to do various blends in different ratios of all of those things at different times; there is a consistency in that I'm never tempted by strict "school at home" or anything overly textbooky or clock-oriented. That kind of thing does not work for my family in any way.
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Molly, quick thoughts on the article which I read with interest -- I always find Alfie Kohn interesting---
First, it sounded like he was critiquing the limitations of standardized tests or a "cultural literacy" focus in measuring true education. ED Hirsch is the proponent of a core of knowledge ( here's a sample article by him which Kohn refers to a bit scornfully as a "bunch o' facts".
I agree with Kohn about the limitations of standardized testing and cultural literacy as a measurement of true education but I don't scorn them quite as much as he does. They may be insufficient but their limitations are in their insufficiency more than their essential wrongness. Whereas some other measurements he proposes strike me as truly wrong and rather scary -- they would be too subjective and rely too much on the judgement of "experts" whom I have no reason to trust at all.
I would strongly resist any measurement such as this one
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For example, Nel Noddings, professor emerita at Stanford University, urges us to reject "the deadly notion that the schools' first priority should be intellectual development" and contends that "the main aim of education should be to produce competent, caring, loving, and lovable people."
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YIKES. Makes me awfully glad I homeschool and don't have to worry about my kids EVER being measured by someone else's view of what competent, caring and lovable people are. (BY the way, to be fair I don't think Mr Kohn was holding this up as an example of a better way: he goes on to say:
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In short, perhaps the question "How do we know if education has been successful?" shouldn't be posed until we have asked what it's supposed to be successful at.---------------------
So he is saying that we can't determine whether education is successful until we determine what it is to succeed AT, which is a good point.
What is the radical unschoolers' goal in educating their children? I think they want their children to love learning and to learn that learning is inseparable from real life. I also think a strong element of "autonomy" creeps in there.... ie all persons, including children, should have a right to determine their own fate. This is true in one sense, but untrue in another since our Catholic faith teaches us that we are not essentially the pilots of our own destiny. God is. I think children are deserving of the same dignity and respect that is given to adults. However, like the rest of us children are under God's authority. I think you COULD radically unschool with a respect for that truth -- I've seen people on the Catholic unschooling list who are doing this or something very close.
But that emphasis on individual autonomy that creeps into secular radical unschooling throws off my moral compass -- it does not acknowledge the reality of society as I know it, as a community, as a Body with different components each separate but also functioning together, as we heard at Mass last week.
I think you're SO right about the strewing!
Do you think I'm missing something about the point of the article?
I am not an educational reformer, thank heavens, so I don't have to propose general educational measures as Hirsch and Kohn do in their different ways. I would like my kids to have a broad, generous background of knowledge about the world, not just the society we live in today but the past and the future. I would like them to have enough "knowledge" about the world to be able to develop a philosophical habit of mind, ie a habit of being able to look at the big picture and not get stuck in some narrow-focused ghetto of ideas and facts.
Sorry, this is getting rambling and I don't have time to shorten it.
Oh, I wanted to add that I think an unschooling approach -- a free, collaborative, relationship-oriented approach -- can meet a LOT of these goals in a very organic way. I guess I don't completely agree with either Kohn or Hirsch -- I think the truth is somewhere else altogether and is something to do with family relationships and developing a sense of vocation.
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