Be Not Afraid (to Read Great Books)

Spring is the time to plan, declutter, and read articles on homeschooling philosophy : ). Even though it snowed yesterday and FEELS like December around here, I know spring is just around the corner even up above the mile-high marker.

We bring Liam down to the Amtrak station this afternoon to return for his last month of college before his, yes, his GRADUATION! Right after he gets back to college, tomorrow in fact, he has to present his senior thesis defense so any prayers or good wishes for his success would be appreciated. His topic is upon the proper end of fiction/literature. The title is "Felt Life" from Henry James' introduction to Portrait of a Lady:

"There is, I think, no more nutritive or suggestive truth in this connexion than that of the perfect dependence of the 'moral' sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in producing it. The question comes back thus, obviously, to the kind and the degree of the artist's prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which his subject springs. The quality and capacity of that soil, its ability to "grow" with due freshness and straightness any vision of life, represents, strongly or weakly, the projected morality. That element is but another name for the more or less close connexion of the subject with some mark made on the intelligence, with some sincere experience."

Or as Flannery O'Connor wrote in an essay called "The Church and the Fiction Writer":

What the fiction writer will discover, if he discovers anything at all, is that he himself cannot move or mold reality in the interests of abstract truth. The writer learns, perhaps more quickly than the reader, to be humble in the face of what-is. What-is is all he has to do with; the concrete is his medium; and he will realize eventually that fiction can transcend its limitations only by staying within them. Henry James said that the morality of a piece of fiction depended on the amount of 'felt life' that was in it. The Catholic writer, in so far as he has the mind of the Church, will feel life from the standpoint of the central Christian mystery: that it has, for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for. But this should enlarge not narrow his field of vision.

Anyway, changing the subject but perhaps not altogether, here are three articles I just linked to on a Great Books Reading group I am on (designed for Kolbe Academy parents to read the jr high and high school books before their kids get to them). The articles are about reading difficult but rewarding literature, and continuing to learn and study through life -- basically on the theme "Be not afraid.. anything worthwhile you read with a sincere effort, you will get something out of" (There's something wrong with that sentence but I have to get off the computer so I will let it stand for now).

• How to Read a Hard Book
• Teaching Classical Literature Classically(it seems to relate a bit to our own self-teaching efforts)
• How to Be a Student

security vs standing up

As you might know if you read this blog regularly, I've been sorting through books. About 11 boxes have already gone out the door in one way or another and I have about 10 more left to either sell or consign to thrift stores. I still have about 16 bookshelves left so don't imagine a book-less house.

Most of these discarded books, surprisingly to me, were no-brainers in the clearance process. They were almost all good books, except for a few that I picked up at the dime rack that were more like pseudo-books. Those were easy to get rid of.

Some were from past seasons of our lives, like my daughter's extensive horse book collection -- we kept a few treasures like Marguerite Henry's Album of Horses, but got rid of the 5-pound encyclopedias and riding manuals that aren't particularly useful to her anymore. Similarly with my second son's vast collection of reptile books -- we kept a few well-worn representative treasures, got rid of the rest.

The category that surprised me the most was the old homeschooling books. I had an archaeological deposit of them from various eras of my life. At various times I had lent out or given away a few but I had kept my "core". The same with old, GOOD curricula that I never used but respected too much to consign to the giveaway pile. However, this Lent I was able to divest myself of 80% of these. I thought it would be a terrible wrench, but in fact it was like when I gave up blogging last year for Lent -- it felt like a good stretch.

I was reading Johny Tremain to Kieron and Paddy and Aidan through March, and the last chapter is called A Man Can Stand Up. It is about the battle for liberty. For some reason, this phrase kept running through my head as I sorted through books. I collect books because of freedom ... books are purveyors of ideas. At the same time, it's not having the books that purveys freedom. It's what they can bring into your mind and heart.

I have had a problem since I can remember. I want to surround myself with security. So whatever I value I collect and then I use those things as a shelter and barricade. The problem is that the things often go relatively unused; I become like a dragon sleeping on a hoard. The security of having them starts replacing the value of what attracted me to them in the first place.

We still have a LOT of books! But the process of sorting through them and evaluating -- do I still need this? is it being actively used or will it be in the near future? is it a deadweight in this house at this time? has helped me let go of a certain dependence I was hardly aware of, since book collecting is one of those "good" addictions. In Johny Tremain, James Otis illustrates his point about liberty by standing up in the slanting-roofed attic.

"It is all so much simpler than you think," he said. He lifted his hands and pushed against the rafters. "....one simple thing. Only that a man can stand up."

Of course I am using his quote to illustrate a rather different thing than national liberty, but I did feel slightly the same way as I weeded. Plus it was really helpful to me to be able to sell some of the books. I never used to sell old books. I just didn't want to get into the whole thing of exchanging cash. It still feels viscerally a bit like the money-changers to me. However, selling has allowed me to let go of books that weren't suited to my family, but which I had a lot of respect for. If someone buys a book, I know they have or at least think they have a place for it in their family. If I hand off a box of books at the thrift store, or at the next homeschool meeting, the treasures MIGHT find a valued place on someone's shelves, but they could also end up being tossed (probably my worst nightmare if I happen to love the book).

Anywa, now that I've gone through for the first time and made all the obvious decisions, I'm going to start going through again and making some of the tougher calls. That was actually how this post started -- but it got away from me, not for the first time!

A Book I Won't Be Giving Away

This young man, my husband's uncle, who died in World War II at age 19, had this book as a child. You can see his signature, at about age 8, in the front flap of the book (below). He seemed to be practicing his cursive because he wrote his name about five times all over the front leaves.

I'm having Kieron read it for nature study this term. It's in Ambleside Year 3.5 but I didn't want Kieron to miss it.

The pictures are a bit muddy -- I can't get a good light inside the house this time of day. But you get the idea.









































I was just reading about The Wild Duck -- the text brings back a different age:

THE title will suggest to most boys a line across the autumn sky at sunset, with a bit of mystery about it; or else a dark triangle moving southward, high and swift, at Thanksgiving time. To a few, who know well the woods and fields about their homes, it may suggest a lonely little pond, with a dark bird rising swiftly, far out of reach leaving the ripples playing among the sedges. lo those accustomed to look sharply it will suggest five or six more birds, downy little fellows, hiding safe among roots and grasses, so still that one seldom suspects their presence. But the duck, like most game birds, loves solitude; the details of his life he keeps very closely to himself; and boys must be content with occasional glimpses.

Books and Pseudo-Books

I'm in a sort of cave made of piles of books around my laptop.... one series of stacks is to discard, one is to keep for possible selling, and one is just to keep. My project this weekend has been to type book titles into Amazon and see which ones are worth $$$ and which aren't. Sort of fun, but sort of disillusioning at the same time. So many books in the world that apparently aren't worth much to anyone.

One thing that makes me mad and sad is the textbooks. I own a few big, shiny, glossy textbooks that (1) I collected from the dime rack at the library or (2) I was given by friends who knew I am a homeschooler who loves books. These are monster 5 pound things that look like they could last a century, or kill someone if you dropped them from your second story window, with no expense spared in colorful, elaborate illustrations and smart DK-style headings and sidebars.

And they are going for $.01 at Amazon because there is a 2009 edition out now and these books are 2007 or 2008. Obsolete now. Whereas brand new, they go for $75 and up. Education funding crisis, indeed. Hmph. Someone is making lots of money. I can only imagine how the schools toss out their last year's models in favor of the new, improved model that of course is changed just enough so that the online resources and so forth will no longer support the old ones.

I wonder what they do with the old ones? They're utterly worthless at second hand. When I look inside them, they aren't much worth reading even when pristinely new. Like glossy stockholder's portfolio packets, almost. Text that pushes back at your eyes and actively resists understanding. Do they end up in landfills? Shouldn't we pass a bill limiting this waste of trees and imposition of chemical coloring processes on perfectly good paper? My guess is that this would come off as educational curmudgeonry, equivalent to saying that we should skimp on our childrens' education.

Another sad thing is when the children's hospital, the library or some such place has a Free Book program in place and they hand out the kind of book that hardly seems like a book to me. Aidan got a Blues Clues book one time, so glitzy that it looked like a McToy but much more boring to most kids, I am afraid, and with rather less creative value. At least, for Aidan, who would have preferred a copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar -- when his speech therapist gave him that book he carried it around with him for days. Kids tend to like REAL books in my experience, books that are a joy to read and listen to, but if they do happen to be attracted to a glossy book with a familiar TV character on the front I am not sure if it really helps them develop what I would call literacy. Maybe it does help, a little, in the same way reading the back of a cereal box might.

And one more thing makes me sad and that is when some book that has been a bestseller and published in a glossy hardcover then a mass market paperback, like a Dr Phil book or some other type of self-help or popular inspirational book, and has quickly become totally worthless ... there are 200 copies selling for the fateful $.01 price on Amazon. Meanwhile the author has written a new bestseller. Another kind of obsolescence there.

It makes me want to call for a book-printing freeze. Stop the presses. There can be too much of a good thing. All these glossy illustrations, catchy content, and sheer volume and speed. I am wondering if it has an adverse effect on literacy. Even the Great Books are mass-produced nowadays. How could young people not feel some contempt? Maybe book-burnings aren't necessary -- instead, just endlessly produce books that are almost instant doorstops and landfill fodder. Then you can keep insisting that all you want is universal literacy and no one can really say anything to the contrary.

All this book-sorting has started to help me break free of a long-standing attachment. Books are treasures to me. The look of them alone inspires reverence in me. I imagine heaven as the book stacks at Trinity College. I never would have thought there could be such a thing as a glut of books, which are or ought to be things of the spirit, but now I am afraid there is. If I go back to Aquinas's definitions of types of gluttony I can make an analogy to literary publishing along these lines:

too soon, too expensive, too much, too eager, too dainty, too fervent

Quality matters, and seems sometimes to be in inverse proportion to quantity.

There is a lot of love for books out there still -- the very liveliness of the Amazon Marketplace shows that. But it flows along in a distinctly different, though perhaps occasionally overlapping, stream from the mainstream publication stream.

Week 18 -- Thinking about Low Tides

So we are at what Melissa Wiley calls a "lovely, lovely low tide" right now. But the low tide always reveals lots of fascinating curiosities.

Our family enjoys both kinds of learning—the heady adventure of the well-planned fishing trip, with a goal and a destination in mind, and the mellower joys of undirected discovery during weeks at the metaphorical beach. .... often I find that the children
catch more fish, so to speak, when the tide is out. Beachcombing reveals many treasures.

It's hard to list them all. One thing I notice is that the treasures you pick up in beachcombing aren't always ones you can identify right away. Since I like clarity, I find it hard to go with something I can't define. Like -- when three siblings of very different ages and temperaments find a way to play together well for quite a long time, how can I list it without doing a disservice to what it means? (and then I start thinking -- isn't the better part of our lives like that?)

But a few things that I wanted to list, definitely not all-inclusive:

• Aidan typed more numbers into the word processor, asked me to put them in different colors and print them out. Then I cut the numbers into long strips with my cutting board and he snipped apart the numbers with scissors and put them in order.
• He has been spelling words and yesterday asked me to write a bunch down: quiet, queen, zebra, zipper, hippo, giant, dog, used. He spelled them out for me and I wrote them down. Then he carried the list around with him and asked me if he could take them to bed with him. He tried to write QUIET but he can't manage that yet though he can spell it with magnet letters on the refrigerator. He did write TOP though, and then went upstairs and formed the word TOP with his handwriting-without-tears lines and curves.
• He found 100 Easy Lessons and brought it down and spelled several of the words.
• Then Paddy browsed through 100 Easy Lessons; I was curious about how his reading was doing since I haven't asked him for a while to read. I asked him to read the last story in the book and he did, only missing one word (hunting).
  
• Aidan is spelling and reading everything he sees. " S-T-O-P -- that says STOP!" at the grocery parking lot today, as he read the painted word on the pavement.

Lots of other things I can't remember right now. .... we just got home from an unplanned trip to the dentist. Sean came home with an aching tooth yesterday so we took him out of school to the dentist today. Happily, it was not an abscess or a cavity or anything.... something to do with extra tartar bothering his gums???

I finished Jacques Maritain's Introduction to Philosophy -- very good book -- and am now reading a Gilbert Highet book called The Immortal Profession, about teaching. I'm not giving up my "cursory reading" as you see -- too many books out there that I want to at least read through once.

more on creativity and learning

More notes from Creativity and Learning: this time from an essay by Philip H Abelson called "Relation of Group Activity to Creativity in Science". I thought these four stages of creativity, apparently formulated by one Herbert Fox, were interesting.

1. Preparation, involving thorough investigation of the problem by reading and experiment.
2. Incubation, involving a conscious and unconscious mental digestion and assimilation of all pertinent information acquired.
3. Illumination, involving the appearance of the creative idea, the creative flash.
4. Verification, involving experimental testing of the creative idea.

Recently Harold Hughes has added two steps which should be included. His list is

1. interest
2. preparation
3. incubation
4. illumination
5. verification
6. exploitation

This was interesting to me because the stage of "illumination" is what is commonly thought of as creativity, but these "stages" take into account the work before and after the moment of illumination. Creativity thus seems to follow upon plenty of quality input AND time to process and connect seemingly disparate things, and the creative illumination is then followed by working out the details and validity of the creative discovery.

This article called No school like home talked about the value of informality in the homeschool in developing this creative process.

..A book just published by academics at the Institute of Education, University of London, is highly controversial. It argues that home education is a viable alternative to school up to the age of 14.

Alan Thomas, a visiting fellow in the institute's department of psychology and human development, and Harriet Pattison, a research associate, conclude that informal learning at home is an "astonishingly efficient way to learn", as good if not better than school for many children.

"The ease, naturalness and immense intellectual potential of informal learning up to the age of middle secondary school means they can learn certainly as much if not more," they say in How Children Learn at Home.

Thomas and Pattison interviewed and observed 26 families who home-educated, between them, more than 70 children. Some had been out of school for a couple of years, others had never been inside a school. Most were British, but a handful were Irish, Australian and Canadian.

The authors discovered that these children absorbed information mainly by "doing nothing, observing, having conversations, exploring, and through self-directed learning". They liken the "chaotic nature" of informal learning to the process that leads to scientific breakthroughs, the early stages of crafting a novel, coming up with a solution to a technical problem, or the act of composing music.

"Its products are often intangible, its processes obscure, its progress piecemeal," they say. "There are false starts, unrelated bits and pieces picked up, interests followed and discarded, sometimes to be taken up again, sometimes not... Yet the chaotic nature of the informal curriculum does not appear to be a barrier to children organising it into a coherent body of knowledge."

Thomas and Pattison acknowledge that critics will say home-educated children are likely to pick up information peppered with misunderstandings or inaccuracies, and parents may unwittingly pass on their own misconceptions. "Yet the lack of information quality-control does not appear to lead to muddled, confused children," they say.

"In some ways, it may be an advantage because, rather than presenting knowledge in neat packages, the informal curriculum forces learners to become actively engaged with their information - to work with it, move it around, juggle ideas and resolve contradictions... It is not a static thing contained in a series of educational folders. It is alive and dynamic."

The article went on to say that:

Contrary to expectations, the home-educated children had no difficulty entering formal education, the authors found. The informal curriculum is "as good a preparation as any" for college, university or academic correspondence courses, they say. "The young people had the personal skills to make the transition with apparent ease."

This seems to be in line with what I've noticed about my homeschool through the years. There has been sort of a mystery in the spaces. Sometimes nothing seems to be happening, but it is usually not so. Aidan is suddenly spelling words and asking what they say, and can read the time off a digital clock, and can count to 100 with a little help. Paddy is comparing the tale of the Woozles, in the Pooh story, to the Thompsons getting lost in the desert in his Tintin book. And these are just the intellectual things I happen to notice because they are on my "list" in some way. There are all sorts of other things happening in quiet. Understanding this, I've tried to allow silences and spaces or tried to tolerate them, at least, though they sometimes make me uncomfortable.

The "stages of creativity" seem to echo in some ways the process of what goes on under the surface of our home life in the way of learning. I can sometimes see the interest and preparation; I don't always see the "incubation" or even the actual moment of illumination; I sometimes only know what has been happening at the verification or "exploitation" stage, when the child is able to demonstrate or use his knowledge in some way.

Online:

• Working Paper: Creativity Models
• Seven Stages of Creativity
• Wikipedia article on creativity

Watching Bleak House

We didn't get around to playing Robo-Rally. I made pizza and ginger cookies and it all took a long time. But we did watch 3 episodes of Bleak House while we ate dinner, and that was fun -- the older four kids and I -- the youngers were in their bedrooms, and Kevin was working. Usually it is me off somewhere while Kevin is watching movies with the kids, but Clare knows I am more likely to sit down for a classic book adaptation than for most anything else.

A couple of years ago we got this Charles Dickens collection. So far we've watched Martin Chuzzlewit, which the kids absolutely loved and have watched twice, and Our Mutual Friend, which was quite good too.

Our Mutual Friend was fun because we watched it during Lent, the year before last, I think; we had given up videos and most sweets for Lent so we watched an episode each Sunday and Clare planned a round of teas and dainties -- like, lemon bread and lemon ginger tea for one week, chocolate caramel chai and oreo-frosted tea cake another time, and so on. She printed it out on a pretty itinerary, and we would bring our little tea pot and goodies upstairs every Sunday afternoon. The second to last episode, we were visiting Liam at college and bringing Sean to a football combine in the same area, so we stayed at Ventura beach overnight and watched the penultimate episode along with almond poppyseed muffins and chicken salad rolls and some kind of tea which we brought with us and made at the hotel. It is a nice memory.

Bleak House is a bit odd.... quite dark in the filming. The London scenes are so slimy and grey and grotesque that it feels to me a bit like the second Pirates of the Caribbean. You expect to see people growing barnacles or merging into walls. The pacing is odd in places, and you can really feel the persona of the director in the way he plans the camera shots. We're on the 5th episode now and all the multiple Dickens characters that make these movies quite brisk to keep up with visually are moving towards their Dickensian plot revelations and unravellings of mystery. It's very worthwhile to watch, but not quite so much a tea and muffin type movie, nor quite as hilarity-inducing as the kids found Martin Chuzzlewit. Of Bleak House, Chesterton writes:

Bleak House has every characteristic of his new realistic culture. Dickens never now, as in his early books, revels in the parts he likes and scamps the parts he does not, after the manner of Scott. He does not, as in previous tales, leave his heroes and heroines mere walking gentlemen and ladies with nothing at all to do but walk: he expends upon them at least ingenuity. By the expedients (successful or not) of the self-revelation of Esther or the humorous inconsistencies of Rick, he makes his younger figures if not lovable at least readable. Everywhere we see this tighter and more careful grip. He does not, for instance, when he wishes to denounce a dark institution, sandwich it in as a mere episode in a rambling story of adventure, as the debtor's prison is embedded in the body of "Pickwick" or the low Yorkshire school in the body of "Nicholas Nickleby." He puts the Court of Chancery in the centre of the stage, a sombre and sinister temple, and groups round it in artistic relation decaying and frantic figures, its offspring and its satirists, An old dipsomaniac keeps a rag and bone shop, type of futility and antiquity, and calls himself the Lord Chancellor. A little mad old maid hangs about the courts on a forgotten or imaginary lawsuit, and says with perfect and pungent irony, "I am expecting a judgment shortly. On the Day of Judgment." Rick and Ada and Esther are not mere strollers who have strayed into the court of law, they are its children, its symbols, and its victims. The righteous indignation of the book is not at the red heat of anarchy, but at the white heat of art. Its anger is patient and plodding, like some historic revenge. Moreover, it slowly and carefully creates the real psychology of oppression. The endless formality, the endless unemotional urbanity, the endless hope deferred, these things make one feel the fact of injustice more than the madness of Nero.

Also, I did finish Kant and the Nineteenth Century today as I had hoped to, though I had to stay up late to do so (and once dozed off with my reading glasses on my nose, and now it's even later and I'm wide awake).

Books 2008 -- November and December

List from Sidebar:

• The Singing Sands
• The Uses of Knowledge (Selections from Idea of a University)
• Last Days of Socrates
• Herodotus: Histories
• A Montessori Manual for Teachers and Parents
• Acedia and Me
• Ten Essentials of Highly Healthy People
• Homeschooling: A Family's Journey
• A Haystack Full of Needles
• The Elements of Teaching
• The Sparrow
• Schuyler's Monster
• 
  

understand before evaluating

This is from Robert Hutchins' essay on "The Ways (and Whys) of Reading". I am quoting it because it discusses what I see as one of the most common mistakes people make when they are critiquing a work, whether expository OR literary. As my 12 year old embarks on his teenage years -- what Dorothy Sayers called the "Pert" or dialectic stage -- I don't necessarily want to just TELL him this, but I try to make it an operating principle in all book- or topical events type discussions with my teens. Needless to say, this is a reminder to myself as well.

The first (rule or maxim) is that the reader should neither agree nor disagree with an author until he is sure that he understand what the author is saying. To agree with what you do not understand is inane; to disagree in the absence of understanding is impertinent. Many readers start to disagree with what they are reading almost at once -- before they have performed the tasks of analysis and interpretation which should always precede that of criticism. In effect, they are saying to an author: "I don't know what you are talking about, but I think you are wrong." It would be just as silly for them to say, "right" as it is for them to say "wrong". In either case, they are expressing prejudice rather than undertaking genuine criticism, which must be based on understanding.

This rule calls for patience and humility on the reader's part. If he is reading anything worth reading -- anything which has the power to instruct him and elevate his mind -- he should be loath to judge it too soon, for it would be rash to presume that he has so quickly attained an adequate understanding of it. If he suspects that he has fallen short in his understanding, he should always blame himself rather than the author. Not only is that the proper attitude if the author is worth reading at all, but, in addition, such an attitude may keep the reader's mind on the task of interpretation. There is always time for criticism after that is well done.

This relates a bit to a quote by Chesterton which I put here some time ago.

I notice it also ramifies out to an interpersonal skill, as of course literary and topical discussion always seem to. The Catholic Church calls "rash judgment" the habit of leaping to conclusions -- usually negative ones, but I think it's possible to be too foolishly approving as well. Melancholics and cholerics (I'm one of the former) may be inclined to hit the negative side of the rash judgment, while sanguines and phlegmatics may be too quick to jump on a bandwagon.

Early teens are particularly likely to argue and to form hasty judgments, as you may remember from your own younger days or from life with teen children. This is a developmental advance of great significance, and is to be celebrated. The child is newly able to entertain abstract ideas and consider their meaning in his mind. However, he is not yet skilled in entertaining -- he pulls some in as HIS ideas, and rejects some cursorily, sometimes for very odd reasons, like not liking the author's name.

The goal of education is to foster the impartiality necessary to come to honest, not pre-digested, conclusions.

To some extent, of course, it's impossible not to evaluate as you go. I have met people, and books, that make me immediately wary on the first encounter. The trick is not to "rest your case" until you've thought it through. Nor ought you to start shotgunning your conclusions and judgments --like random pellets -- in all directions.

Since I'm a visual person, I usually think of reading a new book or entertaining a new idea as "letting it into the outer chamber". I try to entertain cordially, fairly, and impartially, but I keep it in the outside rooms until trust has been established. This is a process, and certainly doesn't come through hasty approval or hasty condemnation. As Hutchins points out, it is impossible to grow through reading and thinking if you just turn everything into yourself, as material to support what you already think and feel.

I doubt if many people succeed in doing this fairly and well ALL the time; it's an intellectual discipline. But I do think it's one of the more important habits to acquire, and it's one that each person must acquire for himself or herself. Once you can do it a bit though, you can truly be educated through books.

Making Use of Mind -- Herbart

I am on to Chapter 7 of Charlotte Mason's Philosophy of Education, titled "How we Make Use of the Mind". This chapter, like the section on "Ideas" in chapter 6, gets on to philosophical turf, and it can get very difficult since the differences between schools of philosophy can be very subtle. So be warned that I am going to be over-simplifying in what follows.

The chapter breaks down into three main sections (the sub-headings spring from the main points).:

----------------------------

I. Herbartian psychology and how it affects education

• "Concentration Schemes"
• Distinction from CM method "ideas" as organisms
  

II. Alexander Paterson (who was a penologist and wrote a much-discussed book called "Across the Bridges").

• Continuation Schools.

--------------------------

So I get the feeling that this chapter is a sort of overview of what the educational field looked like in CM's day, some of the "topical" issues which were in the air the educationists of her time were breathing.

First of all, Herbart. What was of worth in his philosophy was in his respect for the power of "ideas". CM acknowledged that his understanding of the power of ideas and "associations" was an improvement on the "Knowledge is sensation" theorists like Locke and more particularly, Condillac, who held that "all our ideas, without exception, are derived from the senses, and especially from touch." (Elsewhere she spoke of "what Plato condemns as "that lie of the soul," that corruption of the highest truth, of which Protagoras is guilty in the saying that, "Knowledge is sensation.") Yet Herbart's "association of ideas" and "apperception masses" were still too reductive. They gave the ideas a power of their own and thus limited the freedom of the individual -- as CM wrote:

Herbart begins to account for man minus what I have called the person. (Person is used in the common-sense, everyday acceptance of the word.) He allows a soul, but he says, "The soul has no capacity nor faculty whatever either to receive or to produce anything. It has originally neither ideas nor feelings nor desires. It knows nothing of itself and nothing of other things. Further, within it lie no forms of intuition or thought, no laws of willing and acting, nor any sort of predisposition, however remote, to all this." (Lehrbuch zur Psychologie, Part III, sects.152––See Herbatian Psychology, by J. Adams)There remain two possibilities for the soul: an effective vis inertiae and what Herbart describes as the power of reacting on an idea; that is to say, the soul itself is no longer quite as it was after it has thus reacted.

Turns out Duplicates––Again, given two souls supplied with precisely the same ideas, in precisely the same order, and with no other ideas whatsoever, and we get duplicates of the same person, a possibility which would demolish once and for ever that great conception, the solidarity of the race. Once more, what does the Herbartian theory of man minister to our interest in personality, our sense of the sacredness of the person? The person is non est, or is the mere sport of the ideas which take possession of him. He has not so much as a special fitness for one class of ideas rather than for another; all is casual; and, as for the evolution of the individual it is not he, but this or that mass of ideas which possesses him, that expands. The man appears to be no more than a sort of vessel of transport to carry ideas into their proper sphere of action.

Herbartian psychology is rich in suggestion, but we cannot take it up as it stands without losing the educational value of the two or three leading principles which are, as we say, 'in the air' for the teaching of mankind.

(from School Education, Some Educational Theories Examined)

I went and consulted the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia (a treasure trove of background on philosophical currents of the early 20th century and before) and found this on Herbart:

With Herbart interest is not simply a means: it is an end in itself. "Many-sided interest" frees from narrow prejudices and counteracts evil possessions, but it is also an ideal worthy of all admiration in se. Ignorance is really the main factor in vice. All action springs out of "the circle of thought"; hence the decisive influence of the matter or content of instruction in the work of character building. "Make your instruction educative" is the great Herbartian maxim. Connected with the insistence on the psychological agencies of apperception and interest is the Herbartian principle of correlation and the five formal steps of instruction. The former should, according to the school, govern the drawing up of the curriculum. Organize the course of studies so that the matter of the different branches simultaneously treated, e.g. the literature, history and geography, may be connected with one another; and as far as possible let the subsidiary subjects be arranged in concentric circles around the chief study...

(the article goes on to describe in more detail the Herbartian method of teaching, but CM also describes it in rather amusing detail in Philosophy of Education. If you go here to the Google repository you can see the Introduction to the Herbartian Principles of Teaching that CM was quoting from.)

The Catholic Encyclopedia sums up

Undoubtedly there is much that is stimulating and valuable in Herbart's works on Education. ...But there are other features in his theory to which serious objections are made. .. it implies an entirely mechanical view of the mind as rigidly determined as that of the English Associationists, with which indeed, notwithstanding Herbart's spiritualism, it has sundry points of similarity....The soul seems to be conceived merely as the arena for chance experiences coming from without.

To both CM and the author of the CE article, the objection to Herbart's ideas come from a diminished view of the human personality.

Jaime Castiello, SJ, who wrote in 1936, and whom I've quoted before on Personality, mentions Herbart in passing in his excellent book A Humane Psychology of Education, and makes a similar point:

"The association psychology of the last century (that of Herbart, for example) had a very superficial view of man when it assumed that a man could be reduced to his "actual thinking process."

For some reason, this research on the mechanistic psychology of the late 19th and early 20th century reminded me of a book I recently read called : IQ: A Smart History of a Failed Idea. The book told about the early tries at an objective form of intelligence testing and is a lively, critical history of the development and ramifications of the idea of testing the "actual thinking process" of the individual human person.

As Charlotte Mason points out, following the logic of Locke and the philosophies that derived from his tends to maximize the role of the teacher. Where Aquinas would say that the teacher is like a doctor -- supporting the patient's health by arts that as closely as possible resembled nature, and taking a secondary role -- the new educational theorists put the teacher in the primary place -- the students were in a sense, objects -- the teaching was done TO them.

a few thoughts and forms

I'm not sure what I think of my new header and format. Hmm. I know I spent way too much time on it, though. I was trying to transition out of my planning marathon -- or at least, into the next stage.

I finally finished the basics of the Year 7 planning -- you can see the details over at Schola et Studium, but here are the forms:

• Chapter by Chapter Outline of Year 7 (course breakdown with books, PDF)
• Overview for Year 7 (doc, with some goals and habits-- I want to eventually add to it)
• 2008 Calendar(doc)
• Prospective Timetable for Year 7 (doc -- hour by hour order to morning -- may change when we are actually there)

It looks a bit cluttered, and I will probably go back over it on August as I wrote on this Real Learning thread. but it's nice to have it basically there. Here's what's left to be done. I am sure there is a Multum non Multa golden thread running through it *somewhere* -- mostly, Language and Reading and Writing and Math and Habits. If I have those, the rest usually take care of themselves.

Year 1 for Aidan and Paddy will not be written up in nearly so much detail. I want to focus on habits. .... not just micro-habits like raising the toilet seat, but formative habits that I have to work on too, like a habit of reading aloud, a habit of time outdoors, a habit of observation -- and so on. Charlotte Mason describes many of them. This year I wanted to work some more on my Charlotte Mason goal, and work some more on these Monthly Themes, particularly the Character Formation one. You notice I got away from them for a while. Which is something I do, but the blog helps me remember and get back on track.....eventually.

I think I would be a better unschooler if I could just do things without planning, but in fact I have to think several thoughts for every one thing I actually put into action, so I thought I might as well try to do some of the thinking up front.

Off to make cookies, and try to focus on something else. I got Asimov's Realms of Algebra from the library, and Critique of Criminal Reason finally came. Realms of Algebra is a keeper. I would TOTALLY read this to Kieron over the course of next year -- it bridges between arithmetic and algebra so beautifully -- except that it is OOP and apparently you can't get it for less than $35 even second-hand.

Today is Liam's 22nd birthday -- I was 22 when I married (OK, almost 23). Time does fly! We will miss him today. He is up at Oregon but will probably get a Guinness with some people up there to celebrate. When he gets home we will have a combined birthday and welcome-back party.

Blessings on you this next year, oldest son!

Can't get Kant

I am still killing my brain over Kant. What I am trying to find out is how Kant's epistemology compares to Aristotle's and Aquinas's. What I probably ought to be doing is actually reading Aristotle's De Anima, and Kant' s Critique of Pure Reason, but when I tried to do that I couldn't get my brain around the terminology and explanations, let alone synthesize, compare and contrast, etc.

So I went to the secondary-sources approach. Frederick Coppleston (a Jesuit scholar) has a whole history of philosophy series, and I have the first 2 of his books, so I knew he was good. The other book I got from the library is Descartes to Derrida by Peter Sedgwick. Quite readable considering the subject matter.

I found this blog post called Aristotlelian Epistemology and the Leo XIII's Thomist Revival. And here is an article called Aristotelian Epistemology.

Whenever Kevin hears Liam and I talking about Kant, he thinks of the lady in Singing in the Rain who says, "I KAAANT stand it!"

Let Them Eat Cake

I just finished reading Let Them Eat Cake The Case Against Controlling What Your Children Eat and I thought I would quickly write out some thoughts. It was a bit different than I expected it to be.

The main points seem to be:

• There are many variety of kids -- if your child is on the high end or low end of the percentile charts, it doesn't mean he has to go on a diet or start having half n half in his breakfast cereal. A more or less consistent growth curve is more important to keep an eye on.
• Children between the ages of 2 and 11 aren't really growing that fast relative to their baby and teenage years, so what seems like "hardly eating anything" is probably pretty normal.
• Stay watchful and pay attention to providing a range of healthy food choices, but don't have a fearful, angry attitude about food and the child's eating patterns. Above all, most food issues are not worth battles and tension.
• Children under age two should NOT have their fat intake reduced; this could be dangerous for the growing brain and body.
  
• Most of the additives in food have been thoroughly tested, are better than the historical alternatives (mold and spoilage on food) and don't really change the behavior or health status of most people. The book does discuss some additives like MSG which some people don't tolerate well and which shouldn't be eaten by pregnant women.
• Even children who are obese often don't grow up to be obese adults (about 30 percent carrythrough, the book reports). A poor self-image often outlasts childhood plumpness so unless the child wants to do something about his body size, it's probably better not to put him on a reducing diet or make any foods "forbidden". Rather, it's better to look at the "big picture" and put the richer foods in a proper context, with a variety of healthy foods served and various fun physical activities engaged in.
  

This actually reminds me of much of the advice I've read in many standard diet or nutrition books (I like to read those for inspiration at intervals). Especially, the emotional component in eating has been taken more seriously in recent years. Food is an important and legitimate component in almost all celebrations across cultures. Almost every culture, the book remarks, uses sweet food as an expression of celebration. Babies' first food is sweet and fatty. So there is nothing wrong per se with sweet and fatty food.

But quarrels and power struggles over eating can often lead to the "bad" kind of emotional eating in adulthood. The book includes a brief discussion of eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia, saying that part of the problem sometimes is unrealistic expectations of what weight and eating should be about. It recommends that the parents rather than spend their energy in negative restrictions, rather expand the child's options and have a variety of healthy snacks and foods in the home and make meals an enjoyable relationship-building time rather than a battleground.

If this book's recommendations can be compared to style of homeschooling it is close to what I already do, I think.

By the way, there are some fascinating "unschooling as a Catholic" discussions in the RL archives -- I have linked to the list that comes up in the RL search engine. Look especially at the ones that have several pages.

Hidden Treasure of Glaston

During Easter break I finished reading THe Hidden Treasure of Glaston to Kieron. It was a good read (see Amazon reviews and there's also a review at Love2Learn (scroll down)). It was a nice time of year to read it, during Lent, because it sort of moves in its plot from winter to spring, from a quest to its fulfillment. In fact, one of the chapters contains a vibrant description of Holy Week and the Triduum in the abbey.

There is some information about Glaston Abbey here, and here.
There are pictures here, and I had Kieron read about the history and archaelogy of the abbey.

He also read about monastery life and order from several sources, including What your Fourth Grader Needs to Know, and the Kingfisher History Encyclopedia, and Old World and America.

In one of those nice life coincidences, Liam was visiting a Benedictine Monastery in Oklahoma during the same time as we were finishing reading the book. Connections! Also, from the library arrived today Into Great Silence, which I've had recommended to me by several people. I hope to get the other kids to watch it with me and get some idea of the monastic life in visual form.

The book is rather satisfying philosophically because the Holy Grail and Excalibur are of course symbols -- icons -- as well as real objects in the history of the Abbey. Old books become an icon during the course of the book too.

I had hoped to get around to working a bit on calligraphy while we read the book and also some illuminating, since this is a big interest of mine from way back, but we didn't. However, earlier this year Kieron had read Across a Dark and Wild Sea about St Columcille and during this time he made his own ink and did some calligraphy in the uncial form.

Kieron is a wonderful kid to do these kind of loose rabbit trails with. I suggest books for him to read or sometimes just leave them lying around, and often he thinks up his own projects, and he always is at least willing to consider my suggestions (which I make in sympathy with his interest in hands-on, artistic or scientific type projects).

To be philosophical for a moment, I notice that once I get a good working relationship going with the individual child, learning becomes a lot easier and more delightful. Liam and I had a very dialectical relationship. My learning relationship with Brendan really took off the year I started a literature/map/history type unit approach. With Clare I learned to back off, and rely on encouragement and inspiration and sometimes a casual suggestion in the line of what she is interested in. Sean is extremely concrete and likes to "get it done". I've learned to work with his desire for efficiency and also give him good books and pretty much let him alone to develop his own relationship with them. I can tell how interested he is in a book by how fast he gets through it. I have learned from all of them how to learn and they also teach me a lot in their areas of interest. This is something Dorothy Sayers mentions as a natural result of real education in her essay The Lost Tools of Learning.

The little ones -- I'm not quite sure yet. And anyway, this line of thought is getting far away from the original Hidden Treasure. But one thing about the little ones -- they were really listening to a good part of this book. It is meant for ages 10 and up; I never would have thought of sitting down with Aidan and Paddy to read a book like this one, so far beyond their comprehension level. But they actually did absorb bits of it. Aidan loved shouting "Mystery of the Abbey!" whenever I said Abbey, and for some reason (I think it was the way his hair looked in the illustrations) the main character Hugh made him think of his young friend Malachy, so he corrected me, "Malachy!" every time I said Hugh. So he was listening and enjoying himself even if he wasn't getting everything out of it that Kieron was ;-).

This kind of receptive learning reminded me of when I read some of the Holling C Holling books to Sean, who was about six at the time, with 3 year old Kieron gravitating around us. A year later Kieron could narrate sections of Seabird, to my amazement. I guess interest across the age range is one of the "hidden treasures" of the homeschool.

Truth and Transformation

Some etymology that I have been reflecting upon:

First, etymology itself -- from etymos, truth, and logos, word. How beautiful! JRR Tolkien was very interested in etymologies, He was a philologist, and that word Philology means something like "one who loves and studies words."

Now, culture -- root is cultura, stemming from colere, to cultivate. The word is very close in origin to the word for worship, as Josef Pieper points out.

This one is in my mind because of Amy's post at Epiphany Springs on Mother Culture. She raises questions I have often pondered upon but have not come to a conclusion about even with a box of chocolates in the offing. But that "cultivating" aspect of the word makes me think.... cultivating involves growth and this is not the same as just relaxing and sitting back. In fact, it is almost the opposite.

So then as to worship. That one originates from the Anglo Saxon word "worth" or "value" or dignity or price... the corresponding Latin word is ""cultus". Hmm.... that is interesting!

Then, here is a tricky one -- obedience. It is very often misunderstood, because our society is set up as individualistic and obedience is thought of as the compelled behavior of an inferior. But when I was reading the Catholic Catechism I found that the etymology is from "audire" meaning to hear or hearken to. Here is Proverbs 22:17, in the same vein:

Incline thy ear, and hear the words of the wise: and apply thy heart to my knowledge.

In this respect, it can be the highest of human acts. There is something intrinsic to me, in that connection between listening -- hearkening -- and "logos" -- word, or reason. You have to listen in order to hear words. And the obedience bit is where one's will comes in; will implies voluntariness, as Charlotte Mason says:

let him (the child) know what a noble thing it is to be able to make himself do, in a minute, and brightly, the very thing he would rather not do.

And what about Epiphany? The word comes from a Greek one meaning "manifestation". We just celebrated the feast of Epiphany of course.

The Wise Men or Magi who brought gifts to the infant Jesus were the first Gentiles to acknowledge Jesus as "King" and so were the first to "show" or "reveal" Jesus to a wider world as the incarnate Christ. This act of worship by the Magi, which corresponded to Simeon’s blessing that this child Jesus would be "a light for revelation to the Gentiles" (Luke 2:32), was one of the first indications that Jesus came for all people, of all nations, of all races, and that the work of God in the world would not be limited to only a few.

In a story, it is the moment when a truth is revealed and a character reaches a turning point, and you know everything is changed -- he or she can never be the same again.

What does all this have in common? Well, isn't it obvious -- it is all about word origins : ). But there is a bit more to it than that, I believe. Gilbert Meilander wrote about Josef Pieper's main concerns in these words:

Pieper emphasizes the close connection between moral and intellectual virtue. Our minds do not–contrary to many views currently popular–create truth. Rather, they must be conformed to the truth of things given in creation. And such conformity is possible only as the moral virtues become deeply embedded in our character, a slow and halting process. We have, he writes on one occasion, "lost the awareness of the close bond that links the knowing of truth to the condition of purity." That is, in order to know the truth we must become persons of a certain sort. The full transformation of character that we need will, in fact, finally require the virtues of faith, hope, and love. And this transformation will not necessarily–perhaps not often–be experienced by us as easy or painless. Hence the transformation of self that we must–by God’s grace–undergo "perhaps resembles passing through something akin to dying."

Will you believe that I did not find that quote until just now when I was looking for something else? But it ties together those word origins very nicely. I am talking about transformation and realization. It is so easy to stay within one's comfort zone.

I have just finished Auralia's Colors, a very interesting book that I got from the library. It is in the style of Patricia McKillip, with that feeling of intense dreaming that you get from one of her stories, but with a bit of Tolkien and Lewis as well. I came across the book from the author's site by way of Iambic Admonit's review of the Golden Compass movie. It is about a baby found in a monster's footprint. That pulled me in right away.

The author of the book, Jeffrey Overstreet has a quote on his blog --The Truth must dazzle gradually-- from Emily Dickinson's poem:

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant---
Success in Cirrcuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind---

Reading for 2008

Dominion Family and Mommy Brain have lists of their reading in 2007. And Faith at Dumb Ox Academy has made a list of her reading plans for 2008. These are fun to look over for ideas.

I was not organized enough to keep track of my reading throughout 2007. What I did list is here and here. I just do not have the energy right now to extract all the names of books from those long reviews, but next year I propose to do better about keeping lists.

I think, though, that I'll try once again to list reading goals. Like Faith's, but by season rather than for the whole year.


Right now I am reading:

• From Dawn to Decadence
• Economics in One Lesson

I just got from the library:

• Auralia's Colors
• The Legend of the Firefish
• Tevye's Daughters

so I will probably read those as a break from the heavier ones.

That's the plan, which will probably take me through winter.

There ought to be some self-help/pop psychology books in there somewhere. It is funny that my daughter's violin teacher and I both read self-help books for light reading. I suppose the good ones are a bit like a collection of short stories with a theme, or like talking to with a bunch of memories wrapped around a single topic. But I only do it when I'm too tired even to read a good novel. I suppose it's the equivalent of watching Oprah or Dr. Phil for people like me who hate watching TV (and I actually did read 2 Dr Phil books last year because our library had them in the dime rack).

I have been trying to read a book of poems by Emily Dickinson but forgot about it for a while.

• I intend to read Paradise Lost.

There is also a collection of education-related books that I am going through slowly:

• The Art of Teaching
• A Humane Psychology of Education
• Effective Study
• Studying is Hard Work

and after I read Economics in One Lesson I want to read Small is Still Beautiful.

As for the GBWW I want to start with Montesquieu and Locke and go from there.

Happy New Year!

Painting Our Children’s Hearts With Beauty and Color

Cay at Cajun Cottage had a good post about the Advanced Child trend. She also linked to some other interesting posts on the subject, but they were more about books that are "reading level suitable" but not "maturity level suitable" for kids . I have some thoughts about that issue, but I'm not sure if it's one of the posts I really need to write. I am sure it's been written well by someone else.

But I like what Cay says:

Goodness! isn't life complicated enough without funneling books down their neural tube? Let's lighten up a bit. Let's paint our children's hearts with beauty and color. This isn't an argument for dumbing down or building up. It's an argument for touching our children's hearts with the first things that came out of our mouths and into their ears...Words!

She goes on to talk about how she will be sharing Patricia Pollaco and Jan Brett and eggnog with her children today, not pushing them into reading Jane Eyre or Pride and Prejudice; there are years ahead for that. "Pushing" is the operative word here, of course; if one of her children picked up Jane Austen, or if Cay wanted to invite a child to read it with her, that would be a different matter. But it wouldn't be about "reading levels" or "advancing" – it would be about an invitation to share a great book.

Ruth Beechick said something I read many many years ago, about how it wasn't necessary to be always "challenging" your kids in reading. Did your kid check a book out of the library and read a couple of chapters and then drop it? Why force him or her to finish it? Do you force yourself to read every single book you start? Maybe it would be a richer experience for the child some other time. Is your child reading at a supposed 5^th grade level at age 6? For one thing, this is not that uncommon. Really, it's not. It does not mean super-geniuis, any more than heaving a Nerf Ball across the room at 9 months means you have the next Joe Montana. Those things tend to even out over time. Some plants bloom quickly, and others bloom over time. The quality is not measured by the quickness. But even supposing you have a genius on your hands, why would she necessarily then want to read only books from Sonlight's Year 5 at age six? Why ought she to have to? There are so many wonderful books out there suited for 6 year old – not dumbed down, but not accelerated either – with creative, poetic use of language, first rate illustrations and perceptive understanding of life's truths.

Ruth Beechick recommended a variety – easier books to let the child consolidate his skills and for age-level enjoyment and understanding; more difficult books for challenge and growth. Most kids naturally gravitate towards a mixture if this is encouraged. My kids went from The Hobbit and Beowulf to Frog and Toad and Peter Cottontail and back again. The key here is no twaddle. The picture books should be ones that a grown-up could find delight in reading, as CS Lewis said. As Cay says, they should be books that paint hearts with beauty and touch them with words.

Reading levels aren't really the key. I know kids who weren't really reading at age 10, who could read the Federalists and Anti-Federalists, with understanding and joy, at age 14. I know kids who were reading bits of Romeo and Juliet and the Hobbit at age six, who also had a heart of joy and wonder for Hans Christian Andersen and Beatrix Potter, and needed time and space to develop a relationship with those things.

James Taylor said that everyone should read the Pooh books. If you missed them when you were six or seven, you should read them at nineteen or forty. They are not "accelerated" – they live outside of sequence at all, in eternity. That is almost the point. Acceleration implies sequence, doesn't it? So does "advancement". They are transitive terms, leaving in question the end goal: advancement towards what? If it is towards "superior mental function" then it is the wrong goal. Children and books and their relationship shouldn't be locked into sequence like tracks in the service of academic superiority; books – particularly speaking of literature, here-- should open doors to eternity. This is a greater thing. You can be advanced and accelerated towards nothing; it happens to kids all the time. On the other hand, you can be a "bear of very little brain" and participate in eternity.

I always feel a bit sad when I walk into the local school's resource room, where Aidan has his speech therapy. The room is stacked with piles of books. … sets all of the same books. You might see a pile of Berlioz the Bear, along with a stack of The Black Cauldron. A few feet away is Tom Sawyer and on the other side is Ghost Town at Sundown by Mary Pope Osborne. When I was a child I would have thought this was a treasure trove, except.. except.. it is not so much a trove as a warehouse. And what they do with these stacks is horrible. I have a hard time writing it, because it seems so well intentioned and yet so misguided. They put them on a list with grade levels and point systems. A school kid reads one of them. Then he takes a multiple choice test to ensure that he has really read them. Then, if she passes the test, she is eligible to pick little prizes according to how many points the book is "worth". Oh, my. I feel so sad for these stacks of paperbacks stuck in the resource room. Just the fact that they are in these stacks seems to dehumanize them, relativize them, temporalize them. This is not eternity; it is like exile, or like exploitation. I feel so sorry for the kids who encounter Lloyd Alexander and Jan Brett in a context of "reading levels" and "points" for "prizes" and stacks of paperbacks just sitting there, in a side room. Surely that kid has not at all the same experience as a child who hears them while cuddled in the arms of a parent, or picks them up while browsing quietly through a home library on a snowy afternoon.

Now such is the power of a child's heart and mind, and the power of a great book, that even this conclave of prisoners can have wonderful results, I do not doubt. One good thing about this warehouse of books is that I can see a little child browsing the warehouse, choosing a book, passing the test, even acquiring the cheap prize, and in spite of all these hurdles still connecting with a book in a real, life-changing way. Because the human spirit, of authors and children, is bigger and better than all those hurdles are small and mean. But it's not the best way. And using books as fodder for "acceleration" is not the best way, any more than it would be a good thing to shovel books into the fuel compartment of a new kind of high powered locomotive. Travelers' guides to your journey ought not to be used as your fuel.

economics and more

I tried to read this a couple of years ago. Maybe it will go better if I follow along with others this time.

Liam started talking to me about Spinoza and Hobbes the other day. At his college this year they are talking about government and rights and responsibilities of rulers. If you go here and scroll down to the junior year you can see some of the books on his course list. This is really interesting stuff. I totally missed Government in high school because I was getting a British O-Level education in Switzerland at the time. My history teacher Mr Schumann was a first rate teacher and I still remember all kinds of things I learned about the 20th century, but nothing much about civics or political theory. It's one of those areas where I wish I could fit an extra 3-4 hours in the day because in one way, it's not necessary to wade through all the erroneous theories of the Enlightenment but in another way it would probably explain a lot that's puzzling about the way the world looks today. I know Charlotte Mason was quite well-read in the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophers and knowing more about those would help me understand her writings better too.

Sigh... anyway, just for starters, I think I'll try to keep up with the Economics in One Lesson schedule. We'll see. Even though I didn't finish the book the first time through, I well remember his premise about watching out for the unintended secondary consequences. I talk to my kids about that quite a bit. The principle applies to schooling and medical interventions and therapeutic interventions like HeadStart, and to parenting as well.

I am just finishing reading Socrates meets Marx by Peter Kreeft. It is a cute series, if you want a readable way to introduce major schools of thought to a highschooler. I am not saying "cute" in a derogatory way, either -- after all, cute used to mean "acute" even up past the turn of the 19th century -- ask my daughter, who is presently reading the Aubrey/Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian. The Peter Kreeft "Socrates" (I've also read The Unaborted Socrates and The Best Things in Life) books are "acute" in bits, and amusing in others, and sometimes a teeny bit hokey, because after all, putting words in the mouth of Socrates and Marx and Descartes and various others is no easy task. I know I couldn't do it.

Memories of Goodness, Doors of Hope

"Advent is concerned with that very connection between memory and hope which is so necessary to man. Advent’s intention is to awaken the most profound and basic emotional memory within us, namely, the memory of the God who became a child. This is a healing memory; it brings hope. The purpose of the Church’s year is continually to rehearse her great history of memories, to awaken the heart’s memory so that it can discern the star of hope.…

It is the beautiful task of Advent to awaken in all of us memories of goodness and thus to open doors of hope."

--Cardinal Ratzinger, Seek That Which Is Above

----------------------------
I found this Advent Tree that my mother in law made for her own children and handed on to us. We used to hang it up in Oregon where we lived when the older kids were small. It got misplaced when we moved here to California several years ago and my 11 year old just found it. So today I hung it up:


You can see the numbered pockets at the bottom for every day of December. My mother in law put old bits of jewelry and "sparklies" in the pockets and every day the kids would dig out the treasure for the day and hang it on the tree. You can barely see the first 3 treasures hanging up. My daughter, who loves vintage things, was fascinated by the jewelry from 40-50 years ago. It is history now!

I was thinking how easy it would be to make this into a Jesse Tree using the ornament ideas and images you can find all over the internet. But the sparklies are family tradition, so we will not abandon those even if we do add on to them.

Aidan took over the camera and got a picture of me ---

and of his daddy -- you can tell it is getting colder around here by the way we move closer to the fire~!

And a very artistic one of his sister with her violin:

"Advent’s intention is to awaken the most profound and basic emotional memory within us, namely, the memory of the God who became a child. This is a healing memory; it brings hope.”

Liam holding his baby brother Patrick Gabriel who came home from the ICU on Christmas Eve. Paddy's fifth birthday is today!

Following the Compass

The Lost Children: A review of Hold On To Your Kids by Jen at Et Tu? HT: The Cates at Why Homeschool?

She quotes the authors of the book:

As children grow, they have an increasing need to orient: to have a sense of who they are, of what is real, why things happen, what is good, what things mean. To fail to orient is to...be lost psychologically -- a state our brains our programmed to do almost anything to avoid. [...]

What children fear more than anything, including physical harm, is getting lost. To them, being lost means losing contact with their compass point. Orienting voids, situations where we find nothing or no one to orient by, are absolutely intolerable to the human brain.

We discussed the topic of teenage mutation at Real Learning a couple of weeks ago. Another book that is interesting to read in this regard is A Tribe Apart. I wrote a tiny review of it here. The book starts by describing several kids in about 5th or 6th grade -- pretty much normal kids interested in baseball and Barbies -- and traces their lives until their graduation from highschool. The transition is remarkable. Generally speaking, the kids "come through" on the other side, but there are tragic exceptions, and even the survivors have battle wounds.

Some homeschoolers "mutate" (for lack of a better word), and some kids who go to school don't, of course. My thought is that peer dependency is much more the source than simply the fact of homeschooling or not -- you can have peer dependency AND homeschooling, and you can have schooled kids who stay away from peer dependency, whether because their families are strong, or their interests are bigger than the system, or perhaps the school itself has a strong healthy culture of its own that counteracts the tribalism. Temperament plays a part too.

Plus, there are kids who take on some of the trappings of the tribe, but only as a sort of game or adaptive trait. It is part of their natural development to try out new things, to explore and experiment and grow in understanding of different ways of life. This is not the same thing as peer dependency itself. To me, dependency means what Catholic doctrine calls "attachment" -- something that has the symptoms of an addiction.

Homeschooling can preserve a culture, though, that works against peer dependency. By taking the kids away from the age ghetto, spending time with them, discussing things with them and allowing them time and space to develop talents and skills, you give them opportunity to develop longterm qualities and skills, not the transitory ones generally valued by the peer culture. You give them some margin so that they can stand a bit apart from the follies their peers rather than accept and practice them devoutly. I wrote about this once before, in Enculturation, not Indoctrination.

There is still a sort of dependency, I suppose. As Neufeld says above in the quote, kids have a need to orient themselves; they are not able to develop in a void. This is his very case for developing a family culture. An imperfect family is better than an immature peer culture, though of course most dysfunctional families are so precisely because they share the competitiveness, co-dependency and immaturity of the peer culture. Perhaps it should be noted that most of the parents of this generation are products of peer dependency themselves. (To me this seems to have something to do with the amazing vitality of the constant question What About Socialization?)

I think sometimes the State and those who believe in the effectiveness of "experts" cringe a bit when they think of parents actually being allowed to influence their kids. Isn't that a sort of child abuse? What if they mess up? What if they inculcate doctrine that I happen not to agree with? What if they raise young adults that thrive outside of the cultural mainstream, who have a strong ethnic or religious identity? Doesn't that mean the society will be fragmented?

One of the victories of the state over the parents has been a rhetorical one; accusing the parents of indoctrination so that school becomes "freeing".

"Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It's up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well--by creating the international child of the future." Dr. Chester M. Pierce in an address to the Childhood International Education Seminar in 1973

HT Dana at Simple Pleasures.

Reading stories like this one at Why Homeschool give me a further sense of WHY kids form peer dependent bonds -- for they don't do it arbitrarily, of course. They do it because their psychic survival seems to depend on it in some way; it seems like a solution. When the grownups seem crazy, weak, fearful and arbitrary; and the peers seem to have strength and talent and offer some hope of a kind of safety, no matter how contingent.... well, there it is. Orienting voids, indeed. And I think that the more the system tries to take over the function of parenting, the more follies like this will crop up, because parenting is essentially personal and organic, while systems are not. Systems are not safe; they have gaps where individual, unique people fall through.

To quote Jen's quotes of the authors of Hold On TO Your Kids, again:

No wonder, then, that "cool" is the governing ethic in peer culture, the ultimate virtue...It connotates an air of invulnerability. Where peer orientation is intense, there is no sign of vulnerability in the talk, in the walk, in the dress, or in the attitudes. [...]

Peer-oriented kids will do anything to avoid the human feelings of aloneness, suffering, and pain, and to escape feeling hurt, exposed, alarmed, insecure, inadequate, or self-conscious. ...