Kitsch and Pseudo Art

Hey, maybe the kitsch part of this is part of what's wrong with Haugen and Haas and their ilk. Think so?

Kitsch deprives feeling of its cost, and therefore of its reality; desecration augments the cost of feeling, and so frightens us away from it. The remedy for both states of mind is suggested by the thing that they each deny, which is sacrifice. .... Sacrifice is the core of virtue, the origin of meaning and the true theme of high art.

Sacrifice can be avoided, and kitsch is the great lie that we can both avoid it and retain its comforts. Sacrifice can also be made meaningless by desecration. But, when sacrifice is present and respected, life redeems itself; it becomes an object of contemplation, something that "bears looking at", and which attracts our admiration and our love.

Sacrifice can be avoided, and kitsch is the great lie that we can both avoid it and retain its comforts. Sacrifice can also be made meaningless by desecration. But, when sacrifice is present and respected, life redeems itself; it becomes an object of contemplation, something that "bears looking at", and which attracts our admiration and our love. This connection between sacrifice and love is presented in the rituals and stories of religion. It is also the recurring theme of art.

from Beauty and its Corruptions, and another HT to Running River Latin School.

In somewhat the same line, Cavarnos in Fine Arts and Therapy:

"To properly understand Plato's teaching on fine art as a means of therapy one must be aware of one further element in his philosophy: his sharp distinction between true art and pseudo art. True art is governed by the principles of idealism, rationality, simplicity, clarity, organic unit, appropriateness, measure, proportion, harmony, rhythm. It is guided by wisdom, that is, by knowledge of man's true nature and ultimate aim in life, by knowledge of Divine and man's proper relation to it, and by a clear apprehension of the true hierarchy of values that should be the object of man's aspiration. Such art seeks to convey this wisdom....

Pseudo art, on the other hand, is not guided by wisdom, but is directed by personal or public opinion, by conjecture or imagination, and gives expression to wrong forms of character and action. Pseudo art presents what is ugly as though it were beautiful, disease as if it were health, and it praises evil under the guise of good. Thus it has the effect of suggesting, and hence inclining people to do, what is ugly instead of what is beautiful. And it results in their developing various forms of ugliness or disorder of the soul and thereby of the body. Pseudo art addresses itself not to the highest part of the psyche, but to the lower parts. It strengthens these, weakens the intellectual power, and thus leads to the disruption of the hierarchical structure of the psyche.

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

Classical Redivivus

Some interesting (for me) threads going on at Real Learning (which is just about to close for Holy Week):

• Let's Talk about Memorization!
• Philosophizing about Classical Education
• Purpose of Education

I love this time of year -- I love to ponder what we're doing in the homeschool and start figuring out what next year will look like.

I found this interview with Father Fessio and wanted to excerpt this part about homeschooling:

Q: It's evident that a passion of yours is education through your involvement with Ave Maria, the work you began and still do with Ignatius Press, and your involvement with NAPCIS. Share with our readers what you think the current state of Catholic education today is and why you feel so many parents are opting to home school their children?

A: Yes. Let me limit myself to the United States and certain features of the United States. For many years, I have received letters and phone calls from parents who are in tremendous grief because their children have lost their faith going to Catholic schools. The problem with the catechetics and academics was basically denied by those in authority and lay people were told that they were working on it- don't worry things will get better. But when your kids are growing up, you don't have time. You need to have a Catholic education now.

So, as a result of that, many Catholic parents began to home school. Primarily because they could no longer entrust their kids to the parochial schools. Once they started doing that however, many of them discovered that it's a better form of education if you can do it. So, now I know many Catholic home school parents, who even if they had a great Catholic school right across the street, would still home school. Right here at Ave Maria, we have a wonderful grammar and prep school - Ave Maria Grammar andPrep- with some of the Dominican sisters from Ann Arbor who are teaching there, a wonderful headmaster, excellent faculty and great kids. But there are many families that live literally a block or two from the school, and who home school- it's not that they think the school isn't a good school, they just think home schooling is a better education for their kids.

Q: Would you agree with them?

A: I would agree that as a general principle that home schooling is superior to schooling in a more structured context of a classroom. But, that doesn't mean it's for everybody at all times and at all grades. I do think it's better. Here at University, half of our students are home schooled. Through high school, about 25% are home schooled.

You find, in general, even though the other students are good too, a greater love of learning, willingness to study on their own, receptivity- and in addition, incredible talent. A number of our students can play the piano, or the violin, or can act, or sing, and do it well. It's astounding to me. I've never seen such a concentration of talent, and a lot of it is because they have large families that home school and can learn these things. So no one can claim now that there's no opportunity to educate their kids in a Catholic way. They can always home school.

Then there are these new family schools, many members of NAPCIS as you mentioned- there's more than a hundred of them around the country. These are family-operated, small, Catholic schools, which are loyal to the Tradition of the Church and to a classical education. And as far as universities go, there are 10 or 12 spread across the country, so I think you can get a good education. I think Ave Maria is one of the best- I really love the kids here as well as the faculty and the curriculum, but there are other good places too.

Q: In terms of a classical education, there are those who would argue that the idea of a classical education would actually include the dynamic of having peers among you in the learning environment, simply in regards to the idea that the original idea of school being leisure among friends, and granted you can get that in the home element as well…

A: What's classical about that? Do they have to be the same age? The idea of schools, is as they say in French a “pis aller” a second best type of thing. What were the best types of education in medieval and post-medieval times? It was with the nobility in the castles. How? With the tutors for the children of the noble families. They didn't go to some school. And then, when you started with the cathedral schools and in the monastaries, you would go in with the monks. You would have young men join the monastery as clerics, lower clerics, when they were 7 or 8 years old.

I think schools have a value, but I think They are not as good as the kind of care and attention you can get in a home schooling environment. I've seen it happen- in a family of four kids, the oldest boy who was very analytical and very argumentative did a lot of reading and a lot of essays on different topics; but his brother, a couple of years younger, was very intuitive and artistic. So, he did more poetry, literature, art and that sort of thing. And by doing that he also learned the other skills he needed, but learned by doing the things that he loved.

There's a fellow that helps do some work for us in our retreat house north of San Francisco. When he and his fiance were getting ready to get married, he had about a fourth or fifth grade reading level. But, he loved to hunt, so his fiancee’s mother got him three subscriptions to some hunting magazines and suddenly his reading level zoomed up because he finally found something he wanted to read. That's how home schooling works.You take a look at your kid and say, "He's interested in WWII" so there's an entrée. You learn to read better and do research. Then you might want to go on to other things, like geography or weather. Who knows what it might be. I think home schooling is a great sign of hope in this country, and the small Catholic schools as well, and as a result of that, the parochial schools and Catholic schools are going through a renewal process. We also have younger bishops now who are more traditional and younger priests who are more traditional. I do see a lot of movement in the right direction.

Argument for an Integrated Curriculum

In Norms and Nobility, David Hicks writes:

"In framing my proposal for a unified curriculum, I have asked myself: How does a scholar's mind work? ....A scholarly mind is characterized by an ability to make connections, to visualize the relatedness of sundry facts, ideas, and concepts. The scholer's mind works like a person laboring over a jigsaw puzzle, grouping pieces by pattern, image, and color, whilee retaining in the mind an outline of the whole picture. The scholar derives his exitement and motivation at first from snapping discrete pieces together and, in time, from seeing the image of the whole puzzle begin to emerge. His excitement, as well as his chances for completeing the puzzle, however, depend on his being given a sufficient number of pieces from the same puzzle.

.... The measured unfolding of history is an ideal vehicle for providing this insight into the connectedness of knowledge's parts and for encouraging the student to perform creative acts of scholarship at any early age. History embraces the whole of knowledge, as well as the student himself, but its vastness need not frighten or overawe the novice. At the beginning, it can be treated, as it was by the ancients, as mythology: the same questions can be asked of Churchill as of Tolkien. Being full of discrete puzzles comprising pieces to ever larger puzzles, history affords an almost immediate opportunity for the student to exercise his or her incipient ability to make connections.

Because the student himself is a part of it, the study of history lends itself to normative inquiry, bridging in exciting and ennobling stories the hiatus beween knowledge and responsibility. No subject deserving of praise as excellent in form or in content is excluded from the study of history, and no curriculum framed in history should fail to form a quick, intuitive, scholarly mind.

There is more in the chapter in this strain, along with specific suggestions for a curriculum for the middle and high schools. I thought it was interesting because though I tend towards using language as the heart of my curriculum, I can see his point about history as an integrative pursuit. As a devotee of etymology, I don't think the two -- language and history -- can be easily separated, anyway, so perhaps the serious pursuit of one will tend to pull in the other.

I think David Hicks' curriculum must have influenced Ambleside's.

speaking, singing, weighing, numbering and tending

This Parent's Review article -- Greek in modern education -- gave me this little description of the Seven Liberal Arts:

Gram loquitur, Dia ver docet, Rhe verba colorat,
Mus canit, ar numerat Geo ponderat As colit astra.

and searching for that gave me this Seven Liberal Arts post from the Common Room. It is part of a whole series and the comments on the article are interesting.

Christine Miller at Classical Christian Homeschooling says that CS Lewis quoted the couplet in The Discarded Image, and translated it this way:

Grammar talks, Dialectic teaches words, Rhetoric colors words,
Music sings, Arithmetic numbers, Geometry weighs, Astronomy tends the stars.

ETA: Drew pointed out that the Latin from the AO article didn't match the English translation (see comments). Apparently CS Lewis remembered the tag as "Dia verba docet" and translated it accordingly. I didn't notice the difference between the two versions when I pasted them in.

Other sources, like the Catholic Encyclopedia entry on Liberal Arts, had it as

Dia vera docet

The whole mnemonic there is:

Lingua, tropus, ratio, numerus, tonus, angulus, astra.
Gram. loquiter, Dia. vera docet, Rhe. verba colorat
Mu. canit, Ar. numerat, Geo. ponderat, Ast. colit astra.

That's different again. (By the way, that's a typo I found above in the CE. It ought to be "loquitur", and it is written that way in the original CE text. )

I need a librarian emoticon ;-).

Educational Acquaintances

I had been looking for this bit from Aristotle for some time and couldn't figure out how to plug the right terms into Google, so I asked Liam and he knew it was in Parts of Animals:

EVERY systematic science, the humblest and the noblest alike, seems to admit of two distinct kinds of proficiency; one of which may be properly called scientific knowledge of the subject, while the other is a kind of educational acquaintance with it. For an educated man should be able to form a fair off-hand judgement as to the goodness or badness of the method used by a professor in his exposition. To be educated is in fact to be able to do this; and even the man of universal education we deem to be such in virtue of his having this ability. It will, however, of course, be understood that we only ascribe universal education to one who in his own individual person is thus critical in all or nearly all branches of knowledge, and not to one who has a like ability merely in some special subject. For it is possible for a man to have this competence in some one branch of knowledge without having it in all.

It is plain then that, as in other sciences, so in that which inquires into nature, there must be certain canons, by reference to which a hearer shall be able to criticize the method of a professed exposition, quite independently of the question whether the statements made be true or false.

No doubt this kind of statement doesn't seem as relevant nowadays when most educated people tend to be specialists in one narrow area and know very little about anything else, but even nowadays when there is such a huge bulk of knowledge to be learned, it seems worthwhile to start from an idea that knowledge is interconnected.

Charlotte Mason seems to have something similar in mind in Education, the Science of Relations

Every child is heir to an enormous patrimony, heir to all the ages, inheritor of all the present. The question is, what are the formalities (educational, not legal) necessary to put him in possession of that which is his? You perceive the point of view is shifted, and is no longer subjective, but objective, as regards the child.

We take the child ... as we find him––a person with an enormous number of healthy affinities, embryo attachments; and we think it is our chief business to give him a chance to make the largest possible number of these attachments valid.

Finally, Cardinal Newman in Idea of a University

I have said that all branches of knowledge are connected together, because the subject-matter of knowledge is intimately united in itself, as being the acts and the work of the Creator. Hence it is that the Sciences, into which our knowledge may be said to be cast, have multiplied bearings one on another, and an internal sympathy, and admit, or rather demand, comparison and adjustment. They complete, correct, balance each other. This consideration, if well-founded, must be taken into account, not only as regards the attainment of truth, which is their common end, but as regards the influence which they exercise upon those whose education consists in the study of them. I have said already, that to give undue prominence to one is to be unjust to another; to neglect or supersede these is to divert those from their proper object. It is to unsettle the boundary lines between science and science, to disturb their action, to destroy the harmony which binds them together. Such a proceeding will have a corresponding effect when introduced into a place of education. There is no science but tells a different tale, when viewed as a portion of a whole, from what it is likely to suggest when taken by itself, without the safeguard, as I may call it, of others.

trying for specifics

That last post was so vague that I don't know if it clarified anything at all. So I decided to pick up the Thomas Jefferson Education Home Companion to look at; I remembered it being much more specific and practical, so I thought perhaps I could use that as a springboard for writing out some more practical thoughts on the matter.

I just read the first article, called Off the Conveyer Belt, by Diane Jeppson who has four daughters. The idea of the "conveyer belt" is of course parallel to unschooling's concept of "assembly line" education. JT Gatto is a vehement critic of the factory-driven model of education, as well.

Here then is a list of the things she mentions that she has found to work towards an individualized education designed for excellence. This are things that we tend to do around here as well:

• Careful record-keeping (either formal or journalling -- but it's been a pattern of mine to record extensively)
  
• Reading plenty of classics yourself (the parents) -- seek recommendations
• Discuss the books --take them seriously.
  
• Have family readings and conversations.
• Design the childrens' academics to support their reading, understanding and appreciation of the classics.
  

Some other ideas she mentions that we don't do as much in this family, at least not exactly the way she describes, but that might be helpful for some:

• When a child decides to study a topic, help him plan objectives, and then design a tutoring system to help him reach his goals. In some cases the mother might be the best tutor; in other cases, the father; in other cases, siblings or people outside the home. (This sounds a bit like the community-based style of education that is described in As the Skylark Sings. (We do this, I suppose, but usually much less formally. We are not people who usually get inspired by logistics, so we do it more the rabbit-trailing, circle and then zone in type method).

• Plan discussion groups with likeminded families. I would like to do this sometime. I always like reading about Love2Learn Family's activities in this area. In the meantime, we have a few friends who love to talk about the same books and movies that we do, and we also rely on the internet to exchange and hear thoughts on the Great Ideas.

• Make room for leadership opportunities. I suppose it is the language that defeats me here. Diane Jeppson mentions craft fairs, running seminars, and things like that for leadership. The idea is to let the kids practice adult life skills while they are still in the nest. I guess we do some of that too, but I usually don't think of it so much as "leadership opportunities" -- more of just expanding, sharing, developing interests and gifts.

Even though Diane Jeppson does use that type of more formal language, she says that in practice she usually tries to keep it as organic as possible. For example, she expanded a simple morning devotion time into a more full-blown reading, discussion and research hour, but she took care not to impose it upon the kids like a ton of bricks, but rather to let it develop more naturally.

My children don't mind being assigned things, usually, but they do seem to heartily resist being molded. I think it runs in the Celtic temperament they get from both sides of the family. So some of the most "relaxed, fun" type of curricula are often the ones they hate most heartily, and some of the more structured ones actually appeal to them more.

Maureen at Trinity Prep School has pulled together some Thomas Jefferson Education carnivals. I think I will try to read through some of them this vacation.

But when I was writing my last post I felt convicted about spending too much time theorizing and not enough time just being around my kids. So that's step one, definitely; just being there!

Clare is baking a cake and listening to Anna and the King of Siam. Paddy and Liam just came in from a walk outdoors in the snow (Liam with photos to show); Sean has been timing his football 40's. And Aidan is trying to talk Kevin into cutting down a Christmas tree!

How to Classically Unschool -- I Wish :)

I was looking up "Classical Unschooling" on Google. Someone asked me about how we do it and of course! my first response is to go research, not just say how we do it like anyone else would.

I see that my blog comes up third on the search, following Melissa and David. Here's also a post by Nose in a Book and one by Nerd Family.... .all about classical unschooling or the balance between the two in some form.

That doesn't seem to help me with "how I do it". : ). Sure, I could write out a typical day; in fact you can see a bunch of them over at Schola et Studium. It would look like a form of Charlotte Mason, which it is. It would probably look like way too many "requires" for most unschoolers, and way too much freedom for many classical types. Often it's provisional -- it's not exactly what I would want.

My ideal is that:

1. I act as a mentor, coach, guide to help the kids develop their talents and interests.

2. They learn from me and go further than I can take them.

3. They end up capable of living a good, meaningful life and being able to support themselves and reflect on their choices and on the society around them, and change what is theirs to change.

On a given day this is not what is happening on the surface. Most often, it's hidden underneath, at best, with glints of the real thing occasionally. As time goes on, though, more of the real value comes through. It's like prospecting, or fishing (I guess I am an Alaskan!)

Maybe a better approach is to list what I try to keep in mind as I plan:

• The student is the primary agent in learning; teaching is a secondary role, and often works best informally rather than formally.
• Inspiration is probably the key to any kind of "teaching" that takes place. "Requirements" are contingent to that. In other words, requirements can provide a sort of map, but they are poor as pilots.
  
• The human being has a natural, driving desire to know. All the great educational methods have been based on an understanding of that truth. You can foster, support, develop that desire or you can make war on it. ..."despise, hinder, offend" it. Obviously, it's better to foster it.
• Plan for strewing -- an unschooling idea that has great value in any kind of family life. Also, "planting seeds" or "preparing a banquet" -- both something like strewing. Basically, giving the child lots of opportunities to learn, while avoiding the extremes of force-feeding or overstimulating and scattering.
• Non Multa sed Multum -- not many, but much -- seems to be opposed to the strewing and planting and banquet ideas, but isn't. It reminds me to keep my priorities in order. Reminds me that scattering trivialities that distract the child is not the same as planting seeds that flower and bear fruit.
• As for what the priorities are: they are (1) "tools" (the kind of learning that helps you do more learning on your own) and hmm, I guess I don't really have a word for it -- but (2) "elements" -- the groundwork for the subjects -- the primary principles. So for literature the primary elements are enjoying lots of good books, for science it is respect for and observation of nature, for history -- well, that is a bit like literature actually, and I think the old tradition was to put them together as "humanities" -- wisdom acquired from past events and reflections upon those events. Composition -- comes from expresssion, verbal and written. And so on.

In practice, you see me trying all sorts of things based on this. I look for "consent of the will" -- consent is a nice term that for me means more than passive compliance -- it means an effort combining heart, will and mind.

Obviously you will usually only see bits and pieces of this on a typical day in the homeschool. Say, my 14 year old wakes up and comes downstairs immediately to do his Greek and Vocabulary. This is a nice example of his will being brought to bear on his work. Some of his mind and heart is involved, but not all. He would probably prefer to be doing something else, but he has internalized that this work is important and part of his daily duties.

Again, you see a child who loves to read fantasy books. His motivation is primarily of the heart and imagination. He obviously makes a willed decision to sit and read instead of kick his heels, and he is using his mind to understand. So there's a combination. But he is primarily directed by "delight".

In actual practice, I sit down and look at my kids and look at what I think is important in education. Then I try to get the two together.

1. If a child has an interest in something or a gift, I try to provide space and support.
2. If I am presenting something that simply is not working. I try to figure out what is wrong. Is it a matter of will, heart or mind? Often an educator will tend to focus on just one of these and treat every difficulty as a failure of that particular area.
3. For all the middle ground things --the things that I am introducing but the kids are all right with -- I am tweaking and kitbashing. I am trying to make it work a bit better and also trying to just continue with the follow through (my tendency is quick discouragement and lack of persistence).

My efforts probably go about 50 percent towards thr third scenario; 20-30 percent towards the first; and I try to keep "really not working" to about 10 percent or less. The missing 10-20 percent is my simple incompetence or just personal sloughing-off. Actually it probably measures higher than that. I would like the first to be higher than 30% -- that is I would like to be better at working interactively and responsively with the childrens' own interests and talents. That is why I admire unschoolers. I'm happy with the 50 percent for #3 but would like to be better, more skillful, at it. This is where my interest in Method comes in. I would of course like to keep my sloughing-off to almost zero. But that made me think of a fourth category.

#4 Mother Culture (Charlotte Mason term) -- what Stephen Covey calls "sharpening the saw". Thomas Jefferson Education has a word for it too, but I forget what it is. My own lifetime learning. This probably ideally should infuse ALL the other areas but certainly needs a bit of its own space as well. It is not at all the same thing as sloughing-off, though for me they can overlap. I love to study and so I can use that as an excuse for ignoring everything else.

I would like to think this might be helpful, sigh -- but it is a mess, and my five year old is "really really really really hungry". I need to teach Algebra before it gets too late in the day. Anyway, I'm going to post it so my depressed post stops heading my blog ;-). So here goes.

Apperception and Association

As I read the book I mentioned in the last post, the Humane Psychology of Education, I think I have a bit clearer idea of what Charlotte Mason meant by "apperception mass" and why she didn't much care for unit studies.

"We are familiar with the struggle of ideas on the threshold, with the good luck of those that get in and especially of those that get in first and mount to high places; with the behaviour of ideas, very much like that of persons who fall into groups in an anarchical state. This behaviour is described as the formation of 'apperception masses' and the mass that is sufficiently strong has it all its own way and dominates the mind. Our business is not to examine the psychology of Herbart, a very serious and suggestive contribution to our knowledge of educational principles, but rather to consider how it works out practically in education.'

Now Castiello talks about apperception masses too. From looking online I see that apparently it is a psychological term for what could be called our "context" or "paradigm".

In their phraseology the apperception mass represents the body of memories and meanings deposited in the consciousness of the individual from the totality of his experiences. It is the body of material with which every new datum of experience comes into contact, to which it is related and in connection with which it gets its meaning. When persons interpret data on different grounds, when the apperception mass is radically different, we say popularly- that they live in different worlds.

This is the way Castiello uses it, when mentioning that the teacher ought to be aware that children will understand differently according to the background that they bring to a reading. This is exactly what I read in books about "how to read". They generally say that a person who say, is familiar with art history will be able to read a book on art without too much trouble, while a beginner like me might have to stop often, assimilate new vocabulary, make sense of new concepts, and so on.

I think however that there is a difference between acknowledging this plain truth -- that one's prior knowledge affects how one learns new material -- and planning educational material in a reductionist, associative manner.

Both Castiello and Charlotte Mason seem to be very much opposed to a conclusion that is drawn from misapplying this concept to the whole working of the mind. Castiello opposes what he calls a mere "bond-making" or associative style of education. He says this relies on the lowest part of the human personality. You say "environmental concerns" and a whole package of theory and conclusions springs right away into my mind, especially if I've been taught that way by association from Day One. You say "smoking is bad" and I slap an "adult" label on the early Sesame Street episodes because Cookie Monster brandishes a pipe in imitation of Alistair Cooke.

It's probably a bit like the scenes in Brave New World where the children go to sleep and subliminally absorb taped messages about their place in life and what "truths" the people in charge want them to believe.

Skeleton Key to the Treasure Chest

On a classical list I am on, someone asked about what your "bare bones" priorities would be if you could only homeschool, say, half time or less. Hey, that is what my homeschool has been like regularly ever since we have started. I should have some sort of graduate degree in crisis homeschooling.

Anyway, here is what I wrote --posting it here because it fits in a bit with recent posts:
------------------------------------------------

Interesting topic because we used to have to do this cutting back at least once a year (pregnancies, new babies, medical crises) and even now when things are smoother I find it helpful to regularly consider what's essential to me and what's not.

• Math -- because it's the hardest to learn naturally for my kids at least, and it's of key importance
• Latin -- same as above and also it incorporates most formal language arts --grammar, vocabulary, logic, and composition/narration/copywork. For younger ones (primary) it would be phonics rather than Latin.
• Literature -- which is a broad enough category to include history and science and religion as well as the childhood fictional classics.

You already mentioned spiritual training -- which would include religious instruction and character formation and some incidental vocational training, I suppose.

Harder to describe for me but important-- setting an example for "how and why to learn" -- (I guess this is where my unschooly side comes in) -- discussion, stories about family culture, modeling research skills, strewing resources and reading materials and reading aloud to them. This would fit in odd corners of the day.... this is not formal ... basically I would call it "discipling" or "mentoring" or "enculturation" -- simply making it a priority to share what I am and what DH is and the "keeper" parts of our family and cultural heritage. Some moms do that enculturation naturally; I have to think about it and be aware of its importance.

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

Sites I find helpful for my minimal liberal arts educational method:

• Robinson Curriculum
• Ambleside Online Emergency Lesson Plan
• Ruth Marshall's site -- particularly her review of the Robinson Method, but there are many more articles and helps on simplifying, and homeschooling a wide age range.
• Trivium Pursuit: Ten Things to Do with Your Child Before Age Ten

I usually go back to these whenever I'm feeling mentally cluttered or overloaded.

• Once I did this interview about Homeschooling Through a Crisis with some strategies for dealing with difficulties.
• Also, I just wrote out this Checklist of Priorities for my learning notes site.
  

A Map back from the Island

Now, about the island that I was trying to get to in my earlier post about classical unschooling:

About a year ago, I was getting restless with the kind of unschooling we were doing. So were the kids, though in a different way. It felt like drifting or worse, like we were following the wrong map and getting too far off our course. I finally figured out it was because I was trying to do "unschooling" like school; in other words, trying to do it someone else's way, following various rules I didn't really understand or in some cases agree with.

Of course, there is some value in taking things on faith sometimes, when one is reasonably convinced that it is a good thing to do so. It is one thing to reach beyond one's comfort zone -- that can be very worthwhile. For a long time, unschooling was productive for me in this way. But it's another thing to work against one's own intuition. It's difficult to describe the difference, but it reminds me of the "good pain" you feel during an intense workout, vs the "bad pain" when you are injuring yourself and ought to stop before it gets any worse. You usually recognize the difference if you allow yourself to do so.

I also realized that to my kids, there wasn't such a line between "school" and "not-school" as there was for me. For them, the division was more between what was boring, meaningless, too hard and what was OK, meaningful and challenging and enjoyable. If I am going to respect my own intuitions about "good pain" and "bad pain" I need to pay attention to the same thing in my kids, too. I find that it gives me more freedom to explore and try new things with them if I am prepared to drop it if for some reason it isn't "taking". The things that aren't working can be easily replaced with something else or approached in a different way.

To get past the "schooly" and "unschooly" divisions that were causing the problem, I started trying to picture how I would raise the kids if we somehow got stranded on a deserted island or on a distant planet or something (the Robinson Crusoe Curriculum, or Lost in Space model of education).

If you want to try it, I recommend the exercise. How would you educate if everything else was out of the way? It is so easy to get overwhelmed by all the choices and requirements out there. I notice that the most difficult temptations for me are fear ("You must do this, or else this will happen....") and greed/wishful thinking "If you think through/do/buy this, then everything will turn out great." Other people may have different issues -- perhaps pride ("I want to produce super-kids, because I can"), perhaps false humility ("There is no way I can do that, so I may as well not even try...").

So, now picture the deserted island, with no hope of rescue in the near future. What then?

• Well, our first priority would be gathering, organizing, developing skills and constructing shelter so we had some confidence that we could deal with eventualities. In other words, physical security.
• At the same time, it would be a priority to maintain a level of human dignity in our treatment of each other. ...kindness and justice, acceptance. Both emotional and physical safety and belonging (see Maslow's Hierarchy of needs) are prerequisites for the leisure, the space necessary, for learning to take place. It is hard to learn in unstable, unsafe environments.
  

So now, let's say the basic needs were met, and the bulk of the work was now to do with maintenance and preparation for inevitable contingencies, rather than sheer battle for life. In other words, now we have some leisure, the garden soil for learning. Now what would I do?

I found that question remarkably easy to answer, considering how much I sometimes agonize between this method or that. When it comes to this, I would find it quite natural to:

• Instruct the children in the truths and practices of their faith, through discussion and example.
• Tell them stories: family stories, funny stories, stories from history, stories of heroes, precautionary tales from my own life and from the lore of our culture.... all the stories I could remember or make up. I will include songs in this category too.
  
• I'd teach them how to read and write and cipher, even if there wasn't much immediate purpose to these skills. But once lost to a generation, these skills are extremely hard to regain. Besides, they are worthwhile in themselves for the reflective and categorizing abilities of the mind.
• I'd observe nature with them, and learn alongside them. I'd rely on their observations and judgements on the world around us. I'd tell them about nature in other regions not familiar to them, in order to expand their understanding by comparison and contrast.
• To sum it up, I would want them as conversant as possible with the distant civilization they came from, both its dangers and its treasures, so that if they ever returned, they would have some familiarity with it.
  
• I would learn with them how to adapt to our present conditions -- in this aspect of our life, we would be much more like colleagues.

• If I had books -- say, a Bible -- I would make sure they internalized its contents, hearing my commentaries and over the years developing their own internal commentary.
• If I didn't have books, I would try to use whatever materials were on hand to develop some sort of written culture -- writing down some of the cultural stories and also keeping a written record of what was going on.

• I would try to teach the older children in such a way that they would be able to teach and provide an example for the younger ones.

• As time provided, we would try together to add some beauty and ingenuity to our basic standards of existence.
  
• We would build some traditions and family customs and jokes.... a domestic culture unique to us.
  
• I would model and teach problem-solving and flexible thinking so that when inevitable difficulties arose we would have some resources to deal with them.

None of what I imagined here has anything to do with school, except that "school" is a means by which some of these things are sometimes accomplished. In past days, parents planned the education of their children according to their means, their manner of life, and the abilities of their children. Their goal was two-fold: enculturation into a heritage, and preparation for adult life. Of course, the limitations were many, too. Educational resources were not readily available; survival took the bulk of many peoples' time and energy; and so on. Schooling arrangements often made quite a bit of sense in these circumstances, though these had drawbacks too -- inadequate materials, corporal punishment, prejudice and so on.

Now back from my imaginary deserted island, my family is blessed with a fairly secure existence, and access to countless educational resources. My kids can easily learn things that I don't know; there is everything from other people, to books, to DVDs, to exploration and trial and error. They can learn things I would like them to know, but written or said in the words of the best thinkers of all times. This is the blessing of our society. Education is everywhere. You don't have to go to school to find it.

The downside of course, is that there is plenty of trash and trivia available too. It can obscure what is important. There is also the tendency to specialization, and dependence upon "experts and "entertaining" education, that seems to work against general competence.

That means that it is a priority to ensure that my children acquire the "tools" (as Dorothy Sayer says); to be able to locate, evaluate and properly employ information -- to discard the trash and put the trivial in its proper place, while holding fast to the good and true. We are on a different kind of island, with slightly different dangers, but in many ways the task is the same: to transmit and protect a cultural heritage that is at some risk, in this case both from exploitation and from neglect.

So that was what came up from my journey to the deserted island. It doesn't HAVE to be a deserted island: I could substitute an Irish hedge school, or homeschooling up in the Alaskan bush where I lived for a few years in childhood, or the Israelites by the rivers of Babylon.

That is my form of unschooling. I think it is still unschooling, because it's independent of the modern school assumptions and objectives, though it doesn't spring from the same source as some other models of unschooling I have seen. You can see what it has in common with some classical and Charlotte Mason ideas. It has an element of the subversive, because I agree with Gatto and the hedge school teachers and Karol Wojtyla that education and culture are revolutionary(in a good way) -- educational endeavours ought to be inextricably tied to to freedom and independence and reform. (Heraclitus said you can never step in the same river twice, and I think it's the same thing with civilization -- you need to continually renew and revise your efforts in every new generation)

But education is also an inheritance, tied inextricably to competence and responsibility and tradition. (In a way the river is still the same river, though the water has all changed). Tyrants fear true education and anarchists attack it before almost anything else. It is a call of "Mon Joie~" ... a "freedom for excellence...the power to act freely with excellence and perfection".

Classical Unschooling: Education on an Island

Ever since I started adding a bit more structure to my homeschooling, I have been trying to figure out how this can be reconciled with my commitment to unschooling. Am I still an unschooler? What are the parameters of unschooling? If I support and facilitate my child's interests for 22 hours out of 24, 7 days a week, and 24/7 for about 3 months a year, am I still an unschooler since I still "impose" some structured mom-directed learning for about 10 hours a week? Or does the imposed stucture invalidate the whole thing? If the kids don't mind the structure and in some ways seem to value it, is that denial on my part or does it fit in with an unschooling commitment? I couldn't really figure out a philosophical answer to that, so I just moved it to the back burner. But I struggled with it, because I really do like my philosophy to be a bit coherent.

For the time being, I've decided that education is to do with practical intellect, like prudence or art. In other words, thinking about education can be done purely speculatively, but educating someone will always come down to doing (and in corollary, "not-doing") -- active and passive methods.

Benjamin Franklin said that while one person is standing indecisively between two educational methods and trying to decide which is best, another person will have time to use either or both and actually cause something to happen. Marva Collins said: Anything works if the teacher does. That sort of sums up the active part.

As for the passive part -- passive has a bad rap nowadays of course, but it has a legitimate pedigree. It means the receptive side of activity. For example, the reference to Jesus's "Passion" doesn't refer to how He was feeling when He was crucified, which is what I made of it when I was a small child and heard the term, but to the undergoing of something.

Charlotte Mason talks much about masterly inactivity, and "despising not, offending not, hindering not" the children, which is so often done in the name of "educating" them. There is a season to stand back, to receive, to respond, if you want to be effective in action.

Either way, "active" or "passive" can both be supportive of education. The educator's role is secondary to that of the learner though; almost every effective means of education makes mention of that essential truth. Cicero says:

Natural ability without education has more often attained to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.

That is, I think, why pure unschooling CAN work (ie result in a well educated child who is prepared to live a reflective, reasoned adult life) but pure teacher-directed education almost never works. Indeed, it doesn't exist. There are always corners in the day where the child can be free with his own thoughts and actions. That is to say, there is always an unschooling component, but it is rarely acknowledged by the modern institutional method or considered as the foundation for academic learning that it really is.

Cardinal Newman says (speaking of modern-method schooling):

Nay, self-education in any shape, in the most restricted sense, is preferable to a system of teaching which, professing so much, really does so little for the mind.

So lots of times mechanized schooling, by not acknowledging the primary role of the learner, actually hinders learning. (If you want to read more about that, The Wundter of it All by Richard Mitchell and Against School by John Taylor Gatto are interesting to read, and so is John Newman's Knowledge viewed in Relation to Learning)

Of course, unschooling doesn't work if it is conceived as complete liberty for the child. That too is impossible. No one lives in a vacuum; everyone is influenced by the time and place they live in. But I have never heard a thoughtful unschooler proclaim that she provides a vacuum for her kids or that this would be a good thing. Even (or especially) the most radical unschoolers don't claim that; almost the opposite. See the article Mindful Parenting by Ren Allen and Sandra Dodd, and there are plenty of others.

Real unschooling is about acknowledging the child's primary role in his learning process, and respecting that and supporting that. But it's only part of the picture, because really, unschooling in that form is parenting. ... trying to parent reflectively and lovingly and personally, rather than relying on ingrained reflexes, or rules designed by someone else, or one's own less honorable impulses. The other truth connected with that is that there is so much more to life and learning than "school" or "schooly subjects". If you read The Three Stages of Unschooling, you see that for unschoolers, "schooly" stuff starts taking a back seat. You no longer have to cram little bits and pieces of daily life into boxes that say "math" or "language arts" (something I hate), because you realize that learning is a genuine and inevitable part of living as humans -- as Cicero said:

Our minds possess by nature an insatiable desire to know the truth.

Aristotle says something similar:

ALL men by nature desire to know.

I was going to bring in the island, but if I do this post will go on forever. So that part will have to wait.

Term Examinations in the Homeschool

(This is an article I wrote several years back and since we are doing some examinations this term -- see here for first day) -- I thought it might be a good time to post it. Also, Day Two is up here and the gif versions are here)

Whether Term Exams Can Be of Value in the Homeschool

When I first started homeschooling I gathered the impression that regular examinations were of little value in a homeschool. Among the points I read or heard were the fact that a homeschool mom can keep track of a child's progress as a teacher of a class cannot, so testing is unnecessary; that students tend to study hard for an exam and then forget the material quickly afterwards, so testing is ineffective; that test results don't always reflect how capable the child actually is and how well he knows the material, so testing is inaccurate.

All these things are partially true, but incomplete. It is true that a mom can assess her child's progress informally simply by discussing concepts or seeing how the child does in a subject. But while this kind of assessment is important and a wonderful advantage of the homeschool, it does not serve the same purpose as an exam. An exam takes a wider view and invites the child to display long term retention of ideas and apply them. It trains memory, a sense of discrimination between what is high priority and what is less so, and the ability to use language thoughtfully rather than just parrot the textbook. Lots of students can catch on to a math or grammar concept quickly and apply the learning to an exercise with great success, but then forget it almost immediately if it is not reviewed. Other children catch on more slowly, but retain the information better. Regular tests and exams give each kind of child a chance to show long-term acquirements rather than just quickness or lack of it.

The second point, that exams are an encouragement only to "cram" for a couple of days and then forget the material promptly when the test is over, might be true in some cases but ought not to be the case in a homeschool. In fact, this criticism points to one of the main positive benefits of regular examinations. Examinations are an incentive to the "self-activity" and mastery that are so essential a part of the Ignatian education. When a student is working well in a subject, he should be reviewing continually during the term by studying vocabulary words, thinking about what he is reading, making connections between one area and another, and applying his understanding. If he is doing this, pre-exam review and study should be a consolidation of what he has learned, not a quick strenuous effort to patch up the lacks in his study up till then.

So the fact that regular exams are part of the curriculum makes the student accountable. If I, the teacher, do too much teaching and helping and don’t specifically teach study habits, and the children don't do enough work on their own to internalize what they are learning, this fault tends to show up on examinations. Exams make "study skills" an immediate and practical necessity. A younger child can do oral presentations and recitations during the term, or make visual displays in the form of captioned posters or little illustrated books; an older student, in addition to those things, can also learn to take notes, to make vocabulary cards, to recite quietly or into a tape-recorder in order to really learn material thoroughly. The responsibility for guiding and teaching independent study belongs to the homeschool teacher, but the actual responsibility for making the mental effort belongs to the student.

The third point, that some children don't test well, is also partly true but in a homeschool can be addressed directly according to the reasons for the under-performance. Some children get nervous and stressed in a test situation. Frequent practice by short quizzes, trial runs plus a low-key, supportive environment will probably help over time. Some children have fine motor problems and can't write quickly or fluently. It is possible that these children could test orally or using a word processor, and then work on their fine motor skills over the next term or year. Some children have short attention spans or a habit of guessing wildly. They can be given breaks in between tests or parts of tests, for them to get some exercise or for the mother to make sure that they aren't getting too far off track on their answers merely to "have it over with". All these problems are quite natural for children to have, but they can all be minimized and compensated for, and remedying this kind of difficulty will keep it from becoming a handicap to the child’s academic success in later years.

Finally, in a homeschool, review and exam weeks can be a nice change of pace and a way to clearly see progress as well as discern areas that need to be worked on in the future. I keep an observation log detailing what I notice about my children's learning habits, making the kind of informal assessment I mentioned at the beginning of this article. I also keep a list for brainstorming ideas for changes to make in the future. This is also a good time to fine-tune and rethink the daily schedule, the chore system, or make plans for activities the toddlers can do during school hours. I usually get a little more time to spend organizing the house during these two weeks too.

I hope all this doesn't give you the idea that examinations in a homeschool have to be intense or stressful. If they are prepared for, and modified to the family and students' situation, they should be a challenging but basically positive experience, giving everyone a chance to display what they have learned, and vary the routine of the school year. You could plan a short break from school, a field trip or some kind of celebration to mark the finish to the past term and the prospect of a fresh start in the new one.

Classical Quantities and Qualities

This, from Drew Campbell's blog, reminded me of what Melanie at Wine Dark Sea said when commenting on John Holt's book. I'm quoting some of Melanie's post:

Part of the problem seems to be in Holt's definition of curriculum; indeed, in his definition of knowledge. He seems to be thinking of a series of facts crammed into a child's head. But a curriculum, properly speaking, means a course of study (it comes from the Latin word for race course). A curriculum isn't, or shouldn't be, so much a set of facts to be learned as a series of disciplines to be explored.

I do like John Holt's books very much, but Melanie puts into words one of my main complaints with his point of view.

Similarly, Drew Campbell, quoting Neil Postman's Technopoly:

In consideration of the disintegrative power of Technopoly, perhaps the most important contribution schools can make to the education of our youth is to give them a sense of coherence in their studies, a sense of purpose, meaning, and interconnectedness in what they learn. Modern secular education is failing not because it doesn't teach who Ginger Rogers, Norman Mailer, and a thousand other people are but because it has no moral, social, or intellectual center. There is no set of ideas or attitudes that permeates all parts of the curriculum. The curriculum is not, in fact, a "course of study" at all but a meaningless hodgepodge of subjects. It does not put forward a clear vision of what constitutes an educated person, unless it is a person who possesses "skills." In other words, a technocrat's ideal - a person with no commitment and no point of view but with plenty of marketable skills.

Speaking of classical education -- not that I was, at least not explicitly : ) --- Mary Daly wrote a post on the Love2Learn blog "What is a Classical Education?"

Quiddity encapsulates the answer to a similar question into a nutshell:

The fundamental shift from classical Christian thought to conventional thought is that from the qualitative to the quantitative.

Fr Stanley Jaki comments on the pursuit of quantification in The Biblical Basis of Western Science:

Nothing which is non-quantitative is the business of science. But everything which is quantitative is its business. Non-quantitative aspects of existence, such as purpose, freedom, design, honesty, cannot he handle by science because they are not quantitative propositions. But every bit of matter is quantitative and therefore the business of science. Does not the Bible say that God “disposed everything according to measure and number and weight”?

Please note that the Bible does not say that measure, number and weight, or quantities in short, are everything. But the Bible says that every thing has measure, number, and weight or quantitative properties. Wherever there is matter, quantities are present. This is what gives science its unlimited competence in everything material, whether living or dead. But this is also the reason for the radical limitation of science to what is material insofar as it can be measured.

Still talking about class ed: Classical School blog run by the owners of Eide Neurolearning has a post on Classical Education for Visual Learners.

One question raised by parents about a classical education is whether it is too "verbal" for some of their children, and the verbal demands of reading classical history or texts can't be underestimated.

But like great thinkers in all historical times, they come in many different sizes, shapes and varieties.

( I sometimes wonder if Socrates wasn't a visual/spatial thinker).

I also liked Eide Neurolearning's recent post on The Art of Exploratory Thinking, with this quote attributed to TS Eliot):

"Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go."

They go on to say:

It's interesting to think about exploratory decision-making as a necessary step for successful decision-making in real-life. In traditional education, discovery-based learning, when it happens, is rarely strategic - or at least the teaching of strategic approaches to discovery is rarely practiced or modeled...but isn't that too bad?

For some reason that reminds me of John Keats' On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer-- doesn't Keats seem a bit like a visual/spatial thinker?:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star'd at the Pacific--and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Love2Learn also discussed Catholic homeschooling yahoo groups recently, which might be the reason why several new people recently joined the Catholic Classical Education group I've been moderating for the last nine years. It is very nice to have some newcomers as well as the tried and true members who have been on there for years and watched each others' kids grow up. When I first started moderating the list, my oldest was twelve. How strange. Now my fifth child is eleven!

OK, I guess this turned into my Sunday Six : ). Or maybe it's turned into Seven, or even eight. Quantifications and qualifications before coffee; perhaps not a good idea.

What Kind of Homeschooling?

It seems almost as inevitable as the arrival of lupines or the migration of the robins that in the spring I will start pondering where I am in homeschooling. For example, May 17 of last year: Classical Unschooling Again!

And the year before that, in April and May -- Unschooling and Real Learning, CM and Classical on the Real Learning forum. It really is a pattern!

I seem to keep returning to those three -- unschooling, Charlotte Mason, and classical -- in one form or another, again and again. Karen E calls her style "schizophrenic" and some people go by the title "eclectic". I could certainly go by Karen's label on some days, but I have always hesitated to use the term eclectic. It always sounded a bit patchwork-quilty to me -- though I just looked at the definition and it isn't so bad:

Etymology: Greek eklektikos, from eklegein to select, from ex- out + legein to gather
1 : selecting what appears to be best in various doctrines, methods, or styles

I guess that is what I do; and patchwork quilts are a nice way of taking bits and pieces to make a cohesive and useful whole, come to think of it.

So the patches in my quilt seem to come down to classical, Charlotte Mason and unschooling, with perhaps a couple of accents of other patterns.

What is the theme in this piecework?


They have several similarities. All of them, in different ways, have a commitment to what my friend Cindy calls "authenticity". They are personalistic methods, based on the concept of the human being (even the child) as a rational, free creature who has responsibility and agency, and to whom dignity and respect is owed by his nature.

They look for "whole" methods -- not divorced from day to day life, but integrally connected with it. For instance, Thomas Aquinas says that though teaching is sometimes necessary and often efficient, the best kind of learning is "inventio" -- discovery, leading to knowledge that is not simple second-hand.

when the mind moves by its own natural power to an understanding of things previously unknown to it. This is called discovery (inventio).

(De Magistro)

They emphasize the child's consent. Learning is diminished in conditions of fear or boredom or coercion. For example, though he did say that discipline was necessary to drive away evil, Augustine wrote in his Confessions about how much more poorly we learn during these circumstances:

For the tedium of learning a foreign language mingled gall into the sweetness of those Grecian myths. For I did not understand a word of the language, and yet I was driven with threats and cruel punishments to learn it. There was also a time when, as an infant, I knew no Latin; but this I acquired without any fear or tormenting, but merely by being alert to the blandishments of my nurses, the jests of those who smiled on me, and the sportiveness of those who toyed with me.

I learned all this, indeed, without being urged by any pressure of punishment, for my own heart urged me to bring forth its own fashioning, which I could not do except by learning words: not from those who taught me but those who talked to me, into whose ears I could pour forth whatever I could fashion. From this it is sufficiently clear that a free curiosity is more effective in learning than a discipline based on fear.

Recently, when I have been thinking about "classical", I have been thinking about "non multa, sed multum", which was an Ignatian motto (I wrote an article about this and other Ignatian mottoes a few years back -- it is here in pdf form). This reminds me, among other things, to Keep It Simple. You don't have to juggle dozens of plates to teach effectively. If you give your kids a few tools, plus a motivation to learn, they can teach themselves. The Liberal Arts are called "artes" because they are things you can learn to DO, and this provides the groundwork for the kind of learning that don't have to depend on direct experience.

As for Charlotte Mason -- I love her idea of a "wide and generous curriculum." :

Children make large demands upon us. We owe it to them to initiate an immense number of interests. 'Thou hast set my feet in a large room' should be the glad cry of every intelligent soul. Life should be all living, and not merely a tedious passing of time; not all doing or all feeling or all thinking -- the strain would be too great -- but, all living; that is to say, we should be in touch wherever we go, whatever we hear, whatever we see, with some manner of vital interest .

This reminds me that my homeschooling is not just about making sure my children have a grasp of the basic "artes" or foundational skills for further learning. Those skills are means, not ends. The "end", the goal, is lifelong ability and desire to learn.

Thinking about unschooling right now reminds me of kairos . This is a word that I first came across when I was reading about rhetoric --from Kairos (rhetorical definition)

signifies "a time in between", a moment of undetermined period of time..."a passing instant when an opening appears which must be driven through with force if success is to be achieved."

Unschooling reminds me to be in the moment. We live life in the present, not in the future or past. The present is the moment that can be acted upon. That does not mean not planning or retrospecting. But it does mean being aware of what's going on right now.... something that is sometimes difficult for me.

This got scattered, but it is where I am right now in thinking about this! I'm sure I'll be contemplating the pieces of the quilt again next year at about this time!

The Classic Model of Learning

The title of this post sounds like it's going to be about classical education, and in a way it is, but it gets there by the scenic route.

Steph at A Room of My Own had The Book of Learning and Forgetting on her sidebar. I requested it from the library because of the title and the picture. It is a very good read; reminds me a bit of some of John Taylor Gatto's books.

There are some details about the contents of the book at this page: The Classic View of Learning and Forgetting

The book's premise is that we have lost the "classic" view of what learning is about. Up till about a century and a half ago, everyone assumed that "we learn by the company we keep." He says that every culture has a proverb dealing with this truth. ( For example, it is expressed in antithesis in Proverbs 13:20: He who walks with wise men will be wise, But the companion of fools will suffer harm) . Learning was seen as a process of growth. The ten year old is not a different creature from his two year old self -- he is the same person, grown and developed. Similarly, learning is not an accumulation, like crystals forming or liquid collecting in a bucket, so much as a growing, like a seedling into a plant.

A century or so ago, a different view of learning came about as a combined result of the birth of the science of "psychology" and the creation of the efficiency industry inspired by the Prussian army. The admiration of the Prussian system led to a desire for increased efficiency and organization in the education system. The early pyschology endeavours -- many based on studies of animals or research done into mental illnesses -- seemed to promise that learning behavior of humans could be codified and measured objectively. This led to many changes in our school system that we still think of as standard today. For example:

• Age-segregated classrooms (thus eliminating the possibility of older students coaching and setting an example for younger ones, and older students getting the benefits of being leader and model for the younger ones).
• Testing and recording as ways to measure academic progress.
• Disability/at risk industry growing around the students who do not keep up (since obviously, it can't be the methods that are at fault, since they are objectively designed).

I am planning to take notes as I read through the chapters, but for right now I wanted to recommend it as a short, thought-provoking read. The main thing that stood out as different for me from books like Gatto's and Alfie Kohn's is that it traced the "paideia" or "learning as mentorship" back to ancient days rather than putting it in a purely modern frame of reference.

Smith makes the point that most "back to basics" advocates are proposing something like "back to 19th century regimentation". He recommends going further back, to a more classic tradition where learning took place in the context of spending time with those who knew what you wanted to know.

Classics

I forget what I was looking for a few days ago when I happened across this Classical School Blog. I put it on my Google Reader because it looked interesting.

Today when I was organizing my feeds on there, I ran across it again. While catching up on the posts, I found to my delight that the blog's authors are Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide, the same pair who run one of my longtime favorite blogs: Eide Neurolearning. The two blogs have similar formats with short articles on interesting information, cross-referenced to other articles.

They have a book called The Mislabelled Child that I am now going to look out for.

Here's a post on the classical school blog about the Progymnasmata -- I have just been looking over Classical Writing: Diogenes which is about Chreia, the third of the progymnasmata.