Education is a life: the gift

So...discipline, as Kathy commented on the last post, is a gift that we give our children rather than something we impose on them.

This fits well with some of the thinking I've heard about rediscovering the monastic "horarium," with specific prayers and readings, devotions and duties--disciplines--tied to certain hours of the clock or times of the year.

It also fits with the terms that Laurie Bestvater uses in her writings on CM-style notebooking: paper postures, paper graces. Could we also say paper disciplines? Again, notebooks are meant to be a lifelong habit for the student, not an artificial, teacher-constructed demand with little longterm meaning.

What we can give is the idea to begin, and the support to continue, along with the practical tools children need. But we can't do the habits of attentiveness or the rituals of nature notebooking for them, any more than we can take over other people's spiritual disciplines.  If there is no education but self-education, there is also no true discipline but self-discipline.