From the archives: Mozart, long division, and the tough stuff

First posted April 2010

Last night I found myself deep in Charlotte Mason's School Education (the third volume in the Home Education series), because I was thinking hard about how what we do for school here does or doesn't match up with CM goals. (Sometimes it doesn't!) I did take some time out to watch Mr. Holland's Opus, including the part where Mr. Holland's school cuts out all the music and drama courses because of lack of funds and because the administration does not value those things.

Vice Principal Wolters: I care about these kids just as much as you do. And if I'm forced to choose between Mozart and reading and writing and long division, I choose long division.
Glenn Holland: Well, I guess you can cut the arts as much as you want, Gene. Sooner or later, these kids aren't going to have anything to read or write about.

It's hard to get away from the discussion and thinking over educational questions in Ontario over the past couple of weeks, questions about political correctness, about the school vs. the family's role in teaching anything beyond the "basic" subjects. The Toronto weekend papers were full of comments from people who would seemingly like nothing better to get their hands squeezed tightly around the minds of my children. We've also been talking about spiritual warfare as part of a study at church. It all leads me to a sense not so much of despair but of urgency, a sense that if our children are to have a chance to stand against not only systematic reprogramming of personal values but against the Vice Principal Wolters of the world, we need to give them some very strong tools to do it with and we need to do that now.

Ray Bradbury and Aldous Huxley, though not necessarily kindred spirits to CM, agreed on one point: that books, real books, are the strongest of those tools. Take books away from people, either physically or by taking away their ability to read them (or their belief that books are valuable, or their understanding that some books are just paper with covers while others are more than that), and you can reprogram your subjects to think any way you want. Find them again, and the winter of frozen minds starts to thaw and bud into spring. It even happened in the Bible.

That's why slaves were forbidden to read. That's why printing presses and newspapers are often damaged or closed down during times of political turmoil. Knowledge (not just information, as Charlotte Mason repeatedly said) is power. Thinking is power. Reading is power. We have the natural world, we have Mozart, we have paintings, we have so much more there to discover...but beyond that, we have books. They are still there. We can still read them. They disappear from the library shelves and from publishers' lists, but they often show up (as if in retaliation) as e-books and on used booksellers' sites. Nobody's taken away the Harvard Classics online. Nobody's yet taken away your right to buy books by David Hicks and Richard Mitchell. Or Bibles, at least for the time being and at least in this country. Or Shakespeare. Or the books that inspired Frankenstein's monster. If they humanized him, can they do less for us?

The definition proposed here for "a leisurely education" was having the freedom (time, space, opportunity) to discover what makes you fully human. Without a doubt, that freedom is being pulled away. Pull back as hard as you can, as long as you can.

Quote for the day: Genuine, custom-packaged authenticity (pay with your credit card)

"In a world of proliferating choice (consumer choice, that is), we are less prone [than we used to be] to feel we are deprived of an identity we value. In fact, it is likely that someone is trying very hard to understand what we feel is authentic so that it can be packaged somehow and sold to us in the form of a rebellious T-shirt or self-help book." ~~ Donovan Plumb, "Critical Adult Education in Canada in the Time of CASAE," New Directions For Adult & Continuing Education, 2009(124), 5-14.

Quote for the Day: Stick with Words

"Modern society keeps drifting away from words, relying instead on images and graphics. There’s even an emoji Bible that translates verses into emoticons (http://www.bibleemoji.com/). I won’t make that shift. I’m sticking with words."

Philip Yancey, "Why I Write"

Oh, my poor brainwashed homeschooled kids

There is a lot going on in the media about free speech, homeschooling, Christians, and education in general.  A Peaceful Day has a post discussing an article that seems to raise unwarranted concern about homeschoolers, particularly American politician Rick Santorum.  Is the real concern that some homeschooling parents (religious or not) might neglect academics or (puh-leeze) socialization?  Or is that just a smokescreen for those who separate "freedom of worship" from "freedom of religion?"  I'm not sure.

As I've said before, merely occupying a particular place in society is enough to ensure that some people out there won't like you.  I am a middle-aged white female, educated in Ontario public schools and universities. I have been a stay-at-home mom for the last twenty years.  I attend a Christian church.  Our children have received most of their schooling outside of the public school system.  I diapered a baby in disposables, I eat pork, I buy cold cereal, I read books by dead white guys, and I wear blue jeans.  I'm sure there's at least one thing on that list (I could come up with more) to cause general fear and mistrust.  In some people's minds, I'm a very dangerous person.

Well, Bubba and me seem to have larned our young'uns good enough that they can get by with the readin', writin', and figgerin'.  The two that went to public high school have been on the honour roll, and have earned a consistent stream of positive remarks from their teachers.  And they've made friends too--imagine that.  The oldest graduated with not only a high school diploma but with most of the requirements completed for her hairstyling apprenticeship, and she completed that soon afterwards...just before she entered university as a science major. (Yes, big bad science.) Middle daughter, now in ninth grade, has her own ideas about all the marvellous things she'd like to do and how she's going to do them. And what can I say about the fifth-grader, whose "lack of exposure to the real world" includes a weekly stint working with adults at the thrift store, and whose current favourite TV show is She-ra, Princess of Power?

Sure, there are opportunities that we couldn't provide, just because of our own family circumstances.  We're urban, not rural; we aren't world travellers; the girls haven't had much opportunity to participate in organized sports.  (Honestly, they didn't care about that.) Only one of them has taken swimming lessons. But guess what? They (at least the older two) can solder, handle a screwdriver, and change oil.  They've taken voice lessons, dance, improv, and drama (at various times).  They know how to shop for groceries,  mow the lawn, and run the washing machine, and they're aware of the dangers of misused credit.  They're the ones who are recruited to water vacationing neighbours' gardens, and help with younger children at church.  The oldest paid for most of her own "wants" during high school, through part-time jobs. All three of them run circles around me with their electronic gadgets (not around their dad, though--who do you think taught them?).  They are not shy about reading or speaking in public.  They can hold a conversation with people outside their own age group. They have opinions.  They argue with each other, and sometimes with their parents. They also identify themselves as Christians.

(I guess that last one must have been brainwashed into them, yes?)


Related posts:
Answers to some misconceptions about homeschooling
Bubba and me think that homeskoolers are not so freaky
How come your kids don't know that?
Is public high school all that perky?

Linked from Carnival of Homeschooling: Texas Edition

There are more and more and more and more of us...

in the world. It's estimated that by the end of October, there will be 7 billion human beings on this planet.

According to the same Toronto Star article, and Wikipedia, we hit the 6 billion mark in 1999. Twelve years seems like a very short time to add a billion people.

When are we expected to hit 8 billion? 2027.

"“The world is currently in the midst of the greatest demographic upheaval in human history,” says David Bloom, professor of economics and demography at the Harvard School of Public Health."--Antonia Zerbisias, Toronto Star

Crayons and Mama Squirrel noticed something strange about population as well. In the Mission Monde French workbook, Crayons was asked to find the population of Burundi. She clicked on a couple of websites, and this is what she found: a 2009 estimate of 8,303,000 2009; and a July, 2011 count of 10,216,190.

The teacher's manual for the course, published in 2006 and re-edited in 2008, gives the population as 6,370,609.

Either someone miscounted, or the population of tiny little Burundi, one of the ten poorest countries in the world, is growing exponentially. WikiAnswers seems to agree with that fact, but we still don't have a clear answer as to why. We guessed that it might be an influx of refugees from famine-stricken areas, but that didn't seem logical either. Second guess: that it's just what the Toronto Star article is talking about, more babies born in the poorest parts of the world.

I don't pretend to have answers. I just read the papers. And the teacher's manual.

A Month With Charlotte Mason, #17

In which we set aside the interview for today (will pick it up on Monday)

Yesterday afternoon I was sitting at the community centre waiting for the Squirrelings to be done a co-op class, and not having one of my own to teach, I started browsing through the bookshelf there. I picked up Super Crunchers, by Ian Ayres, and had time to read through the forward and the first chapter before the kids switched classes.

This book gives new meaning to "[oops] lies and statistics." It's written by a Yale law professor who's also an economist, and the book is about how our culture is, more or less, becoming run by algorithms and formulas. Which are right more often than they're wrong, to the discomfiture of those who have been dethroned by mathematical ways of doing things...but whether that's a good thing or not is another question. Particularly in the area of education, although that isn't a main focus of the book. Isn't that what the DHM, Cindy and others have been saying lately too? That what our culture wants is to measure everything, predict everything, get everything possible down to a quantifiable science rather than depend on less-dependable human instincts? And when you're predicting wine vintages (as in the forward to the book) or whether an anti-car-theft device will reduce crime, that's fine--but when you're predicting people, it's frightening.

Because, to paraphrase Cindy, we now have those tools and we're using them on ourselves instead of for ourselves.

And it makes me think of the whole CM idea "for the children's sake." For whose sake do the schools spend so much money developing programmed reading instruction that says now, today, you will be able to take this step, read these new words, understand this and this concept...but don't ask questions that aren't covered in this step, this lesson. The computer (I'm guessing) may even be able to predict that you may have periods of faster or slower learning, and adjust for that...but in the end, who is this all for? For the student, or for the system? In Understood Betsy, Dorothy Canfield Fisher ends her chapter on Betsy's country school by pointing out that it was only a poky little school with a few children, that no city school superintendent would bother with. My response is, now they should be so lucky.

For whose sake are we becoming only more numbers in huge databases? Have you tried getting any kind of insurance lately? The goal of reducing human error sounds like a good one, until you realize that we're the humans in question...

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