Education is a discipline: how little can you pack?

A Yahoo video popped up the other day, showing how you can fit shoes, socks, t-shirts, pajamas, and a man's suit and shirts into a very small suitcase. It's all in the way you stuff and fold.

In the comments, people complained and asked why you would want t-shirts rolled up into (possibly) smelly shoes, and why you would want those dirty shoe soles touching all your other clothes. Someone else asked, what if you want to bring something back with you? My own question was, where are the other things like toothpaste? But the idea of "packing tight" is attractive. It implies order, discipline, economy. It makes some of us envious.

"For his trip to England, he dressed in his most comfortable suit. One suit is plenty, he counseled in his guidebooks, if you take along some travel-size packets of spot remover. (Macon knew every item that came in travel-size packets, from deodorant to shoe polish.) The suit should be a medium gray. Gray not only hides the dirt; it’s handy for sudden funerals and other formal events. At the same time, it isn’t too somber for everyday. He packed a minimum of clothes and a shaving kit. A copy of his most recent guide to England. A novel to read on the plane. Bring only what fits in a carry-on bag. Checking your luggage is asking for trouble. Add several travel-size packets of detergent so you won’t fall into the hands of foreign laundries." ~~ Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist

And yet even Macon is eventually forced to abandon his medium-gray world of caution and control and things tightly fitting in, for a less predictable but more human life.

Charlotte Mason wrote about the extremes of the educational spectrum.  She talked about what happens if you focus only on "atmosphere" and miss out on "discipline" and "life."  Or vice versa. Obviously, they need to be balanced, maybe like the three sides or three points of a triangle.  And integrated with each other: the atmosphere includes discipline, the discipline gives life.

It's when we try to pack education too tightly that we don't welcome surprises, exceptions, questions, subjects, and people that don't fit our lesson plan. For some reason I'm thinking of the time that Mr. Fixit and I toured a middle school with Ponytails, and I asked the teacher/tour guide a couple of innocent questions about things like which students got to write math competitions. I expected the answer to be "anyone who wants to!" Instead I got something more like "we choose a few of the best students." So much for participation and opportunity. When did the students get to do art and music? Well, each one of those but for only half the year. And so on. We ended up homeschooling through middle school, and Ponytails wrote math contests, and did art and music whenever she wanted, and learned some Latin and economics, and took photographs, and made crepes.

It's when we pack too tightly that we miss certain common-sense facts of life. Yes, as someone says, it fits, but do you want to wear those shirts now that they've spent the night inhaling the shoes? You may have a math program that worked fine for one child, but that misses the mark with the next one. Or, as we did, a math program that one hated, and then when we recycled it for the next one, she hated it too.

In a way, Charlotte Mason says, her philosophy of education does demonstrate economy and lack of clutter. As a travelling missionary once explained on a message board, it really is possible to stuff a year's curriculum into a diaper bag, if you choose carefully.  But as Ruth Beechick said, we teach the child, not the curriculum.  It's more important that we use and teach what is important, than that it all fit into the suitcase.

And don't forget space for souvenirs.

Cute dog photo found at TheTravelDude.net.
Praying mantis ootheca courtesy of L'Harmas 2014.

TIMELY P.S.: The HeadGirl, now mom to three, posts about how they all spent an inefficient but enjoyable afternoon experiencing pumpkins. My point exactly.

Ruskin and Wordsworth go under Charlotte's microscope (School Education)

Did you ever read an autobiography and wish you could have lived in that person's family? Or not, as the case may be?

In the last several chapters of School Education, Charlotte Mason gives a sort of bucket list of the things that children need, the relationships (intimacies, affinities) they need to form; she's been over this ground earlier in the book.  She then spends a number of pages setting up her list against the childhood memories of William Wordsworth and John Ruskin, from Wordsworth's Prelude and Ruskin's Praeterita.  As a little postscript, she includes Wordsworth's advice on prigs.

That's it, that's what all that poetry and quoting is about.  Ruskin wanted to ride a pony, a real pony, just ride it outdoors and imagine he was really going somewhere and doing something; he thought afterwards that that might have made him a bit less of a wuss.

His parents signed him up for indoor riding lessons, but those were a failure, maybe because his heart wasn't in it.  He also spent a lot of time by himself, and he didn't have anybody to take him on nature walks and tell him the names of things, so he settled for collecting pebbles.

Wordsworth, on the other hand, spent most of his time with his friends, skating and swimming and stealing birds' nests. (What Charlotte calls Dynamic Relations.)

They both had books that fascinated them; they both had more-or-less similar opportunities to see art and experience a few of the other things on the list. Wordsworth appears to have had a more balanced, less neurotic upbringing than Ruskin, but in the end they both achieved greatness, contributed to the world.

Charlotte's final point: Ruskin and Wordsworth were each intelligent enough to overcome childhood difficulties, to make the most of what they had.  Even Ruskin's pebbles were the beginning of a lifelong interest in geology. But what if Ruskin hadn't had so many disappointments, had had more time to just play outdoors, make friends, have a few more of those affinities in place? What more could he have become? We'll never know.

And all that sounds like a recipe for pure parental guilt, especially if we can't send our children to kindergarten in the woods.  As Charlotte says in her first volume, a quick daily march around the square won't do either.  So what can one do if one doesn't live in a nature-friendly area or one doesn't have sympathetic neighbours or one has babies and toddlers, or illness, or blizzards?

The answer is, the best one can.  After all, knowing what children need is what opens our eyes to opportunities.

On the school menu this week (Dollygirl's Grade 7)

Tuesday (the lunchtime concerts are now over for the season)

Old Testament:  continue Numbers, about Miriam's punishment and the spies

Poems: This Crosse-Tree Here, a spacial poem by Robert Herrick

General Science:  begin Module 12, about food, energy, and combustion

Handwriting

Music history:  Robert and Clara Schumann

Grammar

Saxon Algebra 1/2

Return of the King

Wednesday

New Testament:  continue the Gospel of Mark

Backyard Nature (notebooks)

Poems

Ivanhoe

Handwriting

English History:  The Magna Charta (use Century Chart)

Grammar

Balance Benders Level 3

Saxon Algebra 1/2

Thursday

Basic Bible Studies:  finish the study on God the Son, and/or begin the next one about the Holy Spirit

Composition:  watch the sampler DVD we didn't get to yet

Architecture:  more definitions of "Gothic," and Perpendicular Tracery

Poems

General Science:  continue the basic ideas of producers/consumers (and decomposers), and how combustion works

Plutarch:  do some catching up on Cicero, and use the Book of Centuries

Key to Geometry

Return of the King

Friday

Basic Bible Studies:  see Thursday

How to Read a Book:  continue the idea of "unity" in a story or a book

Handwriting

Money Matters workbook

Picture Talk:  Jan Vermeer (make an entry in the Book of Centuries)

History:  continue from Wednesday

Poems

Key to Geometry

Shakespeare's King John: start Act III

Charlotte Mason and the not-just-reading challenge, Part One

Even when looking at the few samples we have of actual Parents' Union School timetables, the "what you do when and how" question looms; there's a large gap between a term programme that gives a certain number of pages to be read, plus suggestions for notebook keeping or related work, and then seeing twenty or forty minutes on a timetable simply labelled "Writing" or "Botany."  In a group or classroom situation where everyone is listening to the same story and then taking turns narrating, or exploring the same patch of ground and then getting out their nature notebooks to write and draw, the advantage of numbers may fill in the gap naturally.  But if you are teaching or caring for several children who are working at different levels, how do you fit everybody's work and play time together?  And if you are teaching only one, especially a naturally sociable one, how do you provide an atmosphere that motivates?

Are older students supposed to handle the timetable themselves, including the extra work needed to make each subject really come to life, plus the clock-watching needed to keep on "schedule?"  Do we show them what needs to be done, and simply trust them to get down to business, everything completed by the end of the day or the week? Or do we micro-manage, set timers for everything and refuse to let them write or discuss anything past the buzzer?  If we use daily or weekly checklists to help students stay on track, do we again just write in "Botany?"  Or do we we pre-write or email or verbally tell them everything they're going to need to know and to do?  Where does our direction or authority meet their need for the "meeting of minds," their time for (very necessary) choice and personal response?

Finally, are there situations where a CM-style timetable, 20 minutes of this on Monday, 30 minutes of that on Tuesday, wash your hands and the school day is done, just does not work?  I notice, for instance, that on an early PUS timetable for Form III, there is no mention of music study or picture talk; there is very little time given for reading literature; and there is no in-class time for anything in the "work" category--handicrafts, home skills and so on.  Presumably all this, including the "evening and holiday reading," would have been part of the afternoon's work, and where there were interested teachers and Guide leaders to direct those crafts and nature walks, that would have worked quite well.  But in our particular home situation, perhaps like Jeanne's, we find that some of the variety in our school day comes from mixing desk work or book lessons with a kitchen project, a short walk, or a bit of handwork done while listening to a reading.  And when school time is "done" for the day, there is resistance to reading yet another book with Mom or "for" Mom (even a not-school book), or doing something that might turn up on an examination.  For us, those "extras" (very important extras) have to be worked in as part of the school day, not left for the tail end, if they're going to happen at all.

If we are educating lifelong learners, if education is an atmosphere and a life, then we do need to make "school" a part of the life that we have, and that may mean a life with several children and multiple interruptions, or with one child and the need to keep things interesting when others aren't around.  It may mean a busy farm life or mission field life or travelling life, or life with other challenges such as chronic illness. (You can add your own variations to those.) Yes, a predictable schedule is preferable to a when-we-can one; education is a discipline, too; but we may find that our own version of "predictable" might work better than someone else's--even the PUS's.

Your thoughts?

A short Charlotte Mason thought

I've always liked that quote from For the Children's Sake, about asking yourself how, if certain famous thinkers sat in on your class (school, homeschool, Sunday School, whatever), would they be engaged or fall asleep?

So does it follow then that the job of a Charlotte Mason-style teacher is to make it interesting?

Yes, yes, yes...and no.  "I am not a Performing Bear," says Mary Poppins in Mary Poppins Opens the Door.

It's more like...let it be interesting.  Let it stay interesting.  Don't drain the interesting part out.

"This is an interesting planet.  It deserves all the attention you can give it."  ~~Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004)

Use-what-you-choose homeschooling (Part Five--Last one!)

From Part Four:

"A vast number of things and thoughts: so we train him upon physical exercises, nature lore, handicrafts, science and art, and upon many living books (also here), for we know that our business is not to teach him all about anything, but to help him to make valid as many as may be of "those first-born affinities that fit our new existence to existing things." ~~ Charlotte Mason

I started out here reminiscing about how homeschoolers used to depend on in-print curriculum reviews, but that there weren't so many of them that you couldn't make a reasonable choice; especially on a tight budget. And now the sky seems to be the limit.

I also pointed out that if you got stuck choosing, you might find at least temporary help by plugging in to pre-written booklists and schedules.  Which aren't at all bad things, and they're certainly better than (like the Duchess) throwing everything in the bowl and hoping for the best.

But if you feel like you're stuck blindly following recipes; if you want to get more adventurous, if for whatever reason you find yourself in a place where you need to do things differently...maybe you have a child with an unusual learning style, or a spouse with an unpredictable work schedule, or thirteen daughters named

Madeleine, Gwendolyn, Jane and Clothilde,
Caroline, Genevieve, Maude and Mathilde,
Willibald, Guinevere, Joan and Brunhilde,

And the youngest of all was the baby, Gunhilde...what was I saying...oh yes, as Peg Bracken said, then you are "for it."

Choosing and using is not really such a mystery.  You just need to follow sound educational principles and, so to speak, write your own recipe but don't let it send you up on a sky-high mountain of cake batter.  And I warn you that, as soon as you beckon them, hordes of Principles, Systems, and Methods, right, wrong, beautiful, silly, contradictory, and time-wasting ones, will immediately swarm your castle and beg admittance.

But as Charlotte Mason said, it's up to you which ideas you choose to let through the gates.  Invite the good ones in, and drop the portcullis on the rest.

Books, we've talked about, and we can keep on talking about them forever, because they're so central and they're getting so quickly shut out of this culture. Remember what Ray Bradbury said in Fahrenheit 451, that it wasn't really necessary to make books illegal, because most people had already stopped reading, didn't care anyway?  You don't have to bite people's cell phones in half to make your point; reading for knowledge, and going beyond the elementary reading stage (see How to Read a Book), is a little less hard on the orthodontics.  Search for treasures, and don't limit the search to "children's areas."

"Things, e.g.––
          i. Natural obstacles for physical contention, climbing, swimming, walking, etc.
          ii. Material to work in––wood, leather, clay, etc.
          iii. Natural objects in situ––birds, plants, streams, stones, etc,
          iv. Objects of art.
          v. Scientific apparatus, etc."  ~~ Charlotte Mason

In other words, explore the kingdom.  I know, I know, what was a simple list for her seems full of contentious obstacles for some of us:  clay's messy, wood takes tools, streams are wet, and what's with that et cetera at the end?  But, to put it in a better way, we gain something, even maybe something Charlotte didn't have, by having to make a conscious choice to make the natural, messy, and risky available to our children.

And you know how Charlotte Mason finishes off the "Educational Manifesto" from which I drew that last bit about Books and Things?

There is reason to believe that these principles are workable in all schools, Elementary and Secondary; that they tend in the working to simplification, economy, and discipline.

Simplification!  Economy!  Not to mention discipline!  This is not about overwhelming anybody.  It's about making and sticking to some basic, good choices.  The good stuff is all around us. Remember at the beginning of the first post I complained that technology has made things too complicated?  Well, yes, that's true, but if we know where to look and where to say "stop," we can make the most of it.

Illustrations from The Duchess Bakes a Cake, by Virginia Kahl.

Use-what-you-choose homeschooling (Part Four, one more to come)

From Part Three:

We have principles, tools, and a whole world to explore.
It means that we can stop worrying what the lady at church thinks.
It also means that we have a greater understanding and purpose when we do choose learning materials. 

So what does one need for teaching?  (Also here)

One or more persons, also known as children (also here)
The principle of authority, used wisely
The principle of obedience, taught well
The respect due to the personality of children
Three educational instruments--the atmosphere of environment, the discipline of habit (also here), and the presentation of living ideas (also here)
All the knowledge that is proper to children, communicated in well-chosen language
A vast number of things and thoughts: so we train him upon physical exercises, nature lore, handicrafts, science and art, and upon many living books (also here), for we know that our business is not to teach him all about anything, but to help him to make valid as many as may be of "those first-born affinities that fit our new existence to existing things."
The way of the will (also here)
The way of reason (also here)
The Divine Spirit who has constant access to their spirits; their Continual Helper in all the interests, duties and joys of life.

~~ Charlotte Mason, "20 Principles," found in Towards a Philosophy of Education and elsewhere

One more post to come.

Homemaking thoughts, home-making blogs (Hidden Art of Homemaking, Chapter 5)

Here's a three-question summary of The Hidden Art of Homemaking, chapter 5.

What kind of place do you live in?

What kind of place would you like to live in?

How can you make your (current) place more of that (imagined) place, so it's more your place, and more His place?

And here's a bonus question:

Is there a Christian "decorating" ideal?  Or an "ideal" Christian decorating style?  What do you think the inside of a Christian home should look like?

Does that last question exclude non-Christians from being good interior decorators?  No, of course not.  But since Edith Schaeffer is talking about reflecting God's artistry, there should be a visible consciousness of God's truth, beauty, and creativity in the homes of "Christ-followers."

Photo from Curtain Queen blog (a blog worth checking out!)

Edith has a whole string of nouns for this: imagination, personality, originality, purpose, charm, usefulness, beauty, interest, restoration, order, caring, wholeness, connection, balance. Abstract as those words are, they do give us a picture of what we could be ourselves, by living in rooms that show interest (vs. dullness), restoration (vs. falling apart or discarding), connection (to God, to the natural world, to our own roots, to each other).
There should be something about our homes that says "Welcome Here."

Not only to guests, but to us. 

Maybe it's with words, on a dish towel, on the wall.  Or maybe it's a wordless greeting.

Photo from Coffee Tea Books and Me. 

Maybe it's a place to sit down.

Photo from The Common Room Blog.

Maybe it's a shelf of good books. Maybe it's the art, the music, the flowers, the food (all chapters in the book).  Maybe it's everything together.  However you create it...

Home Making is the Home You Make.

Related posts:

What Can We Do? Crafting a Home (Chapter 5)

Treasured Possessions (Chapter 5)

Interior Decorating and The Friendly Giant (Chapter 5)

We're supposed to like school? (Philosophy of Education)

Well, if not school, at least learning.

"...they never got so far as to learn that knowledge is delightful because one likes it; and that no effort at self-education can do anything until one has found out this supreme delightfulness of knowledge."  ~~ Charlotte Mason, "Too Wide a Mesh," epilogue to Towards a Philosophy of Education

And in that sense, according to Charlotte Mason, the education of the Grenfell twins was a failure.

Check that off your list of standards.

Quote for the day: on church, classes, Charlotte Mason, and real life

One of this week's thrifted books was This Beautiful Mess, by Rick McKinley.  I am not an adherent of the emergent church movement, so I am cautious about this kind of book; but I did find one passage in it that said more to me about homeschooling and Charlotte Mason than it actually did about church.

Here is the quote:

"Our dream at Imago is that one day you would come to church with your kids and travel through Learning Labs as families.  Think about it:  What if you walked into a church and instead of seeing a sign that says "Sixth-Grade Girls," you saw signs inviting your family to the garden, a science lab, an art studio, a media room, and on and on?  If the kingdom is being expressed in all of life, why wouldn't that kind of "church school" make perfect sense?"--This Beautiful Mess, page 109

Well, what we do when we spend time with other believers on Sunday mornings is worship. Mostly. Our church has Sunday School classes too, but I'm thinking we are there because it's a time of corporate, formal worship, not a time to work in the garden or do science experiments. However, I do like what it says about how we might do life and learning together aside from that time of formal worship. Your thoughts?

Charlotte Mason and the Three Faces of Education

"And Ennui.––This notion, that education is included in environment, or, at the best, in atmosphere, has held the ground for a generation or two, and it seems to me that it has left its mark upon our public and our private lives. We are more ready to be done unto than to do; we do not care for the labour of ordering our own lives in this direction or in that; they must be conducted for us; a press of engagements must compel us into what next, and what next after. We crave for spectacular entertainment, whether in the way of pageants in the streets, or spectacles on the boards. Even Shakespeare has come to be so much the occasion for gorgeous spectacles that what the poet says is of little moment compared with the show a play affords. There is nothing intentionally vicious in all this; it is simply our effort to escape from the ennui that results from a one-sided view of education,––that education is an atmosphere only."--Charlotte Mason, School Education, page 150

Is education only environment, or atmosphere? Charlotte Mason points out, in the passage above, the danger of never applying ourselves to seek out ideas, but only letting them drop in our laps, hoping they'll just sink in (something like the current worries over the bits and bites of news that come shooting at us online). If we never make a serious effort to go out and Think, we might end up worrying only about nothing weightier than how to tie a cravat.

On the other hand, she says, the idea that Education is a Life can also be abused. If we're so obsessed with chasing down every last idea, and so busy Thinking that there is no joy in it (another kind of information overload), we will bore our friends and exhaust ourselves.

Miss Mason also mentions a third approach to learning: "mind as machine," or as she puts it, the belief that "Education is the Cultivation of Faculties, leads to Abnormal Developments." She points out that this idea is not so far removed from "Education is a Discipline," but that the difference is just large enough to cause real mistakes if we don't see it. You don't read Shakespeare with children by giving them long lists of vocabulary to be quizzed on; in fact, you don't read it with them to enrich their vocabularies, or to teach them about the life of Julius Caesar, or what blank verse is; or because you want them to show off (or to show them off?) in front of the grandparents or the public schoolers. You read it with them because you want to give them something that already belongs to them.  You read it because it's worth reading, because it's beautiful or true, because it gives you new understanding of God and people. You read it, as you look at paintings and stars and cathedrals, to gain some lasting "mind furniture."

To wind up: my ninth grader came home from the public library recently and complained that a lot of the "teenage books" there all seemed to focus on the same few topics, most of them inappropriate. She gets that; she's not asking to read them. She just wishes that more writers would realize that lots of young people have broader interests than vampires and whatever. What's the "real world," anyway, and who's to say who is or isn't living in it? Is education just what a teacher tells you to memorize, and information just what comes at you over whatever gadget you carry around? Do we have to rebel so hard, trying to get whatever knowledge is out there, that we frighten ourselves? Or do we allow the hard work of learning to turn us into computers wearing tennis shoes?

We can let education drive us, or we can allow it to humanize us. We need all three of its faces, but, as Charlotte Mason says--"in proportion."

Midnight oil graphic found on Workaholic.org

Linked from the Charlotte Mason Blog Carnival: Education is a Life.

A Month with Charlotte Mason, #19: Beyond Us

I said yesterday that I was going to go in a certain direction with this...but I changed my mind.

"I think of a young woman I met at the corner store once who was toting a little one; I asked her if she knew about the mom-and-tot play programs and drop-ins that our community centre offered. She just looked at me without much interest and said, "He'd rather play in the toilet." Maybe she was joking? I've never been sure."--2005 post here about poverty

If there's anything I feel apologetic about in Charlotte Mason, it's that...in a way...homeschoolers have appropriated her ideas, made them our own, and turned Charlotte Mason into...well, Charlotte Mason. Something that takes us an hour to explain (including the necessary biographical details) and causes people to wonder (as one lady asked plaintively at a support group meeting), "um...are there any OTHER ways to homeschool?"

It's true that Miss Mason warned even school principals not to take up her methods too "lightly," and if it was a danger for them, surely it is for us as well...a lot of what online CMers have worked at over the past decade or so has been meant to balance the proliferation of "Charlotte Mason Lite." It's also true that if you want to know what all this is/was about, you cannot do better than to read Charlotte Mason's books. Forty years of experience packed into a few paperbacks..."the best thoughts of the best minds" and all that.

However... there are two points, two big ones anyway, that get missed in this. One is that Charlotte Mason headed the Parents National Educational Union, which was a nation-wide group. In other words, it wasn't just CM and her best and closest friends; this was a large iron-sharpening-iron community. You can call her the inspiration, the head, even the heart behind this educational movement...but she didn't do it alone. She edited the Parent's Review, but she didn't write it alone. She headed the House of Education training college, but she didn't teach it alone. She wouldn't have called her philosophy and methods "Charlotte Mason Education." I'm not even sure what she did call it. In the books she refers to "this method," "PNEU methods" and so on, but "it" doesn't even seem to have a more official name...and perhaps that's the reason we've fallen back on referring to it as "Charlotte Mason" or CM, just like "Montessori schools." But perhaps if we started saying that we homeschool using PNEU methods, it would get even worse...people would do Google searches and come up with travel guides. Or we'd get people asking about how you homeschool using that pneu-monia method. Without trying to discredit Charlotte Mason, I wonder if someday we'll come up with a name for her method that nails it without requiring an entire workshop's worth of explanation.

The second issue is this, and it's why I pasted that quote at the top: there is a need for the wisdom-made-practical that we have benefited from ourselves, even if it's not labelled CM or packaged the way we expect. Charlotte Mason appreciated excellent educators, even if they'd never heard of her methods (or they had lived before her time). She particularly mentioned a teacher in a mining community who taught his students what they really wanted and needed to know, helped them find answers to the things they wondered about, and (I think) showed them that they were intelligent enough to learn those things. It reminds me of Marva Collins teaching inner-city kids stuff that was way off the expected-results charts. It reminds me of some of the books on the website Learner's Library, like Richard B. Gregg's Preparation for Science, published in 1928, endorsed by Mahatma Gandhi, and meant to give rural students in India a strong start in science...which also reminds me of George Washington Carver and his college students scrounging stuff to make their own lab equipment. It reminds me of some of the points in For the Children's Sake, that CM's methods can be used in the most unlikely settings.

And those unlikely settings...perhaps...are where we should be setting our hearts, using our creativity. The unlikely children, even the ones with the "play in the toilet" parents. Especially those ones. Many of us have cultivated our creative frugal homeschooling...and yet it's not even our children, necessarily, who need that creativity the most. I live on a somewhat limited budget, but I could go out and buy a math game if I needed to; I just prefer to make my own, or to use what we already have, or to scrounge a used one. For some parents, using any available materials would be necessity, not choice...but even more important, for some of those same parents, the materials may be there but the motivation and the knowledge to use them are not. Simplest example: many homeschoolers know how to use a deck of cards to teach math skills...you count the spots, you learn the numerals, you play simple games...and don't most people have cards around the house, or pencil and paper, or Cheerios? Using Cheerios, or beans or raisins or pennies, you could exactly duplicate the very detailed early math lessons that Charlotte Mason gives in Home Education. We have this information...we have used it, we've expanded on it, we've created games, we've taught our children... but to a lot of people, a deck of cards is just a deck of cards.

So where to from here? Literally, where to?

Who to?

I greatly admire our online friend the Deputy Headmistress, and I've often drawn on her CM ideas myself. She's been one of the driving forces behind Ambleside Online for years. What has impressed me lately, though, is how she's...reinvented isn't the right word, but I'm searching for a better one...retooled how she does CM/AO, to work well under special circumstances, for two children of a different cultural, different economic/family background. She and her family are giving them the atmosphere and the discipline (sorry about the tulips), the ideas and the living books. What Blynken does for school when he's there doesn't have to look exactly like AO Year 1 (well, he's only in kindergarten anyway). It couldn't, because he isn't there all the time.

But this is the whole point...that this thing is based, according to Charlotte Mason, on a few principles and truths about the way our minds work, about who we are, about what we need. It's not a Victorian/Edwardian/George the Fifthian, English, one-old-woman-in-black movement. It has roots going back to Comenius and Plutarch and classical education as a whole (see some of Krakovianka's posts for discussion on that). It resonated with twentieth-century Christians working at L'Abri. It can reach forward into a time when it's most needed...a time that's already here when we're forgetting so much of even our own past century's history, when people don't want to read anything longer than Twitter, when we don't know how to survive without our plug-ins, or how to cook food that comes without a package and directions. Mr. Fixit has a young German-raised co-worker who didn't recognize the term "Austro-Hungary" (where Mr. Fixit's grandparents were born), and who knows almost nothing about the Third Reich. As another example, when the Apprentice started public high school she was somewhat surprised to find that she knew more about women's history issues (such as the right of a woman to be recognized as co-owner of a family farm) than some of her friends did. And we are hardly militant feminists here.

I don't think the answer, somehow, is going to be in hosting scare-you-off CM workshops, even basic ones. The world is full of Blynkens, and toilet kids, and teenagers who could still find a bigger room to step into if they had some encouragement. Not all of us can handle weekend (or two-week) unofficial foster kids. But some of us can find...need to find...other ways to reach out beyond our own few lucky homeschooled children. The world may not need (or think it needs) more "CM," but it does need more magnanimity, more imagination, more story, more humanness, more connection points, more wonder. If that's what we're able to give our own children, that's good. But if we can find a way to pass it on even further...wouldn't that be amazing?

Something to think about, anyway.

A Month with Charlotte Mason #7: Get a Life

Training your memory is not just a trick for winning baby-shower games, but a habit of mind, taught carefully from a young age. The power of observation is not a unique gift, but a trained power, developed and strengthened with constant use. Along with training in obedience and attention, it makes up a large part of CM’s early-years curriculum. How did Charlotte Mason’s older students get so much done in a school day that ended early and didn’t require homework? They had trained their brains to pay attention the first time, bringing their whole minds to bear on something, visualizing the historical scene or the spelling word, repeating it back, and also retaining it because the next lesson would follow from that one, linking back to the last. The brainwork here was the student’s; he was taught that he could do it, starting small and working up. Charlotte Mason said, “Give an instant’s undivided attention to anything whatsoever, and that thing will be remembered.”

This is what narration is—visualizing, remembering, and telling back either orally or in writing. It is not parroting, or "getting up a lesson" as Laura Ingalls used to do for her mother; it is retelling with understanding. Narration can be written, oral, or done as a combination with a child who is just starting to tell back in writing; and it can be done right after hearing or reading something, or slightly delayed like hearing a story on Friday and then being asked to write a narration on Monday (we have read that this was done in PNEU schools after a Shakespeare reading, later in the 20th century, and we can guess that it was also done that way in earlier years); or it can be done after a bit of time has gone by such as in term exams.

Back to the educational instruments, the three allowable and effective tools for teaching: the last one is the presentation of living ideas. "Give your child a single valuable idea, and you have done more for his education than if you had laid upon his mind the burden of bushels of information." Do I need to say more than that about it? That's all, but that's all.

And if all that habit training and visualizing sound too bewildering and overwhelming when all you’re looking for is what to do for reading and math and how to keep the littler ones out of mischief, Charlotte Mason has some encouragement:

Wise letting alone is the chief thing asked of them…every mother has in Nature an all-sufficient handmaid, who arranges for due work and due rest of mind, muscles, and senses.

These ideas are supposed to free us from some of the anxiety we naturally feel about having all this responsibility for our children’s upbringing and education. You have given them some skills, they have more of their own; let them use them. Parents are not to butt in on play but allow children, as much as possible, to get wet sometimes, dirty, tired, maybe even injured—taking a reasonable risk, but allowing them to grow. The leisurely part of CM is, partly, being able to back off.

“…..A little guiding, a little restraining, much reverent watching, Nature asks of us; but beyond that, it is the wisdom of parents to leave children as much as may be to Nature, and ‘to a higher Power than Nature itself.”

"Nature will look after [a child] and give him promptings of desire to know many things; and somebody must tell as he wants to know; and to do many things, and somebody should be handy just to put him in the way; and to be many things, naughty and good, and somebody should give direction…The busy mother says she has no leisure to be that somebody, and the child will run wild and get into bad habits; but we must not make a fetish of habit; education is a life as well as a discipline."

In other words: CM = Get a Life.

Here is a checklist for leisurely homeschooling—yes, that means You: the philosophy of leisure and the need for an un-anxious, positive atmosphere applies to the teacher too.

If you’re coercing or yelling or threatening, you’re probably doing it wrong.
If you’re spending too much time marking workbooks or cutting things out for the children to paste, you’re doing it wrong.
If you keep switching math curriculums, trying to find the perfect one, you’re probably doing it wrong.
If you’re explaining too much...
If you’re worrying that your kids haven’t mastered sentence diagramming by grade 2...
If you’re pushing your kids to narrate in front of Grandma...
If you never get out of the children’s room at the library...
If you’re worrying too much about this checklist…you’re probably doing it wrong.

In the next post, we'll talk about doing it right.

A Month with Charlotte Mason #6

So that left only three valid, allowable educational instruments or tools—the Atmosphere of Environment, the Discipline of Habit, and the Presentation of Living Ideas.” This is sometimes cut down to “Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life.” Let’s go through those.

I’ll touch on environment just briefly to say that Charlotte Mason thought that homes were great places to learn simply because they weren’t too perfect and packaged. Most of you know the Deputy Headmistress at The Common Room. In recent months she and her family have become more and more involved in the lives of two little boys they know, to the point that the boys’ mother has taken the older one out of kindergarten so that the Headmistress can homeschool him when he stays at The Common Room house, which is out in the country with assorted livestock, creeks and woods to explore, and a variety of humans, related and unrelated, coming and going. In the process of all this, the Headmistress exchanged some emails with the kindergarten teacher, who thought that the little boy would really be missing out on something if he didn’t attend school, because the teachers at their school had "high quality literacy training," had “students reading at their perfect instructional level," and even offered "a leveled book room of books that the reading teachers use to match to the specific needs of the students." (Besides worrying about all the usual socialization stuff.) Since then the Headmistress has posted several times about the wide variety of things both boys are doing, too many to mention here, but including the books she reads to them out of the approximately 8,000 they own. Which place sounds like a better environment for learning? What kind of atmosphere do you want your own children to learn in? Can working only at a "perfect instructional level" actually be detrimental?

Second, on habits and discipline: When you think of habits, you might think first of moral things like not being greedy, or manners like saying please, or helpful things like cleaning up your own mess or turning the lights out. But it's not just about getting them to brush their teeth. Those things are all included in habit training, but there are also habits of the mind that are just as important, such as observation and attention. Charlotte Mason said that the formation of habits IS education, and that Education is the formation of habits.

When we teach strong habits of body and mind, we give our children the leisure—the freedom from anxiety—not to have to constantly worry about what to do next, whether they are going to come when they’re called or not, whether they are going to work attentively at their lessons or dawdle or get distracted, whether they are going to tell the truth or not. As adults, we have, we hope, developed stronger wills that enable us to simply tell ourselves to get back to work or do what we don’t want to do; children, according to Charlotte Mason, don’t always have that power, so it is important to begin with the discipline of habits, and work on developing the will gradually. She said, “The habits of the child produce the character of the man.”

If you read Home Education, you’ll find that Charlotte Mason spends a fair amount of time at the beginning talking about keeping children’s brains healthy and growing by giving them lots of fresh air and outdoor time; and her point is that since you’re out there anyway, you have the opportunity to train them in habits of observation of whatever is around them—plants, animals, landscapes, weather, stars, light, shadows, water, dirt, snow, and encouraging them in their abilities to describe, accurately and in detail, whatever they see. (Or whatever they observe, with any or all of their five senses. I still remember Coffeemamma's Schmoo showing the rest of her family that particular maples had their own smell--or was it taste?)

CM is thought of as a books-based, literary curriculum, and that is true; but I think it is just as much a SEEING curriculum, both in what is literally seen and what is visualized when listening to a geography lesson, when studying spelling words, or in picture study, when children look carefully at a painting for several minutes, and then try to describe it in as much detail as they can from memory. She believed that the act of visualizing something was the key to holding it in the long-term memory. You had to create a mental picture of something yourself, but too much given, too many visuals cluttering up the lesson, would actually limit that process, giving your brain less to work on by itself. I think that relates to our phrase “doesn’t leave much to the imagination.” That’s what Charlotte Mason did want to do—leave lots to the imagination.

A Month with Charlotte Mason #5: Only Three Tools

...and studying the subjects we do cover with books, Real Books—with Real Things as well, but largely with Real Books, inspiring real ideas and real questions, modeling real vocabulary, awakening real curiosity, offering real mind-food.

Real Things are important. A Charlotte Mason education can and should have lots of hands-on, feet-on, five-senses activity. It should have maps and globes, dominoes and math beans, coins, CDs, paint boxes, animals, games of tag, costumes and sets, physical exercises, field trips, singing, building, household skills, outdoor play, clay, magnifying glasses, caterpillars, shells, even tea parties.

But the one indispensable factor is books—lots of books, and the right kind of books, a rich, varied, generous serving that makes them want more. And using those books in a way that makes use of all the habits and skills, intelligence and imagination, powers of attention and observation, that are already in our children and that are being built up by the training we have been giving them.

We want whole books, and real books—not cut apart, rewritten, and sugar coated, but with their ideas intact. Even the more difficult books can be a vital part of the children’s education, without our worrying too much about whether they’re totally understood by 21st-century children.

Recently I read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, which is about a wartime book club and how each person in the group formed a relationship with one author or another in his or her own way, just by reading that person’s book, whether it was an ancient Roman or a 19th-century essayist. They were just plain people, some with more education than others, but they heard those voices speaking into their own minds, without anybody else telling them what they should think about the books; and they understood them, argued with them, loved or hated them. The books fed them, in the midst of a literal time of famine.

In the children’s classic Understood Betsy, the main character is surprised, during her first day in a country school, to be not only allowed but expected to read more than a line at a time out loud--just as she is surprised, in another scene, to be invited to drink all the milk she wants. The teacher tests her further by having her read “Barbara Frietchie,” and all the other children stop their work to listen (and are not scolded for listening). That evening as Betsy recounts her day to the supposedly ignorant old “Putney cousins” with whom she has come to stay, they suggest that she read to them from one of the books on their shelf: Scott’s Lady of the Lake. Their mutual enjoyment of “The Stag at Eve” creates the first real bond between Betsy and her new family.

Third--we're still talking about the three questions parents should ask themselves--how should the students learn? Charlotte Mason wrote about her early days of teaching, which she said were often frustrating because each year the children seemed able to do harder sums, and read harder books, but they did not really grow, in the sense of having minds more awake, or in gaining moral power to overcome problems like habitual lying or dawdling at lessons. She wanted to help them more, but wasn’t sure how. Over many years of experience teaching children, and then training teachers herself, several ideas seemed to come together for her.

She knew of many things that certainly might change behaviour, but most of them were not allowable if you started out by viewing each child as a person made in God’s image, who “must not be encroached upon whether by the direct use of fear or love, suggestion or influence, or by undue play upon any one natural desire,” like competition for marks. In other words, fear could certainly affect someone's behaviour; but that wasn't a route she wanted to take. The personal influence of a strong teacher could definitely change someone's behaviour, and probably for the better in some respects; but what would happen when that teacher was gone and the student did not know how to think for himself? None of these options were respectful of a young human being's moral rights. (Hm, so much for accusations of homeschool brainwashing.)

So that left only three valid, allowable instruments or tools that an educator could use to go beyond the "horse in a mill" school routine of endless recitations and sums. Those three were:

"the Atmosphere of Environment,
the Discipline of Habit,
and the Presentation of Living Ideas.”

This is sometimes cut down to “Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life.” I'll go through those in the next post.

A Month With Charlotte Mason will be taking a break for the holidays this weekend.

A Month with Charlotte Mason, Introduction

Maple buds in our yard (photo: Mr. Fixit)

These are notes from the CM talk I did this weekend, called "A Leisurely Education." They've been edited and added to...I'm going to be posting these in bits and pieces starting today and throughout April. They're based mostly on Charlotte Mason's book Home Education, but you don't have to be reading the book to follow the notes.

Ten years or so ago, when our family first went online and also got serious about Charlotte Mason homeschooling, there were few third-party things, like how-to guides, to help explain what CM was about. In a way that was good, because if you wanted to know what it was about, you had to do a fair amount of reading for yourself. Now all you have to do is Google Charlotte Mason and you’ll get e-books, websites, paraphrases, Yahoo groups, and all kinds of other stuff to help explain, interpret, re-interpret, plan, apply, combine, record, staple, bend and fold CM in a very confusing lot of different ways. It's easy to get tangled up in the secondary stuff that has grown up around Charlotte Mason the educator and the methods that were used in her schools. That includes the Ambleside Online free curriculum project which I’ve been involved in for almost as long. It's an excellent curriculum that applies CM ideas very well; I think it’s done some great things to help homeschoolers take CM methods seriously and get some of the original CM books and articles online, getting away from the ideas about CM being all Victorian tea parties and nature walks that were common a decade ago; but this is about Charlotte Mason's ideas, not so much a look at AO. You need to understand the ideas before you can really use the curriculum.

Especially the whole question of what a “leisurely education” means, and how we can create that for ourselves. So in preparing for today, besides trying to determine the preferred pronunciation of “leisurely” (I'm going with short e), I’ve tried to focus mostly on one of Charlotte Mason’s own books, the first one she wrote in the 1880’s, Home Education. Her other books cover a lot of helpful and practical material, especially for those who have older children or who want to go even deeper into some of the educational and spiritual questions that she raises. Volume 3, School Education, has some very important thoughts about how we view authority, which is probably even more relevant now than it was then; but I think that the first book covers a lot of the basic principles that she expanded on in the later books.

So first of all let’s look at the idea of leisure. The Greek word for leisure, when I looked it up, is put into English letters as SKHOLE, which is also the root of our word school. If you look up the Latin word schola, you find out that, according to at least one online dictionary, it meant an alcove containing a tub in the public baths, or an alcove or space set aside for relaxation or conversation in a palaestra, which was a sports club. So school is meant to be a bubble bath? Or a talk in the locker room?

Well, no. Leisure in the schola sense did not mean Fred Flintstone in a backyard hammock, although Charlotte Mason did describe her methods as “reposeful.” It might be defined as having space and time for minds to meet. Lynn Bruce said back in October that leisure was “ceasing from anxiety and merely utilitarian preoccupations so that one can contemplate higher things, those pursuits without which we cannot be fully human.” (Sounds a bit like Mary and Martha.) If you noticed, she used a key word there, utilitarian. Utilitarianism is exactly the opposite of the kind of leisurely learning, thinking atmosphere we have in mind here. It focuses only on immediate usefulness. It’s why, according to Ruth Beechick, our public school curriculum got overloaded with science during the Cold War and the space race. It’s why the biggest reason for pushing high school and then college or university is so kids will make money when they graduate. Utilitarianism spends a lot of time worrying about being relevant. I think Northrop Frye hit it bang on when he said, “Education is a matter of developing the intellect and the imagination, which deal with reality, and reality is always irrelevant.”

You might think that an emphasis on education being relevant, practical and useful would be a good thing, but the problem is that the usefulness becomes less about what’s taught than the usefulness of the students to the system, the machine; we end up as numbers, or like the song, just another brick in the wall. As Lynn said, less than fully human.

(More in the next post. #3 is here.)

What's for Supper? Chef Earl's Soup

We've posted the link to Potage Paysanne before and also blogged about it. It's the perfect soup for a fall day after you've been to the vegetable stand.

(However, I've learned by bad experience not to give turnip scraps to the hamster...he likes munching them, but the atmosphere afterwards is not pleasant. Is that more information than you really needed?)

New books at the Treehouse

These books all came in a box from a family out west who are finishing their homeschool years and have decided to part with some treasures. Some of these books are part of the Ambleside Online curriculum (mostly for the upper years), and some are just for fun.

Walking the Bible by Bruce Feiler (a junior version--I'd still like to get the real thing)

"But perhaps the most amazing thing about the Dead Sea was something I didn't discover until we began to walk into the desert hills on its southern shore. Because the atmosphere is so dense in the area, the air pushes down on the water and the water pushes down on several miles of salt deposits underneath the Dead Sea. These salt deposits are pushed down toward the core of the earth and then out toward the shore, where they sprout up in two- or three-story asparagus-like formations. They look like salt lighthouses." (p. 47)

Makers of the English Bible: The Story of the Bible in English by Cyril Davey

"But, in spite of Alfred's schoolboys learning the Lord's Prayer in their everyday language, there were few men who troubled to turn any more of the Bible into English. Books and parchments were too expensive for ordinary people to buy. The young men of Alfred's kingdom had little use for reading unless they became monks or 'clerks"--'clerk' is only a later way of spelling 'cleric', or churchman. Monks and 'clerks' could read Latin well enough, so why should they bother to turn Latin into English for people who, in any case, could not read?" (p. 21)

Long Ago in Florence: the Story of the Della Robbia Sculpture by Marion Downer

"The younger della Robbias kept the workshop open for many years. But no one in the family ever inherited the genius of Luca. No one ever sculptured children with quite as much accuracy and feeling as he did--as if each child was his own beloved friend." (p. 30)

Heroes of the City of Man by Peter Leithart

"Like father, like son: Telemachus must go, if not to hell and back, at least from a deadly threat to assured life. All the way home from Sparta and Pylos, he wonders, 'would he sweep clear of death or be cut down?'" (p. 197)

Brightest Heaven of Invention by Peter Leithart

"Biblically, the belief that one can remake the world through terror and bloodshed is a heresy. Its most fundamental error is the belief that there is someone other than the Messiah whose death inaugurates a new age. The most penetrating answer to the religion of revolution is the insistence that there is only one sacrificial Victim whose blood revives and whose unleased Spirit brings not strife but peace. Only those who trust this sacrifice can have confidence that, whatever their mistakes and errors, they will not, in the end, misconstrue everything." (p. 106, on Julius Caesar)

Linnea's Windowsill Garden by Christina Björk

"Now I'll tell you about my nicest plant. Her name is Busy Lizzie. That's a good name for her because Lizzie definitely is busy: she never stops growing and blooming. This is how I got my first Busy Lizzie: Mr. Bloom had a large plant and he let me take a cutting from it. That means cutting off a little branch, so that it can later take root and grow up to be a new plant." (p. 20)

Kon Tiki for Young People by Thor Heyerdahl

"When tormented by thirst in a hot climate, one generally assumes that the body needs water, and this may often lead to immoderate inroads on the water ration without any benefit whatever. On really hot days in the tropics you can pour tepid water down your throat till you taste it at the back of your mouth, and you are just as thirsty. It is not liquid the body needs then, but, curiously enough, salt. The special rations we had on board included salt tablets to be taken regularly on particularly hot days, because perspiration drains the body of salt. We experienced days like this when the wind had died away and the sun blazed down on the rafts without mercy....On such days we added from 20 to 40 per cent of bitter, salt sea water to our fresh-water ration and found, to our surprise, that this water quenched our thirst." (p. 72)

Darwin's Black Box by Michael Behe

She Wanted to Read: the Story of Mary McLeod Bethune by Ella Kaiser Carruth

"On cold days in the winter her eyes smarted from the smoke of the pot-bellied stove. The stove couldn't quite burn up the pine cones that were stuffed into it. When she got to school on frosty mornings, she was glad to stretch her hands out to it. Sometimes, even though she had run and jumped all the way to school, she was cold clear through her gingham dress. Miss Wilson would take her hands between her own warm hands and say, 'I can't let my most faithful pupil freeze.'" (p. 20)

If all the Swords in England: a story of Thomas Becket by Barbara Willard

"As they came within sight of the city, of the sturdy walls, the pile of the great church, the palace, the monastery, a huge throng rushed from the gates to meet them. They sang and shouted and wept, they called for the Archbishop's blessing. They urged him forward among them, bringing him home to his church that had lacked him too long....At every window hung silks and carpets in joyous decoration. The bells of Christchurch clashed and clamored on the clear air of the winter's day." (p. 116)

The Ocean of Truth: The Story of Sir Isaac Newton by Joyce McPherson

"Isaac found a table that spilled over with heavy books, bound in dark green and brown. For a while he enjoyed simply picking up the books one at a time, reading the titles, and stacking the books neatly on a pile. They smelled of printer's ink and leather. One volume interested him. It was by Theodore Beza, the theologian who succeeded John Calvin in the Geneva Church. He was a famous reformer of the last century. The bookseller saw Isaac hesitate with the book in his hand....He held out a book called The Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin....'I'll give you both of them for a deal,' pressed the bookseller." (p. 75)

An Introduction to Shakespeare by Marchette Chute

"An actors' inventory of the period is a riot of color: a scarlet cloak with gold laces and buttons, a crimson velvet jerkin with blue satin sleeves, purple hose embroidered with silver. Every company had piles of old costumes stored away to be remodeled for the minor parts and for group scenes, but the actors who took the main roles evidently had their costumes designed for them at considerable expense. Gold lace was lavishly applied to their costumes, with copper lace for the lesser actors, and one London company ran up enormous bills with 'the copper lace man.'" (p. 58)

The Happy Orpheline by Natalie Savage Carlson

"It was difficult for Genevieve to round them all up when it was time to leave. She made them hold hands. She counted them five times and would not trust Josine to do it. She told them that if they did not stay together, she would never bring them back and that she would leave the orphanage forever and that they would never again be treated to chocolate buns." (p. 44)

Schoolroom in the Parlor by Rebecca Caudill

"'Well,' sighed Chris, 'have a good time, Emmy, Debby, and Bonnie in your extra recesses. I'll be sitting right here in the parlor studying how to spell alligator and crocodile and hippopotamus.'" (p. 74)

The Happy Little Family by Rebecca Caudill

"The week before Mother had knitted the cap. It was long and red, like Debby's, with a white tassel at the end. It was soft as a kitten and warm as feathers. It was hanging on Bonnie's nail behind the kitchen stove, waiting for the first frosty day. To see it hanging beside Debby's made Bonnie feel that, at last, she was surely growing big." (p. 71)

Premlata and the Festival of Lights by Rumer Godden

"Then, once again, Prem seemed to see further, to those long ago golden and silver bangles that had been on Mamoni's wrists when they lived with Bapi and, "I'll buy her a silver bangle now," vowed Prem. She knew gold would be too expensive. She forgot everything else and took a windmill....The shopman charged her a rupee more than the peddler, but she could not stop to argue, and pushed her way back through the crowd to where she had passed the bangle stall." (p. 51)

Little Plum by Rumer Godden

"Miss Happiness and Miss Flower were beginning to understand that Little Plum was in the middle of some sort of quarrel, and they did not know what to wish for: that Belinda would stop climbing the ilex tree; that Gem could learn to play; 'That we should all be peaceful and happy together,' said Miss Happiness. The two little dolls were still talking it over that late afternoon when there came a sudden and determined shaking in the ilex tree." (p. 97)

Dr. Dolittle's Circus by Hugh Lofting

Slowly the Doctor opened his eyes and raised himself on his elbow. "Where am I?" he said drowsily. "Oh, yes, of course, in jail."

Then he stared at the man who stood beside him. And at last a smile spread over his face.

"Heavens above! It's Sir William Peabody," said he. "Well, well, William! What on earth brings you here?"

"I might still more reasonably ask you how you come to be here," said the visitor...."What's it all about? They tell me you were seen throwing a woman into the sea."

"It wasn't a woman," said the Doctor.

"What was it then?"....

"It was a seal," he said at last, "a circus seal dressed up as a woman. She wasn't treated properly by her keepers. And she wanted to escape, to get back to Alaska and her own people. So I helped her. I had the very dickens of a time bringing her across country all the way from Ashby. I had to disguise her as a woman so we could travel without arousing suspicion. And the circus folk were out after me. Then just as I got her here to the coast and was throwing her into the sea, so she could swim back to her native waters, one of your coastguard men saw me and put me under arrest.--What are you laughing about?"

"Pizza with the works" curriculum

There has been much written, and much of it wise or at least well intended, about the value of simplifying young childrens' schoolwork, and about not trying to teach them physics before they've mastered phonics. A recent post to that effect on another blog got many positive comments from veteran homeschoolers. They agreed: take it easy on yourself and your kids; don't try to do too many subjects too early; stick to the "3 R's" until the junior grades. And if you do teach science or history in the primary grades, don't expect the children to remember much of it.

This isn't so much a rebuttal as just another way to look at things.

In Ruth Beechick's booklet A Home Start in Reading (part of her 3-R's series, but we won't hold that against her), she describes the following experiment carried out by a school district:

"Some kindergartners in the district received extensive instruction in reading. Others spent the same amount learning science. They melted ice. They observed thermometers in hot and cold places. They played with magnets, grew plants, learned about animal life, and so on. Books and pictures were available for these children if they wanted them, but no formal lessons in reading were held.

"And what did the school district learn? By third grade the ‘science’ children were far ahead of the ‘reading’ children in their reading scores. The reason? Their vocabularies and thinking skills were more advanced. They could read on more topics and understand higher level materials. The ‘reading’ children, by starting earlier, used up a lot of learning time on the skills of reading, while the ‘science’ children spent the time learning real stuff. And when they did begin reading, they were older and knew more and learned in a fraction of the time that the others took.”

(Ruth Beechick unfortunately doesn't provide any footnotes or verification for this study, so we'll just have to take her word for it.)

Now this may sound like an argument for the don't-teach-them-to-read-early camp, and in fact that is the context in which Dr. Beechick was writing: not to pressure children to read until they're ready. However, all the Squirrelings have happened to be early readers. By kindergarten age, they have all been reading fairly fluently, which, ironically, gives us the same curriculum problem we would have if we didn't want to teach them reading early: what else to do during school time if much reading instruction isn't needed or wanted?

Well, we read books. Out loud, silently, together and alone. Narration of one kind or another often follows.

We do copywork and work on handwriting skills; Crayons practices making her numbers right way round.

And, like the kindergarten experimenters, we "do." Especially this year, with a fourth grader (with a late-in-the-year birthday) and a kindergarten-age child at home during most of the day, I'm trying hard to keep a balance between reading and "doing." Some days feel like we're eating a curriculum pizza with the works (and the kids are helping make it).

We have a big map of the world on the kitchen wall (which Crayons loves to look at and find places she knows, like Poland), and an edible-ingredients model of the atmosphere on the kitchen counter. (We may have to borrow back some of the Thermosphere if we run short.) Already this fall we have had leaf lessons on the back porch (with samples all around us); have acted out (more than once) a favourite story about King David; have made file-folder pictures of the characters from "As You Like It"; and listened to Leonard Bernstein's orchestra demonstrating how Haydn added humor to music.

We've played domino concentration and Pico Fermi Bagels, looked forward to the next chapter of Peter Pan, and memorized Emily Dickinson's poems. (Crayons liked Michael Bedard's picture book Emily, and also the poem that starts "I started early, took my dog and visited the sea; The mermaids in the basement came out to look at me.") We make up new verses to songs, and try to answer Ponytails' Big Questions about everything. The girls mess around with a keyboard and a lap harp. They make up ongoing doll stories, radio shows, and hospital dramas. When the Apprentice comes home from school, she teaches them games she's learned in drama class. Mr. Fixit also lets Ponytails help (as the Apprentice did) when there's a tape recorder or some other piece of electronic stuff to be refurbished.

Now this may not be very different from the daily experience of homeschoolers who say "stick to reading, writing and math for the first few years." Maybe when people say that, they're not including all the things they do with their children and which their children do spontaneously. (I'm typing this while listening to a Squirreling who chooses not to be identified vocalizing at the top of her lungs while playing under a card table tent. They've been opera divas singing "The Voices of Spring" all day after watching The Three Stooges' "Microphonies.") When they put together a very short list for first-grade curriculum, maybe they're not including the books already on the shelf and the games and puzzles they pull out of the closet, and all the other resources they have in their kitchens and workshops.

At the same time, it worries me that "cutting out all those extras" could also mean subjecting primary-age children to an (unnecessary) hour daily of math and the same amount of time spent on phonics AND spelling AND language. No wonder some people can't even imagine adding more to a young child's schedule.

Was it a waste of time for the kindergarten classes to melt ice and play with magnets? According to Dr. Beechick, no; the "real stuff" stirred their imaginations and gave their minds something to work on. (Charlotte Mason would say that they were learning from Things and Ideas.)

Is it a waste of time to do botany and geography and poetry with kids who still play with Polly Pockets? Will they remember everything? No. Will they learn something about their world, that it's a much bigger and more interesting place than the tiny corner of space and time that we inhabit, and yet that even our tiny corner has enough to keep us going for a long time? I hope so.