From the archives: Charlotte Mason and dandelions

First posted May 2010, part of the Month with Charlotte Mason series

We started with A Leisurely Education. Freedom from the small round of busywork, opportunity to grab hold of something bigger, learning to see ourselves (including our children) more as we are in God's time and in God's universe. Living without futility.

And I'm ending with dandelions.

The Treehouse backyard this week has been covered with yellow dandelions. Much-maligned little flowers that provoke criticism from the neighbours (spraying's in disfavour, but they would like to see us at least hard at work rooting them out). They're not good for much except making more dandelions (okay, I know you can eat them too). The first big batch are either going to seed or were cut off last night with the lawnmower, but they'll be back. [As in, within 24 hours.] Nobody really gets rid of dandelions forever, even if they want to--they're stubborn. And we don't want to get rid of them. In spite of the seasonal allergies kicking in around here, we like our dandelions.

I get the feeling that cultivating a yard full of unfashionable dandelions is somewhat like our approach to education, and maybe our approach to life. This is a time of too many conflicting ideas, at least around lawn care. Lawn spraying is now illegal here (we didn't spray anyway), but people still expect you to have a weed-free, dandelion-free, well-trimmed piece of grass around your house...more or less the same as anyone else's. Educational powers talk about diversity while squeezing out the individual. They dump a lot of fertilizer, if you'll pardon the metaphor, and try to control what grows and what doesn't.

Keep the dandelions growing, if only as a reminder that our natures are stubborn and won't be satisfied with educational sludge. Leave enough room for the intangibles and the poetry--as Cindy Rollins said, we can always catch up on grammar later.

A game of romps (better, so far as mere rest goes, than games with laws and competitions), nonsense talk, a fairy tale, or to lie on his back in the sunshine, should rest the child, and of such as these he should have his fill. ~~ Charlotte Mason

Quote for the Day: Don't turn off your brain

"There is even a sense that an undeveloped mind is more virtuous than one prepared for battle...for many Christians, humble ignorance is a far more noble human quality than a cultivated mind...[but] deep within the worldview of the biblical authors and equally within the minds of the earliest church fathers was the understanding that to be fully human is to think." ~~ James Emery White, A Mind for God

From the archives: Edith Schaeffer on environment and message

First posted July 2013. Cindy Rollins' Ordo Amoris blog (now closed) was running a weekly study of The Hidden Art of Homemaking, and this was my post about the last chapter.

I haven't read other people's posts on the last chapter of HAoH yet, but I predict their reactions will be much like they were to the previous one:  "not what I was expecting."  The last two chapters of the book don't really draw the whole picture of Hidden Art together as fully as we might desire.  Was that on purpose, or did Edith just peter out?  The last chapter in particular is surprisingly short.  It's like getting to the end of a mystery book a little too suddenly...say one of the nutty ones by Ellen Raskin...and wanting to go back and comb through the final chapter for any clues that you missed.

So are there any?

First, there's one of the recurring threads:  "There is no place where one cannot plant ivy over the mud hut and put a flower on the stump....I am sure that there is no place in the world where your message would not be enhanced by your making the place (whether tiny or large, a hut or a place) orderly, artistic and beautiful with some form of creativity, some form of 'art.'"

And then the idea that "we [ourselves] are an environment for the other people with whom we work, the people with whom we communicate.  And in this sense we do not choose an art form and create something in that form; we are an art form...an art form God can use in this area of environment."

As others have pointed out, Edith always comes back to communication, a message.

Is the message we are living clear, or is it a lot of "glub-blubs?"

Are we hiding our real identities and gifts?  Leaving clues on bits of paper towel, or doing something more?

"We should be artists in...doing something practical to show that expectancy [that God can intervene]...affects the attitudes other people are going to have to their troubles." 

Mr. Banks carved the turkey; the plates were passed and filled high to overflowing; and Mrs. Carillon asked Augie Kunkel to say grace.

Augie Kunkel didn't know how to say grace.  He just named the dishes and let the delicious smells inspire the proper reverence:

Patate douce, dindonneau truffée, airelles en couronne, petits oignons, pointes d'asperges au beurre, purée de marrons.

"Amen," said Mr. Banks, who didn't understand French; and the eating and the chatting and the celebrating began.  ~~ Ellen Raskin, The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I mean Noel)

Wednesday Hodgepodge, on Thursday

From our Hodgepodge Hostess: "Here are the questions to this week's Wednesday Hodgepodge. Answer on your own blog, then hop back here tomorrow to share answers with the universe. See you there!"

1. Do you find yourself influencing your world, or is it more the other way around? 

Somewhere in between, and it depends on how big a world we're talking about. People have told me that I've influenced them to homeschool their children, or to read certain books, or that I've encouraged them (strangely enough) in the way they teach math. But it comes back just as much the other way. Sometimes I've thought I would actually like to be more influenced by the world, but I couldn't find anyone to tell me how to do whatever it was, so I ended up doing it my own way by default.

2. July 14th is National Tape Measure Day...the device was patented on this date in 1868. When did you last use a tape measure? Do you always know where to find one in your house? Tell us one way in which you feel blessed 'beyond measure'. 

Tape measure: we used it when we shifted the dining room furniture around. Generally I would be using it to sew with, but the sewing machine was temporarily packed away and I've been letting the small jobs pile up rather than drag it out and work at the kitchen table.

3.The Plaza Hotel (Eloise), The Land of Oz (The Wizard of Oz), Narnia (The Chronicles of Narnia), The Hundred Acre Wood (Winnie the Pooh), Wonderland (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland), or Never Never Land (Peter Pan)...which storybook land (on this list!) would you most like to visit and why? 

Definitely Narnia, but maybe one of the safe spots (like the Beavers' house). Narnia can be a dangerous place. 

The Hundred Acre Wood would be second.

4. Where and when do you get your best ideas? 

Whoah, that's kind of a lifetime question, isn't it?

And sometimes you don't know which ones are the best ideas until much later, when you see which ones worked out and which ones didn't.

I think the really best ideas tend to grab onto you more than the other way around. Something you can't stop thinking about, a problem, a possible solution. Bang, out of the heavens.

But Pinterest is helpful too.

5.  So what have you been watching on TV this summer? Anything good? 

We're working through the Poirot episodes on Netflix. 

6. 'Don't swim for an hour after you eat', 'Dog days of summer', 'Knee high by the Fourth of July'...choose a summer saying from the list or share one of your own, then tell us what image or memory comes to mind when you hear it spoken.

"Put that book down and go out and play."

Probably good advice, but not what I wanted to hear when I was deep in the Hundred Acre Wood or off in Neverland.

7. In a single sentence, sum up one life lesson you've learned. 

You can probably find one at the thrift store.

8. Insert your own random thought here. 

One of my favourite minimalist bloggers posted about deliberately keeping books she's reading to a minimum. I don't mind minimizing clothes, and our fridge is much less crowded than it once was, but hands off my books. Not that I don't thin them down on the shelves--I have definitely done some of that. But the reading process, for me, is not very sequential. I have a lot of starts and pauses, then suddenly I do finish something. I'm only about a third of the way through this year's GoodReads goal, but I aim to get there.

Linked from The Fresh from the Garden Hodgepodge at From This Side of the Pond.

From the archives: Homeschooling and commitment

First posted May 2014

A local newspaper columnist published a piece today about, of all things, food trucks.  You know, mobile cafes, burgers on wheels.  She mused, "No one wants to be tied down.  Everybody wants to do what they want, when they want...Churches are selling their buildings...fewer want to subscribe to a newspaper...It's harder and harder to get a commitment for anything." What does that have to do with food trucks?  That we will grab a sandwich and go, but at the expense of sit-down places that have some "commitment" to the community.

Now, I'm not so sure that she isn't stretching the idea of bricks-and-mortar diners as cornerstones of community--after all, they can close up shop and disappear almost as easily as food trucks.  In a small town, you may get Rosie the waitress and Joe the grocer year after year, but here in the city you are more likely to find that the local coffee shop or corner store is suddenly under new ownership--again--and that all the old staff are gone as well. (Mr. Fixit's favourite family-run sub shop changed hands and is now a pale vestige of its former mayonnaise-laden self.)  And I have nothing in particular against food trucks.  But I appreciate her lament over the general lack of commitment in society.

And I hear a similar "aversion to commitment" from some homeschoolers who have trouble understanding a willingness to stick with one particular educational philosophy.  If you centre on one philosophy or method, you risk being called closed-minded.  You may be told that since what works for one child does not always work for another, there can be no overall approach that is "best." You may even have your religious faith questioned, because studying one person too much might mean you are respecting them more than God, or their books as more valuable than the Bible.

Well, it might.  It could also mean that what you have found seems to work, that it contains common sense, that it lines up with your worldview, that it enriches and supports your faith rather than distorting it.  It could mean that you are opting for focus rather than fashion.

Yes, it might mean you're not adventurous or willing to try new things.  Or it could just mean that you've found a road and that's the way you're travelling.  If we're headed to Lake Ontario, we don't have time to worry that we're not going to see Point Pelee or Wasaga Beach.

In an age of pluralism and "wanting it all" that extends, as our columnist says, across everything from  marriage to group memberships, from investments to the taco truck, embedding yourself into any particular anything or anywhere seems risky.  Choosing one thing over another implies that we have already judged the rest negatively. Public schoolers get defensive around homeschoolers, even when we haven't said anything bad about school, because we have committed ourselves, at least for a time, to a different choice.  Non-Christians can't understand how Christians can be so arrogant as to think that one belief is true and others are not.  The presence of one vegetarian can throw a wet blanket on a whole tableful of steak-eaters.

But it is not arrogance that allows commitment to an idea. It's not about us. It is simply being convinced of the value and truth of the idea itself. 

Herbartianism Made Fun and Easy, Part Three: Like a surgeon

Part One is here. Part Two is here.

After his previous zinger about the omniscience and omnipotence of the teacher, Adams continues:

"It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this view from the teacher's standpoint. If the mind must wait till the right idea comes along, what an enormous importance must be attached to the theory of apperception masses. If the idea that the soul ought to choose is not there to choose, what can the soul do but choose amiss? Here Herbartianism appears to great advantage. During the process of education when the soul happens to be on the lookout for a certain idea, the teacher, knowing what is going on in the soul, and the laws according to which its mechanism work, can readily increase the presentative activity of the idea in question and send it right up to the dome..."

Do you notice any, perhaps, slightly fuzzy logic in that paragraph? This is what strikes me: that there is one and only one idea out there today, or at this minute, that you are supposed to grab onto. Like a surgeon asking for a particular retractor or Mr. Fixit asking for a certain size of drill bit, there is one and only one choice, with implied disaster if the tool is missing or you take the wrong one. You've missed your chance at the brass ring; your life will never be the same.

In response, I will quote Colonel Potter:

"Pony Pucks."

Learning is not a midway game of Lucky Duck, where you either win a prize or go home with nothing. And doesn't it make it sound like your chances are even slimmer if it all depends on whether a teacher is standing by, ready to fire the right idea at you at just the right second?

Charlotte Mason suggested that education should put the focus on the student rather than the teacher, the learning rather than the teaching. That is, not in the above sense where the hypothetical teacher seems to hover like an anxious ICU nurse, attention fixated on the student's mental vital signs; but in the sense of letting the child take what he needs from the feast that is spread. Yes, you can say with Herbart that what he ingests may join his apperception masses and head up to the top of the dome. But the point is that there are many good ideas, many opportunities to learn, and most of them won't come around just once. If you choose an apple instead of a banana for lunch today, you probably haven't missed your only chance ever to taste bananas.

Photo of antique surgical tools found here.

Part Four is here.