"To work on what has been taken in": this says it all

by Anne White

I've heard the same thought about food a couple of times recently (you may have seen the same video): that it's a good practice to bless the cheese, the eggs, the fresh vegetables, the life-giving meat as these things come into your kitchen, because, sooner or later, they're all going to be YOU and your family.

Consider this quote from Laurie Bestvater's The Living Page:

Parents also need time to assimilate that 'notebook' is actually a misnomer. We are not note-taking at all; by notebooks we simply refer to Mason's various paper activities...[a] child's notebooks are not primarily products...[they are] not so much to directly reproduce knowledge but to allow personality to work on what has been taken in.

This applies not only to notebooking, but to oral and written narration as well: the success of a lesson is not based on perfect reproduction, any more than we are attempting to become carrots and ground beef by eating dinner. The food becomes part of us, not the other way around.

Now read what Denise Gaskins says in Prealgebra and Geometry: Math Games for Middle School:

When we give students a rule, we give them permission not to think. All they need to do is remember our instructions. But it is only by thinking — by struggling their way through mental difficulties — that our students can build a foundation of mathematical knowledge strong enough to support future learning.

The knowledge that is thought for, and fought for, gives us energy and also becomes part of our bones and muscles. The well-studied painting, the narrated story, the notebook-chronicled history event or literary quotation, all become us, as our minds go to work on them. These blessed things we take into ourselves change us, and we change them.

As a postscript, here's something I found in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, by George Saunders.

What is it, exactly, that fiction does? Well, that's the question we've been asking all along, as we've been watching our minds read these Russian stories. We've been comparing the pre-reading state of our minds to the post-reading state. And that's what fiction does: it causes an incremental change in the state of a mind.

So--eat with grace. 

All the things I wanted to say, Part Three of Four

by Anne White

We have not homeschooled any of our children all the way through high school.  There were a variety of reasons for this, including the always-present question of "what will they do without a diploma?" Outside pressures may not matter in some homeschooling families, but for us they were at least a partial reason for the decision to take on public high school.

I don't think it was that different during Charlotte Mason's lifetime, especially for middle to upper class boys who would have had to go to some kind of outside school to prepare for university. If you look at the study programs for her oldest senior high students, it is assumed that those students would be mostly girls. I think that there was an understanding of the school and university requirements at that time, and a need to work with the realities of that system; to give both the upper and lower-class students whatever they could for whatever time was available to them, before they had to go on to work or some other form of schooling. For us today it may be much the same; what seems to cause the most anxiety for homeschooling parents in the high school years is first of all teaching higher-level math and science and possibly English, and second, getting that work validated so that our students can move on to whatever post-secondary study or job or business they are planning for. I think Charlotte Mason would understand those kinds of outside expectations, although in her time they wouldn't have applied to so many students.

In a perfect world, we might be able to provide CM-style education for everybody, all the way through, in small schools or in our homes; and in fact, it's getting really interesting to see what's happening now with the next generation of CM babies coming along, hearing about homeschooling parents who were brought up themselves to love good books, and who are just as likely as their kids to be interested in a bird on the lawn or a bug on the window. (You know the ads that say it's even more important to invest in girls' education than in boys', because the girls will be better parents and so on? I think Charlotte Mason would have totally agreed with that.) Anyway, yes, it can be hard trying to set up a whole science lab in your house, to teach senior math and literature especially if you're also teaching younger children at the same time; so if your students really are at the point where they need that kind of study and they also need to be credited for it, there are points where you may have to say, we've gone as far as we can; it's time for outside school.

(It's not that math and science aren't important, only that a) maybe not everybody needs to learn them in the same way or in the same amount that the public schools require, and b) they have a way of taking over, and you can't do everything at once.)

But if we can extend our children's CM opportunities by even a couple of years, maybe through grades nine and ten, and then let them take on whatever seems necessary in our culture and economy, they will still be that much the better for it.

So if they are still at home, what should their schooling look like?

In The Living Page, Laurie Bestvater refers to the "CM trinity":

a rich curriculum,

the habit of narration,

and teacher standing aside.

This is a good description of Charlotte Mason principles in general; but I think, more than anything, that this is what you need to put in place for the upper years.  If those three are in place, it doesn't matter so much whether you use science textbooks or not, how many languages you include, or even whether you read Plutarch.

Rich curriculum:  well, you can look at Ambleside Online as an example.  You can look directly at what the Parents' Union School did in the upper years (via the original Progammes posted on the AO site).  You can look on your own shelves, at library sales, at reviews of new books and other resources, at whatever's around you.  Charlotte Mason referred regularly to having students complete Scout or Guide tests in areas of geography, First Aid, and homemaking.  Where things come from is not so much the question as what we do with them.

Habit of narration:  Obviously this includes both oral and written narrations. But t

he upper years are a time when you get to try new "paper graces" (notebooks); for example, my seventh-grade daughter has been keeping a Book of Centuries, and this term we will add in a Century Chart.  I might also note that when when of my other children, now in high school, went through some of the "homeschool relics" of her younger years, the only things she was really interested in keeping were the notebooks that she had really had a hand in designing or writing or illustrating.

Teacher standing aside: We develop "trust", meaning trust in each other, in ourselves, in the student's mind.  Trust in the process, trust in the general principles of CM. Trust in the work of the Holy Spirit.

More to come in Part Four.

All the things I wanted to say, Part Two

by Anne White

More on the subject of Charlotte Mason and the upper years of school...

One hesitation at this point might be that if you've followed Charlotte Mason methods with your family through elementary school, you may also feel, or feel like you're being told, that all that time travelling was fun ,but that now it's time to come back down to earth; time to get down to a more serious view of education. Sometimes people will say this simply because they're not really aware of how challenging some of Charlotte Mason's upper level books and assignments were.

But for others, it is a problem more of philosophy and educational models. We may feel we're being told that the seemingly simple, subjective, mythos or poetic viewpoint is something we should outgrow; that as our children's minds stretch towards adulthood, we have to cut all that out of their schooling and replace it with a big, heavy dose of logos, of reason, of efficiency, of "life is real and life is earnest."  (I think of the mythos and logos as kind of like Ernie and Bert on Sesame Street.  Bert is all "be sensible, behave yourself," and Ernie is all about imagination.)  

David Hicks in his book on classical education, Norms and Nobility, says that "where distrust of connotative language...that is, language that is subjective and emotional, words like 'truth' or 'beauty' or 'home'...invades the modern school, there is a methodological tendency to exclude myth and to encourage detached analysis at the expense of the imaginative mind." Hicks says that the "mythos" side of our consciousness is our imaginative, spiritual effort to make our world intelligible; it gives meaning to human feelings, gives them significance and beauty, and allows us to communicate and share those experiences and ideas with each other. The upper years are about new ways of thinking, the Way of the Will, the great conversations. There is a lot of important stuff happening there beyond the book list, just as there is more to the TARDIS than the control room.

And the other problem with thinking that Charlotte Mason is good for young children, but not practical for older ones, is that we start to expect that when they reach a certain age, they just won't have time for all those books, all the fancy or fun stuff, because they're going to be so busy doing hours of math and science or maybe Latin and Logic, because when you get to that age, you start to focus so much of what you're doing on the next step, whatever lies beyond, like college. The lifetime of learning is going to have to wait until after high school, or maybe until after university. But by that time the key to the TARDIS may have been lost.

In much of today's education, there is the danger of too much specialization too soon; we need to enjoy generalizing (in its positive sense), provide the generous curriculum, while there is still time. In fact, time itself is one of the gifts that we can give our older students: Laurie Bestvater (in The Living Page) quotes from a book by Quentin James Schultze, Habits of the high-tech heart, where he warns that we need to "slow down enough to discover moral wisdom."

The logical, reasonable, "normal" view of education tends to focus on limits--much like looking at the outside, police call box view of a TARDIS. A couple of years ago I opened up a box of some school stuff I had saved from the years when our oldest was about eight through eleven, the first few years we really followed CM, and even I was a little bit shocked at how much I seemed to have expected of her...it almost seems impossible that we were getting that much done in a term, even with a preschooler and a new baby. But I don't remember those school times as being especially hard or unhappy; the truth is that in our daily round of school, my daughter and I (and later her sisters) took those books, and the other parts of a CM education, a bit at a time, day by day, lesson by lesson, term by term; and it worked. We learned to trust the process, to believe in the unknown universes, the places in time and space to which this "travelling phone booth" could take us.. And while I'm speaking here mostly about our own experiences in the elementary years, the same thing can apply to the middle school and high school years.

More in Part Three.