"I See All"
Purpose of education
At the end of Part Four of G.K. Chesterton's What's Wrong with the World comes this wonderful quote, which is worth pondering:
There was a time when you and I and all of us were all very close to God; so that even now the colour of a pebble (or a paint), the smell of a flower (or a firework), comes to our hearts with a kind of authority and certainty; as if they were fragments of a muddled message, or features of a forgotten face. To pour that fiery simplicity upon the whole of life is the only real aim of education...I take this out of its context, where he is talking about female education in particular, to encourage you to go to the original. The passage ends with the famous motto: "if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly".
Heraldry
A Little Way
These parents know exactly what they are doing. Here is Karen Edmisten: "Most of us would probably agree that in many areas of our society specialization can and does lead to fragmentation. Parsing education into subjects, which are then studied in a vacuum apart from other subjects, can also lead to a fragmented understanding of both the subjects and the world around us." Contrast the method or "unmethod" described in action here, in which history is full of literature, literature marches through history, history is interlaced with science, and everything points to Faith, because everything is connected with the Reason of everything.
There is in fact a deep compatibility between the radical homeschool or unschooling approach to education and other manifestations of the Catholic understanding of human nature. Natural Family Planning, like unschooling, is regarded by many as an impractical ideal or an ideology, but when practised in the right spirit it reveals itself as something else entirely. The point about NFP is that it requires mutual respect and attentiveness to the whole person of the spouse. It should not be treated as just another instrument for achieving the aim of reducing fertility. For a couple to master NFP is to for them to grow in mutual love and knowledge. Similarly, unschooling is based on respect for the child and love between generations.
And yet the accounts in the book underline one important fact. It seems that, to be realistic, one must acknowledge that the success or failure of the unschooling as well as the homeschooling approach depends in large part not just on the individual child and his motivation, but on the family as a whole, especially the parents. The flourishing of any individual requires the right kind of attention from others. Precisely because unschooling is a spirituality, it will only succeed (on almost any measure of success) if the family is of a certain type or has a certain maturity. As Cindy Kelly says in her chapter, “The most powerful way to encourage my sons to enjoy a new area of learning is to model it myself and continue our dialogue about their interests and mine.” Not every parent is capable of that; not all have the leisure, confidence, or motivation to do so. But for those who do, I can imagine - after reading this book - that it might work beautifully well.
And yet the accounts in the book underline one important fact. It seems that, to be realistic, one must acknowledge that the success or failure of the unschooling as well as the homeschooling approach depends in large part not just on the individual child and his motivation, but on the family as a whole, especially the parents. The flourishing of any individual requires the right kind of attention from others. Precisely because unschooling is a spirituality, it will only succeed (on almost any measure of success) if the family is of a certain type or has a certain maturity. As Cindy Kelly says in her chapter, “The most powerful way to encourage my sons to enjoy a new area of learning is to model it myself and continue our dialogue about their interests and mine.” Not every parent is capable of that; not all have the leisure, confidence, or motivation to do so. But for those who do, I can imagine - after reading this book - that it might work beautifully well.
Back to the Circle
But my conception of the Golden Circle has evolved, and Michael Schneider has kindly redrawn it for me on the right (an intermediate stage was discussed in an earlier post). The Golden Circle itself is now a Golden Ring, shown in yellow. There are in fact three circles, one inscribed within the short sides of a Golden Rectangle, one inside the long sides, and one through the corners of the rectangle. On the basis of Pythagoras's Theorem, a large number of relationships can be established between areas and lengths in this figure, since we know that the circumference of a circle is Pi multiplied by the diameter, and the area is Pi multiplied by the radius squared. For example, the circumference of the middle-sized circle (the outside of the yellow ring) is Pi times Phi. But I'll leave you to work out what the rest of them are. Let me know sometime. It might make a nice exercise for a geometry class. The theology can wait.
Great Books and Western Studies
There is no clearer distinction between the literary and the unliterary. It is infallible. The literary man re-reads, other men simply read. A novel once read is to them like yesterday's newspaper. One may have some hopes for a man who has never read the Odyssy, or Malory, or Boswell, or Pickwick; but none (as regards literature) of the man who tells us he has read them, and thinks that settles the matter. It is as if a man said he had once washed, or once slept, or once kissed his wife, or once gone for a walk.I feel better, now, about having read The Lord of the Rings so many times. Reading great books, however (even more than one), does not suffice to make a person educated. They need to be placed in a context, they need to be loved, and they need to open the door to other interests and other
fields of knowledge. In a world where there are no longer any common binding assumptions, a world without real traditions, clinging to the great books is like clinging to pieces of wood broken off a great ship that has long since sunk. We need a ship, an adequate vision of reality, and it is the job of education to build it...
That is the kind of thinking behind the curriculum and teaching of the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts in New Hampshire, which also offers programmes in Rome and Oxford, as well as other colleges, centres for Catholic study, and study-abroad programmes - such as the following from the Center for Western Studies, which offers a gap-year on Western civilization and its religious foundations:
Cultural critics are rightly concerned that we are declining as a civilization in the West. Once Western civilization imagined and created universities, hospitals, cathedrals, great art and music, all through the thoughtful combination of Greek and Christian thought that formed the basis for Western Reason (as exemplified in the writings of Augustine and Aquinas). Today, while we may sustain the outward appearance of these institutions, our culture has lost the general Christian convictions it once held, and the result is that these institutions are becoming hollowed-out shells that resemble them on the outside but inside are increasingly confused. Universities teach there is no truth, hospitals practice abortion, great cathedrals house more tourists than worshippers, fine art has gone from public significance to private museums, and we no longer believe there is a connection between faith and reason. We are living on borrowed capital from that earlier age of faith, and many historians and cultural critics are predicting that the West as a civilization is lost. While none would want to go back to a world of plagues, feudal warfare and no plumbing (which is still the way of life in many other parts of the world), we would like to regain anything that past generations have accomplished that is truly timeless, and find ways to apply those ideas to human life in our own day.I have no first-hand experience of these gap-year programmes, but that too sounds like the right idea. And yet what do we do about other cultures, other civilizations? It's no use pretending we are not a multi-cultural society. And how do we revive faith, if that is the key to rebuilding our own civilization?
Illustration: Virgil, with Clio and Melpomene, from Wikipedia Commons.
