Month: October 2022

Literature as a Primary Curriculum for Very Young Children

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As passionate as I am about education and home education in particular, I have never considered myself very good at it. In fact, for those who have followed my writings for any length of time, you know that I consider myself far better at wife-hood than motherhood. When I refer to myself as a “reluctant homeschooler”, that sentiment is as genuine as any I might make about our family’s homeschool journey.

Therefore, it did my heart heaps of good recently to listen as my children recounted the numbers of books I read to them over the years; at bedtime, during the day, as a part of our homeschooling, and everything in between. The older girls remembered all the math fun we had after reading -repeatedly- The Doorbell Rang. The younger ones waxed nostalgically about the time we bought little metal pails and dropped blueberries in them trying to replicate the “kuplink!” sound from Blueberries for Sal.

We read Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows every night for weeks at bedtime until we finished it. We followed up with A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh. We read the first two Little House books at bedtime after that. The list goes on, but the point was that we read so many together and most importantly, they remembered them. The reading of those books during their early years shaped them in ways I had not considered. I simply knew that reading to your kids is a good thing to do, and that reading good books to your kids is even better.

I find myself slightly alarmed by the numbers of young parents who say to us, “Joey is turning four next year so we need to get started homeschooling.” Well yes, you should always be educating your youngsters, but formal homeschooling is a lot of pressure for both mom and Joey when he is a newly minted 4-year-old.

So one of the things I tell young moms who are eager to jump into homeschooling as soon as their kids are turning four is, “Don’t rush it. Read him or her good books, and talk about the books. Use the stories in the books as invitations to other activities.”. I’ll offer a few examples before wrapping up this stream of consciousness.

For example, rather than labor with a 4-year-old over math facts, use Blueberries for Sal as an opportunity to count and add in a fun way. Do the same with The Doorbell Rang to mildly introduce the concepts of multiplication and division to your child who is slightly older. Bake a pie inspired by Little House and use it as a way to talk about fractions. Wind in the Willows is a great book to cover the seasons of the year. Use the illustrations in the books to reinforce colors. And every story is an opportunity to introduce narration to your child.

Trust me; there will be ample opportunity to labor and agonize over curriculum, not to mention spending hundreds of dollars only to realize that this thing you bought doesn’t suit you or your kid. Don’t worry. That day will come. For now however, while your kids are young, I cannot impress how much you can accomplish by simply reading, reading, and reading some more.

If you just can’t help yourself and you won’t feel adequate unless you have a system for your five year old, I highly recommend Five in a Row. It basically does what I just described, but better and more systematically.

Happy Homeschooling to those of you interested in this journey. It isn’t always easy, but it is worth it.

Reel Talk: Father Stu

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Rare is the film anymore that offers its viewers an opportunity to aspire to a higher level of personal virtue and sacrifice. It is rare to find anything offered for mass consumption that is in any way beneficial, much less one that promotes religious values.

Before I go any farther, I’ll note that my endorsement of this film and its broad message is not an endorsement of Catholicism. Nothing goes without saying anymore, unfortunately. I am, however, wholeheartedly endorsing the theme and message that is conveyed through the true story of the life and death of Father Stuart Long. Before I get into the nuts and bolts of what I loved about this movie and why, I want to share the trailer for it:

Stuart Long was a moderately successful amateur boxer who, upon the realization that he was tool old and too injured to fulfill his dream of being the next Muhammad Ali, moved to California to try his hand at acting. Long, a troublemaker with a sailor’s vocabulary despite his college education, walked away from the acting aspiration with little more than a few commercials under his belt.

The film doesn’t recount this, but he was night club bouncer as well as a grocery store butcher when he met the woman who steered him toward the Church that he had given little thought to since graduating from a Catholic high school as a teen. Long and his troubled parents are quite atheistic, but since the woman he desired refused to date a man who wasn’t baptized, Long was baptized into the Church.

As the trailer implies, a dramatic turn of events led Long to feel called to the priesthood with much fanfare and to the horror of his girlfriend. From there his life takes another tragic turn and through his sufferings, he identifies more intimately with the sufferings of Christ.

I have always -perhaps because of who I married- had a deep affection for the trajectory of men and women who, Providentially, come to faith as adults as opposed to having been steeped in the Bible and Christianese from an early age. There’s an urgency and primacy about their faith that resonates and calls me to be better and more earnest in my own faith. This is very much present in the portrayal of the life of Father Stu.

I cannot recall the last time I even thought about Academy awards, much less cared who won one, but I came away from this movie with a strong belief that if anyone deserves an award for a film portrayal, both Mark Wahlberg and Mel Gibson deserve them for this film. I suspect the fact that they are both Catholic played a role in the passion and heart they exuded as Stuart and Bill Long.

At this point, I should add a content advisory. Father Stu and his family, with their combination of poor, working class sensibilities and antipathy to religious faith, speak as you might imagine poor people with an antipathy to religious faith would speak. They love the f-word, and his parents are frequently irreverent in their objections to Stuarts conversion and determination to be a Catholic priest.

None of that bothered us, not even a little bit. My husband and I thought the overarching message was so powerful that we allowed our children to see the film, and we did so without reservations.

If you’re given to clutching your pearls, take them off and see this anyway. It’s worth it.

Sweeping Away Our History…

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Christopher Columbus Image Credit

Yesterday, before the sun came up, I was out for my morning walk, and encountered several high schoolers on their way to the bus stop. It barely registered at first because I see the same kids every morning. When we arrived back at home, all of the members of our family went about our days as usual with everyone heading off to work and school.

It wasn’t until one of our kids mentioned that she wouldn’t be making her customary Monday evening stop at her gym on the way home that I remembered what day it was. Her particular gym, a small outlet which uses kickboxing techniques for fitness training, would be closed for Columbus Day.

The fact that nothing was even slightly altered about the world around me struck me for the first time. I found it rather sad. To be fair, it’s not as if Christopher Columbus is Christ, or even George Washington. I get that. However, his life and accomplishments are worthy of note and remembrance.

When I was in school years ago, all things governmental, including the public schools, were closed on Columbus Day. They did this in honor of the man who discovered the New World. laying the ground work for what would eventually become the United States of America.

If it were just Christopher Columbus, I might not be as inclined to offer this lament, but Columbus Day is just one among many which has been systematically dethroned or amalgamated with other days and watered down. We used to celebrate both George Washington’s birthday and Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Now we have the nebulously named “President’s Day”.

Christmas break has been rebranded as Winter break, and the Easter break of my childhood has shifted away from the dates surrounding Good Friday and Easter. It was long ago rebranded as Spring Break, so even Christ was not so subtly placed on the cultural chopping block.

When we offer complaints about things like this, we are repeatedly told that we are making mountains out of mole hills. With each passing year, I survey the landscape and wonder when the people who are also ostensibly in favor of God, family, country look around and realize that the molehills grew into mountains a long time ago.

To use a Bible analogy (something else few people would recognize today), we have giant molehills on either side of us, a sea of chaos in front of us, and an army behind us working feverishly to enslave us to the values of their brave new world.

But hey. It’s no big deal. Christopher Columbus was a racist and a warmonger. We are so much better than those people ever were!

Education Always Cultivates, For Better or For Worse

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Do you remember the books you were assigned in high school? Over the past few weeks I’ve taken pains to remember the books my teachers assigned my high school classes. We’ll delve further into the impetus for this mental inventory in just a bit. But first, here’s a short list of those ones I recall:

  • Animal Farm
  • Romeo and Juliet
  • The Sun Also Rises
  • Their Eyes Were Watching God
  • 1984
  • The Scarlet Letter
  • Lord of the Flies

I’m sure I’ve forgotten many, but those immediately spring to mind. High school a blur for me. I didn’t have the blast of a good time that some kids did (such as my husband), so I there is no motivation to reminisce those years. I was recently impelled to think more about it when my daughter met incredulity after someone noted the copy of Plato she was carrying. It was assigned by her philosophy teacher. This wasn’t the first time that had happened so I began to consider parts of her reading list of the past couple of years:

  • Plato: The Complete Works
  • The Iliad
  • The Odyssey
  • City of God
  • 21 Essential American Short Stories
  • Red Badge of Courage
  • Little Women
  • The Scarlet Letter
  • The Bible
  • Animal Farm
  • Antigone

There is a slight bit of overlap between our two lists. We both read George Orwell and Nathaniel Hawthorne, for instance. We also both read Shakespeare, although Romeo and Juliet is not on the list of the many Shakespeare plays our kids have both read and performed in.

However, there are some very notable differences between the books they read in their classical school and the ones I read in my government school experience. The Bible is the most striking and most important divergence, but also City of God, Plato, and Homer. The books on my high school list are a much better selection than the kids who attend government school today, but they are substantially less philosophically dense and spiritually enriching than the books on my kids’ list.

As I have read through several of the books with my children as they read them, I have on more than one occasion thought to myself, “I’m having to work very hard to digest and process this. There’s no way [my kid] is understanding this.” With no book was this concentration more imperative than City of God.

Then I recalled my days as a young child in church. These were the days before there was such a thing as children’s church, that magical segregated room where Christian truth is presented at a child’s level of reasoning. There were things I understood, and things I didn’t. However, the constant exposure to the truth being taught to the adults eventually began to reveal itself more clearly: a flicker of light here, an ember there, until eventually the teachings became coherent and understandable until the light of truth flooded my soul.

One of the reasons we love Christian classical education is because it informs the education from the perspective of the long haul. It confidently trusts that perpetual exposure to the True, the Good, and the Beautiful (at appropriate stages and levels) will result in a young adult whose loves have been properly ordered. When loves are properly ordered, it becomes easier to navigate a world in which one is constantly bombarded with the temptation to short term gratification based on flights of fancy rather than love of the truth.

What is education if not the cultivation of the conscience in a particular direction? I’ve noted before in this space that there is no such thing as a neutral education. To the extent that we ever believed such a thing was so, it has been to our detriment.

I am currently re-reading -again- C.S. Lewis’ critique of modern education, The Abolition of Man, as a part of a book discussion with other women whose children are being classically educated. The prophetic perception with which Lewis articulated the missteps of modern education, nearly 80 years ago, is striking. The more we train educators to teach students to shed traditional morality, religious values, and indeed natural law (Lewis refers to the latter as “the Tao”), the less human our culture appears with each successive generation:

“We may legitimately hope that among the impulses which arise in minds thus emptied of all ‘rational’ or ‘spiritual’ motives, some will be benevolent. I am very doubtful myself whether the benevolent impulses, stripped of that preference and encouragement which the Tao teaches us to give them and left to their merely natural strength and frequency as psychological events, will have much influence. I am very doubtful whether history shows us one example of a man who, having stepped outside traditional morality and attained power, has used that power benevolently.”

The Abolition of Man

It would do us well to remember that education is, in truth, an exercise in cultivation, not a series of successive years in which information and facts are poured into empty vessels. There are no blank slates, as we are all born with natural sensibilities that need in some cases to be cultivated, in other cases to be discouraged, and in yet other cases to be utterly destroyed.

Which of these an education program cultivates, discourages, or destroys says all we need to know about that particular education program.

I assert that our current western education system cultivates that which should be destroyed, explicitly encourages those things which should be discouraged, and destroys the very things that should be cultivated in order to produce a person who loves his neighbor rather than loving himself, and only himself.