Poetic Knowlege Chapter 7 ( Fini)

This is the second half of the last chapter of Poetic Knowledge. It's been a very interesting journey. I like this book, struggle to understand some of it, and think that James Taylor is on the right track. He suggests starting small schools with a couple of like minded teachers. They would carefully read a book, somehow creating a whole curriculum from it and pass on a liberal education to their few students. Well....maybe for a literature class. I agree with Charlotte Mason that a curriculum should be varied and not go off on (too many!) rabbit trails. What Taylor describes sounds very much like A Thomas Jefferson Education. This also sounds good in theory, but unless we hope all our kids get jobs as liberal arts professors this is not enough. The facts are that our children and especially our sons will have to get jobs that hopefully will support a family. This means math and science, and not just what can be picked up by reading Carry on Mr. Bowditch. We are not independently wealthy here and my kids have relied on scholarships to get through college and to get the good scholarships you have to score well on the SAT and to do that you have to study algebra, geometry, and Latin! Those subjects are hard and require work to master. But learning to work hard is a great skill for college and life!

That said, I think this is a wonderful method for a literature or history class! To read a book carefully, discuss its fine points, place it in time and geography, analyse its characters and plot, this is the best part of homeschooling! Especially with teenagers who definitely have opinions and want to share them! We didn't do this with many books. With my daughters it was Pride and Prejudice and with my oldest son it was With Fire and Sword by Henryk Sienkiewicz. This one was especially interesting as we knew next to nothing about Polish history but we learned alot reading this very rich trilogy: politics, religion, military strategy, even farming, but not much math!

I once had a teacher like this in Junior High. Our regular English teacher suffered a heart attack and was replaced by a young woman right out of teacher's college. She led our class through The Odyssey and then Great Expectations. It is one of the few classes I remember. She made all the characters come alive. Sometimes she read out loud and sometimes we took turns reading. I can still picture Odysseus tied to the mast to hear the sirens or Pip walking down a foggy street to Miss Haversham's house. Just once though in 12 years. The rest of my teachers were a pretty bland bunch. I think homeschooling is one of the very few options for our kids to have this kind of discussion. Even in college it is rare.

To quote Taylor,"The end of education is the cultivation of the senses, the imagination and the will." I whole heartedly agree with that. But, I think it can and should be done in a family and a community. For an education to be "something very much like perfection" it has to be like a banquet, and a banquet is carefully prepared. It definitely is not a rush of activities and media diversions. I hope we have time enough to have both lively literary conversations and still get a handle on algebra and Latin translations.

More on this discussion at A Healer's Geste.

Poetic Knowledge Chapter 4--part one

This chapter is called Descartes and the Cartesian Legacy and here I feel I'm on firmer ground. The previous chapters have been like wondering in an unknown forest but this chapter describes the beginnings of the education I was subjected to and after all these years of homeschooling I now see why I hated it and thought it was sooooo boooriing. It was! Things have not gotten any better in the public schools since, either. What boggles me is how this way of thinking came to permeate everything. To quote Taylor at the end of this section,"It is only when an exaggerated and isolated status of the mind is assumed, and removed from its proper integration within the knowing powers, that Descartes and his legacy gain prominence." It's hard to imagine how this theory took root and especially as developed by Dewey. But then Americans are frequently dazzled by "experts" and as Taylor says,"Deweys' so called pragmatism, as it filtered down to the masses who largely never read a word he wrote, fit neatly into the American view of education for the good life."

While reading this section and especially about Dewey's "pragmatism" I have been reminded of a series of events that happened when my oldest daughter was in 4th grade. We had homeschooled since 1st grade. I had not discovered Charlotte Mason yet but I had read John Holt and I held the belief that she would learn (and retain) what she needed to know without much help from me. Her education consisted of a math workbook and library books strewn in her path. I used the newly issued What Your First Grader Needs to Know as a guideline and would pick a topic, glean picture books from the library and let her have at them. I was accountable to the local school and provided them with quarterly reports. The local principal approached me at the beginning of the 4th grade year and asked if I would be willing to let her be tested in science with the other 4th graders at the end of the year. The school had been experimenting with a new science curriculum composed of hands-on science project kits. These had been introduced to the kids in kindergarten and continued through the 4th grade. It was in-system testing meaning that the results would not go on students' records or be released to parents but used to judge the effectiveness of the curriculum. I asked if I would be given the kits to use. The answer was no, he was just curious to see how she would compare to the public school kids. I laughed and said no. But circumstances intervened and for a variety of reasons I ended up putting her in school mid-year and she took the test. The principal came to me afterwards and told me she had the highest score of all the students. I was surprised to say the least since her science curriculum was mostly books on tape read by Franklin Bramely! Any science experiment we tried more complicated than vinegar and baking soda volcanoes was a disaster. I asked her about the test and she said it was easy, you just had to think about the questions. Ah! There is was! I had inadvertently let her learn to think! I didn't read Charlotte Mason for a few more years but she explained it to me in number 12 of her short synopses of education subsection c,"Knowledge should be communicated in well-chosen language, because his attention responds naturally to what is conveyed in literary form." It was not that the other kids didn't understand how an electrical circuit works but they couldn't put it into words. We are made to use words for learning. In a PNEU school students learned by language. Nature was observed closely and copied but not dissected! Books were read and narrated and absorbed to the best ability of the individual student. How grateful I am to homeschooling I am that I could give this type of education to my children and recapture some for myself!

The discussion continues at Mystie's Poetic Knowlege Book Club.

Poetic Knowelge--Chapter Three (first half)

In the first half of this chapter James Taylor continues his apologia for poetic knowledge. As he explains on page 74,"The deliberate treatment of poetic knowledge by Maritain and others becomes necessary only after the 17th century and the ascendancy of science as the preeminent method of learning."

It has become needful in our time to advance this lengthy and deep explanation of poetic knowledge because in our hurried society it is seldom experienced. This is nothing new. As a homeschooling mom I frequently experience what Taylor calls connatural learning. What I believe Miss Mason would call the science of relationships or the habit of attention. But as a child my life was regulated by school schedules and the non-stop presence of the TV. I played outside but I never paid attention to nature. I read books but none that made me think. Certainly, electronic entertainment is even more prevalent today and kids frequently have no time to ponder nor anything interesting to ponder if they had the time.

I first read this book a dozen years ago. I don't remember having trouble understanding or following Taylor's definitions and defenses. I was pregnant with my youngest, my oldest was 16. We were preparing to enter the Catholic church. My recollection of this book is positive. I loved the premise and felt that my homeschool was fairly poetic. The girls memorized a lot of poetry, anyway! But re-reading this I realize I really didn't get the full effect of what Taylor is saying here. I'm sure I related it mostly to homeschooling and not to education in general. I now see that this applies to all education and that all children need to begin their education in a poetic mode. Something human is lost when early education is dissected into subjects and facts. I don't see a major overhaul of the public school system happening on this level but it would be awesome if it did. Something along the lines of when my grandmother attended the little one room school with its body of knowledge to be learned. When you could be in the 4th reader but the beginning math book. When you spent two hours of the school day playing. (This is true! A half hour of play in the morning, an hour for lunch and another half hour of play in the afternoon. How much ADHD do you think this would cure today?) The more I read this book the more I am in awe of Charlotte Mason and what she accomplished with her schools! How I wish I had had such an education myself and could recreate it for our stressed nation of school kids!

Poetic Knowledge Chapter Two/the second half

In this half of the chapter James Taylor wraps up his apologia for poetic knowledge. To be honest, it is pretty tough going in spots! But a few things resonated with me. This quote from page 31 states:"Unlike the scientific mode of learning that proposes methods and systems for acquiring knowledge, the tradition that has been thus far reviewed reveals rather a way of knowledge, like a path or winding road, with interesting detours off the road, more than the super highway of modern education." Now, this sounds like a discription of rabbit trails to me. I love rabbit trails...but I've learned to keep them to summer months or other slow learning times.What Melissa Wiley calls Tidal Homeschooling. This is in keeping with my mentor, Charlotte Mason's advice. In A Philosophy of Education she lays out some guidelines in the introduction that include," There is no selection of studies , or of passages or of episodes, on the ground of interest. The best available book is chosen and is read through perhaps in the course of two or three years." And also this," No stray lessons are given on interesting subjects; the knowledge the children get is consecutive." So in my homeschool I now resist rabbit trails and also stick to a slow schedule of reading. This is harder than it sounds because there is a great temptation to race through good books, and also to feel bogged down in a book, as in, will we be reading about the Kon-Tiki voyage forever?

But this quote from Poetic Knowledge seems to validate Miss Mason's curriuclum,"The pre-Christian audience of the Homeric and Virgilian epics and the unlettered peasants of the Christian pre-modern world could never have grasped, as they did, the spirtiual dimensions of the poets in the first case and the supernatural teaching of the apostles and disciples in the second, had they not already read deeply in the book of nature." I chose to believe this gives me licsence to take time off when the weather or the mood (oh, but don't call it a rabbit trail!) hits us to tramp outside for nature study. It is the keystone to all learning!

James Taylor goes on to discribe monastic learning and this quote about Saint Thomas Aquinas struck me,"Certainly to be considered is the fact that Thomas was placed with the Benedictines of Monte Cassino at an early age. This would have been largely a musical education in all the respects spoken of by Socrates. Music was all the monks taught young boys, the Latin and chant of the schola cantorum, a school of song drawn from Psalms and history of the Old Testament..." I confess, here is an area where I feel our homeschool is realy lacking. We dabble in singing folksongs and the odd Latin chant but it has no consitency. My music ability is sadly non existant and I never could go much beyond F A C E or E G B D F in reading music, so this beyond my ability to teach. The hobbits have chosen sports over music lessons so I have to let this subject go. Alas.

Feast of the Immaculate Conception

This is one of my favorite Charlotte Mason quotes: Serenity of a Madonna "It is not for nothing that the old painters, however diverse their ideas in other matters, all fixed upon one quality as proper to the pattern Mother. The Madonna, no matter out of whose canvas she looks at you, is always serene. This is a great truth, and we should do well to hang our walls with the Madonnas of the early Masters if the lesson, taught through the eye, would reach with calming influence to the heart.

The Very Quotable Charlotte Mason

I've been reading A Philosophy of Education by Charlotte Mason. I've dipped in to this book many times before but this is the first time I've attempted to read it cover to cover. I'm finding it irresistible. It accompanies me to the beach, to soccer. I'd take it shopping if I could. She is at her feisty best in this one. An example on a carefully prepared "child environment": "We had thought that the terrible succession of blows inflicted by the War had changed all that; but, no; the errors of education still hold sway and we still have amongst us the better-than-my-neighbor folk, whose function, let us hope, is to administer the benefits of adversity to most of us. What if parents and teachers in their zeal misread the schedule of their duties, magnified their office unduly and encroached upon the personality of children? It is not an environment that these want, a set of artificial relations carefully constructed, but an atmosphere which nobody has been at pains to constitute." Well, no fear of a carefully maintained environment here!