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 Knowlege Chapter 7

This is the last chapter of Poetic Knowledge and all the previous threads are coming together. I am enjoying reading what James Taylor has to say about teaching and schools. I've been homeschooling for quite awhile now and am still looking for ways to tweak the process. Is there a better way to teach Latin? Immersion is not an option! (and my kids enjoy chanting conjugations anyway!)Is there a biography we just have to read? What about map work?? It's constant. But reading the first half of this chapter has been soothing to my home school spirit. I think homeschooling is poetic by nature. I even believe that the parents who home school with workbooks (oh! the horror!) are poetical in the way they keep their kids wrapped in family life.

I particularly liked this quote,"If poetic experience first plays upon the beautiful, the wonderful, the proportionate thing that is intuitively pleasing to our senses, where are we to find this beauty in the noise, glare, and glitz, the noxious air, the tasteless food, the vulgar democratization of manners, the desensitization of emotions and resulting wanton violence from suburbs to cities to nations, that so inform the life of the twentieth century." Where indeed, if not in our homes? Certainly not in our public schools which drain our resources filling themselves up with computer labs and gyms and sports arenas but defund the art room and the library (Oh, I mean media resource room!). I was reminded of my old elementary school which was recently torn down and replaced by a much more modern facility of steel and cement blocks. The old school was built in the early 1900's and made of mellow red brick. It had huge windows framed in walnut.Most of the classroms faced the maple lined street. What I remember most from those days is sitting in class and watching the seasons change from those windows. And also the play ground games that are forbidden now--Red Rover and Dodge Ball. But mostly I remeber being bored and wishing I could just go home and play!

Poetic Knowledge and the Integrated Humanities Program

This week we started chapter six which describes the Integrated Humanities program instituted by professors Quinn, Nelick, and Senior at the University of Kansas during the 1960's. This gets to the nitty gritty of how they tried to return poetic knowledge to the university system which was lacking then as well as now. Forty years ago these professors realized that their students had been deprived of a poetic childhood and were in need of poetic experiences. The program they began seems a model of gentleness to me. To quote Taylor," The professors knew that a materialist society, with all its utilitarian goals that suffocate the poetic nature of the human being, had rushed many of the students through childhood, that time of leisure in which the wonders of reality are encountered simply as wonders." The pragmatist in me understands why parents would complain that the classes provided in these programs were hardly necessary for a college degree but the romantic in me would loved to have attended!

As the discussions between the professors about various classics (carried on during a leisurely lunch, pg. 149) was described I was reminded of listening in to conversations conducted by my parents and aunts and uncles around the dinner table when I was a young girl. Not that they discussed the great books! But, they were all raised in a time before electronic media (my mother was born in 1917) and they were all expert conversationalists and were filled with stories of a childhood that moved mostly at horse speed. A ride in the rumble seat was still fondly remembered in the 1970's! I think we have TV to blame as well as Dewey's ideas for the mess our national education is in. We just don't know how to converse anymore. Our story telling abilities have atrophied.

I will end with this quote by Professor Quinn,"Mistake me not: wonder is no sugary sentimentality, but, rather, a mighty passion, a species of fear, an awful confrontation of the mystery of things." This program was bold as well as gentle. We can't recreate it in our homes but it is a valiant example to us for what can be done!

Poetic Knowledge Book Club--Chapter 5

This chapter is called Voices for Poetic Knowledge After Descartes. It describes a private French school run by Andre Charlier, the poetic research methods of Henri Fabre, and the musings of an education professor and Catholic priest, Dr. Thomas Shields. I was most interested in Dr. Shields insights. He wrote an autobiography called, The Making and Unmaking of a Dullard which is now on my to-read list. He brings up a very good point, that growing up on a farm gave him the best possible preparation for his academic life. My one regret as a homeschool mom is not being able to raise the kids on a small farm. I think this is the healthiest way to raise children, especially boys.

To answer Mystie's question,"What are some conditions of life we can create so that 'souls can bloom'?" I can only write about what we got right looking back on the beginnings of this ongoing journey. Certainly, these were not all conscious choices on our part but God worked with us anyway and a lot of things fell into place almost perfectly.

First, we bought a home on four acres of mixed ecosystems in a small and very friendly town. Our "yard" consists of lawn, woods, a small field, a marshy wetland, berry brambles, crab apples, larch ( a favorite of nesting orioles), maples, birch and beech trees. We don't have room for a cow but we do keep chickens. Our boys do get the seasonal work experience mowing lawns in summer, cutting wood in autumn, shoveling snow in winter and vacuuming mud in spring!

Second, we filled the house with nature books, field field guides, butterfly nets, flower presses, cages and aquariums for observations. We tried to keep up with their questions and interests and to also take them to other wild places to explore and hunt for salamanders or sea shells.

Third, and maybe most importantly and most providentially, we live in a very small town that still keeps seasonal festivals. There will be a Memorial Day parade with a gathering in the center of town and the list of all the people from the community who served in the military and have dies will be read. This list starts with our town founder who served in the Revolutionary War. Next will be the 4th of July when we will have a boat parade on the lake and fireworks at night. There is also a weekend long Harvest Festival in September which is mostly a crafts fair and farmer's market.

And last but not least is our entering the Catholic church as a family and living the liturgical year together. It's not easy in a secular world to keep the Holy Days and to remember the seasons of the Church but it makes it all the more meaningful, I think, when you abstain from those Christmas cookies until the Christmas Octave! Not that we are always successful at that! Or hold off decorating for Easter until after Lent is finished.

I think family life in general is very poetic and souls will bloom anywhere they are loved and nurtured!

Poetic Knowledge Book Club--Descartes Part two

I've been pondering what to write about for this second half of the chapter on Descartes and his legacy. How nature study is fundamental to a poetic vision of the universe? How nature study grounds us and makes it harder for the promoters of scientific theories to waylay us on our journey to Heaven? My healing from my own public school education? None of these really formed a cohesive theme.

Then something in the readings took hold. It was this quote by Emerson,"I advise teachers to cherish mother-wit. I assume that you will keep the grammar, reading, writing, and arithmetic in order; 'tis easy and of course you will. But smuggle in a little contraband wit, fancy, imagination, thought." Now, Taylor considers this a reactionary statement, but it reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from G.K. Chesterton," As long as wit is mother wit it can be as wild as it pleases." This is from Orthodoxy, the chapter called The Ethics of Elfland. Frankly, Taylor was beginning to depress me so a foray into Orthodoxy seemed a good antidote and I re-read that chapter.

Still, I wasn't sure what I wanted to say here but as I opened my Google News homepage I saw this article about Stephen Hawking Heaven is a Fairy Tale?? In the interview Hawkings states,"I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is just a fairy story for people afraid of the dark." It seems to me that Stephen Hawkings represents the logical conclusion to Descartes reliance on the mind. Living in the mind has certainly been his experience and I think he is very brave, but also very wrong and lacking an understanding of fairy tales and (I hesitate to say this!) the universe in general. I just don't understand how anyone can look at the complexity and creativity of the universe from cell regeneration to the spiral of a galaxy and not see a Creator. I just can't. I have never been able to envision no God. Just like Chesterton says of elfland, 2 + 2 must equal 4 and the universe must have had a creator. It defies reason to think it is random. Chesterton, of course, says it best," There are certain sequences or developments (cases of one thing following another), which are, in the true sense of the word, reasonable. They are, in the true sense of the word, necessary. Such are mathematical and merely logical sequences. We in fairyland (who are the most reasonable of all creatures) admit that reason and that necessity." But to return to mother -wit or what we would call common sense I'm going to thank Rousseau here. He, I think, saw through Descartes sterile rationalism and sensed ( and promoted, although certainly didn't live himself) an education for children that Incorporated the family. As a homeschool mom I've come to appreciate educating my own children and realize what a great opportunity it is for healing and educating myself and for grounding my children in the "laws of elfland" and so protecting them from the "laws of educational theorists".

I'll close with a quote from Charlotte Mason, "Whatever extravagance he had seen fit to advance, Rousseau would still have found a following, because he had chanced to touch a spring that opened many hearts. He was one of the few educationalists who made his appeal to the parental instincts. He did not say," We have no hope of the parents, let us work for the children!" Such are the faint-hearted and pessimistic things we say today." Parents and Children.

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 Knowledge Chapter Three /second half

What jumped out at me in this part of chapter three is this quote,"So, with the loss of poetic knowledge from serious consideration in modern theories of knowledge, it follows also that the proper notions of leisure and education are lost along with the proper conditions in a society for mirandum; for "wonder (from which all knowledge begins)does not occur in the workaday world," either from the modern idea of work (living to work, instead of working to live) or in modern education that has turned even play into a kind of work that it is usually conducted as a means to learning something else rather than as an end in itself." {and no, I wouldn't want to diagram that sentence!} I have been reflecting on time a lot while re-reading this book. Over the course of twenty plus years of homeschooling it is good to look back and see what was accomplished. The best was the time our family had to be a family, to relax with each other and spend true leisure time together. The second best was the time to read all those classics of children's literature that I somehow missed as a child. to wander and wonder with Pooh, not just once but again and again! Narnia, Toad Hall, Avonlea, were all new to me. I am still working my way through the Lucy Maud Montgomery oeuvre!

It has been insightful watching my daughter with her newborn son, that time out of time with a new baby. What Madeleine L'Engle calls Kairos as opposed to Chronos. At the end of A Circle of Quiet she writes," Chronology, the time which changes things, makes them grow older, wears them out, manages to dispose of them, chronologically, forever.
Thank God we have kairos, too: again the Greeks were wiser than we are. They had two words for time: chronos and kairos.
Kairos is not measurable. Kairos is ontological. In kairos we are, we are fully in isness, not negatively, as Sartre saw the isness of the oak tree, but fully, wholly, positively. Kairos can sometimes enter, penetrate, break through chronos: the child at play, the painter at his easel, Serkin playing the Appassionata, are in kairos.
I sit in the rocking chair with a baby in my arms, and I am in both kairos and chronos. In chronos I may be nothing more than some cybernetic salad at the bottom left-hand corner of a check, or my social-security number; or my passport number. In kairos I am known by my name; Madeleine.
The baby doesn't know about chronos yet."

That's were we are. Living in kairos while chronos relentlessly moves us forward--marriages, births, deaths. It's the heart breaking beauty of homeschooling, learning along with our kids, watching them grow up but not away no matter how far they travel. I bet the Greeks have words for that too.

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.

Poetic Knowledge Week Two

I am totally distracted this week by the arrival of the world's most delectable baby--my first grandchild. He is amazing. Really! And I am obviously besotted. My apologies.
But I did want to note this quote from Chapter Two-"But the first experiences in the poetic mode will never be forgotten, nor rejected, as if one had outgrown them and found them silly." pg.15
This has been true for my three older children who have gone out into the world. They have not embraced the silliness of the world but have held fast to what they learned in those long, dreamy days of homeschooling. People occasionally ask me what is the most important aspect of homeschooling. I say time. Time to think and dream, read, play, draw, bake cookies, make chainmail, watch ants, you get the idea.

Poetic Knowledge Chapter One

This chapter is called The Validity of Poetic Knowledge and I think Mr. Taylor makes a good argument for the urgent need of this kind of education today. He says,"Poetic knowledge is a kind of natural, everyman's metaphysics of common knowledge." What I took away from this chapter is a hint of what we've lost or more accurately let atrophy. I think all people have poetic souls but Taylor is very correct when he states,"Given that the scientific idea of education is a mechanical model that manifests itself in some from of the "drill and kill" system, and given, in contrast, that the human being is not a machine the conflict produced by the imposition of the scientific idea of learning will also have its negative effect on the emotional life of the learner." I see the "poetry" of so many children lying dormant and unused, even damaged by our current school system. Locally, this system is geared to the high achievers and it doesn't take long for a student to fall behind and be put in remedial classes or even shunted off to the local vo-tech school. I see the value of vocational training but I feel these kids are being given short shrift. We still suffer from what Charlotte Mason describes in School Education, "Our aim in education is to give children vital interests in as many directions as possible--to set their feet in a large room--because the crying evil of our day is, it seems to me, intellectual inanition." It seems that way to me, too.
It's not hard to establish poetic learning in our homeschools. It is usually the natural progression of our days. I think Charlotte Mason has a good blend of poetic learning with rigorous study (we don't learn Latin by drifting around a Latin Reader, we memorize forms!) but how to save our friends? How to promote this way of learning which Miss Mason says in A Philosophy of Education,"Children, I think all children, so taught express themselves in forcible and fluent English and use a copious vocabulary. An unusual degree of nervous stability is attained; also, intellectual occupation seems to make for chastity in thought and life. Parents become interested in the schoolroom work, and find their children "delightful companions." Children shew delight in books (other than story books) and manifest a genuine love of knowledge." There is a promise of healing in these words.

Poetry Monday

Or rather Poetic Monday. I'm excited to be joining the discussion of one of my favorite books on education, Poetic Knowledge by James S. Taylor. The discussion is being hosted by Mystie at A Healer's Geste ( a very interesting blog to wander through, I might add) and starts tomorrow with chapter one!