N&N Preface

A few things came up in the last couple of days to prevent me from sitting down at my Mac and writing my thoughts on the books I am reading (and re-reading.) But now I am sitting in the driveway at the home of Bryna’s sewing teacher. It’s a beautiful place to think, read and type.

Norms & Nobility was written about 1980 by a Christian man educated at Princeton and Oxford. The copy I have has a preface dated 1990. As I said before, I first read this book in 2000. I love the preface. It is worth the price of the book. I have enough to go on, teach from, in just the preface.

In it, the author very humbly assures us right from the beginning that he was a “young and inexperienced teacher” when he wrote it and mentions some things that he would say differently following his 10 years of working in schools. He says that in 1980 he had a “desire to participate in the reform of the American school.” At that time, he saw reform “in terms of the way schools organize themselves, especially their curricula.”

But after his years of working in schools, he changes his mind. In 1990 he believes that the teacher needs to be the focus of reform, not the curriculum. This is an important thought. Parents of public school children don’t often want to think about the teacher as the main problem in education. Indeed, how many of us homeschoolers focus inordinately on curricula, instead of on ourselves?

Education only works if the teacher is teachable and willing to submit to the discipline themselves. I meet so many homeschoolers (I will pick on homeschoolers the most because I am one of them) who are not in the least bit teachable. They either have no interest in knowing what they expect their child to know, or worse, they think they already know it all and are therefore, unteachable. One of the things I hate most in this world is unteachableness. (That isn’t a real word, according to my dashboard dictionary, but I love it anyway.) It is absolutely imperative that education be accompanied by humility (my dashboard dictionary defines this as “a modest or low view of one’s own importance.”) That’s not my definition. Mine is more “a lack of hubris, or a lack of excessive pride, arrogance or self-importance.” Or “teachableness” ;-). But education and humility are inseparable. You cannot have one without the other.

Another admission of Hicks is that if he were to write N&N again he “would probably make fewer and less sweeping claims for the ancients.” I try to keep this in mind as I read his book. As much as it would simplify things, there isn’t a time when a civilization didn’t have adults arguing over how its children should be educated.

He does, however, say that his book is not about ancient education anyway, but “about an ancient ideal expressed as ‘classical education’ against which the modern school is weighed and found wanting.” (emphasis mine) And in my view, it’s not just the modern public school that is weighed and found wanting, but also, and maybe even more especially, the modern classical school. (See, I’m picking on everyone: public, private, and homeschool :-)

But the ideal is what I want to get at - in this book and in my home.

Hicks says the fundamental premise of his book is that “the end of education is not thinking; it is acting. It is not just knowing what to do; it is doing it.” He adds, “the sublime premise of a classical education asserts that right thinking will lead to right, if not righteous, acting.” (emphasis mine) Charlotte Mason taught the children, “I am, I can, I ought, I will.”

I can’t help but think of the “missing” mom from Xenia that was recently in the news. She was raised in a Christian home (her dad was a pastor), went to Cedarville University, married a Christian man (son of missionaries), taught Sunday school at her church, had a one year old child...and then faked an abduction and ran off with a married man. Now, I am in no position to judge someone with my own sins still plaguing me, but we must evaluate incidents such as these.

This 31 year old woman obviously had been taught many things, many good things, but they didn’t lead to right or righteous behavior. Why? Maybe we will discover some clues as we study more about the Ideal.

A Book Study or Two or Three

I've been thinking that I would like to re-read some Charlotte Mason and Norms & Nobility, and finish reading Poetic Knowledge.

When I first started homeschooling in January of 1994, I read two of Charlotte Mason's books, Home Education and A Philosophy of Education. I remember the days of having a 5, almost 6, year old and an almost 2 year old. They spent a lot of time playing outside while I sat in a lawn chair reading. Charlotte Mason had a profound affect on my efforts to homeschool my children.

In 2000, I read the book Norms & Nobility by David Hicks. This book moved me into the new phase of homeschooling that I was facing, that of high school. I have read it two more times since then, and a different color marks each time: black ink, blue ink, and pink highlighter. It's interesting to see that there are certain things that I have underlined every time because they have resonated with my heart. I find them truer each time I read it. My notes to myself have changed considerably over the years as well. In some places, I've disagreed with what I read; in the next read, however, I've agreed. The new color will be purple. :-)

Charlotte Mason and David Hicks changed my life, and the lives of my children. They were worth every penny spent on their books and every minute spent reading them. As my youngest has 7 more years in our homeschool, I think they deserve another read. But this time I will keep notes on this blog.

As part of this study, I plan to finally finish Poetic Knowledge by James Taylor. This is a good book (I've gotten to pg. 61 before); I don't know why I have trouble finishing it. Maybe when I finish it, I will know why I had trouble finishing it.

From the Memory Archive

I’m standing in the kitchen when I hear a little voice from the living room call, “Mom! Jillian stepped on my toe!”

I pause. Decide to make light of it.

“Was it your sore toe?” I call back. (drawing on an old saying of my dad’s)

Long pause.

“No! ...But it was my favorite one!!”

Oh, it still makes me giggle after all these years. I could just see this child’s mind working. This child thought, “I want to get my sibling in trouble. If I say it wasn’t my sore toe, she might not get in trouble. I have to say *something* that will make it seem like stepping on my toe was a really BAD thing!”

~Smile~

From earlier today...while I sat in the car waiting...

Bryna and I are out at her sewing lesson right now. She takes lessons from a ‘retired’ homeschooler, a woman whose kids are all graduated and now giving her grandchildren. Bryna loves these lessons! I probably could be doing this myself, but I don’t have a good working sewing machine right now and it’s good for Bryna to have outside teachers every now and then. I don’t trust the “important” subjects to others at this time in her life, things like reading, history, literature, etc. But learning how to make a skirt, yes.

Her teacher lives out in the country. An idyllic setting. Her yard is FULL of wildflowers - spring beauties (one of my favorites!), violets, dog-tooth violets, periwinkle (I recently read that this is considered an invasive?! That’s the prettiest little invasive if there ever was one), a little yellow flower that I can’t remember the name of right now and, of course, garlic mustard (an ugly invasive - but she doesn’t have a lot of it - maybe she pulls it...).

There are all kinds of trees - a lovely dogwood in bloom, a redbud (I really want one of those - that lavendery purple, ahhh), and all kinds of others that I don’t know personally. Kiernan and I spent a lot of time when she was young identifying wildflowers. But I don’t know my trees as well - except for the obvious ones that everyone knows - maple, oak. Jared, Bryna and I are going to have to do that this summer: learn our trees.

Our First Happy Box arrived today!

I'm so excited about our venture into a CSA. Once a week, the folks at Fulton Farms Organics will deliver a bushel box full of organically grown fruits and veggies to our house. I'm glad to be supporting locally grown foods and keeping our money in the local economy. I'm eager to learn about new foods that I don't normally buy, and to learn how to fix them. This week we got lettuce, spinach, kale tat soi, green onion, green garlic, dill and cilantro, and a few other things. I made the yummiest salad out of the butter lettuce, dill and cilantro. I looked up the kale tat soi - one website said it is "a lovely, spicy little green." It also gave a recipe for roasting it and eating it crispy. I'm doing that tomorrow!

One of Kiernan's beloved professors

I'm sitting here in my library with my mind and life full to overflowing, so I thought I'd start a blog. I'm in a stage of my family life in which I think it is time to begin to record things from our past and link them to the future. I have children that will soon be flying the coop and my youngest will soon be a young lady, leaving childhood behind. I want to put some things in print for posterity. I also plan to keep notes here of books I am reading, school lists of Jared's and Bryna's remaining school years, get on my soap-box every now and then, etc. It will be somewhat of a hodge-podge.

The name of my blog comes from one of the books I read to the older girls when they were little, The Door in the Wall by Marguerite de Angeli. The opening page of the book is a reference to Revelation 3:8. "I know thy works. Behold, I have set before thee an open door and no man shall shut it: For thou hast a little strength and hast not denied my Name."

The story is about a ten year old boy named Robin living during the Middle Ages. His father, a knight, has gone off to fight in the Scottish wars. His mother, after arranging for her son to be taken to a faraway castle to learn the ways of knighthood, leaves to be the Queen's lady-in-waiting. Both parents, say their farewells to their son with, "Be brave."

However, Robin soon falls ill and becomes lame. The servants left to care for Robin all either abandon him or fall ill of the plague, and Robin is left alone. The only one to care for Robin is Brother Luke, a wandering friar. Brother Luke, knowing this child is threatened with the despair of his situation and may be only seeing the impossibilities, reminds him of the long wall around the garden of his father's house, and of the long wall around the Tower of London, and of "any other wall." Then Brother Luke asks, "Have they not all a door somewhere?" "Yes," says Robin. "Always remember that." says Brother Luke. "Thou hast only to follow the wall far enough and there will be a door in it." Robin doesn't understand what Brother Luke means, of course, but promises to remember.

The story is lovely and one of my favorites. A lump rolled up my throat and tears washed over my eyes when, at the end, we finished the story with a sleepy Robin, after a long night of celebrating some truly wonderful things that Robin helped to make happen, asks Brother Luke, "Where am I?"

"Thou'rt here, Sir Robin," said the friar. "'Tis the feast of Christmas, and thou hast found the door in thy wall."

I've found the wall continues one's whole life and one has to find many doors. I want to leave a map of the doors we've found along the way.

Thanks for reading!