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.