Part 4 - Education's Merry Jester
The Wild Card We Call Homeschooling
Christ is Risen!!
This past fall Laura was invited to speak at the first Orthodoxy and Education Conference, hosted by the St. Basil Center for Orthodox Thought and Culture. Here, on our substack, we are publishing her talk in 4 parts (to allow for time for busy moms to read and reflect), but if you would like to listen to the whole talk at one go, you can find it here, on Ancient Faith Radio.
Part 4
(Parts 1, 2, and 3 can be found here, here, and here respectively).
This means first things first. As Orthodox Christians, we must take all of our book lists and curricula, every project we hold dear, and purposefully make them a lower priority than that of equipping the children in our care for their spiritual lives. The Christian life is not a side-quest that we work on on Sundays, when the other quests are resting. When we are blessed to educate in a homeschool setting or an Orthodox private school, this means explicitly guiding our charges in the inception of their spiritual lives. Preparing for sacraments, practicing a prayer rule, and placing all of their relationships under the aegis of Christ and his Church. And when we are in a position of interacting with non-Orthodox students, we must always, then, be cognizant of how we can evangelize them, even if it is only quietly and with the text of our own lives.
So what, exactly, are we doing when we educate these children? Especially if we cannot circumscribe it with any particular system or curriculum? What are some of the right questions to ask?
Here’s what I propose: we are introducing these new young people to their birthright — a fullness of life and relationship that will not be exhausted in these 80 years on earth, but rather is meant to spiral into an eternity of worship. We are inviting them to a feast that doesn’t just happen the first two decades of their lives, but will continue on forever, as they encounter new ideas at the right place and the right time. I propose that theoretically, in education, we are models of love, offering hospitality and generosity, and pragmatically, we are all learners of languages, and thus, fellow guests.
We teach our students by loving them as icons of Christ, and loving Ideas that are icons of truth, sharing our relationships with these ideas with our students so that the Trinitarian pattern is repeated anew: God, Self, Other. And the way we do this fractalizes by exploring ways of communicating through languages, whether that language is English or Latin or Koine Greek or Arithmetic or Music, binomial nomenclature, or even a coding language like Python. We can even communicate through the wordless languages of embodiment in forms as diverse as sport and dance, trade skills and handicraft. Language is the medium of relationship; the vessels and dishes spread out on the feasting table.
To the people who know me, it’s no secret that I like to play with abstract ideas like this. It all sounds great on paper, but how can we take these noble ideas and enflesh them, incarnate them, in reality, with our real, live students? How do we put beautiful thoughts into relationship with beautiful icons of Christ?
Practically, I think it helps us to think of education as showing students how to use the many educational tools at their disposal. In our society, there are so many of these tools, a single person will never use all of them. So our task, no matter whether we are public school educators, private school educators, secular or religious educators, home educators (and I’ll give you a hint about my afternoon presentation—we’re ALL a part of home education) — Our task is to teach them to use these tools, and then, more importantly to give them a vision of what is possible within the fullness of lived experience — we are spreading a feast that not only fills the table, it spills out onto the floor and throughout the hall. There is more here than anyone could possibly dream of, so the point isn’t to amass facts, receive certificates, or bank achievements. The immense possibility present in education as it exists right now is very close to what philosopher Ivan Illich called for in his seminal work, Deschooling Society: “learning webs” where the role of educator is to facilitate a student’s access to the global library of things to know and do, whether those things are ancient and classical or new and modern.
But no matter which tools and ideas you find yourself using and relating to, whatever your task in education, remember the lesson that the wildcards in homeschooling have to teach all of us. We are here for hospitality and generosity, to share a feast. Not to adhere to systems as if they are laws unto themselves. And for the many people we meet who might not know, we have to let them know that there is a feast — and that the Head of the Feast is calling everyone to come.
Home education is holy foolishness because it shows us how much is possible, that the systems aren’t the point, and no matter what we love, that there’s not enough time to do it all.
Then let us be fools for Christ, free to serve one another, and the children in our care, in humble love.