Part 2 - Education's Merry Jester

The Wild Card We Call Homeschooling

This 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.

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Part 2

(If you missed part 1 you can find it here)

If we continue to see home education as merely reactionary, we will miss those insights that it has to offer for the rest of the educational world, and the Orthodox world in particular.

The first of these insights is that the current manifestation of homeschooling in America proves that education isn’t what we think it is.

It’s true, home education is a wild card. Every family that you meet does it differently, using methods as diverse as school-at-home on one hand, unschooling on the other, and everything else under the sun in between. This is because one of the greatest strengths of home education is that it is truly individualized. An attentive parent teacher meets a student exactly where they are, scaffolding challenges and empowering strengths. There are so many choices for curricula, so many diverse and fascinating courses of study, that one can pick up a catalog or two and design a course of education that is unique for every student.

The crazy thing is that there is tremendous success found in this smorgasbord of educational diversity. Some families prioritize the humanities and structure their studies according to the Trivium. Others are science and technology focused and dive deep into math and science. Some seek out travel and experiences, and others teach experiential learning through living books.

Not just a wild card, then, home education is absurd in that it takes the educational systems and practices we each swear by — unit studies, book reports, child-led learning — then finds a family who thrives doing something exactly the opposite.

Home education is the Joker. The Jester.

It is the Fool who asks us to laugh at ourselves in our seriousness, to remember that our priority is not an educational system, but the care and keeping of Icons of Christ.

And just like the archetypal fool, what looks like folly and carelessness can in fact be the key to the spontaneity that allows us to live and educate according to the spirit instead of being bound by rules that have become chains.

I like to think that whenever we sniff out a contradiction or paradox like this, we are seeing the chiastic, or cross-shaped, pattern of reality. Two things that seem like they can’t both be true, instead work together in creating tensile depth. Like a pair of 3D glasses, two different images combine to give us the perception of a multi-dimensional reality. The holy foolery of home education — the breaking of our institutionalized rules to set us free — is the cruciform correction to our desperate search to find the best methods for educating our children. All reality is cruciform —and it is true about our educational pursuits as well.

Home education plays the holy fool to institutional methods — even to classical education — by reminding us that the methods and systems, however good and desirable, are only means to an end which can be accomplished in so many diverse ways. And because home education in its diversity also partakes of what institutions have to offer, whether it’s classes at the local school, or clubs and activities, it simultaneously affirms their value. All reality is cruciform.

Something we talk a lot about in Patterns for Life is this idea that education should be approached, not as a system, but as a philosophy, a method, a set of principles. When we say this, we explicitly mean that there is NOT one “right way” to educate a child. No one can hand you a specific curriculum, a set of workbooks, or plan of scheduled days that will produce an educated child like a widget out of a factory. There isn’t even a perfect book list, much to every reader’s chagrin. Instead, we have to take our philosophies, our principles, these things we believe to be true, about life, about love, about spirituality and about education, and put them into relationship with the particular people in front of us. As Charlotte Mason said, “We spread an abundant and delicate feast, and each small guest assimilates what he can.”

The first of Charlotte Mason’s 20 principles of education is the microcosm of principles that fractalizes into everything we know and do with our students. “Children are born persons” she says, and we instantly hear the echo, “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them,” and the after-image of the icon of Christ is burned onto our eyelids.

What does it even mean, to educate an icon?

One thing we are NOT doing is creating, refining or adding to their humanity or personhood. They are already persons. What God has created in them is there, regardless of what we do to it in the form of education. A formally educated person is not a better person, a more human person, than one without a formal education.

Charlotte Mason even goes so far as to explicitly warn us that, “Character is not the outcome of a formative educational process;” and “We may not make character our conscious objective.” This flies in the face of so many systems and curricula that make impossible promises about character development. This issue here is that the character curriculum oversteps its boundaries — character development is something that encompasses a child’s, a person’s, whole life, and cannot be compartmentalized into a subject, or series of subjects, to be taught. Character is a gestalt phenomenon —it is the sum total of all of the relationships we hold together in ourselves and offer up to Christ. We can only hope, through education, to provide a feast of good ideas for our students to think about and, potentially, from which to select their great loves.

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Keep an eye out for Part 3 in your inbox soon!