Part 3 - 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 3

(Parts 1 and 2 can be found here and here)

“Each guest assimilates what he can” — people love the first part of Charlotte Mason’s quote, but they often neglect the second. No one student is going to relate “the way we think they should” to all of the ideas we spread before them. In fact, we ought to get rid of our “shoulds” and adopt a posture of greater humility.

Fundamentally, we recognize that the act of learning and the development of our characters are essential parts of our humanity, and actually, as natural to us as breathing. How freeing! We do not have to “do this thing” to our students, our children. But Laura, you might say, if we don’t do ANYTHING, the children won’t appreciate good things. They’ll eat nothing but candy, play video games all day, and binge watch Real Housewives of the Seventh Circle of Hell! Even Charlotte Mason said that children must be educated in order to “delight in a fine thought.” Surely this means that education is a thing that pushes the best, and excises the mediocre! We have rules and standards, and we have to raise the children up to them!

Oops, we’ve slipped into thinking of education as a system again. Let’s jump back to that metaphor of “spreading a feast”. A feast is not a program. It’s not something that is done to you. It’s a place, an atmosphere, of hospitality and generosity. When we think of a holiday feast, we think of rich and enticing dishes from which to sample, and good company to enjoy it with. Education as feast is the same way, only the food here is for the mind. Our job is to offer the hospitality, not to force-feed our guests. The children are hungry — they can’t help but be. They might initially be attracted to the Christmas cookies, but as long they’re hungry, and the feast is there, they will return for a plate of roast beef.

We err when we think the method we find most delightful ourselves is the only right way for everyone else around us. Here, the holy foolery of home education can hold a mirror up to our own egotistical pride, and we know this is true and can really lean into it when we feel provoked to defend our chosen methods of education. This is even true within my own chosen niche of the homeschooling world, that of Charlotte Mason. Ask any Charlotte Mason educator what they consider to be “twaddle” —Mason’s word for junky, unworthy books — and you will get many different answers and quite a lot of disagreement. Barring, of course, the outright celebration of sin, “twaddle” can mean anything from the silly and frivolous, to the educational-but-not-excellently-written, and it all too frequently just becomes a synonym for the books that a particular parent or educator doesn’t like.

When we elevate our own taste to universal status, we inadvertently violate Mason’s first principle, that children are born persons. “Eat the goose-liver pate!” We insist to our wide-eyed guests. “YOU MUST! IT IS FINE AND EXCELLENT!”

The truth is that no matter how much we may love this book and that philosopher, we cannot cause another person to love it the way we do. This is just as true for children as it is for other adults. One person’s twaddle is sometimes the spark that ignites another person’s passion.

But — and I hear my own voice protesting this as well — aren’t there universal pieces of, say, literature that all educated human beings must be required to know? Well, we can certainly agree that a good education will try to expose a student to many kinds of beautiful ideas. Go ahead, serve the pate, the sushi, the camembert, if you wish — the Latin declensions, the differential calculus. But it’s also true that no education is comprehensive, and that decisions are always made that elevate some selections at the expense of others. No matter how good and true and beautiful the feast we spread before a person, that person — even a child — retains the freedom to relate to it in their own way. Perhaps the strange truth is that, as persons, we all love uniquely.

This is why the spirit of classical education is so much more important than the letter or form. It is why we must continue to hold the distinction between having an education and being an academic.

It is why we must keep our noblest educational aims subservient to our most primary directive: To serve and equip young icons of Christ for their own journeys of salvation, to help them rightly order their loves.