Poetic Knowledge Book Study Index

This is the index to my posts about Poetic Knowledge, with links to Mystie's posts which link to other posts by other readers.    I knew it would take a long time to compile it so I've been procrastinating!

Mystie has moved to a new location at The Convivial Home, but  her old domain at A Healer's Geste remains up for the next year, so the links still will work for quite a while. 

Chapter 1

"The poetic impulse to reflect what is already there" 

Chapter 2:

The universal embedded in the particular
 How Poetic Knowledge works

Chapter 3

Modes of Knowledge -- poetry is sane because it floats easily on an infinite sea
The Habit of Poetic Knowledge

Chapter 4

Descartes and His Legacy
The ascendancy of the materialistic view of man

Chapter 5

Aristotle quote
So that souls can bloom
The logic of crafts and gymnastics

Chapter 6

The unmaking of a dullard
Some links connected to the integrated humanities program
Rediscovery of their childhood


Chapter 7

some more links, and a list of books
a poem by John Senior:  the End of Education
the integration of an idea and a desire
 preparation for perception of the beautiful


Chapter 8

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy and art
Application:  not a checklist but a process

Poetic Knowledge Wrap-Up

This is Wrap Up Week for the Poetic Knowledge Book Club.    It's been a fun journey.   I am so glad Mystie started the book study (upon Silvia's request, I understand!)  and that so many participated.  

Mystie asked:

 What is one specific thing you are changing as a result of reading this book?

I think the main thing I am going to be changing is my attitude about "getting things done".   James Taylor reiterated so many times that factual knowledge and dialectic reasoning were not the only ways to learn.    I "knew" this already in that I could have repeated his case fairly well, but this time it sank in at a deeper level.  

In fact, I think this is actually a case in point, illustrating what Taylor wants to say about education.  I could teach my children to argue a certain point in a logical manner, or recite a bunch of things they learned about, say, Ancient Egypt or grammar, but that would not mean they really "knew" it.    They could do this and still not have "lived" the knowledge or really brought it into themselves and been changed by it.

On the other hand, suppose my children "played" Ancient Greeks or tried to write a sonnet or argued passionately in an area they really cared about -- like trying to tell a friend about why they believed in God, or why siblings are more valuable than lots of new toys, or something like that.  They would really be living the subject area -- history, or syntax, or logic/persuasion -- not just learning "about" it.

Once I see this, I see several things.

One is that I waste a lot of time -- when I think we are homeschooling, we are only just dipping our toes in learning.   Another is that what my kids do really "learn" in the poetic, gymnastic sense doesn't really overlap very much what I do in our homeschool.  This is rather humbling.

At the same time, it accounts for the mystery I've always sensed.  Every since I started homeschooling, I knew I wasn't really doing a very good job at it.    That is, if a professional teacher came into our house and watched a few days she wouldn't see all that much evidence of rich, organized effective education going on.   Even an excellent, experienced homeschooling mom would probably have to raise her eyebrows at all the missed opportunities, false starts and messes around here.  

Yet even so --- somehow my kids were learning.  I can't even say how, and it's sort of scary because I can't define it or distill it so I can reproduce it at will.  Somehow my kids have been growing up relatively intelligent, decent, idealistic and knowledgeable in various subjects. 

I'm not bragging, because I don't think it's me, or even THEM.   Nor do I feel like we are perfect, so I'm not saying "Do nothing, and all will be well."    We are all trying hard, so I suppose that's one plus in our favor, but we're not super-gifted or organized type people.    Again, I feel it's very mysterious.   I can't point to a sort of sum:  We did this plus this and THAT resulted or even to a subtraction:  We DIDN'T do this and this so THAT didn't happen.   There is some correlation -- if you met us, you could probably easily match my children with us, their parents -- but there is just... mystery, there, too.  Ways that God provided that we couldn't ever predict or control. 

Taylor seems to account for the mystery just a little.  Poetic knowledge is receptive, participatory, responsive.  Well, maybe that is one thing that's happened around here.  We've left some time and space for receptiveness.  We tried to let our life be partly about what He gave us.   We surrendered our priorities when it was clear He wanted things differently -- at least, some of the time, to some extent, not perfectly. 

Thus, this also seems to tie into my faith.    Jesus made a lot of promises to the little children, to those who were burdened, those who were weak.   He didn't tell us we had to have every loose end tied, every subject area mastered, everything under our control.   His priorities are very different, much more "poetic" if you will.

So as to the specifics -- Silvia already wrote the one I was thinking -- that I was still going to have plans and goals, but pay much less attention to the specific time frames and pay much more attention to HOW we were addressing them -- the richness of the process.   Also, when she talked about books and things, she made me realize:  Books are about Things.   OK, that sounds so obvious when I write it.    But seriously.   If books are about THINGS, then THINGS are of primary importance, and books are important as they relate to THINGS.  Not just material things, of course.   In Poetic Knowledge, the most important Things are the immaterial things, and sometimes they are hard to put into language because the language almost HAS to be analogical.  

(This is one reason why literature is important -- because it puts immaterial things into narrative and a kind of vicarious experience).

Next year, as a result of thinking through all this, I'm trying to reach for a more unschooly way of doing things.  I will still have goals and plans, but they will be more customized than they have been in the past couple of years.    I realize that I was struggling with burn-out and that God gave me this Book Club just at the right time.    It is one more clue that He provides what we need when it is needed, so perhaps I shouldn't try to stock-pile things too far ahead, but be more like the sparrows or the lilies of the field.   

Well, this is quite rambling, because at the moment I'm writing in my oldest son's new apartment -- we just helped him move in with his brother yesterday.    Another example of God providing things we couldn't necessarily have predicted or asked for in advance....

Poetic Knowledge Week 12

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art. . . . It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that gives value to survival.” —C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves

HT: CS Lewis Blog, Mere Friendship

We are wrapping up the Poetic Knowledge Book Study!  There is only one more week, devoted to "personal conclusions and applications".   I feel a bit sad. I will miss these conversations!   I have a feeling I will be drawing personal conclusions and applications for some time to come.  Plus, as I mentioned to Silvia on her blog, I think I will probably be revisiting the discussion during the "winter of discontent" which hits me regularly, sometimes but not always in actual winter. 

In relation to that, James Taylor concludes his book Poetic Knowledge, from all the interconnected themes he might have picked, with a meditation on the idea of friendship. It has been a theme woven throughout the whole book, but here it is treated at some length.  This tells me that the concept of a "faculty of friends" is of central importance in the idea of poetic knowledge. 

Taylor writes:

The reward teachers and students experience when they abandon all the cumbersome paraphernalia of scientific education and confront one another and the truths of the subject at hand directly and simply, is friendship. It is friendship, a species of love....that defines such a school and echoes that first image in the West of the teacher Socrates, whose students playfully, affectionately detain him one day so that he will talk to them about justice, as seen at the beginning of The Republic. And this is why (John) Senior says that first of all a school is a faculty of friends.

Taylor quotes Plato's Seventh Letter. Plato is talking about how philosophy, the highest of the sciences in that it is the loving pursuit of wisdom, cannot be given by mere instruction through some kind of handbook, as the Sophists try to do.

after much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another, and thereafter sustains itself.

He goes on:

But I do not think it a good thing for men that there should be a disquisition, as it is called, on this topic-except for some few, who are able with a little teaching to find it out for themselves. As for the rest, it would fill some of them quite illogically with a mistaken feeling of contempt, and others with lofty and vain-glorious expectations, as though they had learnt something high and mighty.

Even though he is talking about philosophy, isn't this to some extent true of education in general?  When academics become purely utilitarian, when economic values of getting a job or ambitious values of prestige and influence and elitism take first place, it naturally results that those who learn from economic or ambitious motives either get contemptuous of all learning that doesn't have a cash value, or get vainglorious and puffed up by their supposed intellectualism.

To hinder this, teaching has to be sincere and in the context of relationship.   We have seen in this Book Club (or so I think) that honesty and real communication are possible even with differences of background and doctrine.   Without that basis, often communication becomes invested in power and manipulation and distrust --  which you also see often in Plato's Socratic dialogues, where a Sophist shows up and tries to treat Socrates with contempt.  Those people may influence others but they are not really following the truth, simply using some distortion of truth as a way to glorify themselves.

In this way teaching can be a difficult discipline, as friendship can be, because the temptation to cut corners and use wisdom as a tool is in all of us (well, I know for sure it is in me, at least) but it is a different kind of difficulty than the difficulty in preparing excellent formal lesson plans, or reading lots of parenting books for strategies on how to make your children behave.  It is a similar kind of difficulty to that of "losing yourself" in the Christian journey, where we actually by our fallen nature tend to want to "build ourselves" by pulling trappings around ourselves like walls or excess ornamentation so we don't have to be, as Lewis says, "naked personalities".  That willingess to be a person, not a collection of opinions and possessions and achievements, is a very difficult thing to achieve and takes a lifetime -- and God's grace, I believe.  

I mentioned before that though a lot of the parenting books tell you not to be friends with your children, I think they are missing the point.   Let's talk about some of the characteristics of friends.  I'm quoting from the article on CS Lewis linked above:

Lewis points out that friendship embodies a spiritual relationship that begins from the companionship among peers, when two or more individuals choose to break away as they discover and wish to share some common interest. As he notes, the development of friendship involves the question, “Do you see the same truth?—Or at least, ‘Do you care about the same truth?’”

Contrasted with mere companions or colleagues who pursue a common physical goal, friends share a common interest that is more introspective and nonmaterial. And seeking friends as a material goal is pointless: “The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends. . . . There would be nothing for the Friendship to be about; and Friendship must be about something, even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice.” 

Friendship, like poetic knowledge, is deeply felt and experienced within but also refers outward to an exterior, objective reality that is loved and valued by both the friends.

As parents, we may be bound to our children by natural ties of affection and responsibility.  But surely it would be a minimal view of what the family is about if the ties only added up to proximity and preparation.   As parents we want our children to see beyond us and their natural interests and circumstances to see what we see and love what we love.  That doesn't mean that we want them to be carbon copies of us, any more than we want our friends to be our clones.  That would be a form of narcissism.   But in Christian families, Jesus is our brother.   He has called us "not servants, but friends."  Our Christian children are our brothers in Christ, and His friends as we are.  This gives us a common pursuit, a common interest, a common quest, and this is the stuff of friendship.  

Maybe "fellowship" might be a good word here.  I was thinking a lot about The Lord of the Rings while thinking about this topic.   The fellowship, the Nine, are not strictly peers or equals.  Gandalf is superior in wisdom, knowledge and power, while Aragorn is superior in role and heritage, to the simple hobbits, who in some ways are like children compared to the races of Elves, Men, and Dwarves.   Yet it is always recognized that they have a part to play and gifts to share in the quest, even though they are humble and simple and small in their hobbit nature.

The hobbits are taught, guided and sometimes chastised by some others in the Fellowship.  But nonetheless there is a very real reciprocal respect and acknowledgement of dignity  -- what you might in fact call a friendship.

I think this is one thing that we are intuitively drawn towards particularly in the homeschool, but we may distrust because we have heard a lot about maintaining authority and we may have embedded ideas about education and school which make us want to put lots of academic trappings between us and our children.

I hope it is clear that I am not talking about clinging to our children as companions, or parentifying them by confiding in them inappropriately, or hindering them from growing into their own identities and making their own lives.    I am simply trying to describe something that Plato says can't thoroughly be described or codified, but that is important anyway -- making room for that flame that passes from one person to another, that transcends instruction and training.  

This type of friendship has always been suspected and suppressed by tyrannies.   In fact, I think you could probably write a Gatto-style rant about the ways that institutional schools distort and starve and attempt to control true friendship.   I read a biography of Pope John Paul II called A Witness to Hope.   One of the first things the Nazi party tried to do was suppress clubs and shared culture and friendship, because they knew that these things were dangerous to their aims.  Similarly, the Communists in Poland struck at clubs and friendly associations and culture and religious fellowships, because they similarly saw that these things are fatal to totalitarianism.  True friendships, Pope John Paul II became aware, were the strongest counter-forces to the machines of alienation and control.   In that way they have something deeply in common with true families, which the schools and other institutional forces also try to disrupt and make powerless.

James Taylor writes, in relation to teacher/student relationships, but some of what he says holds true for the parent/child relationship as well:

But returning from such a passage up and down the scale of knowledge, always with love predominating, such a teacher is best suited to lead the student waiting to begin their journey through the modes of knowledge.   It is clear from all experience that youth do not really form the higher degrees of friendship -- theirs is mainly at the level of what is pleasing.  But given the presence of teachers who are friends and who love their students in the highest order, desiring their good, and understanding and patient of their age, students will have the model in their memory, the form of love in their minds...

I've been writing about the parent/child relationship here, but I think parenting best takes place in a rich context, and this is another thing that is often missing nowadays. My friendship with my husband, if it may be so called, is important soil in which my relationship with my children can either thrive or wither.

And I think friendships that go outside the family are of great importance, too. I am blessed by my "faculty of friends" both in real life and online (that sounds strange, doesn't it?). They make me see things in new ways, but in true ways. Aristotle says that we need more than ourselves and even more than our families to perfect us -- we need a society. When the wider society is somewhat hostile to our efforts, it's all the more important to have a "faculty of friends" to converse with and be around, because that is the way humans develop best. I've certainly gotten way more out of Poetic Knowledge by reading it alongside the "ladies of the club" than I did when I read it alone. Thanks very much all of you, I am grateful for this blessing of time and space to converse!

Poetic Knowledge -- more on chapter 7

For there must be no confusion about this:  that while the poetic mode of education teaches finally by the muses, as Quinn says, this does not mean there is not much to be done, deliberately and consciously, to learn to trust these ways of knowing again.   As Jacques Maritain carefully observed:

If the very act of the perception of the beautiful takes place without discourse and without any effort of abstraction, conceptual discourse can neverthless play an immense part in the preparation for the act...

In the last chapter of Poetic Knowledge, James Taylor talks about how a school devoted to the poetic and gymnastic modes would look.

Here are some more features (part 1 of my notes):

No complex bureaucracy or fancy educational amenities necessary.

Probably one reason why homeschools succeed in comparison to expensive government schools!

Deliberate "poverty"

Without all the trappings, the school can move closer to nature.  For example, let in the outside air, plan the building to let in natural light, and use a fire rather than sophisticated central heating, so as much as possible the children are in a natural setting.

This is much easier to do in a home than in a school building -- in fact, you can actually go outside!


Simplicity is not "easy"

Facing natural temperatures and not insulated and protected by a cushy indoors environments is a kind of challenge, but a good "gymnastic" one.

"Like the memories of light and shadow, the memory of cold and hot, the smell of the open field for playground and science, the drowsy afternoon after a simple but healthy lunch, the sometimes tedious drills for math, would all be recalled in a sympathy that had joined the passive and active powers of body and soul."

"Few books indeed"

Taylor says that the books we would use in a poetic school have chosen us rather than we them, as they are the books in the great Western tradition.   They are like the heirlooms of our family home, not like things we go out to the store to pick up according to our taste.

One book, he says, could suffice for an entire curriculum for a semester.  In his words:

"Furthermore, to teach in the integrated way, so that students see that knowledge is not a set of discrete subjects to be mastered but rather a whole that instructs by delight, one book could suffice for an entire curriculum."

 Not a "Concentration Scheme" though

Now, people who are familiar with Charlotte Mason's thinking on the subject of "concentration schemes" will perhaps pause here a moment, thinking of her pithy description of a 19th century unit study on Robinson Crusoe and her conclusion that it might entertain the students somewhat and make the teachers feel useful but in the end:

The whole thing must be highly amusing to the teacher, as ingenious amplifications self-produced always are: that the children too were entertained, one does not doubt. The teacher was probably at her best in getting by sheer force much out of little: she was, in fact, acting a part and the children were entertained as at a show, cinema or other; but of one thing we may be sure, an utter distaste, a loathing, on the part of the children ever after, not only for 'Robinson Crusoe' but for every one of the subjects lugged in to illustrate his adventures....The children who are capable of and eager for a wide range of knowledge and literary expression are reduced to inanities

 I will not be able to decide how much agreement Taylor and Mason would be able to come to but I would point out that his approach is much different from the systematic, scientific-psychology approach of Herbart and other thinkers of Charlotte Mason's time.   They were doing a form of what we might call "outcome based education" and trying in a sense to manipulate the students' minds.  Their thought was that integrated subject material, as evidenced in extended unit studies, would form "apperception masses" within the student mind as a result of the work of the teacher.  As Charlotte Mason puts it:

here is a scheme which shows how every child is a new creation as he comes forth from the hands of his teacher. The teacher learns how to do it; he has but to draw together a mass of those ideas which themselves will combine in the mind into which they effect an entrance, and, behold, the thing is done: the teacher has done it; he has selected. the ideas, shewn the correlation of each with the other and the work is complete! The ideas establish themselves, the most potent rule and gather force, and if these be good, the man is made.

Taylor's intention is the reverse.  He wants to open up the world for the students, just as Charlotte Mason does.   He is not thinking of the teacher as the sort of Mastermind who puts things in the students through clever techniques.  He is thinking of the students and teacher as having sort of a friendship -- exploring things together. 

He is pointing out how rich a single book can be if approached meditatively, not trying to trap a classroom into the confines of a single book, or so it seems to me.     His approach reminds me a bit here of Melissa Wiley's thoughtful post Way Leads on to Way (here's an index of her posts on Tidal Homeschooling in case you want to see the context).

Taylor writes:

It was a kind of thrill for both myself and the students to realize that within one book, and one that they were coming to love, their whole life as a student was contained.   But the end of such an education is not more and more books or even necessarily smarter students.  Poetic and gymnastic education has as its end the cultivation  of the senses, the imagination, and the will, not the elevation of the IQ.  ... the books... are not the end of education and certainly not intended to produce "bookish" students with overstimulated minds.  It is not a school for people to be able to say, My kid is smarter than your kid.

And later, when talking about high-schoolers with whom he read The Iliad and The Count of Monte Cristo, he describes cheerfully how he found out that they remembered very little of what he had said about the books, but that they told him that they loved the books, that "they were the best books they ever read."

We read a great deal aloud and would talk whole hours about one scene, recreating it in our minds, savoring some moment or event that seemed true to us.

This is the very sort of thing that can come naturally to a homeschool.   Since the intelligence of the student or the teaching expertise of the teacher aren't the main factors, children of different ages can respond to the same reading, and learn to listen to each other.  

 So here we are in our home-school, in a setting as much as possible influenced by natural light and temperature and rhythms of the day.   We do not have fancy lab equipment or expensive athletic facilities or carefully organized lesson plans with stated objectives, but we do have free access to nature and the kind of natural gymnastic discipline that affords; we have excellent books, not a huge quantity, but invited into our homes for their timeless quality; we acknowledge that some tedium is necessary sometimes, as with math drills, but that the total of education is far more than the sum of its mechanical parts.    We don't worry about progress so much as just a good steady rhythm and a kind of truth and honesty in approach -- not wrenching the books towards "teaching a lesson" but allowing the books and other elements to sink inside us.

Though the teachers and parents don't jump down from their position of authority and become "peers" of the children, in a certain respect they are "friends" in that they have things in common because they are human and the children are as much persons as the adults, though still unformed and inexperienced.   (Taylor writes quite a bit more about friendship but I'm saving that for a difference post because it's so important).

So my take-away points.

• Keep things simple -- cultivate a certain poverty and healthy austerity so that the students aren't so coddled and insulated.   
• Don't regret not having lots of formal educational accessories, since the best ones at the schools echo what a home has naturally, anyway.  
• Take time and provide space to develop relations, connections between the books and the materials and the children.
• It's not hard to choose books, because the books have already chosen us through becoming classics in our culture.  But if you need a start go to Ambleside Online  -- the literature selections are particularly good, and you can find resources for art study and composer study and poetry there, too.  
• Don't worry too much about developing IQ and maximizing academic achievements -- all students, no matter what their gifts or lack of them, deserve a whole living education and in many of the things Taylor is proposing, small can be beautiful -- a child with fewer intellectual capacities can still be wise and insightful in his own way.  
• But laughter and connections are important.  I can't count the number of times Aidan has enriched a bookish conversation or added a gift of laughter and love to the read-aloud.  That's probably one of the things we will remember best about our Morning Times -- sometimes it slows us down but Taylor's point is that slowing down, dwelling and pondering, is actually what we want to encourage.  And also laughter and the surprise of the unexpected connection -- Aidan is a master at that. 

Poetic Knowledge Week 11

The fact is, we are not moved by thought alone but by the integration of an idea and desire, the desire for union with reality, and all our composite being perceives reality as good.  If education does not cultivate the natural desire for union with reality with the understanding that the poetic and gymnastic modes are real knowledge, then it delivers something profoundly inferior to the reality and powers of the human being.  For desire of the real to rise up, there must be something real to arouse it, and gadgets, computers, and gimmicks used to hold attention, all taking place in classroom environments technologically insulated from reality, are simply parts of the generally unlovable atmosphere of modern education -- unlovable because they are all efficiency, utility, and no longer beautiful. -- Poetic Knowledge, page 171

 In this last chapter James Taylor speaks from his experience as an elementary, secondary and college teacher as to how education should look if it is practiced in the poetic mode.   Note how much it resembles what Charlotte Mason says about a child establishing relations with the world

the whole circle of the sciences is, as it were, set with gates ajar in order that a child may go forth furnished, not with scientific knowledge, but with, what Huxley calls, common information, so that he may feel for objects on the earth and in the heavens the sort of proprietary interest which the son of an old house has in its heirlooms.

 Though she uses the word "proprietary" it seems you could almost substitute Taylor's word "participatory".   When a son of an old house wanders among his family's heirlooms and heritage, he does not finger an objet d'art wondering how much money it would bring him if he sold it, and he hopefully does not feel inflated in ego by being the heir to this wealth.  Rather, he feels a living connection with the things -- they relate him to his family's history and he takes pride in their nobility and distinction and ideally, hopes and aspires to live up to the dignified tradition. 

There is a combination of awe and desire to live up to the heritage that has come to us not through our own efforts but as a sort of gift or natural birthright. The knowledge, as you learn more about the heirlooms and what they represent, are taken inside oneself and become icons of a deeper relationship.

In the beginning of the chapter, Taylor names three schooly things that are not poetic:

• a diagrammed sentence
• a dissected frog
• a list of historical dates

It's not that sentences don't have structure, that frogs do not have interior parts, or that dates do not have historical significance.   It's that the diagram, the dissection, and the chart of dates are not the things themselves.  Maybe they could all be called schemata...  organizational constructions for learning something.   But by themselves, they do not live. 

I happen to be someone who gets geeky thrills from diagrammed sentences and lists of dates, though I do not like dissected frogs at all.   This admiratio for diagrams and dates probably comes because I love language and history so seeing a diagram or chart of dates evokes all the preceding connections that I have made.  It's like those lines from Yeats's Easter 1916, which I just revisited in a good First Things article called To Murmur Name Upon Name:

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child . . . 

Well, especially the dates.  I understand if you can't follow me with regard to the diagrams.  But they do give me a thrill.   I don't think diagrams and charts kill things the way dissection kills a frog.  Perhaps that is a blindness in me.   But I do see how, when introduced before a topic is loved, they can kill the topic for a beginner.   And when they become things to be memorized or skills to be mastered, they can quickly repulse a child thoroughly.   Taylor makes us understand why.    Would we love our parents if we never saw or touched them, but instead were given schemata representing various traits or characteristics that someone felt were crucial to the parents' identity, and then we had to memorize the schemata and reproduce them, perhaps for a grade on a test?   How horrible it would be, and how unlike the reality of a relationship. 

If you look at Charlotte Mason's analogy, what would it be like if the son of the house hadn't grown up there wandering among the heirlooms, prizing them, wondering about them and finding out things here and there all with that inherited connection to him --- but instead was dropped into the house, where a harsh light shone down and a voice told him to look carefully, because soon he would have to go to a desk and write out charts of where the heirlooms were and descriptions of their appearance and provenance?   Again, how terrifying and unnatural it would seem!

Now I don't think all verbal instruction is horrible and terrifying like this, nor do I think Taylor is making that point.  I think most children love to hear a few words or a story connected with something in their environment, especially when spoken in the course of daily mentoring by a loved parent or grandparent or teacher.    You can see that the student at IHP were silent and attentive to the discussions of their professors.    But that's something different because it connects to the reality of things and is couched in conversation and story and relationship, not isolated and abstracted.

Instead of teaching the diagrams, the charts, and the dissections, you should be exposing the children to the literary language, the historical stories, and the things of nature themselves.   Taylor  recommends a few things in this early part of the chapter:


Natural grammar by immersion in Latin

He thinks children could easily pick up on grammatical patterns by hearing the language spoken -- and that grammar, if it is taught explicitly at all, should be discussed meditatively.  What are nouns, what do they refer to?  Verbs indicate action.   My oldest son and I used to discuss this sort of thing all the time and got quite fascinated by how you can "understand" a poem like Jabberwocky that is almost all nonsense words -- the built-in syntax gives you clues.  We even made up nonsense sentences to see if we could identify the parts of speech just because of their context in the sentence.  And we used to try to talk to each other in Latin, flipping through dictionaries to find the words.  It was fun but strenuous teaching that boy!   But I think he had the right idea, approaching syntax and language in a gymnastic way. . 


Historical tales and accounts

Taylor thinks children and even (or perhaps especially) teenagers should learn history primarily through the primary sources, especially the narratives.    The dates are important, but they should be embedded in the actual story, not detached from it and memorized in isolation.

No textbooks!  He thinks they are dry, detached from reality, and secondhand in their presentation, which is not a strange thought to anyone who has read Charlotte Mason.

Time Spent Outdoors

A rose pulled apart is no longer so much a rose.  Same with the frog.  Charlotte Mason says pretty much the same thing in Out of Door Life for Children:

Is it advisable, then, to teach the children the elements of natural science, of biology, botany, zoology? on the whole, no: the dissection even of a flower is painful to a sensitive child, and, during the first six or eight years of life, I would not teach them any botany which should necessitate the pulling of flowers to bits; much less should they be permitted to injure or destroy any (not noxious) form of animal life. Reverence for life, as a wonderful and awful gift, which a ruthless child may destroy but never can restore, is a lesson of first importance to the child:––
     "Let knowledge grow from more to more;
     But more of reverence in us dwell."

 We are trying to encourage wonder and love, a combination of desire and reverence, and this is nurtured by watching and participating, not by destroying and isolating.

Even though I have only gone through about 4 pages of the reading, I am going to stop here because I want to spend more time in this last, operative part of the book.    So here I already have a few things to do in my homeschool that have the Poetic Knowledge seal of approval and also probably will seem fairly unschool-like to my children.


Gymnastic Immersion in Language --

I can't speak Latin to them, because my Latin is by no means spontaneous, but I can read Latin and we can try to converse a little.    And I can read them beautiful English language, which nowadays is almost a foreign language to most American schoolkids.

Maybe we can do dialogue readings.   Sometimes my family takes parts and reads a play; one time we took dialogue in a Dickens story.  It was so much fun.

History Readings

That's easy.  All literature from the past is by definition embedded in history, and there are any number of interesting retellings of historical events and legends.

Maybe we can compile a family historical notebook.

The things to talk about aren't so much the facts, per se, but as Charlotte Mason says, the relationships.  In her words:

Perhaps the main part of a child's education should be concerned with the great human relationships, relationships of love and service, of authority and obedience, of reverence and pity and neighbourly kindness; relationships to kin and friend and neighbour, to 'cause' and country and kind, to the past and the present. History, literature, archeology, art, languages, whether ancient or modern, travel and tales of travel; all of these are in one way or other the record or the expression of persons; and we who are persons are interested in all persons, for we are all one flesh, we are all of one spirit, and whatever any of us does or suffers is interesting to the rest.

This precedes talking "about" the work -- about story elements like plot, etc, and "what the author is trying to say here" and "how it is said".   This kind of thing comes later, and I've done some of it with my high schooler, but I haven't pushed it on him in season and out the way they do in public schools.  (One thing I have done is talk about plot, literary effects and the like through the filter of a story writer, since he likes to write stories -- and so this is participatory and gymnastic in that the young writer is learning about story elements and effects in order to use them). 

Go Outdoors

That's not so hard.  I just have to DO it.    The rest follows from there.  My older kids grew up thinking of themselves as natural historians.    They kept little journals, consulted field guides to learn about what they saw, and paid attention to the changing seasons and what each season brought.   My younger set grew up differently, partly because of Aidan's medical needs and immunesuppression.   They aren't nearly as attuned to the world outdoors.    My youngest is actually a bit nervous of the outdoor environment.  So I need to get out there and be their mediator, but for some reason it always takes last place on my daily priority list.

Some things to think of:

Go outside at night.  Go to different places in our area, so they can see different things.   Go to the beach (if it ever gets warm around here).   Take water bottles and snacks and go for a long ramble.    Bring the camera, take pictures, and try to sketch from the photos.   Collect things and bring them back.   Get close to the ground to see the ground life.   Look at the sky and see how it changes.   Eat lunch outside, or read outside.   Play in the water.  Dig.   There is a whole world out there.  

Well, this is long enough now, I think!

------------------------------------------

For links to more discussion, go to A Healer's Geste.

I've written more notes on Chapter 7 here.  

The End of Education

Getting ready for my Poetic Knowledge post  I found this poem by John Senior. It was contained in this very thoughtful paper by Dr Stephen McInerney called “The End of Education”: John Senior and the Idea of the University (it's a PDF).   There is some commentary on the poem in the paper.

The Other Window

Two letters in the morning post
dressed in blue and white.
Who can tell which smiles most
envelopes the day or night?

“Dear Alum: The College needs etc.”
and then the fiscal operative clause.
This Dean sees, looking out his front fenetre,
“Fighters for the Christian cause!”

Brave young leaders of tomorrow
in business, medicine and law.”
Conquistadors of sorrow
building all that golden prophecies foresaw.

…just a note that said,
“So sad, I hesitate to bother,
but Margaret, my fiancée, is dead
and I shall not recover.

I don’t expect your consolation.
All I want is that you know how hard
it is to live without sensation,
crawling towards my broken God.”

What is the end of education?
What really is the seed we teachers sow?
A crop of leaders for the Church and Nation,
or the one outside the back window?

Through Googling that poem, I found a blog called Life, Books and Education.   There is a great list of best books on education, on the sidebar.   And a blog post Covering Ground or Contemplation that seems to relate directly to some of our Poetic Knowledge discussion.    Don't you love finding a great blog by googling some obscure topic or quote?

Poetic Knowledge Week 10

Book Study Club -- outline and links to more discussion at A Healer's Geste

This is a short week because there are only three pages to cover (though last week I thought the listed pages were a typo so I didn't read all the way up to the last three pages, if that makes sense -- my husband is getting me a cup of coffee now and I guess I need it!)

Mystie suggested that we could just talk about something we wanted to, or skip this week, or alternately, list some books that we wanted to read as a result of reading Poetic Knowledge.   It's a good week to have a light load because my husband and the older kids just arrived home last night at midnight and today we are celebrating Aidan's birthday! 

So I thought I would first list some posts from my old blog that referenced Poetic Knowledge.    

Enthusiasm
About a quote from the book:

"Enthusiasm is an emotion of the ethical part of the soul."

Particularity and Philosophy of Literature

A list of quotes from different authors.    what they say about literature reminds me of what John Senior says in the transcript in our Poetic Knowledge reading for today:

St Thomas says.... you must always in abstract knowledge advert to the singular, about which there is no science.  There is no science of the singular.... For example, the concept of God is not God.  IT's a way, a sign, an instrument by which we can come to know God -- but God Himself is not the concept.   What philosophy rests on that distinction!

Then Dr Quinn says:

Mr Senior is using the example of God, but it is true of a horse, a fly, or a flea, which is another example that St Thomas uses.  That is, we must always advert to the singular in any realm of thought.

Trust and the Knowledge of the Heart

About how Cardinal Newman warned us not to be skeptical of the foundations upon which our mental processes work. ... also about unschooling and "trusting your children to learn."   Newman didn't write the parts about unschooling, I did, just in case that still sounded like pre-coffee blur. 

Receptive Reading

Quotes from Taylor and CS Lewis and also thoughts on why the idea of narration sometimes bothers me.  (I think I realized that it could get very mechanical and checklist-y, even though I don't think it worked that way in Charlotte Mason inspired schools.

But after reading the IHP's idea of "conversation" I realize why our reading always goes better when we discuss rather than narrate in the way I've always thought narrating "should" go.   No doubt I have a false idea of narration!    Of course, our Morning Time conversations are different from the IHP because we are all learners.   However, it's surprising how many times an 8 year old will come out with something very thought-provoking about a reading.  I suppose it is because young children haven't learned "how to think" about a given theme or story, so their insights are directly connected either to their own direct experience or to other books.    Whereas I as an English literature major have learned how to sort of drain the nectar from a literary work in a very efficient fashion, which sometimes actually doesn't well serve getting the full poetic experience from a literary work.   Reading things with my kids allows me to go back to the earlier days when I read things because they were loveable.

In relation to that, John Senior says that emotions are a form of knowledge.   We don't love or fear or hate in a vacuum.   Aquinas talks about how a sheep fears a wolf not because of its rough appearance but because of a certain form of cognition that tells it that the object it perceives, the wolf, is to be feared and hated.    And for humans our emotions are actually part of our intellectual nature, so we can love or fear things we don't actually perceive with our senses.    It only takes a child a few years of life before he starts fearing dark closets or the space under the bed at night, even if he has never watched Poltergeist (which hopefully, he hasn't).   Chesterton says famously:

The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

The End of Education -- this is a recent post from this blog.... a poem by John Senior, and some links.

Finally -- books I put in my queue as a result of studying Poetic Knowledge?  It just so happens that I went digging in my closet yesterday even before reading the discussion question.

Books to Read This Summer


The Republic by Plato (I thought maybe I could finally tackle it while I'm motivated -- funny how you feel intimidated about reading a Great Book even though as CS Lewis says it's probably easier to read than most modern scholarly books).


Education at the Crossroads by Jacques Maritain

Feeling and Healing Your Emotions by Conrad Baars, who was mentioned in earlier chapters of PK.

Mystery and Manners by Flannery O'Connor

I recently ordered The Death of Christian Culture by John Senior -- you can find it relatively inexpensively used at Abebooks, and I think there's also a Kindle edition. 

Also, I'd like to reread a Charlotte Mason book in light of what I've learned from studying Poetic Knowledge.    I'm not sure which one yet.

Since these are all books "about" something I think I ought to read some Shakespeare, especially since Clar has plans for us to watch some movie versions of Shakespeare this summer, and I think I have committed to reading War and Peace this summer, too.  That looks like a lot of books, but I've been reading a lot lately!  However, it may take me through till next year.

Poetic Knowledge Week 9

Outline of Chapter 6, and links to more discussion at A Healer's Geste

I collected some links to articles and posts that referenced the Pearson Integrated Humanities Program.

“Western tradition has divided the long itinerary of liberal education into three stages, each contributing something of its own to the three purposes of liberal education — to humanize, to acculturate, to make happy. These are the stages of poetry, liberal arts, and sciences. According to Plato, the first step in the long itinerary of liberal education is the elementary or poetic stage…. These descriptions of the poetic stage of development mention the powers within the young student — senses, memory and imagination. Poetic education begins to humanize by developing these powers.” Robert Carlson.

 OK, so children are born human, but still, somehow, as they grow we have a part in humanizing them.   I suppose it is somewhat the same with all higher mammals.  Even the squirrels we took care of last summer, who were more Lower Mammals -- even though they were pre-scripted with many natural instincts, according to the research we did they still are partly cared for by their mother until they are several months old.  She teaches them how to find food, and she and their siblings and relatives socialize them.   So they don't come out fully squirrels; still less do we come out fully ourselves.   We are persons, yes, but we are born persons into a particular time and place, and so education plays a crucial role in every society. 

For a human, nature is important, but not sufficient.  Our senses, memory and imagination don't just encompass our next meal or how to survive and reproduce.  We can abstract the universal from the particular.  Even the simplest cultures have a culture, a legacy and skills to hand on. 

When the IHP was founded, it was recognized by the founders that in a way their program was remedial.  They were dealing with the students who had been educated in a pragmatic yet incoherent way.    Many hadn't had the poetic immersion, the direct participation in real things, that would be ideal for the goals of the program.  

“Given the fact that their physical childhood had passed and the students were in various stages of middle and late adolescence, direct early experience of reality in games, sports, and crafts was not possible. …. all the professors of the IHP believed or soon came to believe that what they were doing on the college level, in spite of the obvious success, was needed much sooner, beginning at the elementary level

Summing up the effect and one of the primary goals of the program, Taylor wrote of the students:

The rediscovery of their childhood, which for many of them had been unfulfilled, was of great importance in the two year program. The professors knew that a materialist society, with all its utilitarian goals that suffocate the poetic nature of the human being, had rushed many of the students through childhood, that time of leisure in which the wonders of reality are encountered simply as wonders. As this entire study has demonstrated, there can be no real advancement in knowledge unless it first begin in leisure and wonder, where the controlling motive throughout remains to be delight and love.

I suppose this is a kind of challenge.   If we have been convinced by what James Taylor has said so far, that this poetic mode comes first and is crucial in a proper education, then how does that look in our homes?  Do we already have some poetic things going on?  Could we reprioritize so that the more lasting things come first and the other things are done differently, more poetically, perhaps?

I know these are questions on my mind as I decide what to do next year.    To me, it seems that Charlotte Mason is the closest thing to a formal curriculum that is in this mode.   Some classical curricula are in the zone too, in my opinion, but classical education as it exists in homeschooling in the USA seems to have been heavily influenced by Cartesian methods and goals.   It seems to be moving away from that nowadays, for which I am glad.   Still, a lot of people using classical still seem to envision "elite" children and this is not a Poetic Knowledge type goal.  Also, classical homeschooling has lagged behind on the skilled crafts and nature study, though there has been definite progress.   Charlotte Mason's declaration that every child, "dullard" or advanced, needed a solid broad and liberal education suited to his abilities is very much in the mode of the point Taylor and Senior and Quinn were trying to make.   Their vision is of a lively, vibrant, rich Christian culture that influences everyone in its range and is not selective of one type of vocation or person in preference to another.

A few things that strike me in the first part of the chapter that I would like to ponder in relation to my homeschool.

Conversation rather than lecture and analysis.  Not that we are big on lecture and analysis around here.  But I am glad to know that conversation -- making connections across books, relating stories to everyday life, taking ideas seriously and not trying to "pull" a theme or symbol out of the story if it doesn't want to come readily -- is what the IHP proposed as a better grounding for future intellectual distinction than a bunch of worksheets on plot, characterization and setting.

Laughter

Laughter of this kind is also poetic in that it comes to us as a surprise of suddenly seeing the connection between two dissimilar things.  One of the recurring themes of the IHP was that while life was not “fun,” it certainly was often funny.

There is quite a bit in the chapter about conversation and how to listen and ponder as well as how the teachers conversed.    It was really interesting.


On the Idea of Receptiveness

“To receive is not to do nothing; a baseball catcher does a great deal, but he is still the receiver of the activity of the pitcher. Furthermore, they explained to the students that every conversation requires an attentive listener, alert and symapthetic; otherwise, the occasion deteriorates into mere discussion, a kind of noise, really, losing the meditative silence within which what is being said can be pondered. Listening then, it was explained, in this way is a poetic thing.

On Conversation and Listening as Gymnastic

Conversation, a word whose etymology was revealed by the professors to show how it meant to turn together around some subject, was s sign of friendship and an activity that invovles the alertness of the whole person, not just the mind but the eyes and ears, noticing gestures and tone of voice that indicate meaning and nuance within the give and take of such dialogue.

On the modes of conversation — making connections across books or drawing from stories and real life.

The example of these professors, teaching by way of their personal conversation, speaking as naturally as if around a table where a leisurely lunch was taking place, making quick connections with the similar and contrary ideas contained in the other books of the program, from daily life, or meandering, wandering around and around the topic, digressing to personal experiences relevant to the subject — all taught the students, indirectly at least, the joy of the memory and a healthy independence from books and notes and all the gimmicks so often used to keep this generation’s attention.

On conversation's ability to continue on past the college halls and into student life

“Continuing conversations that took place after class between the students and the teachers that often continued throughout the week in the teachers’ offices with smaller groups.”

Careers considered as vocations.

The IHP faculty encouraged the students to think of being a sailor, a soldier, a mother or father, or a worker on the land.    Many of them actually went on to become scholars of law or philosophy.  But the point is that they were far from being "elitist" in their thinking.  They wanted the students to be excellent human beings who could have dignified, worthwhile lives and stay close to the real things.

No matter what my children end up being, I should probably be way more active in encouraging them to be able to use their hands and backs to work for others and for the common good.  Even if someone ends up as a philosophy professor, it's good if he can garden or construct a building, too.


Things contemplated as objects of delight and wonder.

This was primary.   Whenever the IHP had to make a choice, they made a choice away from "knowledge as power" or for a utilitarian purpose, and towards delight and wonder, which were the beginnings of wisdom.   They moved towards the thing as a whole, rather than towards dissecting it into parts or abstracting concepts from it.  

The Great Books were read in this spirit.

The atmosphere was intended to be meditative, not disputatious. ...The conversations replaced the modern sense of lecture and were closer to the medieval idea of lectio where the teachers spontaneously delivered a commentary on some text.  ..The students were physically passive, not taking notes or speaking, so they could be emotionally and intellectually receptive as listeners. 

Other things were taught in the poetic, participatory mode too.

Oral transmission of poetry.

During the week…. smaller groups of student met to memorize poetry, truly by memory, since no text was used, but conducted by another student who had himself the poems of the program in his memory. In this way, the professors spoke of doing poetry, rather than studying or analyzing it. It was in the order of music and gymnastic at the same time, since in the first place most of the poems memorized were lyrical and, in the second place, by withdrawing all books or handouts of poetry, nothing came between the student and the poem, not een his eyes.

Rhetoric

The students followed a simple literary approach — from Aesop’s fables and Grimm’s tales — to introduce them to reasoning by noticing the perfect arrangement of beginning, middle, and end, a logic of thought, and cause and effect. …. The IHP faculty knew that the students were also remotely reliing parts of their childhood in these delightful, timeless stories.

Latin

the students, by listening carefully and repeating what they heard, learned to speak very simple Latin from their memories much like children begin to learn their native language without any study of grammar, without any books. This was gymnastic in that it allowed for direct wrestling with the Latin; it was musical in that it brought forth much delight and laughter in the challenge and mistakes of trying to conduct an entire lesson without using any English, pointing, gesturing, acting out the words and meaning instead.

Other things that were included:

• Star-gazing -- learning about the constellations and their stories.
• Dances -- not the high school kind where you are either jumping around or swaying together, but elegant waltzes.
• Calligraphy  -- the traditional art of beautiful writin
• Traditional folk songs -- often some older students would sing them before class and over the course of the term all the students made them part of their interior furniture.  

This quickly produced a sense of delight in the students, not only in the simple refrains but in the fact that now these poems and songs were placed within them and were part of who they were. This is what the professors meant by doing poetry, or song, as opposed to studying them

So a few things come out of this:

One is a kind of optimism.  It is never really too late.   Though the founders of the program realized that the students came to them with lacks in formation, they also believed that even a late start could bear much fruit.  And it did, from what I understand.

Another is that it doesn't really take sophisticated professors with a campus at their disposal to make some of these things happen.    Many of the activities were the kinds of things that homes and villages used to do as part of daily life.    You can start from where you are.

I really liked the emphasis on delight and wonder and love.  I am sure every second can't be filled with poetry and music in the typical family homeschool, but there is a kind of basic goodness in the ordinary things of life that I probably don't recognize enough.   If Thomas Howard said anything to me in Splendor of the Ordinary, it is that the great things happen in the hurry and nitty-gritty of the very ordinary.   A baby is born, but you are running for hot water and towels and reaching to catch the little fellow and bundle him up.   All very quotidian actions, undertaken in the service of a magnificently significant event.  This was the world of quotidian mystery that our God chose to be part of.   I think I can see in what Taylor is saying that this participation is deeply important.  If we skip the engagement, we skip the deep mystery.  It's too easy for us to reduce and simplify by abstraction and analysis, in order to avoid dealing with the wonder and incomprehensibility.  But then we lose something.


I'm thinking:  I probably shy away from informal nature walks and conversation and open time and teaching my children everyday skills because it quite honestly wears me out fast.  And part of that is that I like things to be somewhat predictable.  But I lose something by going for a "system" as Charlotte Mason says, all tidy with the richness gone.    In the Dawn Treader movie, Eustace Scrubb mutters something about how he wishes he could pin his cousins on a board or trap them in jars as he did with his insect collections.  I think that's the modern rationalist complaint about the poetic mode of living, and since I was educated that way it's easy for me to want to hand the kids a worksheet rather than go out exploring with them, where their perceptions are no doubt at least as acute as mine.  The latter is humbling.  But you probably learn more and teach better that way.

Some Links Related to the Pearson Integrated Humanities Program

To get ready to read Chapter 6 of Poetic Knowledge, where we get well into the details of how education in the poetic mode might look in a college,  I went and researched online to see what came up for Pearson Integrated Humanities Program.  Here are a few of the ones I found -- no doubt there are far more:

For background, book review that sketches a rather painful summary of the birth and demise of the project.

Truth on Trial chronicles in gruesome detail the virtual disembowelment of an exceedingly successful and popular program in the humanities at the University of Kansas during the late 1970s. Carlson carefully follows the Pearson Integrated Humanities Program (IMP) from its hopeful inception in 1970 as a place where students could "be born in wonder" (145) to its "death by administration" (123) in 1979. Along the way we meet jealous faculty members, grossly mis-informed church leaders (pawns, really, of the former), and a University administration so lacking in common sense as to appear lobotomized.

The review is worth reading as it goes into detail about some of the unique features of the program.

At Classical Homeschooling, a Definition of Integrated Humanities Program, by John Senior
(I've been finding lots of articles and interviews by IHP founders over there, it is a good site to explore)

A quote:

A modern university is a collection of subjects loosely united by the demands of business and the professions for trained personnel and arranged for the convenience of its administrators.  However, the great tradition in philosophy has held that knowledge is analogous, that is one integral structure having many parts but moving together and arranged from within by its intrinsic nature.

At Calliope, a collection of links -- talks by faculty and students at IHP 

Some I have already linked to, but there are other ones that look interesting as a look inside what the program was about.

At the San Elijo College blog, a short description of the program 

A good quote:

One of the things which struck us in the description of this program was the way in which students "did" poetry: "groups of students met to memorize poetry, truly by memory, since no text was used, but conducted by another student who had himself the poems of the program in his memory." This reminds us of the end of Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 where people become their own books.

At A Draught of Vintage, a eulogy for Dr Dennis Quinn, one of the founders of the IHP.

A quote (long, but there was so many good things there):

Dr. Quinn .. taught us to see the world with the eyes of wonder.  Nascantur in Admiratione: let them be born in wonder, the motto of I.H.P., that we might more easily see those glimpses, those manifestations of that kingdom, that invisible world, as Blessed John Henry Newman so often spoke about, so that this “invisible world becomes more real than the visible world which is constantly passing away before our eyes.”

In his forward to Dr. Quinn’s Magnus Opus, “Iris Exiled: A Synoptic History of Wonder,” the Jesuit, Father James Schall wrote these words:  “To wonder about wonder is the vocation of Dennis Quinn.” This was his passion.  ....

Professor Quinn called this kind of learning “education by the muses” or the “poetic mode” of education. He introduced us to reality through delight. This opened a whole new world to us.  A world that was filled with mystery and beauty, but also a world that was very real and tangible.  This was not mere fantasy or dreamy idealism, as he once wrote in an essay:  “Mistake me not: wonder is no sugary sentimentality but, rather a mighty passion, a species of fear, an awful confrontation of the mystery of things.”

This kind of education, education by the muses or poetic education was a participatory kind of learning whether it was through the poetry we memorized and then recited, the songs we would sing before class, the stargazing at night west of Lawrence, the Yankee trade fairs, the magic of the spring waltzes, the banquets and parties at the Castle Tea Room, the trips to Italy and Greece and Ireland — we participated in the thing itself, we experienced the reality of what we were learning. Again, to refer to Newman, we moved from the mere notional assent to the truth, where we understand things in a notional way primarily through the intellect, we moved to a real assent, to real understanding which engages our whole being. “The muses present life fresh, as if seen and experienced for the first time.”

Dr. Quinn put it this way in that same essay: “Education by the Muses is participatory. To sing a love song is not identical to being in love, but it is to participate somehow in that experience. When a child sees the twinkle of the star he knows it directly; when he chants the rhyme he knows the twinkling indirectly by participating in it. Poetry and music and even astronomy at this level are not to be studied but to be done!”

 How would some of this, as well as what is in Chapter 6, look in a homeschool? That will have to be for a different post. 

A "Dullard" who grew up to be an educational philosopher

I followed a rabbit trail on Thomas Edward Shields, the farm boy mentioned in Poetic Knowledge who eventually became a priest,a professor of natural sciences at Catholic University, an author of several books and many articles on educational philosophy, and co-editor of the Catholic Educational Review.

The Making and Unmaking of a Dullard, his book about his early life which was quoted in Poetic Knowledge, is available in public domain in several places.    I downloaded a copy to my Kindle.

Though he calls himself a "dullard", and he was dropped out of school at age 9 because he was making no progress, I imagine that he was more like one of those "late bloomers" you meet, usually boys, who need a solid grounding in real life before they can do well in academic things.   Dorothy and Raymond Moore often discuss this kind of boy in their books and research about delayed academics.

They call it the Integrated Maturity Level -- when all systems come together to make a "go" and say that it comes at different ages, sometimes not until age 14.    Their recommendations:

1. Study from a few minutes to several hours a day, depending on the child's maturity.
2. Manual work at least as much as study.
3. Home and/or community service an hour or so a day. Focus on kids' interests and needs; be an example in consistency, curiosity, and patience. Live with them!

The focus, for them, is on service, time spent with adults engaged in everyday work, individualized attention, and play (not the electronic kind, but the old-fashioned outdoors Dangerous Book for Boys type play, I imagine).


Anyway, since I have a child with developmental delays I thought it would be interesting to read through the book during this summer.   Aidan is fascinated with concrete things, especially working with his hands.  I suspect that he feels the same need as Shields did to develop his concepts of the world through repetition of experience leading to estimative judgment.

The Logic of Crafts and Gymnastics

Henri Charlier, quoted in Poetic Knowledge, points out something that should be obvious -- that one does not simply think, one thinks about some thing.   I am probably better than most people at thinking while not even knowing what I'm thinking about -- still, it does seem to hold true that thought without an object is not really thought at all.   He goes on: 

The "I think, therefore, I am” of Descartes is the archetype of all the absurdities verbal logic ends up with. This “therefore” corresponds to nothing real whatsoever. It would mean that one knows of his existence only because one knows one thinks! Actually, what one has is “I am thinking.” It is a statement impossible to deny. But to make existence depend on the fact that one thinks is to be a dupe to the necessities of language, and the mathematical language to which Descartes was accustomed, is worse. The more the system of verbal (and mathematical) logic is reinforced, the harder the academic requirements become; the more they are pushed in the same direction, the densert the exams become. Also, the more anxiety will be felt because this system is not suited for most minds for observation and reasoning.  -- Henri Charlier

He also writes:

“It never occurs to the teachers themselves that the methods through which they form their minds are not universal at all, as they believe, but very peculiar to schools. This peculiar art is very favorable to didactic demonstration and very handy when forming other teachers — it is the art of logic interpreted through language. But all the trades (crafts) have another logic which is not taught except in the trades themselves, and this absence is one of the aspects of what is called the crisis in teaching.”

Unlike Dewey, he doesn't believe in teaching trades for pragmatic purposes -- so that the student will learn to fit smoothly into a democratic society and be a useful cog in the machinery.   He believes that the skilled trades, like carpentry, have a logic of their own.   You might say it's a self-correcting logic....  something designed or built poorly will not work as it is intended, whereas sterile verbal reasoning can go far off the path without noticing it.    So working at skilled trades perfects the human as human. ... at its best it can integrate heart, head and hands.

He says that this is how intellectual things used to be taught, too -- as intellectual apprenticeship.   So focusing on how the trades are still taught, when they are taught, may help the schools return to what schools used to look like before the dualism thing took hold on our ways of thinking.  

That's useful to me as I consider unschooling, which also emphasizes interacting with the reality of things.   An example -- a child learning arithmetic by helping his parents run an organic store.    In the past this sort of thing has seemed somewhat Dewey-esque and anti-liberal-arts to me, and I am sure it can get that way, but another way to look at it is that real things require integration of the whole person in a way that stylized  didacticism does not.   It is embedded in the particular, but that doesn't mean it's trapped in the particular -- for universals are meant to be set in particulars.  There is no redness without a red thing, no number system without countable things,  as there is no thought without a thing to think about.     When I think like that I wonder why I am so often in a big hurry to go straight to the generalizations when I am teaching my kids, as if the numbers and arithmetic processes were the "real things" and the particulars were something like disguises.    

I already wrote my Poetic Knowledge post for the week but I am having my yearly homeschool personal retreat right now and so I am thinking a lot about how I want to do things next year!    I wrote in the last post that scientists look for more simplistic schema in their search for verifiability.   Simplifying -- controlling the variables - is a powerful tool when you remember it is a tool and don't wear those glasses all the time.   But I think scientists aren't the only ones tempted to superimpose a simplified schema on existence.   Some religious types do it, as do most fashionistas and reality show followers, and people who write or read the more cliched type of genre novels.    I simplify my clothing choices by only having about 3-4 basic "types" of outfit to choose from.   And I realize I am constantly trying to impose a schema on homeschooling because I want it to be simple.  But simple isn't the same thing as superficial.  Simplicity has to come from integration,from inner unity,  as Dietrich von Hildenbrand points out.   I still don't quite understand it, but I see how it has to be. 

I'm thinking that now I have a real motive to include more "gymnastic" type things in my household -- "gymnastic" the way Taylor defines it, as involving the heart and head through the hands.

Poetic Knowledge Week 8

for the Poetic Knowledge Book Study --follow the link for more discussion. 

What are some conditions of life we can create so that “souls can bloom”?

Chapter 5 of Poetic Knowledge is about an experimental school at Maslacq run by Andre Charlier from 1940 to about 1950.  It was conceived as an alternative to typical Cartesian education.  James Taylor discusses it a bit at the Angelicum Academy website. 

So the direction I'm going to take is:  How did the Maslacq school encourage souls to bloom?  Can we learn anything from it that we could apply to our own homeschools?

Beautiful setting, immersed in nature, agriculture, and history.

The Maslacq school was set in the French countryside, "far from the world", where carts were still pulled by oxen.  

"One doesn't pass such a road quickly, and furthermore, one doesn't find a reason to go more quickly."

(the architecture) is all proportionate to the soul... all of this spoke to the mind amore intelligible language than that of good books." 

It's hard to find a spot in America where Christian culture, beautiful natural scenery, and domestic agriculture are combined!  Here where I live we have the beautiful scenery but not the others.

he gave them a cold and drafty castle but with warm fires in the old fireplaces of the great halls; he gave them the outdoors of Maslacq, the village, the peasants and their farms and crafts, the narrow roads, the hills and the shepherds.

We do have a slow pace but it doesn't seem to follow the natural rhythms of the days and seasons so much, especially in regard to work.     We did intuitively build our house so that it was cold at the perimeters but warm in the center.

Latin learned by the "musical" or poetical method

Andre Charlier taught his students to speak Latin by simply speaking Latin to them; ..he read aloud to them first so that the music and the gymnastic of the language could be absorbed; .... as a musician, he taught them to sing by singing the songs of their traditions and simple Gregorian chants... 

 This is how Latin was taught in Jesuit schools, from what I have read.  I always wondered if the classics and classical languages started becoming more sterile when they started being taught using exclusively deductive methods.   Here Charlotte Mason is much more in the classical tradition (though she didn't emphasize Latin) because the children learned little French and Germans songs and plays and stories before they started drilling the grammar.

It's hard to teach this way nowadays, of course, because most of us are not Latinists.  Latin masses are still said, and Gregorian chant has undergone a revival.  I've found various spoken Latin sites online but there is a difference here between looking and listening to a computer, and being more or less immersed in the language.

I used to read Latin to the kids though my accent wasn't that good.  Maybe I should start it up again.

Rigorous regard for order

This doesn't seem poetic at first, does it?  But of course poetry is not disordered or irregular -- that is just our modern Rationalist/Romantici prejudice.  Nature is very orderly.... not in a reductionist sense, like a Prussian military parade, but in the sense of proportion, priority and integration of many into a unified whole. 

Military parades have a sort of poetry, though.  Andre Charlier was a soldier, from what the book says, and probably was very realistic in perceiving that a regimen would be quite crucial in fostering a healthy culture in a group of boys from all different backgrounds.

Poetry itself is very ordered.   Even some of the experimental poetry of the 20th century is striving (more or less successfully) for its own innate structure which hopes to be richer and more organic than conventional ones (again, whether successfully or not probably depends on the poet).

I think what makes us moderns sometimes think that poetic things and nature are disorderly is that the mechanist worldview upon which so much of post-Enlightenment science was based makes order very simplified in comparison to reality, like a child's dot to dot drawing compared to the child immersed in creative play.     There is nothing wrong with this simplicity -- Isaac Asimov wrote that scientists make models, drawing things out of their context in order to get predictability.  The problem comes when you imagine that the blueprint is the castle or the X-ray is the human being, or that man is made for the Sabbath. 

Importance of example

This system partly depended upon "Captains"  -- schoolboys who acted as "dormitory leaders" and helped the younger boys.  

"The difference here though is that order isto be seen as natural and good and not foreign and imposed for the sake of discipline without a reason.  In other words, the order that Charlier asks his Cpatains to help maintain is not a good in itself -- as if to enshrine a a mechanistic showpiece of merely "well behaved boys."  The order is called for so that, as he says, souls can bloom."

Commands and rules alone cannot impose discipline -- the Captains must be "a living example of what they ask of others, then only a few words are necessary for correction."

"Order and discipline are never isolated as ends in themselves but are vew as the giving of a higher good to all and the means to cultivate friendship."

A gathering of friends

Charlier pictured his school as a "gathering of friends".

It occurs to me that poetry, friendship and other very rich things, like nature, are inherently orderly and disciplined.  One generally doesn't think this way -- at least I don't.    I think in our industrially influenced society, one thinks of work as discipline and things like poetry and friendship as a kind of loosening up of the strained will.   So it may be in a sense, but when I think of it, "real" things require much more of the person than brute effort -- they require a grasp of a much more complex and organic set of requirements.    Marriage and family life are much more rewarding, but also much more like a dance or a sonnet, than they are like conventional work, which is why so many people run away from their personal life to their work life, or glorify science over poetry, because "work" and "science" are often radically simpler than relationships or the fine arts, and thus are more easily dealt with.    The other tendency I see, for less intellectual or industrious people, is to be self-indulgent in leisure and in relationships -- "using" other people or things for their own purposes rather than embarking into a real relationship which requires a give and take. 

"The goal here is always to help friends (he does not refer to them as students), in their difficulties as a result of a soul ordered to self-discipline through a poetic sympathy with the harmony of order and friendship."

 It's hard to get a grasp of what this might look like in a family homeschool with kids varying, perhaps, from infant to teenager.    But Charlier's emphasis on friendship and sympathy and being willing to spend time with his boys reminded me very much of the writings of St John Bosco, who also worked closely with boys (in his case, he established schools for street boys).

He who wants to be loved must first show his own love. Our Lord made himself little with the little ones and bore our infirmities. He is our Master in this matter of the friendly approach. A master who is only seen in the master’s chair is just a master and nothing more, but if he goes into recreation with the boys he becomes their brother....  When a person knows he is loved, he will love in return, and when a person is loved he can get anything, especially from boys. This confidence sets up an electric current between boys and superiors. Hearts are opened, needs and weaknesses made known. This love enables superiors to bear with weariness, annoyance, ingratitude, or the troubles, failings and neglect of the boys. Our Lord did not break the bruised reed nor quench the smoking flax. He is your model. 

Can the notion of "friendship" be applied to family life?   We are often told that we shouldn't try to be friends with our children.   To me, that sounds like a symptom of our modern confusion about what friends are.   Friends aren't enabling pals.  They are people who share a common goal and interests, common characteristics, and a commitment to the other one in his individuality.  Sure, being a parent is more than being a friend -- you can and sometimes must say very different things to your toddler than you would say to your buddy  -- but there is an honesty and kindness and restraint and willingness to commit time and energy to cultivate relationship that is necessary in a true friendship, and no less so in a parent/child relation.    A parent/child relationship, like a spousal relationship, should not be LESS than friendship.     Jesus was able to be a friend to His disciples even while He was their superior as well, their older brother and teacher.  And as Christians, we are all brothers and sisters in Christ; it is even so with our Christian children and ourselves.

Well, this is getting long and I only got a few pages into the chapter.    Oh well!   I must admit, that like Mystie, my eyes glazed during the second part of this chapter.   Maybe now that I have the first part more solidly in my mind I will be able to devote some thoughts to the second part.

So --

• beauty (natural and architectural, or at least domestic loveliness and nature walks).  
• an unhurried pace, a certain amount of seclusion from the world (not hermetic, but just set apart somewhat from the mid-stream of things)
• order -- a few words, and good example (habits?)
• a company of friends (in the sense of comrades on the journey, a fellowship, not necessary a company of equals with a single vote each).
• linguistic learning takes place musically and gymnastically, by plenty of cultural immersion, rather than by grammar drills, at least at first.  

Poetic Knowledge: Aristotle Quote

I liked this from Aristotle's Politics:

The customary branches of education are in number four; they are- (1) reading and writing, (2) gymnastic exercises, (3) music, to which is sometimes added (4) drawing. Of these, reading and writing and drawing are regarded as useful for the purposes of life in a variety of ways, and gymnastic exercises are thought to infuse courage. concerning music a doubt may be raised- in our own day most men cultivate it for the sake of pleasure, but originally it was included in education, because nature herself, as has been often said, requires that we should be able, not only to work well, but to use leisure well; for, as I must repeat once again, the first principle of all action is leisure. Both are required, but leisure is better than occupation and is its end; and therefore the question must be asked, what ought we to do when at leisure? Clearly we ought not to be amusing ourselves, for then amusement would be the end of life. But if this is inconceivable, and amusement is needed more amid serious occupations than at other times (for he who is hard at work has need of relaxation, and amusement gives relaxation, whereas occupation is always accompanied with exertion and effort), we should introduce amusements only at suitable times, and they should be our medicines, for the emotion which they create in the soul is a relaxation, and from the pleasure we obtain rest. But leisure of itself gives pleasure and happiness and enjoyment of life, which are experienced, not by the busy man, but by those who have leisure. For he who is occupied has in view some end which he has not attained; but happiness is an end, since all men deem it to be accompanied with pleasure and not with pain. This pleasure, however, is regarded differently by different persons, and varies according to the habit of individuals; the pleasure of the best man is the best, and springs from the noblest sources. It is clear then that there are branches of learning and education which we must study merely with a view to leisure spent in intellectual activity, and these are to be valued for their own sake; whereas those kinds of knowledge which are useful in business are to be deemed necessary, and exist for the sake of other things. And therefore our fathers admitted music into education, not on the ground either of its necessity or utility, for it is not necessary, nor indeed useful in the same manner as reading and writing, which are useful in money-making, in the management of a household, in the acquisition of knowledge and in political life, nor like drawing, useful for a more correct judgment of the works of artists, nor again like gymnastic, which gives health and strength; for neither of these is to be gained from music