My husband is in the process of starting a K-12 school along these lines. :001_smile: Here's the article. A bit more about Shorris and the Clemente Program.

My understanding is that this lingo is coming from James K.A. Smith's book, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview and Cultural Formation, which takes major aim at Christian educational institutions. I have NOT read the book, and I am only passingly familiar with some of these discourses, but my sense is that he employs the rhetoric of "liturgy" for what I'd call "the practice of everyday life" in order to suggest to a certain group of self-professed Christians that they are actually worshiping something other than Christ. It seems like in his book, Smith is somewhat clear that the liturgies Christian life should be based around are the actual liturgies of the church, but that seems to be getting a bit lost as Christian classical educators (children of Francis Schaeffer devotees?) have seized on the book and tried to apply it to their classrooms, which may be filled with children from different congregations and Christian traditions. But this is not a conversation I'm really in on, so I'm probably missing some nuances. I do think this goes back to this problematic issue of schools trying to take on the whole job of Christian formation that should actually be happening throughout a healthy culture or, in the absence of one as we find today, primarily within the family and local parish. And then that discussion filters down to homeschoolers who actually are in the position (and have the responsibility!) to do something more directly about the issue but are taking their cues from classroom educators and no wonder it's all confused. I'm confused often enough, at least. Not to mention I really feel like I should be able to work in a joke here but just can't quite seem to pull it off...

If we could find them, we should raise money to send ourselves there! I'd be happy to do podcasts on what we've learned upon our return! :laugh: You know, my alma mater still had a professor of rhetoric, though at that point he had been absorbed into the English department - he passed away a year after I graduated. Ironically, I don't think his training was via the classical curriculum but....the Great Books!

I've been thinking about this, too - is Hicks' vision of the classical teacher appropriate for the mom/teacher - child/student relationship? Is homeschooling just an extension of what we do in mothering or is it something different? So, I went through this chapter and tried to list the stuff Hicks says the classical educator is/does - I was a bit unsure how to do this because he presents two different models, Socrates and Isokrates, but decided to set Socrates aside for now, assuming most of us are not "idiosyncratic genius[es]." So, I found: embodies his lessons (37) - science seems to agree! uses great tradition of learning in the arts, letters, and sciences to excite in his students a vision of those enduring values and truths that underlie the world of appearances (this is contrasted with the dialectic, Socratic approach) aims to form an adult, not develop a child, therefore indifferent to child psychology (38) - I thought this was kind of odd, as Hicks seems to have thought carefully about the nature of the child, in contrast to the nostalgic notions of other "child-centered" teachers ("Of towering importance to the child are not the playful, innocent moments remembered the the adult who nears death, but the hard-won progress he makes as a child toward his image of adulthood") uses an inquiry-based [socrates] or knowledge-centered [isokrates] -- as opposed to child-centered -- approach to education (39) appreciates "the virtues of adversity" (40) prefers oral teaching over the impersonal study of the written word (41) - is that a gauntlet thrown to Charlotte Mason? ;) This is all in contrast to the modern teacher who relies on "educational psychology, teaching aids, and learning paraphernalia" (am I the only one who could just see the teacher supply store in her mind at this point?), and his critique of education schools wasn't harsh enough, in my experience. :laugh: Where the modern teacher has "class preparation and teaching technique," the classical educator relies on "knowledge and eros." If we're willing to do some work and self-education, I think we can handle knowledge, especially since in this vision of the teacher-student relationship, the teacher's seeking of truth and virtue drives the enterprise, and "the pupil becomes a part of his teacher's own studies" (42). The teacher is older, has more experience, and thus is (hopefully) wiser, but we don't have to have absolutely arrived at truth, beauty, and goodness. That's a relief! But what about eros? Doesn't seem to fit neatly into the home environment, to say the least, but Hicks claims this is "the source of virtue in learning" (41). The good news is that it seems that eros really only enters into the picture as the student approaches adolescence (Hicks refers repeatedly and only to 12 year olds in this chapter, and his proposed curriculum starts with seventh grade), so I can put off figuring out that piece for a bit (but if anyone has any thoughts, I am all ears!). What is that source of virtue in learning in the mean time, in the younger child? In a happy coincidence, I ran across this lovely reflection today. Delight and wonder: those are part of the lessons we must embody. Do I delight in our circle time and recitations? In my students? Do I wonder during nature study? Do I rush to provide answers and "explain away"?

This has been an incredibly interesting and helpful conversation for me - thank you, everyone, for your contributions! Count me among the younger moms who do find it helpful to hear specifics - I'm in no danger of ever becoming an anxious, workbook, checklist mom, but I am in danger of neglecting to actually educate my kids while I read another book about education. :laugh: I think you raise a really interesting question about the struggle to adapt older ideas - ideas we, not being classically educated ourselves, no longer have contact with in an organic, living way - to a very new, post-Christian context. Can we take a model for educating a small slice of the population and apply it to everyone? What are the essential elements of "classical education" we want to carry forward? How far can we stretch them and adapt them? At what point do they lose contact with older traditions? Does that matter? Something I was thinking about during the Norms and Nobility discussion (which I'd like to get back to, as I stalled in chapter 4...) is how much Hicks seemed to be asking of schools and schooling. Education is a huge project, and in a saner age, many different institutions cooperated to educate the "whole child." Schools were one of those institutions, but they had a somewhat specific task within that larger project. Today, we are raising our children in enemy territory, and I think perhaps asking too much of our schooling to compensate for other institutions that should be helping but are often actively hostile to the proper formation of our children. Teasing these things out seems only more complicated in a conversation about home education specifically. What's "schooling" to one family is just "life" to another, etc, etc. I found some valuable things in the classroom liturgies talk, but at the same time was thinking, I'm never paying for my kids to go to a private school and spend their time having hobbit breakfasts. Not that I have anything against hobbit breakfasts! I just think that schooling is a subset of education, and I want it to do specific things, albeit certainly in ways that don't undermine the larger project. I'm just not entirely sure what those specific things are, yet. :laugh: On the other hand, because of the world we live in, maybe we don't have a choice - it may be historically anomalous to put "acquire poetic knowledge" or "contemplate the good, the true, and the beautiful" or "have a hobbit breakfast" on a school schedule, but perhaps that is the only way to get it done today. And I'll take it over the alternative, to be sure.

When kids are young, I think merely providing the unstructured time and space for kids to respond to what we are reading together is probably adequate - they will create in developmentally appropriate ways if given that margin. I don't intend to require any creative output in these years. Do your kids play with the stories you are reading together? Do they act them out or incorporate them into their own play? Do they draw? Sing to themselves? Build things? If you feel like imitation/creation is missing, my first impulse would be to ensure that there is adequate open time and space for it to happen rather than add any specific thing. FWIW, as an absolute beginner myself. :001_smile:

Thanks, all, these responses are helpful! I should get "festina lente" tattooed on my forehead.

Popping back in to say I read this while getting the baby down for his nap and found it very helpful in clarifying some points of confusion for me - thank you for the link!

I think this is a legitimate question, and I think the response that the good teacher embodies and models these things is true and necessary, but maybe not entirely sufficient. I feel like I've referred to Pieper's Guide to Thomas Aquinas in most of my posts here :laugh: (in my defense, St. Thomas did actually have something to say about everything, and he was usually right ;) ) but he had a, for me, really illuminating chapter on St. Thomas and teaching. "Teaching, says Thomas, is one of the highest manifestations of the life of the mind, for the reason that in teaching the vita contemplativa and the vita activa are joined--not just patched together superficially, not merely connected 'factually,' but united in a natural and necessary union. The true teacher has grasped a truth for itself, by purely receptive contemplation; he passes it on to others who likewise desire to partake of this truth. The teacher, then, looks to the truth of things; that is contemplative aspect of teaching. It is also the aspect of silence, without which the words of the teacher would be unoriginal in the primary meaning of that word, would be empty talk, gesture, chatter, if not fraud. But the teacher simultaneously looks into the faces of living human beings--and he subjects himself to the rigorously disciplined, wearisome labor of clarifying, of presenting, of communicating. Where communication does not take place, teaching does not take place." My hunch is that many teachers are teachers precisely because the second part of this comes naturally to them; they "possess the art of approaching [their] subject from the point of view of the beginner; [they] are able to enter into the psychological situation of one encountering a subject for the first time." And because that comes naturally to them, they don't talk about it much! I'm always skeptical of teachers' own accounts of what makes their classrooms work - at the very least, they usually aren't that helpful to someone like me who could see herself doing almost anything else rather than teaching if it weren't for these ignorant children I seem to be responsible for. :001_smile: I feel like the first thing comes more naturally to me, except that I'm always trying to get the kids to be quiet and leave me alone, so mommy can contemplate something! :laugh: So I have a knack for missing the point. I found Monica's post breaking out some of the skills and habits needed for a discussion like this quite helpful. And I actually thought the worksheets Rallens derided seemed like a reasonable preparatory step when meeting a text, though obviously you wouldn't want to stop there and there are probably more efficient means of accomplishing the same thing in the homeschool setting (narration?). At any rate, my advisor in college used similar text-based questions, some "merely" factual, some more interpretive, at the end of class to help us focus our attention on the right things in reading the assignment for the next class. Here's a practical question for the experienced moms that hopefully isn't too much of a highjack: how quickly do you move through texts in your homeschool? How does that vary by age? I inhaled books when I was young, and, with the exception of some college classes, the effect of my schooling was also to encourage reading more, faster. What, if anything, do you do to slow your kids down and read carefully and deeply?

"Primary sources"! My plan is to focus on narrative histories in the early years, and then gradually emphasize historical texts more and more over time.

Well, this is a bit off-topic, but I would hate to have anyone think of St. Thomas as some kind of narrow-minded chauvinist because of sections of the Summa that I pulled out of context. :sad: St. Thomas was precisely the opposite - he was intellectually fearless! Truly one of the most remarkable voices in the "great conversation," at a time when many were nervous about the rediscovery of Aristotelian texts, St. Thomas not only embraced the study of Aristotle but made his entire project the reconciliation of theology and philosophy in a way that lessened neither! In fact, I would recommend St. Thomas particularly to those in this conversation who are dissatisfied with Hicks' treatment of science. And, of course, he was a Dominican, one of the new, radical, and somewhat suspect mendicant orders. Just one brief quote from the Angelic Doctor that I hope conveys some of what he was up to: "They hold a plainly false opinion who say that in regard to the truth of religion it does not matter what a man thinks about the Creation so long as he has the correct opinion concerning God. An error concerning the Creation ends as false thinking about God." On the whole, this describes my experience of the study of great books in the classroom. My favorite professors absolutely modeled this kind of humble, leisurely engagement, returning with students to texts they had surely read dozens upon dozens of times already, but never seeming finished, never rushing us through to get the point of Hamlet or the Phaedrus or Paradise Lost or whatever - often, we did not actually make it through the book by the end of the term. The focus was precisely not on forming an opinion on the text or on the subject of the text, but simply on the text itself and giving it a true and honest hearing, observing what it is. The only prerequisite was being able to back up your interpretive claims with textual evidence. However I have heard that in some places, the great books are studied primarily through the framework of passing judgement on whether they fit in with the "worldview" of the readers. That sort of jump to judgment and reading of books merely to either give or withhold a stamp of approval seems obviously wrong, whatever the right approach might be. I would also say my experience was almost entirely at the undergraduate level, whereas the "worldview" approach I have heard about was with younger students. Something I am thinking about as I keep reading (I'm just getting into chapter four now): what difference does it make that I am a home educator, not a teacher or school leader? How and in what ways does Hicks' argument take the school setting for granted? How does that affect any applications in the home setting? How does our task differ from his? Again, I'm still in the early stages of the book, but the absence of much discussion of the affections is one thing that has jumped out at me.

The curiosity question brought to mind something I had read a while back about St. Thomas, so I looked it up in the Summa. Under the section on temperance, he discusses a virtue, studiositas, and its opposing vice, curiositas - a few things that jumped out at me as being particularly relevant to some of the concerns we've raised. First, St. Thomas argues that study resulting in pride is curiositas, the vicious desire for knowledge: "...knowledge of truth, strictly speaking, is good, but it may be evil accidentally, by reason of some result, either because one takes pride in knowing the truth, according to 1 Corinthians 8:1, 'Knowledge puffeth up," or because one uses the knowledge of truth in order to sin." He goes on to quote a passage from St. Augustine that speaks directly to the concern at the heart of N&N: "Some there are, who forsaking virtue, and ignorant of what God is, and of the majesty of that nature which ever remains the same, imagine they are doing something great, if with a surpassing curiosity and keeness they explore the whole mass of this body which we call the world. So great a pride is thus begotten, that one would think they dwelt in the very heavens about which they argue." Boom. It also counts as curiositas if one has an "inordinate" desire for knowledge. St. Thomas breaks this down into four parts - the first one seems to be related to what St. Theophane is getting at - "when a man is drawn by a less profitable study from a study that is an obligation incumbent on him." Guilty! The third type of "inordinate" desire of knowledge also seems to get at what we are talking about here, "when a man desires to know the truth about creatures, without referring his knowledge to its due end, namely, the knowledge of God." And, again quoting Augustine, "in studying creatures, we must not be moved by empty and perishable curiosity; but we should ever mount towards immortal and abiding things." (As an aside, it's not exactly relevant to our immediate concerns, so I will refrain from typing it out and causing us to commit the sin of curiositas :laugh: but I thought the reply to objection 3 in article 2 of the section on studiositas was really interesting) All that being said, Hicks' intention is clearly not to encourage a vicious curiosity, and I agree he has in mind something more akin to wonder. Intriguingly, St. Thomas doesn't really talk about disinterest, although, one would think that if studiositas is the virtuous mean in regards to desire for knowledge, and curiositas is the vicious excess, something like disinterest would be the vicious deficiency. In fact, St. Thomas takes for granted man's desire for knowledge - studiositas is a subcategory of temperance precisely because it involves the restraint of a natural inclination. I guess that just shows how deforming many people's educational experience is, that it manages to, not just divert but utterly eviscerate their natural sense of wonder.

Well, if it's true, you should love it, and if it's not, it would be more virtuous to have the opposite response. ;) Here's my best attempt at finding a concise summation of Hicks' project: "My purpose in writing this book is to offer a personal interpretation of classical education - its ends, as well as some of its means - and to respond to objections of those who might approve of the goals of such an education, but who believe that it cannot meet the needs of an industrial democracy or that it is not feasible as a model for mass education." (3) I think it's interesting that at the outset he indicates he is less interested in the traditional methods education - he says will only address "some of its means." That last question - can classical education be democratic? - strikes me as pretty vital, so I look forward to how he develops that aspect of his argument. The ends of classical education, he seems to argue, are "to educate the young to know what is good, to serve it above self, to reproduce it, and to recognize that in knowledge lies this responsibility." (1) "The supreme task of education [is] the cultivation of the human spirit." (13) This is done "by presenting a complete vision of man as he lives and as he ought to live in all his domains - the individual, the social, and the religious." (13) Thus "it teaches the student how to fulfill his obligations to himself, to his fellow man, and to God and His creation." (13) He contrasts this with what schools today see as their purpose: "The modern era cannot be bothered with finding new answers to old questions like: What is man and what are his purposes? Rather, it demands of its schools: How can modern man better get along in this complicated modern world? Getting along - far from suggesting any sort of Socratic self-knowledge or stoical self-restraint - implies the mastery of increasingly sophisticated methods of control over the environment and over others. Man's lust for power, not truth, feeds modern education." (8) Hicks doesn't seem, to me, to offer much in the way of evidence for this characterization of modern education. Rather, he argues today "we" have a "fixation with technique to the detriment of the task" (13) and assumes this has both cause and effect in modern education. I happen to agree with his description in part (I think many modern schools are conditioning students to be the stuff that others act upon, rather than themselves the actors), but if one didn't, or if one did, but didn't see it as problematic, then his offered solutions aren't going to be of much interest.

Well, having now read chapter 1, Hicks comes down pretty firmly in the Platonist camp, so he and I are just going to have to agree to disagree on that one. I do think he does a nice job of summing up the problems in education we see today, and I agree with him that the true purpose of education is the life of virtue - I just don't think he's going to get there from his starting point. :001_smile: This was a nice insight: "To hold that virtue can be taught and that it is the chief duty of the school to teach it need not imply a belief in the perfectibility of man. Rather, it implies a belief in the ideal of virtue, as well as in the value of an education based upon the attempt to know and to emulate this ideal. The ancients admitted no contradiction in this, but our modern operational mood makes this effort much more difficult. Ideals contradict incontrovertible experience, for no one has seen or tested an ideal. Thus, we tend to look upon virtue as what under a specific set of circumstances can be achieved, rather than as what ought to be achieved under all circumstances. We expect from our students what we might call 'reasonable behavior,' by which we mean whatever makes them sufferable--never mind perfect. [Oh, ouch, how often am I guilty of this in day-to-day parenting?] Above all, we deny the need for any connection between schoolwork and student behavior, often because no such connection any longer exists - and plummeting results greet our sinking expectations." (23-4)

So true! Seems kind of...operational, doesn't it? :001_smile: Glancing back at the passage, from the context, I think they're synonyms? The "great books" discussions I've been in have definitely varied in quality - some, I think, have been true disputations, many have been ego-driven competitions. I can't remember ever discussing the question of whether someone should have done something. :001_smile: And I would say that, despite a very heavily Adler-influenced undergraduate education, I have not really experienced a classroom discussion of a great book that was exclusively relativistic or cynical (individual relativists and cynics - myself at times included - abounded, of course ;) ). But I did cross one great books college off my list because I definitely got that vibe there... Your last point, I agree with wholeheartedly, and the way you said it is helpful and shook a few thoughts loose for me. So, just because the main problem we face today may be a radical empiricism, doesn't justify being sloppy about definitions. Being precise about ideas becomes all the more important exactly because overcorrection is so very easy. In practice, it may not be as big a deal, but on the level of theory, it absolutely matters - and will eventually affect practice! On my lists of adjectives, the two pairs that most troubled me were his contrasting real with ideal and concrete with abstract. Those, to me, seem not exactly to be opposites or alternative methods, but actually deeply connected. I'll lay my cards on the table and say that I think all knowledge has its basis in experience, in sense perception, as Aristotle said. This is a different claim from the idea that all knowledge is mere sense perception. Children do move from the concrete to the abstract - "observing what is" comes first. And I don't know that it's exactly a stage children go through (although, since everything is new, it does seem to dominate the "first plane of development"), but is the first part of learning anything (insert dispute over what exactly grammar/logic/rhetoric are here) - so in reading a "great book," the first step is simply to see what it is and says; in a disputation, as Pieper says, the first step is to truly hear and comprehend what your interlocutor is saying. Before they're reading or disputing, kids should be spending hours out of doors. And the real does point us to the ideal - though often we're not honest enough or brave enough to actually look at reality. I have a couple of thoughts about why this observational stage often seems to be neglected or taken for granted, but that's getting pretty far from seeing the text at hand, so I'd better stop for tonight. :001_smile: Thanks, all, for a stimulating discussion.

I think this is right - Hicks uses the word "accepting," but "receptive" seems better to me. One model of how this might look is scholastic disputation - at least in its ideal form. :tongue_smilie: Here are a few snippets of how Pieper describes it in his awesome little book, Guide to Thomas Aquinas: "Let us give a few moments' thought to dialogue and the part it plays in mankind's community life. Such conversation has as it aim not only communication, but also the clarifying of ideas, the finding and illuminating of truth... "Anyone who considers dialogue, disputation, debate, to be a fundamental method for arriving at truth must already have concluded and stated that arriving at truth is an affair that calls for more power than the autarchic individual possesses. He must feel that common effort, perhaps the effort of everybody, is necessary. No one is sufficient unto himself and no one is completely superfluous; each person needs the other; the teacher even needs the student, as Socrates always held... "If this fundamental conviction is genuine it must necessarily affect the mode of listening as well as the mode of speaking. Dialogue does not mean only that people talk to one another, but also that they listen to one another... There was one rule of the disputatio legitima which made this kind of listening mandatory: No one was permitted to answer directly to the interlocutor's objection; rather, he must first repeat the opposing objection in his own words, thus explicitly making sure that he fully understood what his opponent had in mind... "But of course this listening is not concerned solely with grasping the substance. It is also directed fully at the interlocutor as a person; it draws its vitality from respect for the other's dignity, and even from gratitude toward him--gratitude for the increase in knowledge which is derived even from error." I know ElizaG is going to point out that disputation was something that happened in the universities :laugh: but I think there are applications of this model for other ages and phases of education.

Woohoo! I finally found our copy of N&N just in time! I have read through the prologue at this point, and I'm not sure I'm totally clear on how Hicks is defining the main terms of his argument. So, I went back through the prologue and pulled out the adjectives he uses to describe the two competing notions of education he wants to contrast. First we have the "modern" approach (although it's not actually modern; Hicks argues this was also the approach of the Sophists): timely descriptive statistical scientific technological operational ambitious inventive technical concrete real analytical skeptical And then the "classical" approach: timeless prescriptive imaginative transcendental universal normative humble abstract ideal accepting I just don't buy all these contrasts, and in fact, I think he may be granting too much ground to the "modern" educational approach by accepting some of these dichotomies. Similarly, I was made uneasy by the many derogatory references to knowledge derived "from the five senses" (I counted at least three in the prologue alone that used that specific formulation) - that's not "modern," that's Aristotle! Here's perhaps the clearest bit summing up my issue: "Since the Enlightenment, education has developed an acute case of schizophrenia. Its antipathetic selves have fought over the question of man's identity, the old self asserting a knowledge of man derived from the transcendent ideas and inherited truths of religion, art, and letters, and the new self insisting that man can know himself only by examining the composition of the material universe and drawing his inferences from that." (8) We'll see how Hicks develops all this, but I'm not at all convinced that what we see today is a war of old and new, that we have to choose between two distinct sources of knowledge (the giveaway there is "only" - obviously there are those who would argue that we can "only" resort to scientific knowledge or to revelation or whatever - but we don't have to agree with them that those are the "only" two options!). I'm definitely cynical (wink), but this dispute seems like a distraction, a fruitless cycle of "progressive" and "reactionary," which obscures the true nature of our task as educators.

Principles of Jesuit Education in Practicehttp://m.hathitrust.org/Record/001449850

Yes! A couple of years ago, I was at a classical education conference and got so frustrated with the speakers who were so busy dropping anti-Dewey zingers they threw out at least half a dozen infants with the progressive bathwater. A few backtracked when pressed, but even then the vibe was kind of, "Well, moms can cuddle their kids while teaching them the ABCs, but sooner or later the lectures, declensions, and beatings must begin, followed in a few years by rigorous Socratic discussions." This did not strike me as adequate (incidentally, I think a lot of the speakers at this conference actually practice better than they preach - but for those of us who lack pedagogical intuition - ME - getting the preaching right is pretty key to good practice). I've been reading Fr. Donnelly's book, though (thanks for that link!) and feel like I'm finally seeing a way forward - that actual traditional education, rather than contemporary reconstructions, did in fact transcend the false dichotomy so much of our educational arguments today seem to be stuck in. Whew.

:iagree: My husband works in public education, and I am a gung-ho supporter of Core Knowledge in that context. While Hirsch and Willingham have true insights that apply to learning anywhere, the way they frame their arguments is really driven by the situation in public schools. So be aware that "skills" in many public schools do not look anything like the skills work you are doing - I did not fully grasp the stuff Hirsch and Willingham are arguing against until my husband started attending more teacher trainings, and then I read Focus: Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improve Student Learning by Mike Schmoker - a book not terribly applicable for the homeschooling mom, but very clarifying for understanding what my husband was dealing with every day. :ohmy: Copywork it ain't. That being said, I definitely draw on CK resources at home (love their Books to Build On) but don't worry about covering the sequence in any systematic way. The CK sequence for lower elementary includes lots of traditional early childhood "content," anyway, precisely because that's what historically people just do with little kids - nursery rhymes, fairy tales, the like. Reading together about things we are interested in, talking about them some, and occasionally watching Walking with Dinosaurs :laugh: really is enough content for young kids in "enriched" home environments (don't love that phrase, because having interesting, real things to read and talk about should be normal, not something extra, but there you go). Coincidentally to this conversation, there was a nice classical ed shout-out on the CK blog just this week.