That's interesting, ElizaG, thanks for digging it up. Maybe what we need is a rhetorical gap year program to send our kids to before they head off to more conventional college, like this kind of thing except Fr. Donnelly-style. So if someone could get to work on that, that would be great, lol. An acquaintance who teaches English looked at Model English and her assessment was "maybe" an advanced high schooler could do it. But Fr. Donnelly seems to have seen it as appropriate work for high school (Persuasive Speech, on the other hand, sounds like it was always intended for use in college). I wondered if part of what made it seem so advanced is that the authors he includes are largely not read in high school (or anywhere) any more - Washington Irving, Macaulay, Ruskin, Hazlitt - who reads those guys any more? Another thing I've been thinking about is the role of extensive vs. intensive reading. I still have lists of recommended reading that my high school English and science departments distributed, and I have one from my European history teacher - we weren't encouraged that strongly to be reading beyond what we were assigned in class - my sense was that these lists were remnants of a time when that had been more the case - but there was still conveyed the idea that to be truly educated, you'd have to be doing all this other reading on your own time. I've also been thinking about the need for extensive reading in foreign language acquisition. Okay, to wrap up this random assortment of not-terribly developed thoughts, here's a quotation from Literary Art and Modern Education I found in my notes:

I was able to read this last summer, but don't have access to it any more - I should go back and look through my notes. I know of some people very proficient in Greek and Latin who could teach it in a communicative style that would emphasize that they are languages to be used for communication and that we can develop our own ability to communicate in them, but I don't know of anyone who sees the goal of language study as the development of the student's own skill in communication the way Fr. Donnelly does. Even at places currently pushing the renaissance of "living" methods of classical language instruction, my sense is that, at best, their goals have more to do with the restoration of a tradition of humanist scholarship or a Great Books-ish idea of what it takes to live the examined life or something like that. I could be wrong - there are certainly people out there reading and modelling themselves after Renaissance educators, and there are people interested in expressing themselves with style in classical languages. And if Fr. Donnelly is right that excellent models and practice is more important than explicit instruction, maybe it doesn't matter entirely. It will be interesting to see what the next generation of Latin and Greek speakers do, though. Oh, look, the Accademia Vivarium Novum is offering distance classes now - hmm. Classical education also happened in individual households with private tutors or classically educated fathers, and not all schools relied on competitions the way the Jesuits did. I mean, obviously you are right that there probably aren't any homeschooling moms out there who could teach classical languages like Fr. Donnelly, but I'm hopeful about the growth of resources that we are seeing in classical languages. There is a renaissance happening in the classics, much of it is happening outside traditional academic institutions, and I do think homeschoolers can participate in it.

I thought I would bring this thread back to talk about what a Fr. Donnelly-inspired education for the over-12 set might look like. There are several different questions that seem to come up when we think about making use of his methods, and the first two that I was mulling over were how his approach fits into a modern comprehensive high school curriculum and then, secondly, to what extent we would want to update the genres or media covered to reflect the last 100ish years of history. As far as the first question goes, I could imagine two possible tracks - a straight up, old school, classical languages heavy track (which has all kinds of challenges that we could discuss) and then, because we know Fr. Donnelly's textbooks were used in various sorts of schools, a more conventional contemporary college prep curriculum but with Fr. Donnelly-style English courses. Although I'm sure Fr. Donnelly would have some issues with the overemphasis on "erudition" in that sort of a curriculum, it seems like it might be a workable compromise for a college-track student today. And with a little effort you could probably come up with a Fr. Donnelly-style "humanities" course that would satisfy history requirements, too, as a way to carve out a bit more space from the conventional course load. I suppose the other alternative would be to take Fr. Donnelly at his word that a well-read child doesn't need a formal rhetoric course and just focus on guaranteeing a truly well-read child (which I think would involve broader reading and less emphasis on children's literature then is recommended even by most rigorous homeschooling programs these days). I don't know that I've read wherever he says that, and I'm not totally sure how to interpret it - does he mean a rhetoric course very specifically and narrowly? Surely there still needs to be some formal composition program, if only to make sure a student gets some active writing practice, even if there is no explicit teaching of precepts, etc. Can anyone point me to where he discusses this?

This distinction makes sense to me. I just dug up an old Fr. Donnelly thread to resurrect, and apparently we discussed the content subjects in middle school back then, lol.

That would be so kind! I will email you. I had another idea to bounce of you, too. I actually would like to get into a broader discussion of the post-EFL years, implementing Fr. Donnelly methods, classical languages, etc, etc, but perhaps I will start a new thread or resurrect one of the older ones for that because I also still have a couple things to say about the last two chapters of Bookless Lessons.

I share this habit or temperament, and the only thing that has ever made it better is when I go ahead and block out a chunk of every day when I MUST BE LEFT ALONE. Not possible to do in every season and takes some time training everyone to STAY AWAY FROM MOM, but if I know I have some guaranteed solitude coming, it is easier not to excuse little attempts to grab solitude here and there which are just distracting, throw off my rhythm, and don't even result in satisfying aloneness. DH is also very good about making sure I LEAVE THE HOUSE BY MYSELF NOT TO GROCERY SHOP for a few hours every week. When those are consistent, it is surprisingly way easier to tell myself, "hey, you're getting a nice break in another two hours, you really don't need to go hide in the bathroom right now and will in fact enjoy your break more if you power through this lesson, chore, whatever." Okay, so that's just "Make your kids have a quiet time," which has to be some of the oldest homeschooling mom advice out there, and I'm sure you've done it, but it's good advice, lol. And needs repeated sometimes - I initially had scheduled lessons with my eldest this year during my youngest's nap and the other kids' quiet time and quickly realized that was not going to work. And now I'm going to go put on a podcast and clean the kitchen!

Amen to this! Are the specifics of the Vittorino Plan in The Catholic Way in Education? Are they worth me spending $30 on a copy? In poking around for that, I found a bunch of Jesuit theses from the 30s on the Ratio and Jesuit pedagogy that look pretty interesting...

My hunch is that it is not the presence of different perspectives that concerns mms, but the absence of good faith.

I don't agree at all with this characterization of Eliza's contributions to this conversation. My goal here was to better understand some of the practical things I could do to avoid shallow, rote science education as my children get older, and I think I've gotten what I can along those lines from this discussion. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experience.

Yes, EFL is talking about younger children here and the best way to prepare them for whatever their later studies might be. Her writing focuses on children under 10 and doesn't address how to educate teenagers in science or anything else, which is why I raised the question here.

Thanks for the clarification! I do think we were crossing wires a bit over the meaning of "formal" - I'm sure I could have defined what I meant better from the start. 🙂 My 12yo frequently exhausts me with his interest and inquisitiveness, lol, so I can probably stress a little less about this for now. I'm sure he'll be fine - it's his mother I'm worried about. 😂

I am very confused now. Didn't you suggest a 12yo could "read a bunch of library books on chemistry topics for science"? I also thought we had drawn a distinction between "exposure" (which no one in this thread, including EFL and Robinson, seems to be against) and formal science study. Maybe we have been meaning different things by "formal science study" throughout this discussion. In referring to library books, documentaries, etc, I was trying to explain that I'm not hiding knowledge from my children, but trying to figure out how to move from unplanned "exposure" (for which I have no particular goals) into formal science study (in which I would expect my student to demonstrate mastery of specific content) in a way that guarantees they are leaning something, not simply regurgitating undigested material. I think there are questions of both content and methodology to that. Because of my own lack of scientific knowledge, which happened DESPITE getting a supposedly excellent education that included high school bio, chem, physics, BC calc, and an AP science class that I can't even remember what it was!!!! and then, bio, physics, and calc again in college, I feel at a loss for how to proceed. Perhaps I'm overthinking this. I suppose EFL's answer to this question might simply be that a student who has been taught to observe will just automatically better digest their formal science studies, and the teacher's approach and the presentation of the material are less important. Still, unlike EFL's mother-teachers who got to wash their hands of all this by age 10, lol, I'm directly responsible for arranging my kids' education through high school in all probability, so I have to make some decisions about how to do things, and it seems like there are probably better or worse ways to go about it.

Yes, definitely, but I will have to sift through the adult offerings because he's been through everything in the children's section. Yes, this is what I want to avoid - I got great grades in all my high school and college science courses, but I don't have much personal culture to show for it, lol. Ha, yes. But thank you for reminding me of TOPS - I remember it being mentioned before but this is the first year I've really been in the market for formal science, so I hadn't really looked at it that closely. This kid is, for better or worse, pretty good at hunting up his own supplies, so that might be a good fit for us. My kids have been exposed to modern science - they check out books from the library about various science topics, we watch documentaries, my eldest son steals his grandfather's Scientific American every month, etc, etc. Based on things Eliza has said, I believe the same is more or less true for her family. I'm not planning on shielding my kids from any field of knowledge, and I don't think Art Robinson or EFL suggested that either. As I understand it, the question is more about how and when to effectively introduce formal science study. EFL's cautions do ring true to me and my own experience of science education even at two very elite schools, and I'd like to avoid those issues and provide something better for my children. I am genuinely interested in the nittty-gritty of your approach because you have successfully raised students who have excelled in scientific fields. How do you make sure your students are really assimilating the material and not just "getting through the examination" as EFL puts it? Or maybe your experience suggests EFL and Art Robinson's concerns are overblown?

He's in 7th grade and about to start Algebra 1. I was hesitant about chemistry precisely because of having to work around the math, but he lobbied hard for it, and I didn't want to waste 12yo-boy intrinsic motivation, lol. Honestly, at this point, I think I am going to downgrade it to something he can pursue on his own if he wishes and shift gears for his formal requirements.

I had read that Art Robinson thing, but it had been a while and was not at the top of my mind, so thank you for reminding me of it. This kid would still read and mess around with chemistry stuff on his own, so there really probably wasn't even a reason for me to make it a formal subject of study except for anxiety over hitting 7th grade, which has seemed a really big deal to me for some reason, lol. 8, do you have any thoughts or advice about my concerns about asking my students to study things that aren't really accessible to them yet or offering them materials that over-simplify scientific concepts? I feel like part of my problem might be that I don't understand a lot of scientific concepts well enough to notice when it's happening.

So, I wanted to talk about the discussion of children's developmentally inappropriate questions in the chapter on Religious Education. Here is (part of) what EFL says: I think I have taken this more or less to heart with my younger children, but I'm starting to see how it remains an issue even in the over 10 crowd. EFL gives the example of trying to explain electricity to a young child, which exactly fits my situation this year with my 12yo who requested to study chemistry. As we are beginning to get into it, I feel like I am constantly running into the kinds of problems EFL outlines: I picked out a chemistry book written for a general audience for us to read together, and we are having all of these problems. The book steers clear of math and focuses on the "concepts" which are all conveyed via analogies that are often as far from this child's experience as the thing being analogized - and sometimes, they aren't even very good analogies. And honestly, I'm realizing how much of what I learned about chemistry in high school turns out to have no real content to it - I "know" that protons are positively charged and electrons negatively but do I really mean anything by it? This kid had originally wanted to just work through all the demonstrations in a high school-level book of chemistry labs, and I vetoed that thinking that he wouldn't actually learn anything about chemistry if he just mixed a bunch of stuff together with no grounding in what it was supposed to be demonstrating. But in retrospect, I'm thinking that would have actually been a better path. At least then he would be making lots observations himself and drawing whatever conclusions are actually within his power to do so. Does anyone have any other thoughts about how to manage this issue as our children get older and reach ages at which they are allegedly able to learn some of these things that are so far outside of everyday experience? Personally, I feel like I have a sense of what to do for learning about people and places remote from our experience, how to connect the known up to the unknown there, but I am way more at sea with scientific topics.

I didn't quite know what to make of the literalness of the truth-telling section also. On the one hand, I see what she's getting at in terms of wanting to instill in our children precision and accuracy in their speech, but on the other hand, it seemed weird, lol. Maybe a better angle to look at it would be to think more carefully about how I am asking questions - if I mean, "what is 9x7?" don't ask the kid, "Can you tell me what 9x7 is?" I'm not sure, though, still thinking about that one. I have fewer kids in a smaller age range than you, Eliza, but, last year, I was marveling at how clean Celeste Cruz's house always looks and that led me to looking at her schedules (for example - notice that she does have a time slot on there for inspecting the kids' chores), and so I made something almost as pretty for us, and it was an immediate and definitive failure. Like I don't think we had even one day where we came close to following it. But we can stick to a routine pretty well if I accept it's going to take a month or so to work into it. If I consistently find myself not getting to something, at this point, I take that as a sign that I'm trying to do too much or in the wrong order or doing things separately that we could be doing together. And any really large-scale changes I've (mostly) come to accept, like mms, are going to take a long period of very small changes. This year, I watched a bunch of this lady's videos on home management - actually, I stopped about halfway through and this has reminded me that I want to go back and finish them. One thing I liked about them is that she has a few that explicitly address strategies for when mom is not operating at 100%. My sense with her, as it seems is also true for the MOTH lady and Celeste Cruz, is that most of the general daily household chores are done by the kids. Also, she seems to be just relentlessly positive, which I am...not. Yet. I am more cheerful than I used to be. As long as I'm not pregnant and am getting enough sleep. So, you know, maybe six months out of every two years. 😂 Quiet time is over and I have to go oversee a math lesson, but I do have something from the Religious Education chapter I want to talk about, and I'd like to hear more about the perceptual control theory stuff!

Ahhhhh, things have been busy here with all kinds of real life happening, but I am hoping to get back into this conversation some. Eliza, I agree with feeling that I vastly underestimated how much work and/or required play I could and should be asking from my oldest children when they were smaller, though at the time, it certainly seemed like they had way more chores than their peers. I think somewhere EFL says at least two hours a day and that was for a pretty young child as I recall. I think the middle kids are having more asked of them, but I need to make sure the littlests don't coast on the older, more competent kids' contributions. One other thought from the work chapter - I've mentioned before how I don't feel very confident in my assessments of what kids can and can't do, or exactly what standards to hold them to, so I was reading with a particular eye to this question this time and found two things that maybe kind of helped a little: "Good work calls for thoroughness, but thoroughness is impossible without long drill in carefulness and should not be expected of young children. It is less important for a young child to do things than it is to keep trying, for the effort is what counts most. Be satisfied with the best they can do, keeping in mind their age, understanding, and practice." Okay, so clearly this means yes, you can't expect a child to do a job perfectly right of the bat, but it would be more helpful if I understood exactly what EFL meant by distinguishing "thoroughness" from "carefulness," I guess. Then, towards the very end of the chapter, she says this, addressing the situation of a slightly older child who has not been asked to do a lot of work heretofore: "Do not undertake several new things in the same week or month, but only how to do that one thing as well as he can, then make him do it regularly and promptly. After a short but adequate time, perhaps a week or month, add another task. Continue in this way, at the same time keeping up the previous daily requirements and getting more exacting with these." Ah, so apparently I'm actually supposed to "keep up" with all the work I've assigned so that I can gradually and appropriately raise standards over time. Shoot, I was really hoping all the effort I put in just teaching them what to do in the beginning would be it, and then I could walk away and never worry about sweeping the dining room again. I am going to need to find some more nervous energy somewhere.

Yup! The archaeological sites are cool, I am not going to lie. But our museums suck, if it makes you feel any better, lol.

A lot of card materials will make a distinction between, say, the clothing of a poor person and a rich person in a given era - it's simple, but I think it works for a 6-9 year old. Some fundamental needs charts also include a category related to social structure. Also, I think that, ideally, Montessori card materials work differently from fill-in-the-blank type worksheets, but that would be getting really into the weeds on Montessori, and, at any rate, I don't use card materials myself. We use the framework of fundamental needs to create our own materials (I couldn't find one chart that had all the categories I wanted anyway), and I vet the resources we use for that. We can make the study as complex as we want, and it is easy to vary the complexity for each of my children depending on their age and previous exposure to our topic. Additionally, a major piece of elementary studies is the idea of "going out" to take advantages of other resources in the local community. So, to take your example, we don't learn about Native American cultures just through books or or set of card materials, we go and see the pre-Columbian archaeological sites in our area - this naturally leads to the discovery that Native American culture is neither static nor monolithic. It also helps us appreciate the difference between archaeology and history. There are two different ways to think about history: is it the study of the past or is it the study of change over time? Developmentally, I think you have to establish the first before you can move on to the second, and it is a very big concept for young children to wrap their mind around. My youngest student still basically thinks of time as now and "when grandpa was little" and is just starting to get a handle on the idea that there was a time before grandpa was alive. So I would distinguish the fundamental needs work from social history, which has embedded in it certain ideas about the causes of historical change. And to be honest, I'm more concerned about my children coming away from studying history with an over-simplified view of historical change than I am worried that they won't have the most accurate, nuanced grasp on a specific set of facts about any given historical period. I find most of the history materials aimed at children unacceptably whiggish, triumphalist, or reactionary. So we are lingering with the fundamental needs for a bit while I try to figure out how I'm going to handle what comes next.

I'm not sure what kind of framework you are looking for, but you might like Felipe Fernandez-Arnesto's work - he is an excellent scholar, but also writes very engagingly for a general audience. Civilizations is kind of like Montessori's fundamental needs work for grown-ups.

Yes, I think the key for me to beginning to enjoy history in high school was realizing it wasn't just an interminable catalog of people who held offices at certain times and wars and so on, but that history could explain things that I was curious about. Children of the Universe is a pretty good overview of the elementary (6-12) curriculum. To Educate the Human Potential is probably the fullest of Montessori's own statements on the elementary child. I googled and found a pretty nice blogpost about the fundamental needs work in particular - this is similar to how we tend to do it here, though I don't buy materials, don't laminate a million three-part cards, or anything like that. We made our own fundamental needs chart and are making booklets for each era we study.

I'm a historian by training, but I don't intend to teach history the way historians do it - the actual skills of a professional historian don't seem to me to be very useful outside that context. For gen ed purposes, it seems to me there are two reasons to study history: the first is that it is the best evidence we have for what man is like, how he behaves, and how change happens; the second is to understand ourselves better (like a professor of mine said, "If you want to know what something is, study how it became"). Knowing history seems especially important to being a good citizen. I like the Montessori approach of starting history study by looking at how people have met their fundamental needs in different times and places - universal characteristics expressed differently based on the contingencies of history and geography. As my kids get older, I plan to focus more and more on how individuals have exercised power - for their own sake or for the sake of those they have power over? How were they constrained by their circumstances and how were they free? What were the results - intended and unintended - of their actions?

I assume it's the same mechanism by which we interpret mispelled words and typos. All of us have years and years of experience reading now and have developed certain expectations around what letters will follow others in what contexts. Also, these are mostly short, common words, and there are contextual clues. If I gave this to my 7 year old, he would be lost even though he could read these words spelled correctly. And if I jumbled a passage from a highly technical journal article, I doubt we could decipher it so easily. You might find the work of Stanislas Dehaene interesting - even more up your alley, he's also done stuff on the cognitive basis of numeracy, though I am not familiar with that work.

It is neat that good readers can decipher this easily, but the current scientific understanding of reading is that even advanced readers still decode each letter in each word, just very very quickly.