My sense of the scholarship on the history of American education is that it is pretty mediocre and underdeveloped. I assume you've looked at Lawrence Cremin? Two contemporary historians who are on my to-read-someday list are Caroline Winterer and Carl J. Richard. They are more interested in classicism as an influence on politics than classical education for its own sake, but I suspect one could glean some interesting things their work and maybe some helpful citations.

Our edition footnotes this and says that it wasn't in the original version that was published in the Ladies Home Journal but, weirdly, was added when the stories were all published together as one volume (or maybe Kipling had written it that way and LHJ edited it out? the notes also say the LHJ version had a few Americanized phrases). In any case, your Chrysalis Classics version is accurate to the actual first published version. :001_smile: As far as Kipling goes, though, my favorite is Kim. LOVED that book when I read it the summer before 9th grade. Kind of afraid to go back and reread it. Someone probably mentioned it and I missed it, but my husband really enjoyed The Last of the Mohicans when he was younger. And I quite liked Ivanhoe. I'm enjoying following along with your project, Hunter! Thank you!

None of my kids have known their colors at 2, and apparently it's actually a much trickier thing to learn it seems: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-johnny-name-colors/

This conversation resonates with a discussion my husband (a public educator) and I have been having about Christopher Lasch's analysis of the history of mass education in his excellent book, The Culture of Narcissism. Lasch points out the growth over the last century or so of the "belief that education should be painless, free of tension and conflict." He notes that this belief has enabled and excused bad teaching: "Under cover of enlightened ideologies, teachers (like parents [!]) have followed the line of least resistance, hoping to pacify their students and to sweeten the time they have to spend in school by making the experience as painless as possible." My husband's experiences testify to the vicious cycle in public schools that Lasch identifies as the result of all this: "Standards of teaching decline, the victims of poor teaching come to share the experts' low opinion of their capacities, and the teaching profession complains of unteachable students." It seems to me that homeschoolers have not been immune from this trend, even ones trying to follow a more "traditional" educational path. There's such a scarcity of resources that really address in concrete ways the true heart of teaching - this connecting of student and lesson, two pieces which may be conceptually distinguishable, but in practice are inseparable. Instead, most of what's out there seizes on one half or the other as the supposed secret to painless learning. Frustratingly, I've found that generally speaking even good teachers - in school and at home - lack the vocabulary to explain what it is that makes them effective and often attribute the results of their own careful preparation and good teaching sense to some absurd ideology that doesn't actually describe what happens in their classroom or their homes. Thanks, 8FilltheHeart, for being an exception.

ElizaG, thanks for clarifying and elaborating - sounds like a great plan. Let us know how it goes! At least until we get access to those archives and use them to write very specific books describing the only pure and authentic EFL system, causing Hunter to go :willy_nilly: I think a long Psalm could work. EFL has her specific recommendations (ETA: for Americans! I doubt she advocated for Hiawatha when she was speaking in Europe), but she also writes more generally in approval of the memorization of "long and difficult poems, whole chapters from the Bible, speeches of the world’s great orators, books of the Iliad and Odyssey—things that have literary content, fine pictures for the mind’s gallery, and lessons for life." If this approach works out for us, I could see doing some Homer in translation when the kids are older, since I don't think we'll get to any Greek in our home school.

Hey, sounds exactly like what we're hearing today about the alleged advantages of "blended learning," which I might now start referring to as Workbooks 2.0. But you know, teachers are expensive compared to a software license. Thanks for filling in some more of the history here - interesting and strange!

Yeah, count me as another mediocre storyteller. My repertoire is limited to an uninspired - but consistent - Three Little Pigs, although the last time I tried, my three year old insisted on taking over and made it the Four Little Pigs - "two sisters and two brothers." :laugh: I did happen pick up this book at a used bookstore recently, although what I should obviously be doing is actually practicing telling some stories, not reading about it... It just so happens that today my children did in fact raid the pantry for a few potatoes...which they used as projectiles. :huh: And you're in luck - on p. 139, EFL also suggests peppercorns as an alternative potato-creature eye-material. :laugh: Thanks also for the summary of your EFL-style plans! Am I understanding correctly that you will work on shorter poems with your older kids simultaneously with a longer work? I'm still trying to imagine how this all fleshes out into a day-by-day plan, how and when one fits in some of her non-poetry suggestions, and so on.

Thanks. :001_smile: I've been so exasperated at how my sweet baby has turned into a marauding toddler a little ahead of schedule, and I finally realized after the bead cabinet incident that it's because my almost-four-year-old has totally apprenticed him. So I'm doomed. Anyway... Ha, I read Phaedrus back in college, but at the time was a little more interested in what Socrates had to say about eros than written language. :001_rolleyes: Wow, this oral culture piece brings a lot together and has even increased my husband's enthusiasm for the crazy idea of scrapping our first grade plans to learn Hiawatha (he's already on board with replacing all our toys with pinecones, sticks, and potatoes). :laugh: Talking it over last night, he said it reminded him of a favorite point of the professor he studied Exodus with in grad school: man always wants to see things, but God asks him to hearken to His voice, to listen. This is incredibly interesting.

Organizing my notes this evening, I re-read a passage that kind of blew my mind - I'm not sure why this didn't sink in before. EFL is discussing all the different things one might draw out during a poetry lesson: vocabulary, "content knowledge," grammar, rhythm, rhyme. So far, so good, and perhaps not too different from any program we might think of that integrates language arts around literature. But then she adds this: "...the thought will suggest itself to the teacher-mother that such instruction could be given with greater ease and dispatch in connection with reading lessons, the printed page being a ready mechanical aid to locating verse-endings, rhyming words, monosyllables, dissyllables, etc. All this is true, but mind-training is similar to muscle-training, and it is not mere instruction, or knowledge, but use that gives strength that endures and power that achieves. Devise lessons that can be taught while the pupil stands, with his eyes on your eyes, instead of glued to a book. Make the lessons never too hard, but hard enough so that the child may experience the joy of attainment." (Bookless Lessons, p. 258) Talk about less is more! Referring to the printed text as an obstacle to building mental muscle! It seems kind crazy...until you stop and realize that, of course, this must have been how it was done for centuries before, you know, the printing press.

I've read a few things from more experienced moms along these lines. Problem is, the practical advice always seems to amount to: "Stop reading my blog and go do some work! You'll figure it out as you go along!" Not quite the short cut I was looking for... :laugh:

Re: questions about Lynch's audience and religious content, I know she was trained at a normal school (teachers' college) and taught in public schools for the first part of her career. I think she was definitely aiming at a broad, mainstream audience and hoped to influence the public schools as well. Your practical takeaways are very similar to mine, especially the not stressing over the read alouds. Somehow this year, I wound up with plans that were way more Ambleside-ish than I really meant to, I think mainly because I just couldn't figure out what else to do, and I have not been happy with how all the reading was working out. So we're in our between-term break this week and I'm thinking of tweaking our schedule to include more "observation training" and less, but more carefully chosen read-alouds. I assumed that "animal tales" meant more along the lines of folk tales (three little pigs, the little red hen, brer rabbit), while fairy tales meant traditional stories with human protagonists and more magical elements (Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Sleepy Beauty), and honestly the line there can be a bit blurry. But my thinking on this comes from Auntie Leila, not Ella Francis Lynch, so maybe she meant something else entirely? I'm still going back through my notes and trying to organize them. I'd love to discuss some of the "hows," if my toddler, who today trashed the bead cabinet I should never have bought :glare:, gives me a chance at some point this week.

Thinking some more about Lynch's reasons for epic poetry for the five year old, I'm also struck by some reasons she doesn't use. She doesn't make much of an appeal to tradition, although as Eliza pointed out, it's a pretty traditional approach and a pretty convincing argument to me! My guess is this is probably a matter of context and audience as anything else (would it come off as too intimidating to link this aspect of her approach to the classical tradition, given the broad audience she is aiming at?), as she doesn't have a problem making appeals to tradition or the way things have been done in other matters. She also makes a pretty restrained connection between the study of literature and moral development; there's not much in the way of lofty rhetoric around pursing the good, the true, and the beautiful or the cultivation of the affections. Formal academic work seems to be firstly about mental, not moral, development, although Lynch has a very rich notion of what that encompasses, all the faculties of the mind, imagination, emotions, so on. And so there is a connection, as the mental life is embedded in the moral life, but if your kid isn't learning obedience, hard work, and good manners in the context of family life, it's not going to happen via choice of particular academic work (would that it were that easy).

Thanks! We're nowhere near DC either, alas.

ElizaG, thanks so much for the article summary! I'd just found a reference to Orbus Vivus and was going to ask you if you'd tracked down a copy yet... Yes, this! ETA: Just crystallizing this thought for myself: the "littleness" becomes a great strength, because that is what forces the mental exercise. It is entirely the mind (of teacher and student) that is "doing a lot."

There is a difference between the ideal of the self-educated man and the self-made man, who is really about thrift, hard work, and honesty rather than any educational or intellectual attainments. In any case, Lincoln did not have a Jefferson education! And Lynch actually highlights the role of Lincoln's mother in his "self"-education. In the end, I think a lot of this gets back to the context question; self-educating in the early 21st century is just going to have a different result than self-educating in the early 19th century. One of the most striking things to me is that Franklin and Lincoln would have just had many, many fewer things to read (I just looked at the Robinson curriculum booklist and what? Bobbsey twins? And I thought the 1000 good books list was stretching it...). Which leads me to the one long poem a year thing. In addition to the national identity angle ("there is no reason why every American child is not better and happier for knowing by heart the folk-epic of his land"), Lynch presents a few more general reasons for starting your child off with great poetry, particularly of the epic variety: 1) It suits the child developmentally. "The child...is looking upon a world crowded with marvelous new things. Early poetry, therefore, or that dealing with primitive things, is especially attuned to the child mind." (ECH, p. 59) "The ancient sagas, with their figurative and heroic language, reflect the characteristics of the early peoples--their intensity of feeling, their facts and fancies, their strength and weaknesses--all mental characteristics of the little child." (ECH, p. 61) "As the reasoning faculties develop and the critical talents grow keener the children become cynical, and begin to feel ashamed of their old poetical ardor. Therefore let us give the child real poetry during the years when his imagination is receptive for the thought of the poet, for by delay the gift is lost." (ECH, p. 62) I ran this one by my husband and he wanted to know what about all the, um, adult themes in the great epics. I said I dunno, but presumably Greek six-year-olds were not sheltered from them. 2) This is the time to form children's literary tastes. This makes a lot of sense to me and reminds me of the Montessori principle, "the best for the smallest." "Better than at any subsequent period, you can thus form the child's literary taste. It is not necessary to make him acquainted with all or even many of the masterpieces... A single poem carefully studied, memorized, and loved will do more for the child than a dozen that are indifferently skimmed. The trouble is that real poetry is too often left until late in the course of instruction, while trash, supposed to fit the child's intellect, is substitute. This is absurd and harmful. If we nurture the minds of our children during the early years on the best literature, if we place them in the society of great men, they will not be satisfied with the dime novel or the 'bestseller' in later years." (ECH, p. 63) 3) Related, great poetry gives children a gift for their whole life, to return to with profit as long as they live. "One of the reasons for selecting this piece of poetry [Mark Antony's speech] is that it is one of the few things that will never grow stale with use. It will live through the ages. The child will love it as soon as he can understand it, and the man of seventy will love it still more." (ECH, p. 64) 4) Length, coherence, and complexity of a text challenges, strengthens, and furnishes the mind and memory. "Excessive reading weakens the memory. Quite different indeed was the practice of learning long and difficult poems, whole chapters form the Bible, speeches of the world's great orators, books of the Iliad and Odyssey--things that have literary content, fine pictures for the mind's gallery, and lessons for life. If equal in the first place to the strain of acquiring, the mind fed upon such things as these becomes strengthened." (ECH, p. 66) "Because of this continuity of thought and structure [she is speaking specifically of Hiawatha here] its educational value is comparably greater than and equal quantity of good but assorted literature." (ECH, p. 68) I find these arguments pretty compelling, with perhaps the exception of #1. (ETA: Maybe I'm just being too literal here. Re-reading her I don't get the feeling Lynch would object to prudent postponing of more mature passage for later years.) Thoughts? Have I missed anything important? I also don't see why, in theory, some other epic or lengthy piece wouldn't work, if there is an option that would better reflect the culture of an individual family. In spite of it all, I still remain in favor of America, or an America, at least, so I'd be inclined to give Hiawatha a shot, but would also be interested in discussing other possibilities.

Some hasty thoughts before we run out the door for the morning... Re: after 10, in addition to what ElizaG mentioned, Ella Francis Lynch seems to suggest that the child staying at home at this point might more or less take over the own education, in the tradition of Franklin, Lincoln, et al. I kind of assume that the ideal of the self-educated man is a particularly American one, which may further explain the appeal for her (and maybe us, since we seem to be back in a time when acceptable formal schooling options are limited). Re: nursery rhymes. Lynch does have some formal-ish lessons for the very young child based on nursery rhymes in Bookless Lessons. She also recommends folk tales for the pre-age-of-reason child, with fairy tales saved more for later. In Educating the Child, she writes, "You will be told by popular writers and lecturers that the children love the poems written by the children's poets, such as Stevenson and Eugene Field. These two men and others have indeed written exquisite poems of childhood, but it is you and i that enjoy them, not the children..." I have found this to be true... I think ElizaG is spot on about Lynch trying to find an American epic for American children. I had actually been musing about this recently while reading Marrou's description of the place of Homer in A History of Education in Antiquity, more from the perspective of if there even is a suitable English-language epic for (in my case) the American Catholic family. The closest I could come up with was Tolkein, and I actually know of some Catholic families who treat him more or less like Homer. :laugh: One of the Jennifers, you really get to the heart of the matter, I think. What conditions could Lynch take for granted that we can't? Does our different context doom us to failure if we try her method? We can probably address some issues, but definitely not all of them, and it's not totally just a matter of our lack of virtue. For example, Lynch though the farm was the ideal place to raise children, but that is not going to be an option for the vast majority of us. Still, I'm wary of those who argue all changes are inevitable, or more accurately, historical changes force us to respond in a certain way. We are constrained, but nonetheless still free. Traditions have always had to adapt to changing circumstances, though the way forward has not always been clear. I don't know if that makes sense or addresses what you were getting at. Vintage educators often tempt me to despair, too, but we have also had experiences that give me hope. When my oldest was four, I thought I had doomed him to a life of mindless TV watching - it was a victory when the TV was on only an hour a day. Lo and behold, he got older, better able to entertain himself without making me feel like jumping out the nearest window, and we've largely weaned ourselves off TV without too much wailing and gnashing of teeth. So take heart!

This is perhaps exactly what appeals to me and terrifies me about trying this out. I know I'm, ahem, "low energy," introverted, and undisciplined - basically not cut out to be a homeschooling mom of many. And I think I've spent a lot of my efforts thus far doing what actually amounts to searching for techniques to get around all that (don't get between the child and the living book! recreate a Montessori classroom in our house! lock the children outside in nature while I hide in my room!). But probably what I should really do is take what little I have and try to make sure it's entirely focused on what is truly essential, assuming I can figure out what that is. Lynch's system feels like a step in the right direction to me, although I'm still trying to articulate exactly why that is. Thanks for the Caryll Houselander link...man, she's good. Hmm, hard to say - I'm glad I read them both, but I tend to be completist. :001_rolleyes: I think if you want to get a better sense of how Lynch's specifically academic program works, go with Educating the Child at Home. For an introduction to that, but definitely more child-rearing, character-training type things, which Lynch sees as utterly foundational to her academic system, go with Bookless Lessons.

Anyone interested in discussing the work of Ella Frances Lynch, neglected homeschooling author of the early 20th century? Here is a series of three articles in which she gives a brief overview of her methods. Two of her books are online: Bookless Lessons for the Mother-Teacher, aimed at the younger child, and Educating the Child at Home, which goes through roughly early elementary. Big takeaways for me thus far include the essential element of chores in education, an emphasis on truly great literature from the very beginning of formal schooling (note that she ties lit and history together in the early years, but uses literature as the spine rather than a chronological history rotation), and how to go about sensorial education without having to buy a pink tower. Lynch's methods are practical, in that they do not require much "stuff" and really take advantage of the home environment, rather than trying to reproduce school methods out of context, but also somewhat daunting in that I think I would have to do a fair amount of preparation and self-education to pull them off. But I'm finding that will probably be the case no matter what. I'm about to start fleshing out the plans for our next six-week term and think I might experiment with planning a few EFL-style lessons.

Directed Studies at Yale consists of three year-long courses that are taken by college freshman simultaneously; one could arrange the reading lists sequentially instead.

I think your comment about her being an exception to the exceptionalism is significant. There are so many interesting things going on here about what constitutes "America" (even "mainstream" Americans didn't agree! so why do we tend to think of "assimilation" as a simple and standard process? Kathleen Conzen's work on German-Catholic immigrants raises a lot of questions about this) and which aspects of Catholicism seem to be most in tension with it (or not!) at which time. Maybe someday I'll have the leisure to figure it all out, not that I know what that will accomplish for me... Antebellum nativist violence happened in rural areas, too, so I still think Ella Frances Lynch's self-confidence about her place in American society was a product of a certain time in American history. Her work is "conservative," but not really in a way that is particular to Catholics, as you point out. Eh, I think I am doing a lousy job articulating myself and I think we disagree on a few things, it's not just that if you saw what I was saying you'd see how right I am. ;) Thanks for the stimulating chat, and I'll stop hijacking your thread so someone who actually knows something about the Bluedorns can help you out. :laugh: ETA: I assume you've seen this article already?

Oh, to be sure, there are changes within this period, especially in attitudes towards modern methods and ideas. But, I still think there was a coherent era from some time after the Civil War, maybe let's put it at 1886 when James Gibbons was made a cardinal through Vatican II that shared a range of attitudes on this question of Catholics' place in America, from Fr. Hecker's extreme evangelistic optimism at one end to Cardinal Gibbons's more moderate assimilationist hope for Catholics' full social, civic, and cultural participation at the other. This is in contrast to more defensive attitudes of antebellum years when the Protestant mainstream was still inciting the burning of convents and whatnot. Thanks so much for the information on Latin and Greek instruction! Very helpful and calming.

I'm using these lesson plans this year. Not far enough in yet to say how it's going, but at least the book isn't just sitting on my shelf any more.

I feel similarly, but increasingly I'm wondering - what's the worse that could happen? It's not like I'm that awesome at implementing modern ideas of what constitutes good parenting or homeschooling. :laugh: This is a really interesting difference, and I think there are several things going on here, including some theological differences, but also one pretty important historical factor that has probably already occurred to you. Lynch was working at a time when the "Americanizing" forces in the Catholic hierarchy had pretty much won the day, and American Catholics really felt like they were finally getting to participate more fully in cultural and political life. There was a lot of optimism about the effect Catholics were going to have, even folks arguing they were going to convert Protestant America. This peaks in the 1950s, and then we hit Vatican II, and now there are plenty of Catholics in prominent roles in mainstream American life and institutions, but they're just as badly off as everyone else. So I think there are some questions here, not just about whether we've gone downhill, but also about why Catholics didn't really seem to resist that much or serve as the leavening agent in American culture that some thought they would. I've been confused about this: at what age historically were classical languages introduced? I do have a decent Latin background, and I've been dithering about when and how to start the kids with it.

Amen. The thing that first endeared me to EFL was a passage in which she advised a mother to take care that she had enough "psychic energy" to deal with her kids. That's me, perpetually short on psychic energy, to put it mildly.

I can be no help, as I'm just getting familiar with Ella Frances Lynch thanks to your links from a while back. I read through the series of articles on "How Florence's Children Are Taught" and am maybe a quarter into Bookless Lessons (it was way too practical, so I let myself get sidetracked reading Marrou :001_rolleyes:). But I found her to be really clarifying and helpful (seriously, it inspired probably my most energetic mothering to date, until the current first trimester regression, sigh), so I am interested in what you work out and how it goes. You couldn't have told me that before I bought a bead cabinet? :laugh: