If You Want to Build a Ship by Laurie Bestvater

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” –Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The 2009 ChildlightUSA conference will take the theme of Beauty in a Charlotte Mason Education and I have been thinking about what that means. In what has become almost a cliché, it often seems to an onlooker that a Charlotte Mason education is about Victorian lace, fine china, Stravinsky waltzes and coloured pencils.  As Van Pelt and Rusby Bell so aptly pointed out at last year’s conference, as one goes deeper into Mason, one begins to have with her the “Great Recognition” that what we really want to do in education is to trace the workings of the Holy Spirit in all the fullness and glory that that implies.

…that God the Holy Spirit is Himself, personally, the Imparter of
knowledge, the Instructor of youth, the Inspirer of genius…every
fruitful idea, every original conception, whether in Euclid, or
grammar, or music was a direct inspiration from the Holy Spirit,
without any thought at all as to whether the person so inspired
named himself by the name of God or recognized whence his
inspiration came (Mason,vol.2. pp 270-71) (Citation 1)

It is as this Great Recognition dawns on us, as we realize that what we are truly after for our children and for ourselves is not just adding some picture study or knowing our composers, but this wonderful sense of being excited each and every day to wake up and see what the Creator and Redeemer of our Souls is going to do, what He has wrought that we haven’t yet discovered, and how He weaves beauty and relationship within the Trinity that He longs to share with us, that we understand, really understand,  that there are no subjects off limits to Christians, no boundaries to the exploration we are invited into, no sanctioned music or saccharine novels that keep us holy just because they are sold by Christian book companies. Rather, (and terror accompanies beauty oftentimes) “anything afoot in the world, in a way that shall expose sin as a God-damning waste and shall show obedient life as a joy forever,”  (Seerveld. p.39) (Citation 2) is our subject. We approach not in a puritanical, ”aha! now I‘ve found the Christian moral,” sort of way, but with a complete awe for “common grace,” seeing that God is indeed sovereign, restoring and working out His purposes in much deeper and richer ways than we can imagine. We need to hone our beauty sense; Calvin Seerveld from the Toronto based, Institute for Christian Studies, calls it,”aesthetic life.”

I think it was Mason who remarked on that mysterious phenomenon we often experience  of realizing or learning a thing, and then seeing it everywhere we turn, as if it were in the air somehow—that’s what all this thinking about the “Great Recognition” and Beauty has been like for me. The call seems to be coming from everywhere… in our recent read aloud, for example, playwright John Masefield was quoted; “the truth and rapture of man are holy things, not lightly to be scorned. A carelessness of life and beauty marks the glutton, the idler, and the fool in their deadly path across history.” (Citation 3)  In his new book, Culture Making, Andy Crouch tells me,

What was missing, (from the Christian’s stance on our culture)

I’ve come to believe, were the two postures that are most

characteristically biblical—the two postures that have

been least explored by Christians in the last century.

They are found at the very beginning of the human

story, according to Genesis:  like our first parents,

we are to be creators and cultivators. Or to put it more

poetically, we are artists and gardeners. (Citation 4)

Culture shapers like Cardus (Citation 5),  The Clapham Institute (Citation 6),  T.E.D (Citation 7),  industry, the young people returning in droves to the orthodox churches to try and recover the beauty and history of their faith, ChildlightUSA,…. in one way or another, all are urging us to take Mason to the streets–the time is so ripe for this kind of education!  If I may be allowed to generalize what they are saying, it would be something like this:  because we have all but lost the notion of Beauty as being absolutely essential to life, lost our aesthetic sense, and we are caught in the default reductionism and materialism, the Church is in danger of using the creation (and here, with Seerveld, I include culture)… simply to “get people saved.” Oh, my heart cries, the Good News is so much more than that!  We want to restore children to their awe and wonder, to give them back childhood heroes and the wealth of a nourished imagination. They need a deep cultural heritage with which to approach the challenges of the future and wills and reasons that are “buff” and strong with use to become the full persons the Lord intended them to be.  How as Christian educators may we offer less?

Last night I had the opportunity to hear Jean Baptiste Mugarura, a Rwandan native and national director for Youth for Christ in Rwanda, speak about the terrible time of genocide in his country in 1994.  In a country the size of Vermont, with a population of 7 million, one million (1/7th!) were slaughtered by machetes in the hands of the organized youth of that country within a three month period.  It seemed to crush my lungs inside my chest to hear this God follower explain that they, the youth ministers, were all the while crying to their churches as the youth were being recruited…we’ve got to do something, give the youth a picture of the beauty of Christ or Satan will give them something worse to fill the vacuum…and the church went on with “business as usual.” I spent a restless night thinking about this.  Here too was the message appearing again, only graver, what about the absence of Beauty?  We are not free, it seems, to keep this Great Recognition to ourselves, are we?   To be honest, my concern is that we may fall into “business as usual,”  enjoy the nature walks, and feel comfortable in our Christian classrooms or in homes nobly hung with the prints of masters and miss the clarion call of the Lord embedded in Charlotte Mason’s ideas.  As Seerveld points out,

The devil will easily let us Christians have a few nostalgic

meadows: he is scrounging for the hearts of men and

women in North America, including the youth of the

church, especially in the city life of technology

where the centers of human cultural power and mass

communication media are. Where the cultural action is,

its most current marketplace, that is the very place

where the Holy Spirit must be called into forceful play.

That is where young Christian artists must be encouraged

in the name of the Lord to pour their talents, bending steel,

composing melodies that fill the airwaves, filming the

complexities of our tensed, hidden lives, using the grit of

sand and glass and pigment in compositions to expose the
meaningless waste of sin around us and to show the life of

exciting joy present in our modern world when the law of

the Lord is obeyed. (Seerveld, p.36) [Citation 8]

Jeannette Tulis, in her blog “How A Charlotte Mason Education Can Grow an Artist,” reminds us well that allowing CM’s work full reign in our children’s lives creates these young Christian artists who are so sorely needed as leaders for the next generation (a cause for joy and a project of the last 20 years for me as well) but lately I have been asking myself, is this enough?  Is there not more we can do?   Mason was about giving this kind of rich, imaginative, whole education to every child: poor children and affluent, coal miner’s children and children with governesses, Christian and non-Christian alike.  As I have been working with ChildlightUSA this year and observed Nicolle Hutchinson’s adventure in the world of charter schools (Citation 9),   I have had to really wrestle with this idea: can we take this education to the public square where we may not name the name of Christ? It seems to me that Mason’s work is the best representation of a truly Christian education I have ever found, essentially Christian even. How could it be fit into a public setting? Wouldn’t something terribly precious be lost? Would it be selling out somehow? Ironically, it was my senior student, himself educated in the way Mason described and who sees beauty in constitutional law, who helped me to put this question in a useful context. “Mom”, he said as I told him my quandary, “It is a point of law, that the name of a thing is not the thing itself.”  I was stunned, I admit…one, that he “got” this so easily when I had to chew on it for quite a while, and two, that here was a leader God had raised up under my own nose ready to take things to his generation that I am just now getting around to musing about!  OF COURSE! Why didn’t I see this?!!  Our way, this Mason way, of doing education will benefit and restore personhood to children whether we name the Name or not (would I could name Christ in every educational setting and take each child to the Source of Beauty that our education will reveal). The name of the thing, is not the thing…Truth in education and our dealings with children is still Truth, no matter what we are permitted to call it.  As St. Francis of Assisi is attributed with saying, “Preach the gospel, and if necessary, use words!”  Teach the Beauty, trace the work of the Holy Spirit who is the Source of all learning and innovation with atmosphere, discipline and life, whether we name Him or not, and open children to a hunger for this deep, aesthetic life! In so doing we reclaim their personhood, give them respect and rescue them from drab days of textbooks aimed only at passing standardized tests. Faithful in these small things who knows what this Hope will engender?

May I challenge us this Advent to consider how the Great Recognition is a calling? May I urge the carrying of these wonderful ideas and methods into all points of our public lives and encounters with children?  Can we pray together that our churches and conferences and study groups are not fortresses but public squares, our gospel not just for “the family” but the whole world?  Let’s be intentional and organized and saavy about how to bring this Good News in education to the culture, our very enthusiasm and artful living “making them long for the immensity of the sea.”

P.S. You may not know that ChildlightUSA is involved in many different ways besides the conferences and this blog to recover and support Charlotte Mason education worldwide.  Take a virtual stroll through the website for a full picture or talk to one of the board members listed there. As you consider your giving for the rest of 2008 and the new year, remember Emmanuel, God with us, in education as well and send a tax-deductible contribution to ChildlightUSA.

_______________________

1. Mason, Charlotte. Parents and Children.  Wheaton, Illinois:Tyndale House, 1989.

2. Seerveld, Calvin. G. Rainbows for the Fallen World. Toronto: Tuppence Press, 2005

3. Morely, Christopher. The Haunted Bookshop. Philadelphia: J.B.Lippincott Co., 1951

4. Crouch, Andy. Culture Making Recovering our Creative Calling. Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2008.

5.  http://www.cardus.ca/organization/about

6.  http://www.claphaminstitute.org

7.  T.E.D produced a video of Sir Kenneth  Robinson giving a talk at their 2006 conference called “Do Schools Kill Creativity.”  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY It is really worth the time it takes to watch this.

8. Seerveld, p 36.

9. Charter schools are self-managed public schools that are approved by local school districts. They are created and controlled by parents, teachers, community leaders, and colleges or universities. Charter schools operate free from many educational mandates, except for those concerning non-discrimination, health and safety and accountability. Charter schools offer alternatives in education.” (from the Pennsylvania Dept. of Education.)

© 2008 Laurie Bestvater

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Naked and Blue at My Back Door by Sandy Rusby Bell

Several years ago I opened my back door to call the children in for a snack. I was greeted by my seven, five and two year olds, all completely naked and painted blue. We had recently been reading about how Julius Caesar fought the Celts in Britain. Susan Wise Bauer told us that the Celts “were tall, muscular, warlike men. They were so proud of their height and strength that they went into battle naked! They wore only metal collars and tall metal helmets that made them look even bigger. They carried heavy iron swords and wooden clubs. And they painted themselves blue all over, because they thought that the blue lines would magically protect them from swords and arrows” (Story of the World, Volume 1: Ancient Times, p 276).

Embarrassing as this incident was, living as we did on a corner lot in the suburbs, I knew my children had truly made the story their own. And almost seven years later, they can still describe it in great detail.

When I speak with other people educating using Charlotte Mason’s methods, a common theme emerges: children create entire worlds out of the stories they hear in their lessons. One friend remembers fondly how her children would descend to the basement to reenact what they had read in history only to emerge every three hours or so to find some food.

When my older children were little, they became Laura and Mary and little baby Carrie (is it a testament to the power of story or the power of my daughter’s strong personality that Mary and Carrie were played by my sons?). They wore old-fashioned clothes, did arithmetic on slates, made molasses on snow (it tastes horrible by the way), churned butter and had Little House on the Prairie birthday parties.

Sadly, this summer I noticed that my children were no longer “creating worlds” from their reading. Their play had become rather prosaic and I was starting to hear the forbidden words, “I’m bored” far too often.

What had happened?

It wasn’t difficult to trace the root of the problem. This September my eldest daughter began high school. My plan for these years has always been to have the younger children’s schoolwork that requires my direct involvement done by about 1:00 so that my daughter and I could spend a few hours discussing what she’s reading, looking at her written narrations, working on composition, reading Shakespeare and Plutarch together. She is reading virtually all of her own work independently but I believe that this time set aside each day is absolutely essential for reaping the full benefits of a broad liberal education.

Early last spring, as I began to plan for the fall, I took stock and realized that in order to do this, my younger children were going to have to become more independent. There were some things that would still require my focused attention. I had started a new math program with one of my boys, which requires a fair bit of teacher involvement but which I really believe to be the best for him and was clearly showing results.  I was trying to always be with the children when they worked on their Copywork and Spelling Dictation so I could immediately cover any mistakes. As much as possible, the children were narrating immediately after reading a passage.

But there was one big change we could make. If I could get the youngest children reading really well by the fall, they could do so much more on their own. They could, theoretically, do much of their math independently if they could read the directions.  And they could read much of their own coursework.  And so, reading lessons became my number one priority.  I had all the best intentions. I really felt that the world would open up to them as soon as they could read well.

We had also spent eight years reading through history in chronological order, and I planned for us to start with the Ancients again in September. The problem was, we had the entire 20th century left to cover in about 6 months. A lot happened in the 20th century! We diligently read through a popular homeschooling history resource to get ourselves an outline of the 20th century. Instead of taking our time, and delving deeply into what we were studying, reading about each event in modern history became something to check off our to-do lists.

This spring was an unusually busy time for me and there were some days that all I got done with the youngest children was Bible, a reading lesson, math and our dutiful, but joyless, reading from our history book.

And guess what? Their progress in the mechanics of reading slowed down, their math stayed at about the same level, and they remember absolutely nothing about the 20th century except what they already knew from other books they had read.

And perhaps saddest of all, their imaginative play suffered. Saddest not just because they were sometimes bored. As Charlotte Mason tells us, losing themselves in play of this sort is “not for the children’s amusement merely: it is not impossible that posterity may write us down a generation blest with little imagination, and, by so far, the less capable of great conceptions and heroic efforts, for it is only as we have it in us to let a person or a cause fill the whole stage of the mind, to the exclusion of self-occupation, that we are capable of large-hearted action on behalf of that person or cause” (Home Education,  p 153, emphasis mine).
Developing an imagination has tremendous moral implications.

I think that in order to truly be able to love my neighbour as myself, with all that that implies, I must be able to imagine myself in his life. And most often the ability to do that comes from books. How often have I become passionate about the struggles of a group of people after I’ve read a well-crafted story about them?

I would argue that it is not knowing history that will help us to avoid repeating it, it is feeling it. It is one thing to know that six million Jews died at the hands of the Nazis in World War Two, it is another thing to have “lived” through the years of appeasement leading up to the war with a Jewish mother, and then experienced her fear for her children when the Nazis invaded and then sobbed with her when her children were taken from her. One cannot have “experienced” such a thing and not always be watchful for parallels in current events and determined to never let it happen again.

I have learned my lesson.

We will keep working on reading lessons and math and spelling and handwriting, but first, I will feed each child “the meat he requires in his history readings, and in the literature which naturally gathers round this history, and imagination will bestir itself without any help of ours…” (Home Education, p. 295).

And I will never again rush through 100 years of history but will trust that it is better to “linger pleasantly over the history of a single man, a short period, until [the child] thinks the thoughts of that man, is at home in the ways of that period. Though he is reading and thinking of the lifetime of a single man, he is really getting intimately acquainted with the history of a whole nation for a whole age” (Home Education, p. 280).

I will remember that  “a child does not lose by spending a couple of years in acquiring [the mechanical skills of reading and writing] because he is meanwhile ‘reading’ the Bible, history, geography, tales, with close attention and a remarkable power of reproduction, or rather, of translation into his own language; he is acquiring a copious vocabulary and the habit of consecutive speech. In a word, he is an educated child from the first…”(A Philosophy of Education, p. 30).

And my children play, almost always completely dressed, in our yard in the country.

© 2008 Sandy Rusby Bell

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