Getting Ready: Childlight USA Conference, 2011 by Bonnie Buckingham

"Trees in a Lane, Ambleside" by John Ruskin, 1847

I  live close to Gardner Webb University, which makes it easy  to go to the Childlight USA Conference,  but there are  more reasons why I go back every year.   My spirit ignited when I first read Susan Schaeffer Macaulay’s For The Children’s Sake in 1992 when I began homeschooling our 4 sons.  In 1995, Susan came to Charlotte for a weekend conference on Charlotte Mason. Looking back, that was extraordinary (plus lunch with her!). When the Childlight USA Conference began in 2004, I had to go.  I’ve come to it every year.   I’ve given workshops on poetry and become an avid lover of poems and words.  I’ve made friends. I’ve watched a group from Canada drive down  (see below what CM said at her last conference about travels to the P.N.E.U. Conference) to the hot days in Boiling Springs. I’ve met those from Ambleside Online who come. Every time I go to the site, there’s a deep gratitude to people rather than names. Ranald Macaulay came one year. We called him one year, and his son-in-law came one year. John Thorley came for many years. All of these visits gave us a sense of a wider educational movement (rather than just our own locales) and excellent teacher training.   Now, I’ve graduated those sons and just have the last one, Emma, at home entering high school.  Charlotte Mason said, “Education is an atmosphere, a discipline and a life.” That’s why I keep coming back.

This year is the 7^th annual Charlotte Mason Educational Conference.  If you are new, here are a few thoughts to “get ready“ as you land or drive into Boiling Springs:

-Sit with a speaker at a meal. Sign up for the discussion meals in Bailey.

-Ask questions, share ideas, listen.

-Speak to those in line in the cafeteria about workshops or struggles.

-Go to fireside chats. It is a relaxed atmosphere to learn.  Talk about the book being discussed while walking back to the apartment with a new friend.  Stay up a bit late.  This year, I will share on Makoto Fujimura. I’m bringing “The Four Gospels” alongside “Refractions” and notes from International Arts Movement conference in NYC in March.  These are essays to dig into for truth, beauty and goodness from a living artist.

-Look through the workshop schedule. How do you decide which one to go to? Maybe break up your group and cover more . Discuss afterwards. If you are alone, pick which one will most help you for this next year.   Or pick the one you are passionate about.  You will go deeper into that subject:  art, poetry, writing, history, etc…

-Take a walk. It is a beautiful campus.

-Drink water. It is June in North Carolina!

Charlotte’s very last conference was the Whitsuntide Conference in Ambleside in 1922. Her opening address (read with a British accent):

“ It gives me and gives us all extraordinary pleasure to meet so many PNEU members, especially when one reflects on the fatigues of travel through the weary hours of a long, hot, dusty day; for members are here from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, from the most distant as well as the nearer counties of England, and, of course, London has sent a large contingent notwithstanding the ‘season.’… The PNEU have taken pains to master a distinctive philosophy of education which some of us believe will do a great many things for thousands of children and their homes”   (The Story of Charlotte Mason, pg. 172-173).

I agree with the following attendee, who went to the PNEU Conference over 100 years ago.  C. C. Cotterill wrote “Some Impressions of a PNEU  Conference”  (Parent’s Review in 1899 , p. 544).

 “One single aim seemed to me to pervade everything spoken and every person that spoke–how best and most harmoniously to develop the whole nature of a child. It is impossible to overstate the refreshing and exhilarating effects of such an atmosphere. It was an atmosphere of ideas and ideals.”

“Among the most suggestive and interesting communications to which I listened were the remarks, amounting often to not more than a few sentences, made by persons in the audience, in the course of a discussion.”

“In a word, everyone seemed desirous of communicating to others the proved results of successful observation and experiment in the education of children.”

“If I ask myself what I enjoyed most, I think the most interesting and enjoyable element of all to me was the spirit of the thing–the healthy, friendly, disinterested, open-minded spirit that seemed to pervade everything and everybody; the sense that everyone was there with the single aim of giving and receiving that which might be most helpful towards making the world–the child-world, doubtless, chiefly, but not the child-world only–something fairer and better, truer, happier, more beautiful, in the rolling of the ages. But it was for me rendered the more delightful, because it was all simple, unpedantic, natural.”

Any thoughts or impressions on “Getting Ready” for the 7^th Charlotte Mason Educational Conference, June 8- 11, 2011?

© Bonnie Buckingham, 2011

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Professing and Practicing by Lisa Cadora

As some of you in this Charlotte Mason community know, my husband and I have been home-educating two 13 year old girls this year for their 8^th grade year. One is my niece, and the other is the daughter of a dear friend and CM kindred spirit. I cannot thank these two sets of parents enough for allowing The Reverend and me to have these delightful creatures in our home this year, and I hope and pray that this experience has benefited these girls, their future education, and their families as much as it has blessed us.

Having NEVER homeschooled before in my half-century long life as a professional educator, I was thrilled with the opportunity to do this, and, at the same time, wracked by apprehension at the prospect of taking on the sobering responsibility of teaching them, parenting them, feeding them, and living our lives before them. “Why?” one might ask, “You’re a PROFESSIONAL.”

All manner of issues of life and learning, of practice and theory, are called up by the term “professional”. This year has led me deep into the thicket of the relationship between what one knows ought to be and what is, between what we profess and how we live. As any of you who have children—either those who you have created yourself or those of whom you have been given charge—will attest, this is where the proverbial rubber meets the proverbial road.

And what have I discovered?

1) The line between real life and school can get thin.  I had heard the CM-schooled young adults speak of this at our last gathering at Gardner Webb, and it invigorated me. The Reverend and I are thinkers, readers, discussers, and so it is not unusual that the girls would have witnessed us in a back-and-forth about x issue. What was new is just how much of what was on the agenda (scope and sequence) for the girls could fire up some neural activity in their ersatz parental units.  What I hope this taught them is that most matters of life are indeed an on-going discussion in an effort to get the articulation right and strive for the practice to follow suit, or to adjust the articulation according to what is discovered in the practice, which brings me to …

2) There is a need for PRACTICE and not only information acquisition in learning. I think this is what Charlotte Mason had in mind when she talked about the discipline of habits. Far more, however, than getting straight on what one SHOULD do, it is the day-to-day actual DOING of what one determines is right. As Barbara Brown Taylor so helpfully points out in An Altar in the World,  “Wisdom is not gained by knowing what is right. Wisdom is gained by practicing what is right (Taylor, 2009).”  Typically we ask students to sit for seven hours a day while we turn a fire hose of information on them when there is no fire to put out, which brings me to …

3) We place a weird premium on so much of what classical Christian educators would call “grammar”. As long as what is deemed as “learn-ed” in the general culture has to do with the accumulation of decontextualized facts regarding this and that, I am in favor of teaching, say, how to rationalize the denominator when numbers under radical signs appear in it. But, in matters quantitative, I am far more interested in whether or not the girls have a sense of  what it means to earn and save money, how much is accumulating in their savings accounts, what interest it will draw, and what the practice of tithing might teach them. I’m interested, too, in what they realize it means to work for far less remuneration than would be traditionally expected—or none at all—, and how they will spend accumulated savings responsibly.  Where is there room for this in the way we traditionally school? Which brings me to …

4) Is it fair to ask students to venture into realms so theoretical in nature that they cannot possibly get any intuitive traction afforded by a real-life application? I think this may be a sin, actually, in that it could be an affront to the Incarnation. Education is for real life in a real world, for creaturely stewardship of creation, not for trafficking in smooth theoretical parallel universes. While I loved many things about the Jacobs’ Elementary Algebra text we used, I seized at several of the word problems that, in the end, required that the authors know the answer to begin with in order to be able to construct the actual “problem”, thus rendering it an inauthentic exercise for the girls. Which brings me (although not as obviously) to …

5) Thirteen year old girls thrive on social connection. Both girls were in possession of certain technological devices that enabled them to stay in touch with their friends back home. The Reverend and I quickly saw the need to put boundaries around the use of these lest the friends be ever with us, not as co-participators, but as distractions, beckoning the girls to give their attention to other things during lessons, on car rides, at the dinner table, on the babysitting jobs, at worship, etc., robbing them of valuable interactions with people of other ages, namely adults. Once we put these boundaries in place, we saw them enjoy and seek out the company of other adults who invited them into their own real lives of raising kids, running a household, recreating, etc. Indeed, I realized that they were being incorporated into a much richer life of our church and neighborhood than they would have been had they had only “youth” activities and their peers endlessly available to them.

I have two more weeks with my wonderful girls, and, while I am sad to see this year with them end, I am infinitely grateful to them and to their parents for allowing me to experience more deeply and, in some instances realize for the first time, several things I knew of only “professionally” up to this point, thus renewing and deepening my admiration for all educators—home and school—who strive to truly educate in ways that bring together what we know and what we do, what we “profess” and how we truly live.

© Lisa Cadora 2011

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