What do Christmas and the season of educational conferences have in common? First, both sneak up on you. One day it’s August, and, the next thing you know, it’s time to launch the Advent calendar. So, too, with the conferences. Wasn’t it just Christmas? How can it be time to get back on the road?
Secondly, both require dragging out stuff. For Christmas, we search out boxes of ornaments and lights. For conferences, we haul out boxes of books, racks, and banners. This year, we’ll have one extra thing in our booth, but more about that in a minute.
Conferences celebrate community—a community of learners and teachers who, no matter how different their faiths, politics, and pedagogical approaches, cherish the moral, spiritual, and academic principles that unite us in the education of children. Reengaging with that community via conferences fills me with joy.
But there’s an extra reason for my joy this year: since November 1st, my life has been confined, literally, and I’m ready to get out! After eight years of resisting, I’ve undergone two badly needed foot surgeries. Trust me, you don’t want to know the details. But it’s going okay.
Recovery is exactly what they said it would be: painful and boring. Ostensibly it sounds great to sit for weeks with your feet up. But with bandages, ice, and a lot of pain, I don’t recommend it.
Still, two factors have helped. I’ve gotten some work done although I’ve also realized that the post-surgical brain is not the sharpest.
The other factor is better. I’ve been able to camp out with my four-year-old granddaughter. Fortunately, she still fits next to me in the Lazy-Boy recliner that has served as my daily throne (feet elevated and iced). Reading, talking, and singing, we have passed the long weeks together.
In light of this blessing of time with her, I’ve taken more to heart a book that always sits on my night table, namely Charlotte Mason’s late work Towards a Philosophy of Education. Her philosophy can be introduced by using one of her most lauded mottos: “Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life.” It sounds routine today, but we need to remember that, like so many 19th- and early 20th–century reformers (many of whom were women), she was swimming upstream against heavy currents.
Here’s another thing: it is far easier to appreciate such concepts when one is a grandparent, rather than a parent. Grandparents can step back and relish facts that parents lose sight of while embroiled in the daily challenges of raising children. Grandparents enjoy a more uncluttered path to seeing a child as a born person, who responds naturally to the quest of learning. Or, to use Mason’s words, a child is a “spiritual organism, with an appetite for all knowledge.”
While Patti was entertaining me in my recliner, we got pretty creative. We’ll be finding little parts of things we’ve disassembled for a long time to come! Another thing, too, filled our time: she has started to narrate almost everything she is learning.
Narration is a powerful tool in learning, something I’m rediscovering not only through Patti at this stage of her development, but through my rereading of Mason’s writings and by rethinking what I’ve garnered from my Classical Education colleagues.
As a child of the 1950s, I was raised under the dictum “children should be seen, not heard.” But I was a talker—an extreme talker (that won’t surprise anyone who knows me). I have some hard memories of people telling me to shush up. Surely much of the times I should have been shushed. But, in retrospect, I was expressing a child’s natural impulse to narrate. I wanted to narrate orally, and, later, write down, everything I was experiencing and coming to understand.
My mother tried to listen to it all, believe me. She was more involved in my education than a lot of moms back then. But she was also born into an impoverished home, a first-generation American, raised in a struggling Orthodox Jewish household in Brooklyn. Her considerable academic abilities were discounted since her primary duty in the 1930s was to skip grades, graduate high school early, and go to work. So she did, ending her educational possibilities.
I think of my mom whenever Patti starts to narrate. I thank my mom in my heart for absorbing my narrations. And I rejoice as Patti spins her four-year-old understanding of the world:
Grandma, when I was a little child [sic], we lived in a place called Elizabeth City, Austria. It was in California. I was a very old child back then and we had a farm but it was not like the one in this storybook but there was a lazy rooster named Rupert. . . .
Charlotte Mason promoted narration as a serious tool for literate children to assimilate what they were learning. Yet, even during the pre-literate stage, we can encourage the act, indeed art, of narration. God gives each child endless observational, expressive, and communicative gifts. At different stages, those gifts blossom forth in surprising ways, including a powerful desire to synthesize and communicate. Fostering these gifts is our calling.
And I need to get better at it, particularly with pre-schoolers. There are two more grandchildren, ages 3 and 2, right behind Patti. I’m delighted that the Great Homeschool Convention organization has created a Charlotte Mason “Track.” I intend to attend as many sessions as possible between my own speaking slots and the mandated “feet-up” time in the recliner.
Yes, a recliner. We’re renting one for the booth. That’s the other bit of “stuff” I referred to above. I still have to keep my feet up a lot. So unless I’m off on my knee scooter giving a talk, you’ll find me ensconced in a Lazy-Boy. Come chat. And if you need to borrow an ice pack, I should have one!
