Our first Living book – one which we ‘live’ with - rescued our sanity and sleep, and enabled Evie to catch up on some developmental milestones. It’s been a shock to realize that in actual fact “Baby” doesn’t ‘know best’. In fact weaning, sleeping, please’s and thankyou’s, table manners, social graces and even things like potty training involve the Parents as much as, if not more than the children.
We have hit a glitch with potty training. It’s the one thing I really thought needed to come from Evie in the form of ‘readiness’. But we have done nothing to help her associate toileting with routine. As a result she is quite happy to sit in a poo nappy for half a morning. Today we began to target this laissez faire attitude of ours by insisting that she sit on the potty first thing for a couple of minutes. We’ll get her to do the same before bath and just ease her into the notion that the potty is a reality. Thinking back to weaning… Was she really ‘ready’ or did I just ‘decide’ she was and go at it… Sleep training. It certainly did NOT happen ‘all by itself… As Babywise suggests, concentrating on FULL feeds in the first week HELPS a baby transition “naturally” into a predictable routine. But if you expect the sleepy snackbar occupant to just suddenly put herself into nice meal size feeding intervals, you’re in for a nasty shock!
This has totally upended all my notions of the ‘instinct’ and child motivation and will, being primary in the rearing process. If so many processes in development are not only aided but, on the whole, initiated by parents then the old fashioned ideas of direction and authority coming from above are not outdated, but TRUE.
We continued our journey with Babywise, buying each successive book as Evie turned corners. Babywise II, Toddlerwise and Preschoolwise. Unfortunately when we reached Toddlerwise, I experienced an attack of rebellion against routine and structure and became enamoured (again) with autonomous child philosophies – this time in the form of ‘Homeschooling’. I had met some homeschoolers who advocated community and life education where the child learns all they need to from ‘doing life’ in the community, with their parents and with other homeschoolers. Learning is never separated from life, and therefore never needs to become a battleground, especially since these parents let their children’s interests be the guiding force in their education. It SOUNDS great. But the actual shape of everybody’s day was kind of nebulous and unpredicatable, and some of the new freedoms I’d found WITHIN routine shouted out that life might just become vague and unproductive again. ‘Being organised’, and ‘taking control’ are two phrases I’ve always loathed, and the thought of being labelled a ‘control freak’ scared me witless. But around this time I did begin to feel that there were definite positives in all our lives as a result of the little ‘order’ Babywise had brought to our chaos. Instead of bouncing around erratically from one passion to the next with little or no connection, we were achieving goals. I had even managed to schedule regular hour long writing sessions during Evie’s predicatable 1 and a half hour long naps, and managed to write most of a novel in a year! Control, far from producing anxiety in Evie made her coo and gurgle. She is still a very secure, and happy little person. A far cry from the clingy, whinging baby of our first few months as parents. But homeschooling still appealed. I liked the idea of being able to give Evie a different kind of education.
This is when we stumbled onto THE WELL TRAINED MIND by Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer (a mother daughter team). Their approach to homeschooling is radically different to the ‘unschooling’ (as they call it) approach of many homeschoolers (particularly here in Britain).
Taking their cues from a lecture by Dorothy Sayers called “the Lost tools of Learning” they base their ideas about education on a return to the Classical approach. It sounds kooky – Latin, Greek, Homer, Virgil, Aristotle and Plato, old fashioned Logic and Rhetoric, but it makes sense when you see their ‘roadmap’ of education – the framework created for the mind to hang ideas on in a logical orderly fashion. Chronological History, parts to whole. You learn to crawl before you walk and walk before you run. Makes sense. And suddenly so does life and education and boundaries and order. You can SEE cause and effect if you start at the beginning and progress linearly. If you have a patch work education (as I do) – russian history here, the depression there, grammar learned ‘by assimilation’ (so that you’re never sure WHY something sounds ‘wrong’), classical music ‘appreciated’ and subliminally absorbed but never given a name, a composer or a movement to ‘LOCATE’ it in the grand scheme of things, you just feel basically Lost.
The Well Trained Mind is the education I always yearned for. I was always being seized by fits of reform, and motivated by that vague sense of lostness, I would get an art history book from my parent’s shelf and pour over it, deciding to read x number of pages a day until I knew ’something’ about Titian. But although I did read about Titian, he continued to float – an island of pointless information, not anchored to any mainland body of Knowledge that I knew was out there, but was still ignorant of. University only worsened this sense of ’substanceless-ness’ – I knew how to workshop and deconstruct and I could just about write an essay by ‘feel’ (on a good day) but the proper construction of rhetoric, even the understanding of the grammar necessary, eluded me.
The Well Trained Mind divides education into three stages, called the Trivium. The first stage – grades 1-4 is called the Grammar stage. This is fact and story accumulation time. When children are at the sponge stage – just soaking it all in. This is the time for rote learning. For times tables, for grammar rules, for the early myths and stories of history, for maths with manipulatives (beans, fruit, coins), for discovering and observing the natural world. The next stage – The logic stage introduces old fashioned Logic (mind puzzles and classical ‘arguments’) into the curriculum and returns the history student to the beginning again to begin to ask ‘why’. This stage is about cause and effect, about analysis. It jumps the student into symbolic maths, it turns the observer into an experimenting scientist who makes deductions. The final stage – the Rhetoric stage, uses the tools learned in the grammar and logic stages to begin to Express. This is the time for Speech and Debate, for writing persuasive essays and creating new original thoughts that are INFORMED – based on what has gone before.
This makes total sense to me. I can express alright. But I feel a great emptiness where the content of that expression should be, and a great frustration over the form of expression because I’ve never learned the basics of ‘good, grammatical, logcial expression’. It’s just taking a wild stab at a blank sheet of paper, and needs every bit of courage and energy I possess to ‘have a go’…
I want MORE for Evie and her brother. And, (smirk), I’d like to learn WITH them. This is the kind of education I would have liked. Here is a chance for us all to join the Great Conversation that’s been going on since clay tablets were first etched with symbols. I’m tired of living in the Post modern Dark Age of pastiche and absurdity.
Here’s to order, control, routine, organisation, framework, structure, and boundaries. Just as the human skeleton simultaneously holds us up, AND enables movement and flex, so too, these formally ‘dirty’ concepts prevent our lives and minds from being jellyish blobs that go nowhere and have no shape, that make no contribution, and live in the dull glare of that new ‘opiate of the masses’: the Telly.
OH yeah. Did I mention we don’t have a telly?
The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home by SW Bauer
- ISBN-10: 0393059278
- ISBN-13: 978-0393059274
