There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. - Hamlet (1.5.167-8)
It is such a wide world, and a ten year old is just starting to see past the horizon of her own front yard. I love reading essays by people who are still curious and trying to figure it all out after eight or nine decades. Like this Roger Angell essay in the New Yorker, This Old Man: Life in the Nineties. When a child gets in the car after school most days bored and discouraged, and spends the evening after lessons and extracurriculars hunched over worksheets, something is out of balance. I believe in drilling and memorizing, and I actually believe in worksheets. You need to know math facts and grammar and how to spell. The capitals of the fifty states. That can be tedious, and it takes practice and repetition. You don't stumble across it while admiring beetles and running free while other kids are trapped in school. The suspicion of sentimentality, of lack of rigor, is what kept me away from looking at alternatives to our parish school for so long.
But a schooling that leaves inspiration out entirely, that's lacking the spark of learning--I'm realizing that that is not only equally wrong, it might be worse. R had a science teacher in fourth grade who would engage the kids in class, and stay after school to answer questions and point kids to books they might like. Learning he would not be back to teach her in fifth was one of the triggers to pull her out to homeschool. R would get into the car at the end of the day excited about ideas she learned in his class and ask to go to the library to learn more. I started to wonder what it would be like if she was given time to do that in all her subjects. Even if she fell behind for awhile on testable skills, what if we just spread the world out in front of her, watched what she landed on and liked, and gave her all the time she wanted to explore it?
"Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in."
- Leonardo da Vinci
Whenever I panic that half the year is over and we have gone too deeply and not broadly enough, I think of this:
"For the mind does not require filling like a bottle, but rather, like wood, it only requires kindling to create in it an impulse to think independently and an ardent desire for the truth."
- Plutarch, "On Listening" in Moralia.
Laying kindling is a harder job than filling bottles with testable skills and facts. The future benefit to a child who is learning to think independently is hard to measure by having her fill in sets of circles halfway through fifth grade. In an era of education when the pendulum has swung so far off balance in favor of measurable results--where children are treated as generators of data points that are attached to financial rewards for schools, and increasingly, corporate interests--it's intimidating to swim against that tide.
There is an unsettling element of figuring it out as we go along that wakes me up with anxiety some nights. I keep praying to St. Catherine, and remind myself that R is changing this year. She makes connections across subjects. She rarely gets impatient and says "Just tell me what answer you want me to pick" as she did when we first started. She thinks critically about marketing when she sees ads, and identifies upselling on iPad apps. My friends have noticed that she's more poised with grownups. I notice a new confidence. She expects people to listen when she talks, even adults, and she listens to them as if they might have something interesting to say. She asks me to pause documentaries over and over so she can ask questions, unlike at the beginning of the year when she would just watch passively. Those are things we can't put back in the bottle now.
